The Paper House (7 page)

I look at Mum. She looks okay to me, just the same as always. Maybe her hair is looking a bit thin, or her skin is a bit shiny.

Thanks, Mum, she says.

Then Gran looks at me. Do you want a milkshake, Heather? Of course I want a milkshake! I tell her I’ll have a chocolate milkshake and maybe one of those chocolate crackles just to make sure I have enough chocolate. She is smiling. Mum isn’t smiling. She gets down on her knee and puts her hands on my shoulders and says, I just have to go see someone for a bit. And I say, That’s okay, me and Gran can have two milkshakes.

I sit in the window, and Gran turns to Mum and puts her hand on top of Mum’s hand. And they kind of just stand there like that for a while, and I wonder why Mum even bothered to bring me here if she was just going to stay anyway.

Bye, Mum, I say, and blow her a kiss.

I’ll bring her home later, Shelley, Gran says, and we sit in the window and wait for our milkshakes together.

Gran has a red car with bench seats, which is my favourite thing about driving with her. We can be right next to each other, and sometimes she lets me take the wheel for a second. She says her car is nearly as old as she is, and then she winks at me.

Are we going home? I say, and she says she’s taking me the long way past the bakery.

I’m going to get you guys a pie for dinner, she says. It’s a chicken pie with thick gravy and vegetables and crispy pastry, which is the best kind. Even better, she buys some vanilla slice for afternoon tea. I know you like it, she says. When we get home Dad and Fleur are playing Sonic in the lounge room. They don’t even look at us, but I’m kind of glad because there’s only enough vanilla slice for me.

Is she here? Gran shouts to Dad, and he says, She’s out the back! and she is, but she’s sleeping, so Gran cuts us all a slice of chicken pie and I eat mine so fast I get a stomach-ache and Gran puts me to bed. Then I hear those words again: leave, help, sick. But I’m full of pie and slice and my happy day, so I sleep.

I
RECOGNISED PARTS
of my body. It wasn’t the same body as before, not the sharp corners and the bony undercarriage, but rounded off at the edges. If I poked my skin, my fingertips disappeared. Dave watched it, wherever I went, his eyes up and down. Who knew why they lingered, whether in delight or disgust? I wrapped myself in a dressing-gown.

‘Good morning,’ he said. He put on his glasses. ‘What are you going to do today?’ He looked at me and yawned in that rested way, easing his way into the day, slowly rising. Full of clean air. I felt my body moving from one centimetre to the next.

‘Just read, I reckon.’

‘I don’t want you to feel trapped here,’ he said, pulling on his pants.

‘What, in the house?’ Knotting his tie. ‘Well I am, a bit.’

‘Maybe you could try another walk.’ Threading his belt. ‘Take Fleur with you. There’s a place down the road that does a half- decent coffee.’ Lacing his shoes. I followed him into the kitchen.

‘I went there yesterday,’ I said.

‘Did you? Did Fleur go too?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Sort of?’

‘She came down later.’

‘You went by yourself?’ He was frowning; I got the distinct feeling I was in trouble. A child, grounded, sent to my room.

‘The lady over the road told me about it.’

‘Sylvia?’

‘Yeah. Sylvia. How do you know her name?’

‘She keeps trying to feed me biscuits,’ he said.

‘You don’t even like biscuits.’

‘I know.’

He tapped the seat next to him. ‘Hey, come here. Just for a sec.’ I sat at our table-for-two that had now become three, and he seemed older, somehow, suddenly. The corners of his eyes ran in crossroads. His voice came out in multiple directions. ‘How are you travelling?’

‘Fine.’
There’s a man living in our garden.
‘I’m fine.’

‘Uh-huh,’ he said. ‘It’s just, you’re not fine. Standing out in the rain in the middle of the night isn’t fine.’

It came down in hurricanes, the rain. Fat drops and dark clouds. It swept through and back around and in the mornings the valley was full of fog until the rain breathed it away. Sometimes it didn’t happen until Dave had left for work, and I curled my feet under my body and talked to the currawong, and he smiled at me in the broken way he had.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said.

‘I went down there when I got home.’

‘Good for you.’

‘It’s steep. And it’s slippery as hell. Just about killed myself getting to those trees you hate.’

‘What do you want me to do about it?’

