My short story 'Close' was published in the 25th UTS Writer's Anthology - The Life You Chose And That Chose You. The book was launched at the 2011 Sydney Writer's festival and I read an excerpt of 'Close' on stage.
‘Close’s’ subject matter is achingly familiar. The language is exquisite in this portrait of highly identifiable domesticity: ‘I dragged one of Lenny’s singlets from the basket, flecked by torn tissue, shook it fiercely until drifts of paper snow fell on what was left of the lawn.’ De Hautecloque is skilled at tapping into the melancholy and the allure of the everyday. Kill Your Darlings Journal, 'Peering into the Lives of Others', 20 June 2011
The lights went out over dinner. Annie dropped her fork onto
her plate and swallowed her mouthful. We sat a moment in the silence of the
interrupted dishwasher cycle until Annie could no longer contain a whimper. I
could see that the lane at the back of the house was still lit.
‘It’s ok,’
I reassured her. ‘Probably just a fuse.’
My body
knew the way down the hall. Annie refused to sit alone in the dark. She tugged
at the back of my T-shirt, tailing me to the front door, where I felt into the
fuse box. I flicked the main back on, setting off a chorus of beeps as the
machinery of the house came back to life.
‘It’s
back!’ As soon as she spoke, it was gone again. Three more times we tried.
‘We’ll have
to wait ‘til Daddy gets home,’ I said. She whimpered again. Lenny wouldn’t be
home until the sun came with him.
Back in the
kitchen, I felt around the drawers, pushing aside worn coasters and tea towels,
glad wrap rolls and rubber bands. I couldn’t remember if we even had a working
torch. ‘Shit,’ I muttered while Annie waited on her stool, swinging her feet
into the cupboards. She stiffened as the minutes passed.
‘It’s ok.
Finish your dinner.’ I fumbled in a box above the fridge, and turned back to
the bench. ‘And pass me the bread.’
I stuck 24
birthday candles in what was left of the loaf. Annie brushed her teeth by half
of them and we read the final chapter of a tale about a love-struck frog by the
other half. I tucked her in, leaving her curtain open so the streetlight
crossed her pillow, and told her to count the stars for sleep.
…….
The dishes awaited me. Annie’s lunchbox needed cleaning for the
next day. The washing basket groaned in the laundry. My work sat grounded on my
desk out the back: an illustration for an article on tartan furnishing fabrics.
I had been ruling lines all day, building the sett of a made-up tartan, fine
strokes of colour, side by side. The work was absurd without light.
A wind had
picked up. From the back door the night was alive. A single cloud worked across
the sky. Light was confined to three small pools under three street lamps, not
enough to alleviate the black.
Over the back fence, his light
was not on either. I had not seen him for almost three weeks. It had taken me a
couple of days to realise that his solitary shuffle no longer parted the back
lane. As the days had accumulated, I mentally arranged them into realistic
absences: a short trip away, an illness, a simple change of habit. I watched
for him every day. Faded cushions and boxed appliances had appeared last week,
beached on the pavement at the front of his flat, awaiting council pick up.
They made me flinch.
As I turned
to go back inside I could hear a plane approach. They often came at this hour,
in sets, like waves cresting over the roof of our house. It was never the noise
that unsettled me, but the fact of them passing over. The back door began to
vibrate. I stepped out and waited for it to appear, the moment announced in an
all-concealing din which I followed down the back steps. The sound bounced off
the walls of all our houses, until it disappeared over the lane and westwards,
and I continued out the gate, along the side of our fence and up the path to
his flat.
…….
The door to the block was held open with a brick. Moths
clung to the coughing fluoro on the landing. I could hear the family upstairs,
a microwave door slamming and opening and slamming shut again, the mother
shepherding her children. I placed my hand on his door, and I leant on the
handle. It gave way.
A pause
confirmed the silence. From the doorway chairs emerged from the darkness, arranged
in the middle of the room: three chairs, a low table between them, a console
and a television screen. The walls were empty. I moved towards the table, where
my eyes adjusted to the shapes of pens, papers, a television remote control.
And then the light went on.
‘Shit!’ I
said in unison with a man.
‘Who are you?’ he added. He stood
in the doorway, in jeans and a track top, unaccompanied and unfamiliar. ‘Who
the hell are you?’
‘The cleaning lady.’ I looked
away as I said it. ‘Louisa. I’m sorry. I hadn’t –’
‘You scared me half to death.’
He moved into the room and
towards the kitchen, which I saw for the first time in the light.
‘I hadn’t
heard from him for a while,’ I persisted. ‘I just thought –’
‘Died two
weeks ago.’ He took a box off the bench.
‘I’m sorry.
I didn’t know.’
He looked
me up and down.
‘I’ve been
away,’ I answered.
