LENA

The front of the house was too neat. She’d seen enough Current Affair segments on hoarders to know that the courtyard should be cluttered with wheelless shopping trolleys and dead pot plants and washing tubs and bicycles without seats or tyres and maybe a couple of bird corpses and a rat skeleton. There should be mail piled up on the front porch, the edges chewed by snails and covered in slug juice. It should smell bad enough that even passing on the footpath you need to cover your face with a scarf and hold your breath.

But no. The pavers were even and recently swept, the hedge tidy. The front stairs were clear, as was the porch. You’d never, ever know that walking through the front door would be stepping into a nightmare realm. It was a trick front. A trap.

Like Josh.

The tiny scratches around the front door lock were the only indication that anything disturbing had happened here at all. An easily picked lock, the police said. As they were leaving, they told Lena she should look at getting it replaced with something sturdier. Given the state of the place it’d be a better idea to remove it altogether. Leave the door swinging open. Welcome, Neighbourhood Burglars. Take whatever you like. Please.

In the hallway, Lena dumped the sleeping bag and backpack of clothes and toiletries that she’d lugged on and off the bus. She coughed violently, swiped at her streaming eyes. It was barely 8 a.m. but the air was murderously hot and smoky already. Not much better inside. A desperate inhale between coughs lined her throat with dust. She rifled through her bag, grabbed her empty water bottle.

The kitchen was blocked by the newspapers she’d helped clear from the hallway the other day. They coated her hands in black powder as she pushed them out of her way. Why were Nic’s papers so fucking dirty? Lena handled newspapers all the time and they never left her with more than slightly gritty-feeling fingers, and that was only if she was unusually sweaty in the first place. Most nights it was cool by the time she carried them. Last job of her shift, clearing the low shelf to the left of the cigarette counter of that day’s leftovers. Sometimes there were few enough she could sweep them up in one hand as she passed. Other times she needed a trolley to lug them out to the recycling. She never wondered why until the day she arrived for her shift and noticed the counter already clear, a handwritten sign declaring PAPERS SOLD OUT SORRY.

‘That woman drove her kids into a dam,’ Kim at the ciggie counter said. ‘People can’t get enough of it.’ After that, when there were few papers to clear at the end of the night, Lena would take one for herself to read on the bus home. Always something bloody and tragic on the front, with kids or a pretty girl. Occasionally a terror attack somewhere famous, like Paris or London. Sometimes the front-page stories were horrifying enough that she couldn’t sleep. A couple of months ago a man out in WA killed his whole family. She’d lain awake all night thinking about how there were times up in Brisbane when she had churned with rage at the Dick, and sometimes at Mum, too, for inflicting him on their family. Still never occurred to her to murder them in their beds. Punch the Dick in his dick, yes. Drive his car to a cliff top and release the handbrake before leaping clear, sure. But not while he was inside it or anything.

Did the Dick ever think about killing them all? Sometimes when he was angry he’d yell in a way that made Lena imagine a cartoon fist about to burst from his mouth. But the worst that ever happened was a spittle shower. He was a dick, but not the physically violent kind. Though maybe people weren’t until they were.

Neither Mum nor Dad ever laid an angry hand on them growing up. Not even a smack on the bum. Mum definitely wanted to sometimes. Many times she’d walked away from Lena or Will or both of them, naughty—screaming, fighting kids. Kids who’d drawn on the walls or made mud soup in the only good saucepan or broken each other’s Christmas toys. Mum would speak calmly even as her face turned pink then red. They’d laugh at her. Oooh, look out, Will, she’s gonna blow. But she never did. She’d go outside, close the door on them. When they were little they measured her fury in how many cigarettes she smoked before she came back in. Once she’d quit they’d watch at the window as she paced. Working off the cheese, they’d call it and laugh. God, they were shits. They didn’t know.