He had eyes like steel and a fist like steel and he trapped them both on me and we stared.

‘I just want you to be careful.’

‘Fine. I am being careful.’

‘Maybe don’t go down there for a bit.’

‘No.’

He put his mouth close to my face, his griefless, creased mouth. ‘I know you’re sad. I’m sad.’

‘You’re not as sad.’

He sighed. ‘It’s not a competition, Heather.’

How could he understand? How could he know the way my wound would fill and empty and fill and empty like a tide?

He pulled a bit of folded paper from his pocket. ‘I’ve made an appointment for you. For tomorrow afternoon.’

I felt the tightness in my shoulders first. ‘What kind of appointment?’

‘Jenny Greer is her name. The hospital said she’s very good.’

It ran through me like an earthed wire, the physicality of it, the mournfulness of it.

‘Come on, Dave.’

‘Just go once, yeah? For me?’ He had his face put on all earnest.

‘Fine. Once. Because you want me to.’

‘I’ll take it.’ He kissed me – firm, regimental. ‘I love you. Call me if you need anything. I’m just down –’

‘I know. You’re just down the road.’ I put my hand on his hand. He didn’t smile the way I had hoped he might. The door clunked into its hinges as he left. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the space he had filled.

I pulled on my slippers and stepped into a late spring shower. The southerly wind had taken the edge off the impending summer. The garden was alight with the wet dose of soul food – flowers that clutched at each other, leaves that swayed as if to music, ducks and frogs and mushrooms with hats. I tiptoed past a cluster of peony roses (their faces! baby pink and white and wearing green skirts) and ducked under a willow that had wept so keenly it had drooped all along the creek bank. I hugged my bare arms and walked upstream, where the creek broke through into a shallow pool, its surface almost invisible under a layer of insects.

Wood cracking. How far away? I had no point of reference. Behind me? In front of me? I held my breath. A slip of light appeared. The ground was mud. My eyes saw only the light; the rest of the garden had somehow become even darker than before. I turned to face the source. A silhouetted man looked back at me, or away from me, or neither – it was impossible to tell.

‘Noel,’ the shadow said.

Noel.

‘Heather,’ I said, and the shapes behind him breathed in a grey halo.

‘This is the best spot,’ he said. ‘You’ve chosen well.’ A talking slip of black air. I was immediately at ease.

‘I like the way the creek becomes two creeks,’ I said.

‘Yes, I do too.’ He sat on a rock and I could make out the shape of his face, pointed and crooked. His hair fell to one side. ‘So, why are you down here?’ he said.

‘I live here.’

‘That is not the question I asked,’ he said. His jacket was wrapped curiously around his body, like a sloth.

‘I wanted to know what was down here,’ I said.

‘And what did you find?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Precisely,’ he said, and took a squirming lizard from his shirt pocket and set it on the ground.

‘How did you do that?’

‘Do what?’ He grabbed my hand. ‘Are you cold? You’re shaking.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘Come with me.’

I followed Noel into a room which was, as best I could determine in the dark, a kind of windowless brick chamber, one-roomed and smelling faintly of ginger. It was poorly lit, but where there was light, it fell from above in discrete rays, and as he moved under them his body flickered in and out of focus. In the far corner he had a makeshift kitchen – a ceramic pot wearing mildew, a clean towel hanging from the edge of it, a plate and a spoon positioned neatly in parallel. Facing that, something I assumed was his bedroom – torn blankets and flat leaves and a knitted hat stuffed with some type of foliage.

‘This is home,’ he said, and I said, ‘I see,’ but I didn’t. ‘Cup of tea?’ he offered. There were no obvious tea-making facilities. ‘No, thanks,’ I said.

He told a bit about his life. Born in a snowbank in Michigan. He’d met his wife, Lucille, selling cartons of puffin eggs on a train station platform. They drove east to west along Route 66 to visit Jack Kerouac, and he took them out in a wooden rowboat and they fished in a lake into the night, when the Northern Lights danced above them. After that they’d stowed away in the wheel well of a jumbo jet and watched the Pacific Ocean pass beneath them on their way to Sydney, then hitchhiked down the Hume Highway to live in the attic of a Carlton terrace.

‘You don’t have an accent, though,’ I said.

‘I’ve been here a long time.’ He smiled. ‘A long, long time.’

