The Paper House (8 page)

‘Do you want me to come in?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Heather?’

Ms Jenny Greer. Not a doctor. She wore a tiny orange cardigan. Her hair hung in distinct oily strands. ‘I’m a counsellor,’ she said. Her hand like wet paper. Dave shook it.

I said, ‘Do you have a bone density issue?’ Dave’s steel grip on the air surrounding me.

‘You should probably wait outside,’ Jenny Greer said to him. Her mouth hung to the side.

She sat on a small red chair and I sat on a long blue couch. ‘So, Heather,’ she said, and waited. The couch was usually for couples counselling, she said, but I put my shoes up on it anyway. One large window overlooking the car park, and another high up, like we were going to look into next door’s bathroom.

‘They have tints that cover greys now,’ I said.

She smiled, thin on one side, made a note on her paper.

‘Tell me about why you’re here today, Heather,’ she said.

‘They told me I should.’

‘Who told you?’

‘The people who know better than me.’

She turned to a fresh page in her notebook, clicked a cheap pen. ‘The way this works is: we spend about an hour getting to know you. After that the sessions are forty-five minutes and we’ll mostly let you lead. I don’t want to push you into anything. Does that sound okay?’

‘I guess so.’

‘So, first I’d like to ask you a bit about your family, if that’s okay.’

My gut twisted. I thought of my mother between white walls, her face gaunt.

‘Why?’

‘That’s just how this works. I ask you some questions, you tell me some answers, maybe we have a bit of a laugh, you go home and have a good rest in front of the TV.’

‘There’s nothing good on.’

She smiled. ‘The guy in the waiting room – your husband?’

‘Yes. David.’

The pen went round in circles. ‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’

‘One sister,’ I said, trying to peer over the top of the paper. ‘Fleur.’

‘How old is she?’

How old was I? ‘She’s forty.’ Fleur and Dave. My family.

‘And your parents?’

She’d worn a dress with a pom-pom fringe, and he’d had a pink flower in his pocket. His kissed each of her knuckles one by one, her hand white under the moon, which followed them across the porch. Her shoulders were exposed and glossy.

‘I have an aunt in Brisbane.’

Jenny waited. The clock on her desk clacked.
Clack
.
Clack
. One minute, ten minutes. I suffocated in the tight air but I did not move, feet on the couch, eyes on her limp mouth.
There’s a man living in my garden
, my brain said.
He wears terrible jumpers
.

‘Well, that’s all the time we have,’ she said, and closed her notebook. ‘Make an appointment for three days’ time. We can talk more then, if you’re up to it.’ Hair falling around her in spider webs. She had her hand on my bare shoulder, a split second with our skin connecting.

Dave leaped at me as though I were on day release.

‘How did you go?’

‘Fine,’ I said. Jenny Greer shuddered behind me.

‘Helpful, do you think?’

‘Oh yes, very helpful.’

I drowned in the flood of his relief, in its winds and waves.

*

On a winter’s afternoon when I was six, I put my belongings in a paper bag and ran away from home. I had a doll with eyes that didn’t close and a packet of bubblegum that I’d found in Fleur’s room and a map of Melbourne, and I got on a bus with fifteen cents that I’d stolen from Mum’s purse, and the driver asked me if I knew which stop I needed to get off at, and I told him I did even though I was only half sure. I sat on the bus with my paper bag and I talked to a moustachioed man who took photos as a job, just travelled around the place taking photos of things.
This is your stop
, he said, took a photo of me and clicked the film over. When I looked back to him from the folding door, his head had changed, eyes all folded in. Clicked over.

When I stepped from the bus I saw Gran’s green coat and I knew Mum must have called ahead, because when I tripped down the stairs and into her arms she just held me as tight as she could until they came to pick me up. No one shouted, except Fleur who yelled at me for stealing her gum.
But the man
, I said.
He swapped his head
. I was stupid, Fleur shouted, I was a baby.

‘Dave took me to a shrink,’ I said, and Fleur raised her eyebrows. ‘Not even a shrink. Not a doctor at all, just a shitty counsellor.’

‘Right,’ she said.

‘What do you mean,
right
? I don’t need a counsellor. That’s why you’re here.’

‘That’s not why I’m here.’

‘It’s a
bit
why you’re here.’

‘No, I’m here to bring you toast and play cards.’

