As the days grew longer again, so too did Elias’ absences from the rooms above the Earthly Paradise. Often it was the small, last hours before morning when he came home. Rather than letting his disappearances disrupt her own sense of waiting, Rose simply became more reliant on herself. Her child, her home, her job, her photographs. It was enough. And to be perfectly honest, she enjoyed being alone as much as he did, but for her it was an abundance rather than an act of cannibalism.
Elias came home late one Friday night about six months after Rose started working at the museum. Scrabbling at the lock with his keys, dropping them twice before finally getting the door at the bottom of the stairs open. He pushed it too hard, and it slammed into the wall.
‘He’s drunk,’ Rose thought fondly, listening to him clamber heavily up the stairs towards her. Hebe, precocious and toddler-plump, slept on oblivious to her father’s clumsy fumblings along the walls towards the bedroom he shared with Rose. The streetlight outside Hebe’s window kept her company so completely that she rarely woke in the night needing anything other than to stare unblinkingly with her amber eyes at the globe, before being washed back to sleep.
‘Rose, Rose,’ Elias hissed, shaking her shoulder roughly and giggling.
‘I’m awake,’ she whispered. ‘Shush, you’ll wake up the baby.’
Elias sat down on the bed and shucked his shoes off. They clattered noisily on the floor.
‘Oops,’ he giggled and held a finger to his pursed lips. ‘The baby.’ He lay down on his back on top of the bedding and sighed happily. ‘I met a man at the pub,’ he said.
Rose turned the bedside lamp on and looked at the father of her child. His eyes were unfocused, the blue washed out by the drink, the whites bloodshot. Scar tissue was already beginning to form into ridges on his cheeks where he said the itchiness was the worst. In the end, his entire face would be marked with these rivers of keloid. Shiny like a satin party dress.
Elias had been compulsively tearing at his face with his fingernails since the summer. Initially the sensation in his face had been one of intense pain. He had sat in a chair for a week, wrapped in a blanket, rocking and noiselessly sobbing. The doctors could find no reason for the burning sensation, though every test had been done. He described it as ‘like having my face sliced open with razor blades’.
After the first ten days the pain had faded to a throb, which Elias found curiously comforting, like worrying a sore tooth or a patch of tender gum endlessly with your tongue. Cathartic, almost. Then the itching started and Rose watched in dismay as Elias slowly tore the skin from his cheeks, chin and forehead, turning them into lakes of watery fluid which wept ceaselessly down his face. In spite of the infection and inflammation, the itchiness remained his constant cross. The thing that took him away from the rooms above the Earthly Paradise and to the forgetting comfort of the bottle.
‘Tell me about the man you met,’ Rose said, nestling her head against his shoulder. ‘Tell me Elias, I want to know.’
Elias had ostensibly gone back to university to do his final year, while Rose worked at the museum part-time. Morning lectures and library time became a thing of the past as he kept to the nocturnal habits that he had developed over the holidays. He grew his hair – long, past his shoulders – and a beard in an attempt to hide the sores on his face.
‘Daddy yukky,’ Hebe would say authoritatively when Elias picked her up.
Elias started to walk with his shoulders collapsed in defeat, his visual life becoming a flickering white noise of concrete. Every specialist failed to find a cause or a cure for the affliction, only salves and well-meaning advice about not scratching. He stopped allowing his mother to drag him to private clinics when a specialist suggested that he talk to a psychiatrist.
‘I’m not fucking crazy,’ he said, standing up and leaving the consultant’s room. By the time his mother caught up, he was rev-ving the car’s engine impatiently. Pulling out into the traffic he glanced quickly at her set face. ‘No more,’ he said, ‘no more. I can’t take it.’
He took her home in her car, leaving it parked under the portico of the house and caught a bus back to the city. Instead of going all the way into town, on a whim he hopped off the bus at the museum and went in search of Rose. After several enquiries, he found himself ushered into the back section of the building and pointed in the direction of the photography labs.
Elias allowed his sense of smell to take over navigational duties. Among the acrid and medicinal reek of photography chemicals he fancied that he caught Rose’s attar married into its pathways. A lone technician lunched forlornly in the drying room, doing the remains of a crossword in a Woman’s Weekly. ‘I think she’s in the library,’ he said in reply to Elias’ enquiry. ‘Down one, then big doors to your left.’
Through the glass windows in the library doors, Elias watched Rose flicking through a book and writing notes at one of the reading tables.
‘Hi baby,’ he whispered into Rose’s ear.
Utterly engrossed she failed to hear him walk up behind her and it wasn’t until she had twisted around in her seat, startled by his voice and looked at him that Rose realised that it was Elias.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘I came to see you at your work. It’s lunchtime. I want to take my girl for a coffee and a ham sandwich. That’s okay, isn’t it?’
‘I guess so,’ Rose replied doubtfully.
‘Some of us are trying to work, you know,’ the person sitting across the table from Rose said in an aggrieved voice.
Rose held up her hand up, fingers and thumb splayed out like a starfish. ‘Five minutes,’ she mouthed, smiling. Elias winked and sauntered out of the library, whistling under his breath.