Knowing was what kept Lena awake the night she read about the man in WA. His picture had been in the papers, but three or four hours into the sleepless night Lena noticed that the figure she was imagining stalking through that house with a shotgun had her grandpa’s face. She’d only ever seen him in photos, this man who they weren’t allowed to know about until they were teenagers and then, once Mum told them, they weren’t allowed to talk about ever again. They’d googled him, of course, once they knew there was something worth googling. Will tried to be all protective—Lena, trust me, you don’t want to read this—but she’d elbowed him out of the way and read the article herself. It wasn’t even that bad. The article that was. Not graphic, anyway. A friendship gone sour, a fight the other man thought ended when he broke his ex-mate’s nose. Then Lena’s grandpa returned with his nose taped up and a knife in his fist and finished it his way.

Nothing like the crime in WA, then. So why did her mind insist on conflating the two, and so vividly she couldn’t sleep? Why her inability to push away the image of the girls in My Little Pony t-shirts in the picture on Mum’s mantelpiece—eight-year-old Nic taller, fatter, smilier; serious, skinny, six-year-old Michelle tucked under her arm—in bed in the farmhouse from the paper, their dad coming through the door with his gun, shooting one in her sleep and then, when the other woke at the noise, shooting her as she screamed and screamed. Why couldn’t she stop obsessing over which one he killed first, which one had to see her sister’s body? I hope Mum was first, Lena’s brain kicked, because Aunty Nic was older, could’ve handled it better. But, then, Aunty Nic would’ve understood more, so maybe it was better that she went in her sleep, Mum still so young she might not have had time to comprehend the size of the betrayal, the irrevocability of the horror.

This didn’t happen, she’d told herself, leaning out of bed and grabbing her phone and opening a news site to see the picture again. See, idiot? Those faces belong to strangers. The thing in your head never happened. Not to them.

Was that why Nic kept all these papers? Lena wondered now, rubbing her hands together to dislodge the grime. So she could refute the midnight horrors by returning to the documentary record, reassuring herself that though terrible things have happened—keep happening, will always be happening—they are not happening to her?

But how would that work, like, actually? The three or four papers on the top of each stack might be accessible, at least until the tower got above head height. When Lena and the cop had cleared them all for the ambulance they’d had to push the top stacks off the towers, leaping out of the way to avoid being hit as they came tumbling down. It hadn’t occurred to her in the nightmare moment to wonder how those stacks, each one made up of maybe fifty papers bound with string, had got so high in the first place. Lena hadn’t noticed a stepladder anywhere, but that didn’t mean anything. There could be a whole fucking industrial lift in here and she wouldn’t have seen it.

She finished clearing the kitchen doorway of newspapers, making a mental note to check if the council around here did extra recycling pick-ups. There was a narrow path from where she stood in the hallway to the sink under the kitchen window, passing the table on the left and the fridge and stove on the right. She tried to picture Nic in this space, stumbling through sleepy-eyed in the morning to make some toast, or dashing in during the ad breaks at night to boil the kettle. It was impossible: there could be no stumbling or dashing, here, only steady, watchful motion. Like walking across the stone bridge over the creek behind her mate Lou’s place in Brisbane. Wide enough as long as you don’t slip or turn an ankle.

The sink was filled with plastic takeaway containers—clean, by the looks of them. Nic had always been fastidious around food. When they slept over as kids they had to eat at the table off new plastic plates. As soon as they were finished, Nic would throw the leftovers and plates in the bin, wipe the table and their hands with antiseptic spray that smelt like pine trees and stung the broken skin around your nails. Then she’d take the bin bag outside. Later, if she’d bought ice creams, they’d sit on the front steps and gobble them down, throwing the wrappers and sticks straight into the outside bin. Lena had mentioned it to her mum once and she’d rolled her eyes and said, Thank god she doesn’t have kids, which was a thing Mum said about Nic all the time, even though she seemed perfectly happy to leave her own kids with her for days or even weeks.

Lena was glad for that particular weirdness right now. If Nic had been a food hoarder or even let her dirty dishes pile up, she really didn’t think she’d be able to deal with it. Her gag reflex was overdeveloped. Pity she didn’t go down on Josh; might have spewed all over his deceitful dick.

Stop! Focus.