I leaned closer to her, listened to the way her breaths stopped in the middle. ‘How long will you stay?’

‘Just until I know you’re not going to lose the plot completely.’

‘I’m not going to.’

‘Well, that’s what they say, isn’t it?’

‘That’s what who says?’

‘Crazy people.’ Parts of her face were smiling. ‘Couple more days. Dave seems to have things under control.’ She flicked through the channels, stopped on a verbose documentary. ‘Whales,’ she said. ‘I’m going for a smoke.’ She took her earthen smell with her, her baked and battered smell.

Late in the evening, the sunset broke across the garden and created a theatre. Fleur took her truck into town to buy sausages. I sat on the grass at the top of the hill and the orchestra beat out at me. My ears rang with the music. High above the pit, a canopy of green tendrils and flat leaves and birds with rainbow faces.

Inside, Dave wrote end-of-year reports:
Johnny has demonstrated improvement in maths
;
Sally with the nose continues to outperform all other students
;
Heather is inept in the areas of physical education and general life skills
.

A ladybird crawled along my arm. I pushed my fingernail under its belly, tricked it into changing course along my hand.

‘We haven’t had any dinner!’ Dave called from the window.

‘Fleur’s getting it,’ I said. ‘You know, because she’s helpful.’

The window banged shut. Moments later, he sat in front of me with his head on my knees, as usual. In the orchestra pit. A conductor. An analogy: I felt all of the heat of him coming through my knees and into my chest, all of his electricity and his life.

‘Counselling can bring up a lot of stuff.’ He said it as though it were a great insight, something truly profound. ‘I guess that’s why they make you go more than once.’

‘Like when you go on a holiday and you need another holiday to recover.’

He kissed my kneecap. ‘Exactly.’

The crying stuck in my ribs, trapped and frantic, like a heart palpitation, like arrhythmia. The bones quivered, waiting for the crying to begin. The muscles contracted around it, holding it there. Sharp breaths, each sticking in the butterfly cage.

‘Please tell me what I can do.’

‘If I knew, I would tell you,’ I said. I stroked his head, listened to his breathing catching in the damp air. ‘I just didn’t think this part was over yet. That’s all.’

‘Which part?’ he said.

‘The part where we just miss her.’

‘Oh.’ He kissed my hand.

‘I just want one more minute. That’s all. I just want to see what I forgot to remember.’

He told me he would stay up with me after dinner, watching the Late Late Late Something, and I sat with my back against the headboard and thought of a deep pond with lily pads and frogs floating belly-up, hands swollen and bug-eyed. I thought of a yucca with its fuzzy head cut off, and a ring of petunias with purple lips. Dave laughed in his half-sleep. Eventually his hand dropped from my leg and his eyelashes flicked on his skin. On the TV, a laugh track skipped round and round.

F
LEUR WALKS WITH
me to school. She’s in the big school now but she still walks me. She says Gran told her she has to. I don’t mind.

My teacher Mrs Maynard makes us line up outside the classroom and put our hands on our heads. She says it will stop us getting into mischief. I wave to Fleur and she goes to her big school and I stand there with my hands on my head.

In my lunchbox I’ve got a strawberry Roll-Up. It’s a special treat because Dad packed my lunch today. I don’t think he knows about food pyramids. Mrs Maynard says we’re only allowed home-made stuff for recess but Dad has never home-made anything and anyway I always eat up the back where no one can see me. Especially not Mrs Maynard.

Roll-Ups don’t really taste like strawberries even though it says it on the packet. More like those lollies with white on the bottom and red on top. I think that’s better, but it’s not even the real reason I’m excited about my Roll-Up.

The best thing about having a strawberry Roll-Up is that they are Amy’s favourite and since I’ve got one maybe she will play with me.

Last week we played on the monkey bars but she got tired so some girls from year six threw sand at me for a bit. They must know that sand is soft so it doesn’t hurt.

Heather, Mrs Maynard says. She’s talking pretty loud. Heather, are you even listening?

I’m not listening but I say, Yes, Mrs Maynard.

You can put your hands down now, she says.

Some of the boys laugh. I put my hands down.

One of them is doing a squeaky voice, going, Heather! I love you, Heather!

I’m pretty sure he’s joking. I don’t think he really loves me.

Stop it, Hugo, I say.

