The Paper House Read online

  As the medication wore off, pain burned through me like salt. A bushfire. Acid, chilli, lightning. My heartbeat danced between breaths; hundreds of tiny hands squeezed my blazing flesh andante. The room swam. It cracked, it shattered. My body heaved and gave way beneath me and I screamed. A tired nurse looked at my chart. ‘Oh, caesar,’ she said, with nothing in her voice. ‘I’ll get you something for the pain.’ And her face was a dragon, flames licking the colourless walls, claws drawing blood from my skin, red and angry like a wound, and the TV asked, Which Friends star turns 48 today? Dave slept.

  *

  In the morning he filled forms with unspeakable labels. CAUSE OF DEATH. ‘Why is there a doll in that plastic crib?’ I said, and they wheeled it away. They moved me to a different ward and told me I would spend at least four days recovering and sipping tea. I had become the least sick, the least sad. In the far corner near the window, a middle-aged man dressed the stumps where his girlfriend’s legs had been. A woman with a tangle of white hair and a man with no hair at all had squeezed into one bed; I couldn’t tell who was the patient, and maybe they both were. The bed next to mine was empty, but the flowers were still in their vases. The whole day went by without a single visitor; just the immediates, the carers, the obligated.

  When dinner arrived – a stodgy lump of mashed potatoes; a pile of flat peas – Dave put his hand on mine and sighed like a man who had spent a week sleeping in a vinyl armchair. We looked at each other. He touched his fingertips to my face. ‘I have to go to the house,’ he said.

  ‘The house,’ I said.

  ‘Everything is just in piles and boxes.’ The boxes: a half-built crib, hand-me-downs from friends, a silver heirloom teaspoon. ‘I need to do something useful.’

  ‘For when we have to live there.’

  ‘Right, Heather. For when we have to live there.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, and he kissed my forehead.

  I felt it right in my heart, which no longer beat in my chest but hung weighted in the pit of my guts, as heavy and still as a stone amid the hum of the machines and the shrill ring of the bedside phone (three dollars a day).

  ‘Hello?’ Her crowded, hollow voice.

  ‘Mum?’ I said.

  ‘Heather? Is that you?’

  A click, and darkness.

  Outside, three birds sang to one another. A big one with a throaty voice first: the same dull note three times. A smaller one next, aggressive as though responding to a telemarketer. And a third one, panicked, runs of pitched scales, trying to smooth it over. Then again from the top; big, medium, small, until the sun had passed over and they could move on to the next thing.

  Dave came in after breakfast. ‘Did you sleep?’ I said. He hadn’t. He wore the same clothes as yesterday. He had photos of the house on his phone. The roses had given birth to tight buds along the verandah, and he had bought extra cushions for our bed. He showed me a koala cradled by the gum tree on the nature strip. I looked for the house I had seen at the auction, but it wasn’t there; no folded pink blankets or ducks hanging from mobiles.

  ‘Any water in the creek?’ I said, which was the only thing I could think to say. He scrolled through the photos again.

  ‘Is there a creek?’

  ‘Way down the back,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe it’s on the neighbours’ title.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  We waited for the doctor to come into my room. Dave read the paper but could tell me nothing about the world’s events. ‘Where did the others go?’ he said.

  ‘The lady who lost her legs went home,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty sure.’ The one with white hair had disappeared in the night. Maybe there had been beeping, crying. There was no evidence of it, if it were true.

  And we waited.

  I knew the doctor would come into my room. I knew he would look at my chart and take my blood pressure. I knew he would shake Dave’s hand and wish us well. And I knew he would say, ‘You can go home now,’ and I knew I would stare at him and shake him by his lapels and demand that he tell me – that he stop withholding from me – where this ‘home’ was, and how I might set about getting there.

  But he didn’t. A nurse gave me a blue form and told me there had been an accident and they needed the beds.

  ‘I see,’ Dave said. ‘And you’re sure she’s well enough to go home?’ He squeezed my hand.

  The nurse looked over my chart: placenta praevia, caesarean section, stillbirth. ‘Seems so. Doctor’s explained all the important stuff anyway, no doubt? Driving’s off-limits for six weeks. No funny business ’til she’s fully healed.’

  ‘Funny business?’

  ‘Sex.’

  ‘Hah.’

  ‘Make an appointment with your GP six weeks from now. If you feel sick, or feverish, go sooner.’

  ‘What if I just feel so sad that my legs won’t move?’ I said.

  She looked at me with her fat red face. ‘We have a pack for that.’ A plastic bag filled with leaflets and forms and despondent women with their faces pressed against windows and more than one sullen raincloud. ‘There’s a group session for outpatients. They meet on Wednesday nights.’

  ‘What for?’ I said.

  ‘Well, to talk about how they’re feeling, I guess.’ Sweat beads collected above her eyebrows. ‘This must be a very hard time for you.’ Her hand on Dave’s shoulder. ‘For both of you.’

  Dave packed my bag while I stared at the ceiling. I had accumulated some flowers, all delivered by couriers. ‘Do you need these?’ he said, and I supposed I probably didn’t. He put them in the bin. ‘And this?’ A plastic bracelet and a sticker with a drawing of a pink bear. I put it in my bag. We moved stiffly and reluctantly. When we had finished packing we took the long way out of the hospital, through radiology and oncology and other ways to die slowly, and the parking was fifteen dollars. ‘I guess we can’t get ice-creams on the way home now,’ I said. My skin stuck to the hot seat. My heart beat against the floor.

  We pulled out of the car park and headed south, not north, not into the sun but away from it, through rows of gnarled vines and fields of black-faced sheep and fast along the generic paddocked highway. We stopped at the petrol station by the exit, a place I’d stopped at many times before, with my belly rolling and the air in my skin and my eyes, and he filled the car in silence. It was all silence. The radio was silence. The road was silence. I had filled my ears with the sound of nothing and I was absolutely, definitely, never going to open them again.

  The car stopped at a place I didn’t know, on a road I didn’t recognise. Just a house, flickering in and out in the afternoon sun. Dave plucked me from the car and pulled me into his shoulder; he smelled of paint and tape and dust. We walked through the front door the way I must have imagined we would, into the neat entryway that led through to the kitchen, his arm around me but empty, so empty, just skin on his skeleton, and I wanted to sleep for the rest of my life but I didn’t know where the bedroom was.

  I OPEN MY eyes and Mummy’s face is right there. Get up! Get up! Her shouting sounds more like singing. She’s waving something in my face but the world is still blurry and I can’t really make it out. Come on, Heather! she sings. It’s your birthday! It’s a hat, in her hand. The light through my window reflects off the tinsel train. She’s wearing one too. Mine is purple; hers is pink.

  She whips me up in her arms and I cling to her neck like a baby sloth. We skip down the hallway like that, out into the back room where the table is laid out like a party. Streamers and balloons, striped paper plates and fairy bread piled to the ceiling. Mummy is dancing now, round and round the table on the tips of her toes, going, Happy birthday, Heather! and Fleur has her head on the table with her hands over her ears, and a blue hat sticking out.

  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 a
nd 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.

  FOR 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 s
hades 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.