The House Within Read online

  ‘It’s tough on your Mum,’ said Anna, ‘especially when Ritchie’s trying so hard.’ Her voice was without inflection.

  ‘Why doesn’t my father come and see us?’ I asked, hoping to throw her.

  ‘Well dear,’ she said, in a reasonable tone, although I could see her colour rise, ‘your Dad lives in Australia now — it’s not like driving to Auckland, is it?’

  ‘He’s rich. He could come more often. He could send for us.’

  ‘It was for the best,’ said Anna, too swiftly. ‘Your father wanted a clean break. It was for your sakes.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said, laid back, imitating a style of talking I’d seen on television.

  ‘You shouldn’t say that, Stephen. I mean, it’s like swearing.’

  ‘Silly bitch,’ I said. I wouldn’t have anything more to do with Anna. I didn’t like the way her new husband looked at me with flinty eyes.

  I swore I would never go near Scouts. My friendship with Anthony was teetering on the brink. Jill, his mother, was on the Scouts’ Ladies Committee. Anthony wasn’t going to get away with a performance like mine. I felt as if I was striking out on my own in some dangerous way.

  RITCHIE’S SCOUT TROOP built a new hall. A dedication ceremony was held for it one spring afternoon. ‘You have to go,’ my mother told me. ‘No ifs or buts.’ She caught me in her arms and hugged me, even though I ducked. ‘I love you, Stephen,’ she said, in that clumsy, embarrassed way adults use to kids when they are trying to reassure them, and not altogether reassured themselves. She meant I love you in spite of what you do to me. Even though Gerald can’t bear the sight of you any more. And suddenly I knew that things were not all right between them. There was some kind of resignation about her face that was not to do with me. I felt a surge of pure joy. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘sure I’ll come.’

  The Scouts sweated in their jerseys in an unexpected heat wave, as they stood to attention, their wrist bones chafed red with prickly heat. I felt light and free, my shirt and boxer shorts a vindication of my stand. At the same time I was stifled by the presence of parents and well-wishers, packed scores deep around me. Gerald and my mother stood arm brushing against arm, every now and then turning to look into each other’s eyes in a way I found sickly. Perhaps I had imagined what I had seen in my mother’s face earlier. The betrayals of adults weighed down on me like the dense overcast clouds gathering above us.

  The speeches droned on. I wanted, after all, to have someone turn to me and say I was a good child too, without having to learn rules and salute to anybody.

  — Thank you for the one hundred stacking chairs donated.

  God will never smile on me.

  — Thank you for the gift of an electric stove.

  God doesn’t love me.

  — We thank those who gave us an electric water heater.

  You’ve got verbal diarrhoea God.

  — Let us hear God’s word concerning building in other days.

  Shut up.

  ‘So,’ said the minister, folding his hands, and reading at a distance from the improvised lectern, ‘So Solomon built the house and finished it. And he built the walls of the house within with boards of cedar, both the floor of the house, and the walls and the ceiling: and he covered them on the inside with wood, and covered the floor of the house with planks of fir.’

  I liked that.

  ‘WE COULD BUILD a house, just you and me,’ I said to Ritchie that night. Soon it would be the holidays and they stretched before me like colours at the end of a kaleidoscope, bright and tempting but unrealised in my imagination. I expected Ritchie would be off with his Scout group, and I would be left at home with my mother and the baby, who wasn’t a baby any more, but nearly old enough to go to school. She followed me round, wanting me to do up her shoe laces and take her for walks.

  To my surprise, Ritchie agreed. Scouts were in recess over Christmas. ‘Just you and me,’ he said.

  ‘Yup.’

  I thought about Anthony, but I was going off him. He never seemed to be sure enough of what he wanted to take a stand over anything. He’d joined Cubs. Funnily, that didn’t seem to impress Ritchie. After all, he had chosen to join, Anthony simply went because he was told.

  ‘Scout’s honour?’

  I almost told him to shove it.

