Tarcutta Wake (2 page)

Adeline

In the middle of December the roof caved in. It had been the wettest spring for many years and everything had been quietly mouldering away up there for months. Then the sudden seam that appeared in the ceiling above my bed; the covers drenched in stale water, smattered with broken plaster. The sheets clung to my legs and a clump of sodden insulation batting lay across my chest like a dead wet cat. Everything was coated in a sticky white-grey dust. Colour of dirty goose feathers, city snow.

I should have gotten up then, walked to a safer part of the house and called the real estate to tell them what had happened, and that it hadn't been my fault. But I'd been dreaming about Adeline, and I was so sure that if I woke up properly, there'd be the news that there was nothing they could do for her, that they'd had to turn her off. So I tried to ignore the hole in the roof, to find my way back to the old house where Adeline still sits waiting on the back veranda, her dark hair knotted at the back of her neck and everything steeped in the medicinal smell of her skin.

Even here, it is raining. The backyard is cluttered with cardboard boxes going soft in the rain. Adeline takes a draw on her damp cigarette and says, Well, what do you think?

The sides of the boxes are disintegrating and things are starting to spill out, gimcracks and books, clothes with patterns that I recognise right away.

Is this everything? I ask.

It's everything, she says.

Okay then. Alright. Good.

And down in the old garage the girl we tried to share – the girl we tried to share, and could not share – is teaching you to play guitar, and the band of light that comes from beneath the door is the colour of dirty goose feathers, the colour of city snow. I go down and I bang on the door for a while but she just plucks harder at the cheap nylon strings saying, This is A, this is G, this is F, her voice like a cracked porcelain dish spilling over, This is B, this is E, and eventually I walk away.

Cotton

You could tell just by how clean her hair was, someone told the papers afterwards. You could tell she had money, that she was somebody. Had been somebody.

On the morning we found out, we didn't say very much. We smoked a lot and passed the papers around the table, comparing the stories in the tabloids with the stories in the broadsheets.

Somewhere there was a matchbox, her baby teeth nestled into cotton wool. Somewhere the bronzed baby shoes, the envelope of feathery blonde curls, kept safe.

All you really have to do is be here

Someone set fire to the place a couple of years ago, and one of the back rooms was left badly damaged. Roscoe just cleared out what was left of the furniture, swept up the shards from the petrol bomb and locked the door.

Wasn't much took place in there anyway, he told her when she started.

Who did it, do you think?

Just bored kids, probably. Nothing for them to do out here.

I suppose fire's thrilling when you're a kid.

Stays thrilling to some people, he says.You'll be okay till the end of July?

That's fine. I'm not going anywhere.

She'd seen the film when she was young, a wartime drama that had bored her to sleep on the green chevron couch. Slow, saturated yellows of the 1970s, and the kind of ending her mother cried at, though that wasn't saying much. It wasn't until she moved out here that she remembered, driving past the heaped stone wall and beyond it, the greying weatherboard farmhouse, the surrounding paddocks dotted with the hulking frames of ruined machinery. A peeling sign read
Open to visitors, Sat & Sun,
and beneath that,
Short Term Help Required.

Roscoe was silver and wiry, the lines of his face resembling animal tracks over dusty ground. When she asked about what kind of help was required he smiled, broad and askew.

Tell you the truth, love, all you really have to do is be here. Eleven a.m. till five p.m., both days. My sister's chemo sessions start in Sydney next week, and I'm getting a bit desperate.

She followed him through the house, purpose built and furnished for the film and unchanged in the four decades since. A
dvd
of the film played on continuous loop on a flat screen in one corner of the living area. Everything else looked makeshift, salvaged, fashioned from packing crates and produce boxes.

Austerity measures, said Roscoe, and flipped through a stack of ration cards. Try to make sure these don't go missing. They're worth a packet these days. Ironic, eh?

He gave her a wink then, and handed her a cluster of rusty keys.

