Our house was once our Granny’s house before she died from eating too much sugar, so it’s half faded and half lively. I mean it looks like a place that’s tried on a few too many hats; interesting hats, though. There are funny things, like a used car tyre sitting on top of the letterbox, cut in half, painted white and planted with pink geraniums. And those geraniums have to share their tyre house with some claws of couch grass and the odd fat sow thistle, but they don’t look too mad about it. There’s no lawn in the front garden, just a wild wandering pumpkin vine and also nasturtiums and some nameless flower bushes and a cluster of giant green plants with shiny leaves, as big as plates, sitting around a pond. Barnaby made the pond as part of an installation. The installation was a kind of aqueduct that carried water from the downpipes to the pond, though it never really worked. There are still lonely pieces of wooden pipe waiting for some water, with pumpkin vine tendrils curled around them.
There’s also an old mustard-coloured couch on the porch, a cape gooseberry plant which Ricci gave us, some jasmine winding round a long stalk of bamboo, a couple of broken bikes leaning against the wall, and two dolls sitting on the windowsill. One is a pear-shaped wooden peasant lady with a scarf, the other is just a plastic green bendy figure who has no features, not even a nose, but it’s wound around the sturdy little peasant lady in a passionate embrace. What a pair. You can probably guess who did that to the dolls. The key is above the gas meter and I can reach it by standing on the old shoe-cleaning box. Our door is painted white but the paint is all peeling off in a nice comforting way, and there’s a xylophone attached just below the frosted window, with the xylophone banger dangling from a piece of string (yet another Barnaby installation). It’s meant to be a doorbell, but most people just yell out.
All this is so familiar to me I hardly ever notice, except when there’s something new. Like a lady with red hair sitting on the couch, cross-legged, eyes closed and a faint smile on her face. Smiles don’t usually disturb me, but this one did, probably because I was already disturbed and the last thing I felt like was coming home to a flame-headed vision of peacefulness.
She opened her eyes as I stomped loudly up to the door.
‘Oh hello, you must be Cedar.’ She unravelled her legs and stood up, stretching her arms and standing on her tippies, just like I do every now and then. Not only that, she was skinny and her hair was untidy and piled up in a knot with bits spilling out. For a minute I wondered if she was me. An older, other version. She wore silver hoops in her ears and she had owl eyes, big and hungry. I watched the way she patted Stinky, because I always like to see whether someone is a dog person. As I’ve pointed out before, you can trust a dog person, just like you can trust corduroy. She was probably older than Barnaby and younger than Mum.
‘That’s right,’ I said, noticing a big bulging old backpack lying at her feet. ‘I’m Cedar. Who are you?’
She smiled at me. I was probably looking like the Black Death, and I didn’t feel like smiling back. I looked at the ground. I felt agitated. It was her smile – it seemed to know something I didn’t know.
‘You probably don’t remember me. We have met once before but you were only a baby.’
‘So, you’re one of Mum’s friends?’
‘Not yet. I’m your aunt, though I don’t feel like an aunt. It’s quite odd to say it, really. I guess that’s the first time in my entire life I’ve ever called myself anything as respectable-sounding as an aunt. Tirese is my name. I’m your dad’s sister. Half-sister, actually.’
The smile broke again. Now I recognised it – it belonged to my dad. My dead dad. I have a photo of him with that exact smile, but now it had leapt off my photo and landed on the face of someone I didn’t even know. I wanted it to stay where it was, in my mind, tucked away in a quiet, special place that only I could visit. I went there sometimes and smiled back at my dad. So it was our place, Dad’s and mine, and now someone else was stealing from it. She’d got his smile and she could wear it, take it with her, any old place, to flash it at any old person.
I knew my dad had relatives in Western Australia, because Barnaby went there and met some of them. He never met Tirese, though, because he would have told me if he had. He would have remembered her hair.
‘I’ve been in India,’ she said, as if by way of explanation, as I hadn’t responded to her announcement except to stand there with a frown. I didn’t exactly feel like meeting an aunt who’d pinched my dad’s smile. I’d had enough shocks for one day. Couldn’t she have come at Christmas or some other more appropriate time?
She said, ‘You probably never even knew I existed. After all, I didn’t even really know your dad.’
‘Why didn’t you know him?’ I was somehow relieved. She may have his smile but at least she didn’t know him.
‘Your grandpa remarried when your dad was about sixteen, and by the time I was born your dad had escaped to Melbourne. So we never knew each other, except through letters and a couple of times when he came home for Christmas. Isn’t it funny, though? You and I have the same hair.’ She bent down and started putting on an old pair of leather sandals.
‘I didn’t know him either,’ I said.
She folded her arms across her chest and sighed.
‘Yes, I know, poor love. Looks like we’ve got a bit in common then. Shall we have a cup of tea? I’ve come to stay a while. Do you think your mum will mind? Not too long. Couple of days. I’m just stopping on my way home. Thought I’d visit the other half of the family. I’ve been away for years.’
Her eyes drifted, like little boats caught in a sudden wind, and I knew she had her own memories tugging her thoughts back. Maybe it didn’t matter that she had a part of my dad in her; maybe it would be a good thing. She hauled her pack up and dragged it towards the door as if it was a worn-out, battle-weary body that needed a good rest. I knew then that she’d be staying longer than a couple of days. I’m not sure how I knew, except that it had something to do with that mysterious drifting gaze she had.