The windowsill over the sink was cluttered with empty soft drink and wine bottles. Over the top of them she could just make out the corner of the Hills hoist that, on scorching hot days, she and Will would hook their hands on to and swing in a circle while Aunty Nic aimed the hose at a central point. Reaching that point, feeling the cold slap of water before quickly moving on, was better somehow than standing still and having Nic spray them all over.

There used to be a door from this room to the backyard and laundry. She guessed there still was, somewhere in that corner between the end of the sink and the entrance to the living room. Behind the stacked cardboard boxes, which were themselves almost concealed by a pedestal fan, a breadmaker, a blender, two irons and an assortment of other small appliances and their tangled, grimy cords.

She ran the tap a minute, splashed her face with water, drank greedily from her hands, then refilled the water bottle. She opened the fridge, hoping there’d be something cold in there she could chug before she continued.

There was not. Nothing to chug, nothing cold.

On the top shelf—raised as high as the notches on the side would allow—were a dozen or more small dark amber bottles, some with fading prescription labels, some with Chemists’ Own labels advertising their contents. Among them were stacked boxes of Panadol, Nurofen and Codral, as well as at least twenty other packets of medications Lena hadn’t heard of, wound-up bandages, boxes of bandaids and, poking up between the rungs of the shelf, tubes of what looked like medicated cream. Fat, full tubes; scrunched-up-at-one-end tubes; squeezed-completely-flat tubes.

The shelf below held enough single-serve packets of mustard, ketchup, salt, pepper, soy sauce, wasabi, chilli sauce, sugar and Splenda to service a medium-sized restaurant for a month. Each condiment had its own section, though the slipperiness of the packages and the sheer bulk of the lot of it meant that there was considerable overlap, ketchup sachets having fallen onto Splenda stacks, sugar onto salt, soy sauce onto chilli. Still, enough care had been taken that the space was divided into mostly uninterrupted chunks of colour: red, yellow, brown, green and white.

Between the middle shelf and the vegetable drawers were tissues. On the left, four regular-sized boxes stacked two by two, on the right at least forty purse-sized packets.

The left-hand vegetable drawer was filled to the brim with boxes of toothpicks, matches, travel-sized sewing kits and other small packets and boxes Lena couldn’t bear to examine. The right-hand drawer held an astonishing range of condoms, with tubes of lubricant and several different brands of pregnancy test mixed in.

The freezer was stacked with ice cube trays. All of them empty, many of them broken.

‘I’m being pranked,’ Lena muttered, groping behind the fridge until she found the plug, which was firmly pushed into the socket. She flicked the switch and waited to hear the whir of the cooling unit start up. Nothing.

By the time she had emptied the fridge (out-of-date medicine, creams and condoms straight into a garbage bag, along with all the condiments and all but one box or bottle of everything else), it was clear the fridge was not getting any cooler. She took out her phone, off since she’d been woken in the night by obscene messages from men she didn’t know, turned it on, bit her lip while the banked-up messages buzzed onto the device. She deleted them all unread and then texted Nic: Is your fridge broken?

While she waited for a reply, she sprayed the inside of the fridge with disinfectant, wiped it down, sprayed and wiped again, then a final time with hot water.

There’s a fridge in the living room

Okay, Lena wrote. But does the one in the kitchen work?

Not for years

Bloody hell. Lena stepped over the piles of who-the-fuck-knew-what to get to the living room and felt new panic rising. What was all this? Just fabric and boxes and, and, and, what? Finally she made it out: snuggled in between an armchair and a stack of video tapes, and bearing the weight of what looked like five or six clumsily folded blankets, was a tiny white fridge, smaller than the bar fridge in her room at uni. She picked her way over and wrenched it open. Two small cans of off-brand cola, two bottles of Fanta, a bottle of spring water, one of orange juice and a small carton of chocolate milk. All of it blissfully chilled.

Lena drank the water and then a cola, crouched right there in front of the open door. The fizz burnt her throat and made her eyes tear up but the cold was like a miracle. Soon the sugar and caffeine would hit and might just get her through another hour of this hell. And then?

Her phone buzzed.

Josh.

