The Paper House (3 page)

It’s too early for this shit, she says. Mummy gives her a whack.

It’s Heather’s birthday! she says. Heather, open your presents.

There’s a stack of boxes with different wrapping paper. Some of it is hologram paper and it glows under the kitchen lights. Some of it is lolly-coloured with bows and whistles. Some of it has pink kittens and white puppies. It’s all finished with masking tape, folded in every direction, crumpled and creased. Where the paper is torn I can see the presents underneath but I open them anyway; Mummy is smiling so wide that I don’t want to make her feel bad.

All the presents are just my stuff wrapped up. My Lady LovelyLocks doll. My puzzle with the family of bears. My Muppets colouring book, every page already finished.

Thanks, Mummy! I say, and hug her around the middle. Her eyes are full of sparks and she kisses me everywhere. Fleur just keeps sitting at the table, eating her fairy bread breakfast and rolling her eyes.

In the afternoon we go to Gran’s house and stay there until Thursday.

F
OR FIVE
days we sent our bodies into the world without us. On the first day they sat in a windowless chapel. Other people were there, parents and friends, and our bodies told us afterwards of the way the carpet was torn in places, and that in a week or so we should expect to receive a wooden box in the post. Had the bodies given them our correct address? Our new one, I meant, the borrowed one. They had, they said. The wooden box would arrive at our new address and maybe we would know what to do with it after a while.

My body wore a black cape and a black shirt and black shoes, and its edges blended into the poorly lit corners of the room.

On the second day, our bodies went out into the garden and found a flat bit of lawn at the top of the hill. Dave’s body lay a blanket and my body scratched where the tough buffalo grass made contact with its skin. The cheese was delicious, they told us. The air was hot but moving. If you pushed your nose into the sky just right, you could catch the smell of the sea.

On the sixth day they went down to the main street to buy chips, and sat on a low wall and flapped in the wet wind. There’s lots to see, they told us. People everywhere. There’s a farmers’ market in the park by the public toilets. We got you some eggs, free range. Dave’s body cooked them in butter and we ate them but they tasted of nothing.

I wondered about the house. My memories of it were limited, the way they are when you inspect a house twice before deciding to live in it for ten years. I felt sure it had a bedroom across the hall from ours, with a bay window. And I was convinced of a little door at the end of the corridor that opened into a staircase. Maybe in the attic there were rows of windows and maybe from there one could see the horizon, damp with smog.

‘What does the house look like?’ I asked my body.

‘Why don’t you go and have a look?’ it said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’ My body sighed, pulled at its black robes. I touched my fingertips along the corrugated length of my wound. In each stitch, my heart was beating.

The next morning, Dave and his body stood in the bedroom in our new house and put on a collared shirt. He’d found a few days a week as a relief teacher in one of the local primary schools. The school itself was just fibreglass and modular, but it perched cliff-side over a rocky bay. The plans we’d had for that school. Mornings I had spent idling in the street, watching the kids in their blue tunics, calling and waving. She would have plaits. Every morning, I would make time to do the plaits.

‘Will you be all right?’ he said, and shoved another pillow behind my back.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘I’m just down the road. Less than five minutes. Is your phone charged? Can you reach it? Promise me you’ll call if you need anything.’

‘Sure, Dave.’

He kissed my head and I let his paper smell sit with me. ‘Just rest.’ Then he frowned. ‘Have you got everything you need?’

‘Yes,’ I said. My body pulled the blankets over both of us and I burned there next to it, uncourageous. Finding the boundary of my grief. The high and the low.

I tried to make out the shape of the house from my window. A bit of decking, a few steps down to the garden. At the end of the deck, some windows were open. I cracked my own, let it swing out into the day on its ancient hinges, and heard the rattle of a wind chime on our tiny balcony. It was a perfect day. I closed the window.

What I did after that was anyone’s guess. My body purred alongside me, taut and burning with its necessary functions. Maybe I clicked through daytime television. Probably went to the toilet once or twice, changed my underwear, put the others and their red frown into the bin. After lunch (toast? freeze-dried soup from a sachet?) I might have sat back at the window, pressed my cheek against it and tried to collect the whole garden in my cognition. Or I could have sewed a hot air balloon and shot myself right into the sky.