‘You are such a bad boy,’ Rose said, pulling out a chair and joining Elias at the table he had commandeered in the cafeteria. Even on a grey Tuesday it was busy. He pushed a plate of sandwiches and a cup of coffee across the table towards her. ‘What were you doing in the library?’
Rose folded the triangle of moist white bread over onto itself and took a big bite. Her teeth left a series of curved and uniform indentations in the layers of bread and pink gelatinous meat. She swallowed.
‘They want me to print some of the old-fashioned glass negatives using chemicals and methods that they used at the time the pictures were taken, so I was reading up on the recipes that they used to make light-sensitive paper and what they processed them in. Incredibly interesting. I was really surprised when they chose me to do it.’
‘I thought you did that anyway,’ Elias said, crumbling a crust onto his empty plate.
‘No, no, usually I print the glass negs pretty much the same way I do my own photographs. And if the negatives are good you can get really clear prints off them using modern methods. As good as anything. Actually better, if the truth be known.’
‘Then why do them the old way if the new way is better and probably cheaper and quicker?’
‘Lots of reasons,’ said Rose defensively. She always felt slightly bad about liking her job so much.
‘Name three,’ he countered.
‘It’s interesting, clear is not what you’re always looking for in a photograph, historic or otherwise, and three … three … and three, it will mean more hours and therefore more money for me, and four, why the hell am I justifying a museum initiative to you?’
Rose glowered at him over the rim of her cup of cooling bitter coffee. ‘You are such a bastard,’ she said quietly, standing up and replacing her cup in its saucer with a clatter. She stalked out of the cafeteria, the sound of her shoes clicking across the marble floor echoing loudly in the great hall.
She hated coffee.
Elias didn’t come home that night, but she hadn’t expected him to. It was the weekend, after all. It was closer to lunch than breakfast when she heard his key in the door downstairs.
‘Hiya,’ she shouted from their little kitchen that overlooked the walled garden behind the shop.
‘Babe,’ Elias shouted back and came up the stairs, two at a time.
‘It’s daddy,’ Hebe informed Rose.
‘Do you think?’ Rose asked her conspiratorially.
‘Oh yes,’ replied Hebe. ‘It’s bloody daddy all right.’
‘Language,’ reproved Rose with a giggle.
‘Girls,’ cried Elias, bursting into the kitchen.
‘Told ya,’ Hebe said.
‘Your daughter’s a genius,’ Rose advised Elias cheerfully from the floor where she sat with Hebe, surrounded by childhood and its various trappings.
‘How could she not be?’ he replied and bent down to pick up Hebe. Outraged at the imposition, she grabbed hold of one of his swinging shoulder-length dreadlocks and gave it a savage tug.
‘Ow,’ he said and winced. ‘Easy, girl.’
‘Daddy yukky. Stinky,’ said Hebe, wriggling to be put down. Elias dropped his daughter into Rose’s arms.
‘You look like you’ve been sleeping in a rubbish dump,’ she observed.
‘Might as well have been. Tony’s place is a bloody disaster zone. And it has rats, big ones. All night I could hear them scrabbling around in the walls, hardly got any sleep.’ Elias shuddered in distaste at the memory.
‘Poor you,’ Rose said. Elias failed to notice the slight edge to her voice.
‘Bloody rats,’ Hebe said wisely.
‘I’ve made a decision about our future,’ Elias continued, ignoring Hebe and sitting down at the Formica kitchen table which Rose had just scrubbed clean. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for ages. I’m going to leave law school. I’ve had it.’
‘But you only have one more term left,’ Rose pointed out. ‘Why not just stick it out until you’re finished? Just because you have a degree doesn’t mean you have to use it as anything but a safety net.’
‘I can’t finish my degree if we’re living down south.’
‘But we’re not living down south.’
‘But we’re going to.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Rose said carefully.
‘Remember I told you a couple of months ago about a man I met at the pub? The man that lived on a commune, well, community really, down south? I told you about it, the place on the banks of a river in the middle of the bush. Sounds like paradise.’
Rose nodded.
‘Well anyway, I ran into him and a couple of the other members again last night and he has invited us to join them. He reckons getting away from here and back to nature will fix my face up.’
‘So you’ve made this decision that we’re all going to pack up and move, on what essentially amounts to a whim on your behalf.’ Rose’s voice was steady and controlled but she was bloody angry. ‘This is our home, I have a good job here, and what about Mr and Mrs Chin?’
‘What about Mr and Mrs Chin?’ he retorted. ‘You’re always moaning about missing the country and your family. This way you’ll be a lot closer to them. You should be happy, but no you’re not, because there’s no pleasing you, is there, Rose?’
Rose wondered if this was true.
‘And you’re my wife,’ he finished triumphantly.
Rose knew that that particular statement definitely wasn’t true.
‘Anyway,’ Elias said, ‘I’ve bought a car. It doesn’t go yet, but Tony’s got a mate …’
Rose stopped panicking. Perhaps by the time the car was fixed, Elias would have changed his mind. It wasn’t, after all, beyond the realms of possibility.
The winter was almost over when they loaded the car to the roof. Leaving more than they took, they set out to find a new beginning.