‘I’ll need
your key,’ he said, taking the box
outside onto the landing and returning for a pile of papers stacked beside the
door. ‘He never mentioned you. Mind you, he probably never mentioned me
either.’
‘We didn’t
talk much.’
‘Listen – I’m Nick, by the way –
agent’s coming Thursday. Could you do the place before then?’
It took me
a moment to realise what he meant. ‘Oh, sure. Tomorrow’s fine.’
‘Any bits
and pieces, just put them aside, ‘ he said. ‘I’ll pick ‘em up Thursday.’
‘Nick?’ I
added, stopping him. ‘The key. I never had one. He always let me in. It was
open tonight.’
‘Bloody
lock.’ He tossed me his keys with an underhand throw. ‘You gotta do it from the
outside. Meet me at ten on Thursday.’
He left without looking back.
I turned
out the light and stood a moment in the open doorway, long enough to hear Nick
start his car and drive away, his headlights briefly casting their light in an
arc across the space, each wall and each surface aglimmer for a moment.
…….
As I closed our back gate, a pair of spotted doves sat
cooing. They had tucked into the clover for the night, and they looked at me without
moving, pious and querying. I shooed them with a mock kick, and slipped back
inside.
I poured a whiskey, found a
chocolate biscuit and took them to the back step. A breeze cut through the
poplar tree next door, but there were no shadows.
I pictured him, his grey hair
bobbing behind the grevillea as he smoked. Or walking up the back lane, his
downward glance just high enough to stop his glasses falling from the bridge of
his nose, a single paperback in a plastic bag by his side. Most afternoons, Annie
and I passed him at the local Portuguese bakery. Had they noticed he hadn’t
been in? He always sat outside, sipping a milky coffee from a glass, its froth
coating his moustache. I’d looked over his shoulder whenever I was close
enough, hoping to see what he was reading: philosophy or a classic. I had
tempted contact when we passed face to face, wondering if he recognised me too.
But he never searched for my eyes.
Inside, I felt for my phone and
sent Lenny a message: Power out. Can you
check? Fridge urgent. x
Annie lay on her back in bed, her
swaddled teddy beside her, her chest rising and subsiding with each breath. I
drew the curtain and lifted the blanket to her chin.
…….
Lenny was beside me when I woke.
‘Is the
fridge on?’ I whispered.
He rolled
over, edged his arm across me and nodded into the pillow.
‘What was
wrong?’ I asked.
‘Circuit on
the verandah.’
‘The rain?’
‘Maybe.’ He
was still half asleep.
The
verandah was a tacked-on structure of vertical wooden cladding, worn
floorboards and tin roofing, left empty by the previous tenants. It was
penetrated by choko vines and year round drafts and when the rain was heavy, it
spilt down the inside of the back door. But it had a wide, sliding window which
took in the garden and the length of the back lane, as it stretched away from
our house. There was no view from the spare room so I had set up my office out there:
a plywood door on trestles and an old process rack for my computer, my pencils,
paints and books. Each day, I sat drawing and watched the meanderings of the
lane, the uninhibited moments of people taking a break from the main road.
I looked at
Lenny, his eyes closed and bruised with fatigue. ‘How’s the album?’
‘Getting
there.’
‘Will you
get it done by Friday?’
‘We
better.’
Annie
peered into the room. She climbed in between us, wrapping her arms around my
neck. ‘Did the light come back, Mama?’
I nodded.
She rolled
to tickle Lenny’s stubble. ‘We had no lights last night, Dada.’
‘Hello
Annie frangipani.’ He reached for her.
‘I’m a
limpet, Daddy,’ she said and gripped to his side, and they lay there in
silence.
…….
I hung the first load of washing before either of them got
up. The morning sky was pale blue, promising. Three days of rain had left a
mountain of clothes. I dragged one of Lenny’s singlets from the basket, flecked
by torn tissue, shook it fiercely until drifts of paper snow fell on what was
left of the lawn. I stretched its body into shape and pegged it on the line.
The spotted doves pecked, contentedly terrestrial, every day criss-crossing the
same patch of lawn in their loyal pairs. And now they were buoyed by crumbs of
tissue. I launched the line at them.
We had
moved for Lenny mostly. He wanted space and a job. The manager of a local youth
centre on the fringe of the city had seen him play, and offered him a permanent
course doing ‘spoken word’ with the kids from the area. After ten years of
freelancing, he jumped at it. He could write and work the course, while still
recording his own songs in a mate’s garage studio three streets away.
So we left our city apartment and
moved to a suburb where the streets were wide enough to slope towards their
gutters, to a house with a long hall and three bedrooms and a north facing
garden. Annie was four. On the first morning in the new house, she had gone to
the back door, looked out onto the lawn and the lane and said, ‘Can we go home
now?’