‘And Lucille?’

He paused. ‘No, not Lucille.’

‘Oh.’

‘What do you do?’ he said, his grey mouth mechanical.

I tried to remember. ‘I think I draw, sometimes.’

‘Oh, an artist!’ I felt the word in my throat.

‘Not an artist. Just someone who draws sometimes.’

‘Draw me.’ He puffed out his chest.

‘I couldn’t if I tried,’ I said. ‘I can’t draw faces.’

‘Oh.’ He asked me about what I did draw – what materials did I use? Had I tried gouache? It wasn’t that hard; painting was easy if you knew what the shapes looked like. Did I have anything I could show him? Had I ever had an exhibition? Did anyone buy my work?

‘No,’ I said again. ‘I just draw for myself. Only me.’

He sipped on the tea that he had conjured from nowhere and looked me up and down. His eyes met too close in the middle; they were comical behind his glasses and I wasn’t sure whether I was looking directly at him, or at the walls behind him, which swelled and eased. The teacup disappeared into his bony hands and he stopped, cracked his knuckles, frowned.

‘Why?’

In a bluestone cottage at the end of a sweeping gravel road, Mum and I hung her paintings from sharp hooks. She had painted women knitting in armchairs, and men pulling dogs back from the road, and two girls running naked through a river. I hooked them all, admiring my handiwork as I went, and she followed behind me and realigned them, swapped them, changed them. Her eyes blazed, her fingers shook. When we had hung all of the paintings, we sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor with our backs together and looked at the exhibition, and she said,
This is going to be amazing
. But nobody came. At the end of the week she went back up to the bluestone cottage with her roll of red stickers and took down every painting, and left them in the back of her car for three months while she read
New Idea
and cried into her hands.

‘Oh,’ said Noel. And then he might have said,
You are not your mother
, or maybe I just heard an echo of the hundreds of other people who had said it.

‘I should go,’ I said.

‘It was nice chatting with you.’

In my kitchen I found an assortment of strange and wonderful food. Dave had stocked up on tea bags, ginger biscuits shaped like flowers, and tiny fish in brine, which I shoved into a sandwich. I took my plate and my sketchbook to the balcony, where the charcoal blew away as soon as I touched it to the paper, and I drew petunias wearing striped pyjamas, and the pink trumpets of Linnaeus’ Heath, and an invisible man in his paper house.

*

The first – and only – time I saw a shrink, I was sixteen. School-assigned, compulsory. At the end of a long corridor, I opened a small grey door and saw a small grey man. He asked me two questions: Do you have private health insurance (‘Yes.’); Are you on any medication (‘No.’). I told him about my childhood – stranger in hindsight, and the things that seemed good at the time were maybe the bad bits, and vice versa – to which he raised his grey eyebrows and wrote things on a notepad. (I would later get a peek at it and see a picture of a man riding a stallion and holding a morning star.) I told him about staying with Gran, and cooking with Mum, and the balcony on the house at the beach, which overlooked the grey water, and Mum telling me how she thought about just walking out there, just walking out into the sea and never coming back. (He nodded and pinched his lips together.)

At the end of the session he took out his prescription pad and scrawled some gibberish.
After dinner take one of these, and one of these
, he said,
and come back to see me in two weeks
. The grey door closed, and it did not open again. I put the prescription in the bin. The school did not chase it up.

It was a subject of some conjecture, the idea of a hereditariness to the illness. It had been for years prior, Gran watching my mother, and Dad watching me, with the same stricken eyes, narrowed, seeing things that were there and things that weren’t there, and tying them together. In my moments of heartbreak, they wrapped me in blankets and held me tight in the corner, shushing and whispering. In my moments of joy they were more afraid still, clinging to the railings of the windows as I went into the world, and still clinging there when I returned.
How are you feeling?
And me not understanding that in feeling good – in feeling
great
– there could be any danger.

Jenny Greer’s waiting room reeked of false comforts: an air freshener plugged into a wall socket; a receptionist doused in sunny perfume; a landscape in a cheap frame. Dave watched me, watched me, making sure I wouldn’t leave, or that if I did leave, he could follow me. He could follow me out the door and down the street and I wouldn’t get away because where would I go? I would stand in the street and he would come running after me and take me back, and we would sit in the waiting room until I went in, one way or another.