The cola almost came right back up. Not that it would matter. Cola spew would blend right in to this filthy rag of a carpet.

Do u hate me?

Three seconds of her heart hammering and then:

Wouldnt blame u

Know I don’t deserve it but would luv to talk

She typed go to hell, deleted it, forwarded his messages to Annie and Lou instead. She waited for their counsel, crouched in front of the little fridge with its children’s party mix of drinks.

Annie and Lou were of one mind: fuck him and the horse he rode in on. Delete the messages, delete his contact details, block his number.

She would. Later. Right now, she’d noticed there was a path, of sorts, running from where she crouched to the armchair in front of the TV. Shit, Nic, could you be more of a stereotype?

Lena stood and, careful not to disturb the stacks of who-the-fuck-knows on either side, made her way to the chair, an old-fashioned recliner covered in chocolate brown velour, with crocheted granny blankets draped over its back and arms. This, at least, was familiar. Aunty Nic would settle herself in here after dinner, Will and Lena or, later, Lena alone on the sofa beside her. Sometimes Nic’d start gently snoring, and Lena would crawl onto her lap and tickle her face until she woke and returned fire, tickling Lena into ecstatic hysterics. Only now, looking back, did Lena understand that the snoring had been fake.

The fluoro yellow crocheted sock velcroed to the arm of the chair was filled with a nail file, a bottle of nail polish remover, lavender polish, clear top coat and a purse pack of tissues. The whereabouts of the remote control it was supposed to hold was a mystery. At her feet was an old-school portable CD player. She pressed play and glam rock screamed into the room. She pressed stop, flipped the player open: Open Up and Say … Ahh! Poison. Ugh. When it came to music her mum and aunty were bogans through and through.

Her phone buzzed, buzzed, buzzed and she ignored it like a dripping nose. Sniff sniff sniff.

She needed a strategy. Already she’d wasted time and energy scrubbing out a fridge that was destined for landfill. She needed to take stock of her situation, plan, prioritise. From the armchair she could see the television, which sat in a cabinet almost hidden by the stuff it held. Like the back shelf of an op shop, it was cluttered with a horrifying array of worthless, dust-gathering porcelain figurines. Garishly bright frogs and wonky-eyed cats, dogs with threatening grins and yellow ducklings with creepily realistic webbed feet. Little shepherd girls reading books or weeping or bending over lambs or puppies or looking out over the rest of the miserable creatures on the shelf. A dozen or so figurines of Pregnant Mary and Mother Mary kept company with a bunch of fat Buddhas, mostly laughing but a few, seeming to understand the gravity of the situation, stared heavy-lidded at their own feet. Between, behind, in front, over and under the figurines were vases of every colour, shape and size, along with—for fuck’s sake, Nic—trophies for sports Lena was pretty certain no one in the family, let alone Nic herself, had ever played: cricket, rugby, soccer and volleyball.

The wall to the right of the TV was lined with colourful crates and opaque plastic organiser boxes. Lena counted sixteen without even moving her head. They ran all the way to the back of the room, in some places stacked right to the ceiling. A few rag dolls, some CDs and various office supplies spilt out here and there. The space between where she was and the at-least-neatly-stacked stuff around the walls was chaos. She could see at least five tables of various sizes piled high with paper and books and cardboard boxes like you got at the fruit and veg market. There were some more armchairs and lounges piled high with blankets and towels. Or probably, based on the sharp edges poking through, covered in other stuff over which had been thrown blankets and towels. The floor, where she could see it at all, had a light coating of papers and fabric.

Lena sank into the armchair. She could use up the entire roll of garbage bags, fill each one to bursting, and it would make no visible difference in here.

Her phone buzzed. She opened the message without thinking, was punished with a picture of an erect dick, gripped by a pale, hairless hand. wanna fuck i last much longer than that college fag

She blocked the number, was startled by her phone ringing in her hand. Mum. She contemplated not answering, knew the phone would keep buzzing at her until she did.

‘Lena. Jesus. What the hell have you got yourself into? Do I need to come down there?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Cool, calm, voice of a virgin who’s never been filmed so much as flipping her hair in a boy’s direction.