There's a folder in the top drawer of the bureau with all the information you'll need. Names and dates. Trivia and such. You'll get the odd smartarse that just wants you to know how much they know. But if there's anyone you get a bad feeling about, you call Dave. Number's written there in the folder. Film creeps are the worst creeps, I can tell you.

On the outside wall there is still a black smoke smear climbing up from the window, the window itself covered over with a raw sheet of plywood. On slow days she'll unlock the door of the burnt-out room, where the walls and ceiling have not been repainted, and the damp charry scent of the ruined floorboards reminds her of camping in winter, of sleeping in her clothes and conversations beneath a ruined rail bridge. Some afternoons she scrapes one of the dining chairs into the room and closes the door behind her. Sits and tries to read, her hand on her belly, waiting to feel something kick. Though it's too soon. She knows that much.

All the other rooms were repainted and reopened to the public within two months of the fire, Roscoe's little laminated notices reinstated: This is where such and such happened. This is where whatsherface said or did or broke this. She comes in at 10.45 to set up the
dvd
and murmurs along with it while rearranging the rack of dusty souvenir postcards.
Darcy? He's over in Katoomba working on the funicular …

Visitors pay five dollars to walk around the farmhouse, sliding their fingers over everything and waiting for something to happen. They pick up the ancient flipside toaster like it's magic. This is where so and so made toast, she thinks, and asks them to please not disturb anything. To please get out of the bed, the bathtub, et cetera, that they can re-enact their favourite scenes when they get home.

Jack Thompson will not be standing outside, waiting for you in the rain, she wants to tell them. No, those aren't really his pyjamas. Your life is not a movie, unless that movie is the final scene of
The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Her own house still feels like a film set. Her own house does not yet feel like her own house, although it is. The first compensation payment went towards the deposit. In the shed she finds Golden Fleece oil cans, rusty fox traps with their terrible jaws snapped shut, a water-damaged book on barbed wire. Whoever lived here before lived here a long time, had made and grown things. But it's wild out there now. Some of the herbs and vegetables have lasted through the several months of vacancy, but most are choked by weeds or gone to seed. In the rental properties that came before there had never been any point to it, growing plants for the next tenants to eat, for them to look at or not look at, take care of or let die. Anything she grew, she grew in pots, hauling them into the back seat of the car when it was time to move on. But here, it is different. She can finish what somebody else has started, and still be here to see what comes of it.

The first few weeks have been spent ripping out the dead things, digging the garden beds over and rebricking their borders. The ground is soft with late-autumn rain and everything comes up easily in her hands. At dusk her muddy boots and bulky woollen jumpers are kicked and shrugged off just inside the back door, ready for the next afternoon. Inside the house, little has changed since the removalists brought everything in three weeks ago. Cardboard boxes still line the hallway, filled with books and clothes she can't get into. During the evenings the house has a gentle clicking to it, the sound of crustaceans underwater, and the winter lilac of the sky makes her believe that yes, she might have drowned out here. Standing in the old clawfoot tub, she runs hot water over a vial of progesterone, wipes a swab around the bruised injection site. The first few had nearly made her throw up, the feeling of the cool oil blooming from the needle. But it's easy now, mechanical.

Moonlight soaks through a second-hand sheet. Somewhere out there, a barking owl, its sound of a woman screaming. It's been a long time since she screamed. Her noises are small, involuntary. She keeps her left hand pressed against her stomach, doesn't think on anyone. There's no one to think on, and it's better like that, stronger, as though part of it dissolves when shared. When she finishes she lies back and listens to the blood pounding soft in her head. Tells herself she'll put up curtains this week, cook proper meals. She'll unpack the record player and it won't be so quiet. Nina, Dylan, The Boss. Mance Lipscomb to drown out the owls' screaming and the lonely underwater noises. Maybe she'll haul the furniture around, reassemble the bookshelves. But she's unsure about how much heavy lifting she's supposed to be doing. This was the first time in her life that she'd hired removalists, and it had felt like stupid luxury. For fifteen years she'd traded a slab of beer or a bottle of scotch for a second pair of strong arms and it had worked out fine. But the Levines didn't want her to strain anything.