None of these seemed any more or less possible than any other. My body was no wiser, stretched and curled and stretched again. Reaching for the water and then pissing it out.

Dave returned from school. His day was fine. The people seemed nice. They took him out for lunch at the place on the roundabout. He’d bought me a jam tart, an apple strudel. Did I want something to eat? Did I have enough water?

‘I’m fine,’ I said. I pressed my head against the window and watched the day drift apart. Dave brought me a tray with tea and toast and I left it to congeal on the side table. ‘Can I get you anything else?’ he said. ‘No,’ I said, and he lay next to me, watching TV with his hand on my knee.

‘They found that guy who was lost in the Grampians,’ Dave said.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Alive?’

‘Nah.’

‘Oh.’

‘They reckon it’s going to be thirty-eight tomorrow.’

‘Great.’

‘Climate change,’ he said.

My pain medication sat tight in its silver packet on the bedside table. ‘If you don’t want them, I’ll take them,’ Dave said, looking for a laugh. All those fat little pills burning holes in the wood. How many would it take? Across the fence, someone called to an animal.

Dave said he would make something for dinner. ‘I’m not hungry,’ I told him, but my stomach rumbled. He brought me a sandwich cut into a heart shape and I put it on the tray with the cold toast.

I watched the evening go, with its diminished frame rate, the sun reduced to an infinitesimal crawl across the sky. Sometimes it was hot, and the bed sheets wrapped themselves around my legs, translucent with sweat, and the TV crackled and popped. At other times it rained, summer broken open to weep over my garden and beat against my window, the relief of cool air trickling through the gaps in the old walls. And all the while, whatever the weather, I was gripped in the vice of the sight of her, the smell of her, the absentia of her.

Dave pulled the stash of pamphlets from my bag.

‘What’s this about?’

‘Come on, Dave, don’t go through my stuff.’

He thrust them into my face.

‘Maybe you should think about it.’

‘I don’t need to.’

‘But maybe you do.’

‘I’m not going.’

‘But what if you –’

‘I’m not going.’

He shoved them onto the bedside table.

‘Fine.’

Dave brought in some cheese and biscuits – not the good cheese, just the hard cheese in the plastic box – and we watched the end of a black and white movie on the TV. He told me all about school. Corridors. Lockers. Grey carpet. ‘When I first arrived, Hamish Reid – he’s the SRC rep – made me the worst cup of tea you can imagine and he sat with me while I did all my induction stuff. Two and a half hours. He didn’t speak the whole time.’ He lifted my chin. ‘In the morning,’ he said, ‘I’m going to take you for a drive around the block.’

‘Right,’ I said.

‘You’re angry with me.’

‘I’m not angry with you.’

How to explain it, the screaming in my ribs?

*

‘Why don’t we go into town?’ he said in the morning. ‘It’s early, we can have some breakfast and I’ll drop you back before school.’ So upright, different shades of brown.

My body plucked me from the bed, held me between its fingers like a bit of old stocking. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘Come on. The fresh air will do you good.’

My body looked from me to him, back to me, shook its head.

‘I don’t think I can.’

‘I’ll help you.’

Dave took me from my body and danced me out into the street. Sunlight clipped the edge of one thing or another, ricocheted back. We had clutches of pink petunias and a cobblestone path, and Dave tripped and spilt along it without hesitation.

‘See?’ he said. ‘It’s beautiful out here.’

The wind was strong, for a girl who had become a stocking. I flapped in Dave’s arms. The world and I collided, saucepans on a rack. My breath caught and jammed. Dave grabbed at me, dragged me into him, wrapped himself all the way around me. ‘Breathe,’ he said, but I was polyester. ‘Breathe.’ He spoke warm into my eardrums. His chest pushed against me, came to its crescendo and dove away again. I reached for my floating breath, my untethered heartbeat, shoved it back inside my body and cried into his shoulder blades as they rose and fell in their easy way.

‘There you are, beautiful girl.’ His fingertips warmed my skin. ‘I’m sorry. Let’s go home.’ But he took me back to the place with roses I refused to smell and sounds I blocked out. Over the morning I dropped in and out of fitful sleep. The dreams came thick and often: alone at the top of a cliff, holding a bird of paradise; staring through a porthole into a school of purple sharks with glowing necklaces; my mother, with her grey face, humming something from
La traviata
. The pain caught me, grabbed me around the middle and thrashed violently. It rocked and rolled. It squeezed and twisted.