Lenny started going to the centre
every day, rhyming the kids’ lives into shape. Annie started school. Lenny
picked her up and she rode her bike around the cracked basketball court beside
the hall, until it was time to come home. We dissolved into roles we’d never
marked out. I worked at home, hung the washing, cooked dinner in the daytime
and fended off the neighbours: Mrs Murani bleating about her plantar fasciitis
or her daughter’s wedding, or the Leytons over the road offering play dates
with their girls or Friday dinners in their yard. At home, Lenny succumbed to
the comfort of not needing to speak. From my desk I watched him and Annie
drawing in chalk on the pavement or plucking wild strawberries from beneath
their leaves or blowing dandelion clocks on the grass.
That’s when I began watching him
too.
…….
‘Look what I caught!’ Lenny appeared at the back door with a
giggling Annie, dressed for school and slung over his shoulder. ‘Toast or
toast?’
‘Toast, cried Annie.
He swung her into the kitchen and
I followed.
‘Will you be at the studio all
day?’ I asked.
Lenny sat
Annie on the bench and faced me. ‘I’ll make it up to you, Lou. I Promise. Next
week. Okay, Frangipani?’ She nodded. ‘We’ll look after Mummy next week, huh?’
‘Can you
take her this morning?’ I asked.
He put
bread in the toaster. ‘Sure. What’s up?’
‘Got a
deadline. Picture for an article on tartan.’
‘What’s tartan?’ asked Annie.
We had become like every family.
We walked our kid to and from school, shopped where there were car parks, grew
our vegies and traded them over the fences. There were not so many of us that
we could pretend not to see each other, the way it had been in the city. We
shared swimming lessons and birthday parties and local library books, their
jackets covered in the grime of all our accumulated fingerprints. I felt myself
tramping the grid of our habits, repeating and deepening the tracks until ran
deep.
‘You guys should get going.’ I
handed Annie her bag.
‘We are,’ said Lenny. ‘I’ll call
Alex to look at the power point out the back.’
The man in the lane was
different. In two years, I hadn’t seen or heard him speak, not even to the
tenants of his block. I wondered what his voice sounded like when he ordered
his coffee. He undertook his daily movements in a kind of stupor, unencumbered
by what was around him. At first I’d thought it pathological, but my sightings
of him became the punctuation marks which made sense of the endless repetition
of daily life. He resisted it. I felt close
to him.
…….
Our laundry bucket held soaking whites. I tipped them out
and filled it with scourers, a scrubbing brush, baking soda and the old rags I
used at home. I wedged the back gate
open and carried the bucket to his door, returning for the vacuum and wheeling
it down the bitumen.
In the
daylight, his flat was unremarkable. Brown carpet, walls without even a hook, a
single living space, an adjoining bedroom and bath.
I began in the kitchen, wiping
the phantoms of foodstuff from the fridge and cupboard shelves: rings of
yoghurt, oil and jams. The stovetop looked unused. It was hard to imagine him
completing the small tasks of life—cooking
a piece of meat or a sauce, or tying the top of a rubbish bag.
I wiped every surface. I polished
a single mirror, cleaned door handles, dusted down cupboard doors and table
tops and rubbed pale scuffs from the skirting boards. When it was done, I began
to look around.
Under every piece of furniture,
in drawers and cupboards, I hunted for something that would reveal him: a book
of poetry in a foreign language, receipts for something out of the ordinary, an
odd collection or membership of some sort—a keepsake, a baton from him to me. But I found nothing
apart from a few pens and matches and some fallen coins and tissues at the
bottom of the wardrobe. The place began to feel lonely. In the living room, I
moved all the furniture to one wall. The clearest remains of him were the spots
of flattened pile where he had placed his three chairs. I vacuumed over the top
of them but the tufts would not revive.
I pulled
the furniture back into place, and felt something between the cushion and the
base of one of the chairs. It was a single paperback, adorned with tall, white
serifed letters and a rocket blasting off into a jacaranda sky. Alistair
MacLean, The Dark Crusader, the price
in rupees on the back. A cheap thriller. The pages fanned evenly between my
thumbs.
I pressed
it apart at the prologue: A small dusty
man in a small dusty room. That’s how I always thought of him, just a small
dusty man in a small dusty room. No cleaning woman was ever … I forced it
shut. I went to the window and checked the street. But there was nothing. Only
the filigree of the polyester curtains. I re-opened the book: … just a small dusty man in a small dusty
room. No cleaning woman was ever allowed to enter that office with its soot
stained heavily curtained windows overlooking Birdcage Walk. These curtains
were light. I parted them with the backs of my fingers. The lane was empty.