Let us take care of it, they said.

Sure, she relented. Go ahead and set it up for Tuesday.

The following week a trio of men had come into her apartment with all their flannel and lifting straps, and she stood back and flapped her hands in some ineffectual choreography while they carried out her armchairs, her kitchen table, her refrigerator. She watched them put the fridge onto the truck. A few days earlier she had defrosted the freezer – it had been a solid block of ice for the best part of a year. She'd just chipped pieces off now and then when she couldn't get the door to close. Finally she unplugged it from the wall and packed the floor around it with old towels. Throughout the day things emerged from the ice; packages of peas, a halfbox of waffles, an exploded beer bottle and, inexplicably, a blue toy train. She chiselled it free and ran the hot tap over it. The little rubber wheels spun as she pushed it across the draining board with her index finger, not understanding how it came to be there in the freezer. Once the ice had completely defrosted and the towels were soaked with melt-water, the smell of chemical cold, she put the toy train back inside the freezer door. Now it rattled around inside the taped fridge as the men hoisted and shuffled it to the back of the truck.

She considers telling the Levines about the freezer train when they fly in to visit her at the new house at week fourteen. There is still the question of which books to unpack, which pictures to hang. How to make herself look like the kind of person who can keep something safe. New subscriptions to
The Economist
and
Foreign Affairs
are already stacked up on the kitchen table. Bub will be politically aware, she will joke, though in reality the articles make her feel soft, blunt; she reads over the same line two or three times without taking any meaning from it. Stills from the last three ultrasounds are there with the magazines. At ten weeks, it looks like a monkey smoking a cigarette. Though if neither of them mentions the similarity, she won't draw their attention to the fact. Their child's potential monkeyness is their problem.

They are still calling it compensation, although the official sum, the one written into the contract, is much smaller than the amount she received. But they're polite. Good god, are they ever polite, so compensation it is. She could float two years on it out here, in this town where apology is so close to everybody's mouth, as if tucked just inside the lower lip. Bump into someone in the street and it just tumbles out:
I'm sorry. Excuse me, I'm sorry.

Hell, we're all sorry, she wants to respond. We're all sorry about something, aren't we?

One night her brother calls from interstate. He doesn't like what she's doing but he doesn't have much to say about it.

Just letting you know I'm heading over to Spain next week, he tells her.

Well. Bueno.

Want anything? he asks, as though Spain is the milk bar at the end of the street.

A chocolate frog and a bag of snakes.

Ha.

No thanks, I'm all good here.

A good bottle of PX, maybe.

I'm not drinking, I told you.

Yeah. I'd stop drinking too if someone put six figures in front of me.

It isn't six figures.

You should think about telling Mum. I don't like you hiding over there on your own. You're being rabbity.

Okay, she says. I'll think about it.

Like hell you will. I could've leant you something, you know that right? If it was about the money.

It isn't about the money.

Then what? What is it about?

*

Standing in the burnt room, where nothing of great importance was ever filmed, where nothing has started to kick, she wants to go back through all the rooms of her life, place everything that mattered, prop up laminated notices; this is where I grew thin and breastless, where my laugh softened to a scratch; this is where god became a lowercase word; this is where I surfaced; this is where I stood, and watched, and couldn't do anything. This is where, and this is where.

Outside the house, on the other side of the plywood, somebody coughs and spits. There's the sound of the screen door opening and banging closed, a throat being cleared. A walk-in – she would have heard a car if there was one. No noise of an engine, no tyres crunching the loose stone drive.

A man stands in the centre of the room, fingers of one hand resting lightly on the rough-hewn table. He is looking up at the television, where the water tower scene is playing out. Next will come the struggle, Jenny Agutter storming down the hill, holding up the shoulder of her torn dress.

Can I help you with anything? It's supposed to be five dollars but we're closing soon.

He turns around then, and his expression is that of someone stranded several hours in a small airport. He looks at her, looks past her into the room she has just walked from.