  There was a stand of young gum saplings on wasteland down past the end of the town reserve. Among these we carried timber collected from the rubbish dump and began our construction. When we reached three shaky storeys, we could look from our house over the tops of the young trees, into a valley of houses. The roof we thatched with plaited branches. At the dump we found a roll of artificial green lawn and this is what we put on the floor.

  ‘Planks of fur,’ I said, stroking the surface of our carpet.

  ‘It’s fir, like trees,’ said Ritchie.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, embarrassed to admit my mistake. ‘This finishes it off.’

  And there my brother and I spent the rest of the summer.

  Ritchie had begun to grow a faint fuzz of hair on his face. He gave up clean living and we disgusted each other with old routines of smoking and lavatory jokes. He taught me the Scout Law, but it was more like mockery the way we recited it. Still, it was because of his Scout status that we were allowed to stay out at nights in the house we had made and count stars, sheltering down in our sleeping bags when unseasonable rain passed over the town. We lived on bread and cheese and apples. What was our mother thinking of, letting us sleep out in the woods like this, like possums? Later, I thought that it was because she and Gerald were so absorbed in their problems that she didn’t really notice.

  We didn’t talk about Gerald any more. Ritchie and I were a unit, sealed off from Scouts and our mother’s lover, and the father we didn’t know any more. Although we did talk about him. We invented pictures of what he would be like. He came in many guises. ‘He’s coming on a bucking bronco like someone in a rodeo, riding straight for us,’ Ritchie said. I could see the horse’s thrashing hooves flying every which way, my father waving his hat in the air. Scooping me from the ground moments before we confronted the bull, he would vault up onto the saddle, with me clutching his thonged jerkin. Together we would go into battle.

  ‘We’ll win, of course,’ said Ritchie. Ritchie, the optimist.

  ‘I reckon he’ll be a folk singer, like Peter, Paul and Mary,’ I said, groping for someone really famous. I couldn’t remember hearing him sing.

  ‘Mum’ll be Mary.’

  ‘She’s too fat,’ I said.

  I didn’t tell Ritchie about those other dreams, like wet dreams, which filled my head, blinded me when I woke up, with their sharp realness.

  ‘How can we get him back?’ Ritchie said, lying on his back, a rollie in the corner of his mouth, eyes squinting against the smoke.

  ‘He made a clean break, it was for the best,’ I said, imitating sarcasm.

  ‘I’ll bet I can bring him back,’ said Ritchie.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’ll think of something,’ he said, with an older brother’s confidence. And I believed him.

  We took turns to stay awake and watch for prowlers and some nights we thought we heard rustling in the bushes, but we couldn’t see anyone there. When it was my turn I lay awake under the immense black sky and I heard the stirring of dogs, their low howls that greeted the primrose dawn. I thought that, like Ritchie, I might learn to live in the world. I could see that the things he did when he was apart from me were things that helped him to make the best of it all. I thought it was like growing up on the outside, but you didn’t have to change on the inside.

  THE DOG DAYS of my mother’s affair with Gerald had begun long before its formal ending. Sometime, during that rainy season, as summer turned to autumn and then again towards winter, Gerald had left without us really noticing. It was not a separation, our mother said, when we did eventually ask her, but I could see that a weariness had descended on her, disappointment perhaps.
Gerald had thrown in his job and gone off to develop a block of land on the other side of town. Our mother had refused to go with him, and we guessed it was on account of us. We supposed we ought to be grateful, and we were pleased not to dance to Gerald’s tune any longer. But during that period our careless lifestyle felt more like an endurance test. It might have been better if Gerald had gone right away, but for a long time he kept up a pretence of just being absent on leave, coming backwards and forwards to see Abbie, and sometimes to sleep with our mother. From what we could gather, Anna helped Gerald on his land, spending some of her weekends out there. She and my mother kept a distance between them.