‘It hurts,’ I said.

I watched something about people shouting. I sipped water from a crystal glass. I stretched out the twitching muscles in my legs. I half slept again, ragged, clinging to the bed as though it were a lifeboat. I cried. I stopped crying. I cried again. The only relief came from brief moments of exhausted unconsciousness, but even then the dreams lashed and whipped. Dave sat next to me in bed with a book in one hand. With the other, he drew long strokes across my forehead.

‘What time is it?’

He brought my hand to his lips. ‘It’s just after eleven. How are you feeling?’

‘I don’t know. Shouldn’t you be at work?’

‘I called in.’

He moved the television into the bedroom. The rabbit ears got terrible reception, so we had the choice of round-the-clock news or learning the alphabet from adults with children’s voices. He pulled my head into his armpit and I let him
Three men killed in head-on collision
even though it smelled like a dank office building
Record new unemployment levels
and we didn’t watch the news together.

For eight months I had tried to grow a family. Most of that time I’d spent doing what I was supposed to: foregoing soft cheese, playing Mozart through headphones, avoiding heavy lifting. But once, I did have a smoked salmon roll in the food court, after I bought the yellow jumpsuit with the fish on it. And once, I did have my hair dyed, when the greys began to curl around my ears like webs. And once, on Dave’s birthday, I did have half a glass of wine, listening to Al Green with the rain coming down. They seemed stupid and easily dismissed at the time – ‘My mum smoked when she was pregnant with me, and I turned out all right!’ – but in the dim corridors of the hospital, I wondered which of these moments had been the catalyst.

They told me there was nothing I could have done differently. Placenta praevia came with risks, they said, we always knew it wasn’t going to be completely straightforward. I had been falsely reassured by the pamphlets and the midwives with soft voices. It wasn’t more common than I thought; it wasn’t less serious than I thought; it was every bit as terrible as the worst case scenario, and my baby had died with her hands over her eyes in the dark. I had tried to bleed to death but hadn’t been able to muster the courage. When they brought us back to the ward – me: breathing, tired, anaemic; her: still, blue-lipped, silent – Dave squeaked from his throat and then we were three. The family I had been growing, cut at the roots prematurely.

Friends who had given me rattles and booties and ‘My First Christmas’ decorations disappeared without a trace, hiding in their homes with their living children. Maybe they were afraid it was catching; maybe they just didn’t know what to say. Part of me was glad that they didn’t. I wanted to talk about her, but not yet.

I sat in bed and ate biscuits with jam in the middle. The sun went in. I read a book about a boy who took his mother to the sea in a wheelbarrow. I shuffled the quilt down from where it had become bunched in one corner. I took off my socks and rubbed my feet. I watched re-runs of cartoons that weren’t good the first time around. I breathed on the window and rubbed it clean. I named the grass parrots on the lawn below: Stanley, Francis, Prue. I did everything that wasn’t preparing for the next phase of life without her.

‘You have been so brave,’ Dave said, but he was talking to someone else, someone behind me. Wind hissed in the old house, shooting under the doors and in the gaps between the old glass panes. ‘We’re going to be okay, me and you.’ I wasn’t sure how he knew, but I longed to believe him.

And then he said the very thing I had been willing him not to say, ever, to never, ever vocalise even under threat of death or in a moment of madness, and I was winded, blinking, grabbing for the bed sheets, crying –

‘We can try again.’

– and I saw the paths stretch out ahead of me: to the left, where I stayed in bed forever, grieved endlessly; to the right, where I got out of bed, put my heart back together, grieved endlessly. To speak of ‘trying again’ while her ghost was still in the room was an insult to both the child gone before and the child that might come after. The child before might be merely a precursor, a practice run, a whole person deemed sufficiently remembered and loved; while the child after might be a bandaid child, a second child, a replacement child. Without time taken to wait – not until the first child was forgotten but until the hideous burning fire of grief had dulled – neither child could be fully a person, but just a function of the other.