Rooms

There was never quite enough space on Isonville. It was unspoken, but Anna’s mother looked forward to the day when she could add Aunt Beulah’s seven rooms to her own. The children squabbled over everything and nothing, hot and unreasoning, leading with jutted lower jaws and windmilling arms, until she would be there among them, clasping their thin wrists with fingers as tight as steel bands: I’ve just about had it with you two. The only answer was to move Hugo’s bed, wardrobe and chest of drawers along the corridor to the room set aside for Grandfather Ison’s visits. Anna sighed. She entered a period of rainbow-chasing and peace. Hugo left a hole in her room but she quickly filled it with girls’ annuals and an old club chair fetched from Great Aunt Beulah’s end of the house. She pressed fat cushions into the horsehairy corners and adjusted the limbs of the rag and celluloid dolls who sat there through the days, watching as she window-gazed and read. She talked to herself and sang. She clipped horses, dogs and disdainful cats from magazines, and Grandfather Tolley gave her a framed set of mail-order prints for her walls. Then one day she told Uncle Kitch, Aunt Lorna and the twins about her new room. Aunt Lorna sniffed: All right for some. Anna felt instantly tactless and small. Of course—Uncle Kitch and Aunt Lorna hated living in the overseer’s cottage. They stared through their narrow kitchen window at the big house across the creek, waiting for Aunt Beulah to die. Anna sensed this, seated with them at their linoleum-topped wooden table in their muttony kitchen. The dark corners and rotting holland blinds trapped the fumes of chops and cabbagy soups. There were dents and chips in the canisters above the sink. Their dog slept in the house and its yellow claws and muzzle grease were there on both sides of the back door. They had uncomfortable habits, their packet biscuits harboured dampness, they were full of glittering envy. I must go now, Anna said. Anna won a bursary to pay her Women’s College fees. She loved her room in the new wing, set red-brick and square where the land at the rear of the Children’s Hospital climbed up to the hedged and tiled North Adelaide mansions. It was like a nun’s retreat, squared-off, low and functional, with cement bricks painted white, hoary brown industrial carpet, a single divan with a bed-head shelf and bed-base drawers, a tiny desk, a two-shelf bookcase. She pinned Che Guevara to her wardrobe door and Ho Chi Minh above her desk. A buzzer connected her to the front desk, a buzz to let her know that she had a visitor waiting, a buzz at ten minutes to ten, all visitors out. Much better in a room than in a cramped car seat on a back road behind the Razorback. The patchwork quilt upon her bed had been passed on to her when Great Aunt Beulah died, and she made love on it on sultry afternoons when Lockie drove down from the bush to be with her. They had never made love in a room before. Lockie didn’t feel so guilty on a proper bed, even if it was narrow. We could get married, he said, you know, before I go in the army. Anna lived in that room for three years, until she was unhinged by grief and fled. She wandered dazedly around England; her money ran out; she stuck her thumb in the air on a sleet-lashed junction near Leeds. Two New Zealanders in a Transit van, and by the time they were on the North Circular, Anna had somewhere to live. Bringing home hitchhikers was a tradition of that Hammersmith house. Dear Folks: From my room I can see mile upon mile of London’s damp rooftops and chimneys. Whenever trains pass on the suspended line just feet from my window, the whole house shakes. Feeling much better—return ticket in more ways than one! It was Sam Jaeger she married, and they lived in a weatherboard and plaster transportable home at the lip of a gully, its four small rooms looking out upon the hills, the valley, and the grim stone Jaeger homestead below. The laundry clarified that house for Anna, leaving her ragged and miserable. The reconditioned washing machine was from Leo’s Discounts in Terowie and it shook the house and shimmered unstoppably far across the tilting floor. Paint blistered in the humid air and her father-in-law told her that she could not have a dryer and don’t waste water. He said, the deep grooves deepening on either side of his fleshless mouth: Icecream, phone bills, and now you want a dryer? Come now, Missy. Her mother-in-law put in: Let’s have a bit of elbow grease on those oil spots in Sam’s khakis. Sometimes Anna stared at the little separated mountains—reeking nappies, greasy overalls, blue singlets, sodden towels, her own greyish whites, over every inch of the floor—and felt helpless, paralysed. At the end of the day Anna shut the laundry door and sat with a sundowner in her chapped hands and thought about Lockie Kelly, his loving hands. Then Sam fell out with his father and they moved to the empty schoolmaster’s house on the sunken road. A cheerier laundry this time, steeped in sunlight—but that room turned on Anna when Michael was killed. Sometimes, in the months following the accident, Anna would pick her way across the damp floor with Rebecca’s little pants, blouses and skirts bundled in her arms and almost, just for a moment, believe that she still had Michael’s things to launder too. Everyone agreed that Anna’s father died a good death. He’d had his setbacks—a lost finger and years of struggle—but you cannot keep a wild man down, and he’d bloomed again when he inherited the Four Square Store from his father. He enjoyed chiacking with all the women, who liked his long, sly face and shopped more often than was necessary and drove home in a little foggy glow. The strokes laid him out in a sunny back room behind the shop. From his heaped pillows he could watch the dipping wagtails on the overgrown lawn outside. There were books from the lending library stacked beside the bed. He liked to turn the thick leaves of his father’s only photograph album, lingering upon a shot of his mother, who was crinkling her eyes against the steep sun on Henley Beach as grey-pointer sharks lurked unseen in the shallows behind her. Anna wondered if he’d rescued her in his mind, been enjoying her embraces all these years. She saw him every day toward the end. When Rebecca skipped classes at the Conservatorium to be with him one last time, she came out blinking, sniffing: Grandpa still makes me laugh. Now that he is gone, the room has become a den: sewing machine, filing cabinet, desk, fraying club chair and divan bed. It’s a room full of memories for Anna’s mother, who runs the shop alone now. Rebecca and her lover have a house in North Adelaide. It was built when Isonville was built, but it has five rooms, not fourteen, and it was intended for a respectable working family, not a squatter’s brood. It’s in the renovated part of North Adelaide, and Anna likes to spend a night in the spare bedroom from time to time, even though she still has a sense that Rebecca continues to watch her warily, as though fearing that she might turn her life upside down again. A baby will come along and the spare room will become a nursery, but by then Anna will have a place of her own, somewhere in sight of the sea, where she may think of her lost son, her lost loves. The perfect distraction for a fractious grandchild will be her Pandowie Jubilee keyring, hung with keys and lives.