Then he does a deep voice like a man. Heather, he says, we have to go to the hospital.

Amy is laughing.

I think about how I’m going to share my strawberry Roll-Up with her.

Boys! says Mrs Maynard. That’s enough!

Hugo smiles at me. Maybe he does love me.

Mrs Maynard counts all of us and tells us we can go inside. Hugo gets in the line behind me and gets really close to me so I can hear him breathing.

Your mum’s a spastic, he says.

Amy starts laughing again.

At recess I don’t even eat my Roll-Up at all. I just put it in the bin by the sandpit.

D
AVE FUSSED AROUND
me all weekend. He scuttled – opening windows, closing windows, turning on the fan, adding another blanket.

‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘I’m fine. You’re being ridiculous.’

‘It’s my fault,’ he kept saying. ‘You should do these things in a monitored way, you know. Can’t just go and dredge up all these feelings without having a
plan
afterwards. Did she give you a plan? Maybe I can find a plan online.’

On Monday afternoon, Fleur slipped alongside me. ‘Dave’s gone nuts,’ she said.

‘Don’t say “gone nuts”,’ I said.

She shrugged. ‘He has. Got any snacks?’ I produced a bag of pretzels, a block of local organic chocolate, a tin of butter biscuits. ‘No jerky?’

‘Biltong, or the American kind?’

‘You really cleaned Rupert out, huh?’

‘I can’t remember.’

She chewed and spat, a proper cowgirl. At the end of the bag she found the salty dregs and tipped them into her mouth.

‘Are you still leaving tomorrow?’ I said.

‘This afternoon, actually. Seven hours’ driving and then prettying up my Daisy at five in the morning.’

‘Oh, right,’ I said. Would Dave get me up with the sunrise? What if I missed it?

‘But, as a special treat before I go, I’m taking you to the shitty counsellor.’ She raised her glass of juice. ‘Cheers!’

‘You are? Where’s Dave?’

She put down the glass, pushed me towards the door. ‘He called before. Has to stay late, something about the boys putting a cherry bomb in the toilets.’

‘Why didn’t he call me?’

‘Dunno.’ She opened the passenger door with a flourish. ‘Get in.’

She drove into town in her disconnected way, not knowing quite where she was heading. At each intersection she frowned, looked left and right, moved on with hesitation. The streets hiccupped with children in uniform; they gathered in clumps around tables and bins and bus stops and any other anchor they could find.

‘Is everything okay?’ I said, after a while.

‘I went to one, you know.’ She stared straight ahead, one hand on the wheel.

‘One what?’

‘A shrink. A psychologist, anyway.’ Wound down the window by hand, let her arm drop out of it.

‘
You
did? Why would you need to see a shrink?’

She passed me her pouch. ‘Roll me a smoke, would you?’

‘I’m pretty rusty,’ I said, licked the glue, pinched and rolled the tobacco between my fingers. It was peaty and warm, like her. ‘Why?’ I said again.

She shrugged. ‘It was after I got divorced. The first time. Thought I should get on top of some stuff I was feeling.’

‘You felt stuff?’

She looked at me. ‘It’s important to nip it in the butt.’

‘In the
bud
,’ I said, passing her the feeble cigarette.

‘You’re missing the point.’ The cigarette sizzled as she lit it. ‘Did the school ever make you see one? After?’

I thought about the grey man in his grey corridor. The way he had looked through me to his billable hours and the box he had to tick for the school’s records. ‘I can’t remember.’

‘I asked them to.’ She flicked ash to the road. ‘Guess they forgot.’

The way his door had clicked shut as I left, locked and final. How I’d thought about walking into the sea that day and every day for weeks afterwards, but pushed my face into my pillows instead.

‘This is the place,’ I said with relief. ‘You can park round the back.’

‘Don’t have time, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Right. The sheep carnival.’

‘Yeah. Gotta get me some ribbons.’

‘Will you come back?’

She drew deep breaths, her face obscured by her clouds.

‘Do you need me to come back?’

‘Maybe.’ I closed the car door. ‘I’m at fairly high risk of buying the town out of snacks, as you’ve seen.’

‘Tell you what,’ she said, grinding her butt into the bitumen. ‘You get me something better to sleep on than that bag of hay, and I’ll give you another week of my illustrious company. Play your cards right – two weeks.’