  Ritchie took an hour one evening after school to iron his Scout uniform, testing the heat by spitting on the iron so that balls of spit hissed like fat in a flame. Our mother was at the shops and we had Abbie to look after. Her cut-out books were spread across the living room floor. You be Ken and I’ll be Barbie, she kept asking me. I was just about ready to hit her, although I knew I would be in big trouble if I did. Ritchie was looking anxiously at his watch. He didn’t want to leave me alone with her. Gerald was expected over if our mother didn’t come home in time.

  ‘Go on,’ I said, ‘I won’t push her down the dunny.’

  ‘I’ll stay a bit longer,’ he said. I could see tears of rage forming behind his eyelids. ‘She’s not my kid, our mother ought to look after her.’

  ‘Please go,’ I said. ‘You have to. You’re going to be the leader, I betcha, everyone thinks you’re best.’ I knew this because Anthony and I were speaking again. He was all that was keeping me from joining Cubs. I couldn’t bring myself to admit I might have been wrong. Jill had told him everyone on the committee thought Ritchie was a promising kid, the kind who would be a leader. I couldn’t believe it was me begging Ritchie to hurry off to Scouts.

  ‘Honest, I won’t lay a finger her on her. I’ll pretend to be Ken and screw Barbie,’ I said.

  But then, both Gerald and our mother turned up at the door at the same moment. ‘I’m late,’ said Ritchie, pushing past them into the fine drizzling rain.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ she said to Gerald. ‘You said you’d be here in time for Ritchie to go.’

  ‘I’ll run you down on the back of the bike,’ said Gerald, anxious to appease her. My mother had already put the car away.

  Ritchie hesitated. I could see he wanted to say no, but if he left it a minute longer it would be too late to bother at all. Black marks, either way.

  ‘Get out there,’ said Gerald, walking towards the door.

  ‘Okay, okay. Thanks Gerald.’ A Scout is friendly and considerate. Disgusting. He didn’t look at me as he went out. I couldn’t blame him for accepting the lift. All the same, it seemed like charity, saving Gerald’s face.

  The puny little motorbike farted into life and I heard the screech of its tyres as Gerald spun out the gate. I could guess there was too much weight on the bike for its size and the speed it was going. At least, that’s what I thought afterwards. I don’t know what I thought then. I just heard the crash as it happened. And I heard my mother, a thin scream caught in the back of her throat as she ran.

  I followed her, but a neighbour pulled me back. He grabbed me with such force that I fell over, and each time I got to my feet he pushed me back again, and between falling and climbing to my feet, like an animal being beaten, I saw my mother crouching over my brother’s body.

  And I heard the word dead.

  I SAT IN church and watched our father while my brother, who lay in his coffin, could not see him. I heard people around me sing ‘All things bright and beautiful’ and thought of how nearly I had been tempted into the path of righteousness. The words swam around me —

  … the tall trees in the green wood,

  the meadows where we play,

  the rushes by the water,

  we gather every day …

  For a moment I had to squeeze my eyes shut to contain my tears. I put my hands over my ears to try and stop the words leaking in. The Scoutmaster stood up and, through a fog, I heard him talk about how he had lost the brightest star in his troop. As if he’d been robbed. I saw my father sink his face into his hands, in a gesture not unlike my own.

  He didn’t look like any of the images I had of him in my dreams. Rather, he looked like a man who had shrunk inside his expensive suit. There was blue stubble on his chin. My mother looked like an old scarecrow, frayed round the edges, as if the stuffing was coming out of her. When the service was over, my parents sat side by side in his car, heading towards Anna’s house, where there was going to be a wake. My mother and father, with me and Abbie in the back. Driving along with our headlights on in the daylight, to show that we’d been to a funeral.

  My father tried to talk to me, but I acted like a shit to him. I could see he wished I was dead instead of Ritchie. So did I.

  In the end, instead of coming in with us, he left us at Anna’s house, and drove off, back towards Australia.