In his window I thought I saw my
face, just the faintest outline of flesh looking back at me briefly, before
being bleached out by daylight. And there, through the new growth of the grevillea,
was my house, our house, the brown Colorbond fence, the cladding of the back
room, the window in front of my desk, the back steps, the apex of the
clothesline, all of it unadorned and still. From here, it looked as empty as
his.
…….
Back home, I flung the bucket into the laundry, emptied the
rags straight into the machine, stuffing the abandoned whites in with them and
setting them on the hottest wash.
I wiped my face, pinned my hair
and took a pot of tea to my desk. The ruler was aligned for the next stroke.
Without looking up, I resumed the lines of my drawing, repeating belts of
green, black, white and red, first drawn vertically then crossed with
horizontal strips of the same pattern, ruling without stopping, determined to
fill a whole page. The more lines I drew, the more I noticed the squares
completing themselves, variations emerging from the mix: deeper greens and
maroon and the odd island of pure white preserved in between. When I had
finished, I cut and collaged a set of three tartan-covered chairs into an empty
room and signed the bottom right corner.
…….
The spotted doves sat high on the power lines that night.
Annie wore her robot pyjamas and manoeuvred her way through the house, arms
outstretched, reciting ‘We have power, we have power,’ in a low-pitched
mechanical voice. She illuminated the rooms of the house, like light bulbs on a
circuit of Christmas trim, awakening the walls, her toys, our shoes, the fish
in their tank. She reached the back verandah.
‘Alert,
alert!’ she called and then stopped at the switch, her arms dropping to her
side, ‘Mama, this one still doesn’t work.’
‘I know,
bubs. That’s where the problem is. Alex will fix it.’
‘Then how
will you work?’
‘I don’t
need to work tonight. I finished my picture.’
‘Can I see it?’
I took it from the desk and gave
it to her. ‘Remember you were asking? Well, that’s tartan.’
‘Look,
Mama. Three chairs. One for each of us.’
‘I know.’ I
returned it to my desk and closed the door between the verandah and the
kitchen.
‘Can we leave
all the lights on tonight Mama?’
‘No
darling. We don’t need them all.’
‘But I’m
scared.’
I scooped her up and carried her
to the bathroom, put the paste on her toothbrush and waited by the basin while
she brushed. She stood on the tops of my feet and we walked to her bedside,
stilt like, but with no distance to fall, flicking the switches as we went.
…….
The sky was cloudless outside our window when Lenny came in
at dawn. I waited for his breathing to soften. I padded down the hall, careful
not to wake Annie. I fitted Nick’s keys into an envelope with a note, an
apology for needing to be somewhere else. Then I walked it barefoot to his door
and edged the envelope under the sweep.
Just before ten a car pulled up
at the end of the back fence, a bronze four wheel drive. I unknotted the sari
from above my desk and straightened it across the glass. A man climbed out of
the driver’s side—it was
Nick—and then another guy
from the other side. They walked up the front path towards his door. Five
minutes later a small hatchback parked in front of them. A woman in a stiff
white shirt and pencil skirt approached the building. It must have been fifteen
minutes before they all walked out together, the lady shaking Nick’s hand, then
the other man’s, and returning to the flat as the two men drove away.
I took the
washing basket from the laundry and placed it at the foot of the line. The sun
edged around the brickwork, warming my fingers, as I filled two sides with
white school T-shirts and cleaning rags. I hadn’t noticed Lenny appear on the
back steps.
‘We
finished, he said.
‘Before
schedule?’
‘I know.
And I’m actually happy with it.’ He rubbed his eyes against the sun. ‘Tea?’
I nodded.
The concrete of the back steps was warm for the first time
since last summer. Weeds were emerging from the cracks. I dug at the fishbone ferns with my toes, as
the two of us squeezed ourselves between the back door’s frame. Lenny handed me
my cup.
‘Alex said
he’d come after midday.’
From the poplar tree over the
lane came a loud call, strong and repeated. I looked at the tree and then at
Lenny.
‘Fig bird,
I reckon. Or a dollar bird,’ he said.
It called again, a pulsing, descending
sound, like the whistle-pop lollies I’d played as a kid. Lenny shaded his eyes from
the sun.
‘Yeah. A
fig bird.’ He pointed to the highest branches. ‘Got the red round the eyes. See
it?’
I could,
exposed in the branches of the poplar tree. ‘I’ve never heard it before. Are
they local?’
‘They pass
through.’
We sunned our feet, Lenny picking
at the paint on the railing, peeled by the days of rain. He flaked it into the
drain below. The woman in the pencil skirt came down the front path next door,
holding a folder and a phone, trying to work the alarm on her car keys.
‘Hey, did
you finish with that tartan thing?’
‘Yep.’ I
said. ‘All done.’