  OPEN WOUNDS

  A STRANGE DELIGHT

  HE WALKED ACROSS the morning, trampling a welter of shadows, a tidy, hard man, pushing the sunlight ahead of him. Carefully dressed down in too perfect casuals, Peter still felt uncomfortably aware that he was clothed as if going to a company barbecue. It had taken him a long time to decide what to wear, and though at last the garments were chosen, the Italian shirt even bought especially, he knew, as he walked along, that he could not achieve the casual disregard with which Bethany liked to see clothes worn. And the way she wore clothes so effectively herself.

  It was a walk he might have enjoyed under other circumstances, but as it was he would have preferred not to have been seen abroad in this street. Still, the airport bus had put him down just a few hundred yards distant, so there he was. The street was wide and tree-lined, well established now, though that was not the way it had been when he bought the section and had the house built for his wife. But he had known then what it would be, that street — a broad band of green grass and middle-class values where he would be able to sell well when he could afford a still better move. The neighbourhood had turned out just that way, with silver birches grown up and neat block walls, even a tennis court or two stretching down to the fencelines bounded by shasta and Michaelmas daisies. The painted letterboxes stood in line with wrought-iron numerals fixed on them and, by common agreement of all in the street, camellias were planted uniformly along the edge of the grassed verges, apple blossom sasanquas to cast a glimmer of pale pink ice in winter. And the people were right too, not given to squabbling in public, neither very wealthy nor living in poverty. No one talked about the Viet Cong, or abused God, except in swearing which was different, or made love on the lawn as Bethany had suggested they should do and they hadn’t. Oh yes, he had chosen well.

  And it had seemed to him that Bethany, too, would grow with, and as, the flowers and the shrubs. True, her style was her own and not inherited, but then neither was his. She had worked in a laboratory where she had to use her brains; there was some standing with the job, and it contained her exuberance enough to make it charming. So why had she not mellowed and moulded with the years into the shape of the street and its inhabitants?

  More strangely still, why, despite her incongruity among the coffee parties and club bazaars and the jumble sale pricing, the cashmere and Munro spun tweeds, did they tolerate her, and not him — who had tried so hard?

  For though they might appear to ignore conflict, the people did feel here, and care — and, most of all, they wondered. Right now, eyes would be watching him, eyes that knew him, that would consider his movements with memory and knowledge, and the pursuit of drama. Eyes that would wait hungrily for developments. Ears that would listen. Children who must suddenly be still. A surreptitious phone call. Peter is back.

  So, at last he came to his house, and knew instinctively that if the woman was there at all, she would be on the porch at the back on a day like this.

  As he rounded the corner he f
elt a sudden knot collecting in his stomach. Up until now this visit had not assumed reality. Carefully considered, yes. The possibilities planned, most certainly. But the emotions carefully contained, because one knew that, deep down, they were waiting there, ready to rise up out of a lost stratum, to engulf him if he was unwary.

  He shut his eyes against the sunlight and panic for an instant, paused just long enough for the knot to subside, then walked briskly forward.

  The section was much the same as when he and Bethany had lived there together. Only the fence now leaned at a droll angle towards the neighbour’s vegetable garden and lank weeks struggled with the flowing colours of untended summer flowers. Bright waterlily dahlias, perennial phlox and a wild dream rose, the one they called ‘First Love’, grew raggedly, falling across the edges of the proliferating grass. In one corner sunflowers propped themselves indolently against the garage, and in another a plum tree spread enormous branches laden with ripening fruit. He would have thinned the sunflowers long ago, and he knew that the plum would lose half its fruit because the tree was too heavy.

  And there was Bethany, as of old, seated on steps, baring long, golden legs to the light. Her dress was of heavy orange and brown linen, too hot for the day, yet the colours somehow right for it. The skirt was tucked into the legs of her panties. Her shoulders were slumped against the verandah post, so that her breasts were thrust forward, and the top of the dress was pulled down to her brassiere so that there also she could soak up the warmth.