‘I’m talking about you letting Nic turn you into her personal home cleaning service.’

Relief like a shot of vodka through her. ‘Mum, it’s fine. I’m just making sure her place is safe for her to come home to on crutches.’

A deep, long sigh. ‘How bad is it? Really, Lena. Tell me the truth.’

‘It’s … pretty cluttered.’

‘Jesus. That woman is a bloody disgrace. S’cuse my French, but bloody hell. She has no right to drag you into her—’

‘She hasn’t dragged me. I want to help. And she’s your sister. Have some compassion.’

‘I used to, believe me. I had buckets of it. That woman drained every one of ’em. And now she’s doing it to my daughter. I won’t have it.’

‘Well, it’s not up to you. I’m an adult.’

‘You’re a sucker.’

‘Better a sucker than a bitch who turns her back on family in need.’

‘I’m a bitch, am I? Lovely.’

‘When it comes to Nic, yeah, you are.’

‘She’s never been able to understand that you’re not hers.’

‘I’m not anyone’s. I make my own choices.’

‘I’m trying to protect you.’

‘I don’t need protection.’

Another deep sigh. ‘Yeah, you say that, but … I’m your mum. I worry about you. I don’t want you taken advantage of. She does that, you know. She’s a leech. Living for nothing all these years and—’

‘Mum, I’ve gotta go. There’s a lot to do here and I’ve still got uni and work and everything.’

‘Do you want me to come down? I can ask at work. They owe me some time.’

The day her mother saw what Nic had done to the place was the day the only bit of property owned by anyone in their broken, fucked-up family would be burnt to the ground. Better at least wait to find out if it’s insured before letting that happen.

‘Nah, don’t. It’s really not that bad. It’s good, actually, having my own space for a bit. No housemates.’

A pause. ‘Yeah, okay. But I’m serious, Leen. If it gets too much, if she starts asking you for, I don’t know, anything else, you say no and call me and I’ll handle her. You’ve got your own life to live—you can’t be—’

‘Okay, Mum. See ya.’ She hung up.

Four texts had arrived while she’d been talking. Two dicks, a Mum said Aunty Nic’s got you cleaning her house? from Will, and a Can you do 4–12 tonight? from her manager. She deleted the dicks, sent an eye-roll to Will and a thumbs-up to work.

Seven hours until she’d have to leave. Six-and-a-half before she’d need to be in the shower. She could get heaps done in that time. The whole kitchen would be good. That way she could at least make coffee tomorrow before she started.

First, though, she made a careful lap of the entire place. Though lap was the wrong word. There was a zigzag, barely there path running from the lounge room to the hall. From that relatively clear space she opened the door to the spare room and her stomach filled with cement. When she’d visited Lou the first time she’d been astounded to realise that Lou’s bedroom had always been that. The bed was the one Lou had slept in since her early teens, when it replaced the one she had slept in since she was a toddler, which had replaced her cot. The pale cream walls with butter yellow trim used to be pink with purple trim after they were cream with pink trim, but they were the same walls. The antique hardwood dresser had been there since before Lou was born, handed down to her parents to place there in anticipation of the daughter they knew would come. Lou moved to the overstuffed armchair by the window at a certain time in the afternoon because she knew the winter sunshine would warm her there, just as it always had. There was a photo in the hallway just outside the room of Lou aged maybe six or seven sitting in the exact chair she sat on talking to Lena, with what appeared to be the same shaft of sunlight bouncing off her shoulder. It seemed, to Lena, like time travel.

Lena had never had a room of her own for more than a year or two at a time. Even then, those rooms were never really hers, as she was reminded whenever she wanted to change the colour of the walls or stick posters on them. If you mark the walls they’ll take it out of our bond, Mum’d chant.

This room at Aunty Nic’s was one she woke in from age three to thirteen. Not every morning or anywhere near that, but at some point, at many points, in each of those years it was this grey popcorn ceiling she saw when she opened her eyes, this tan loop-pile carpet her cold morning toes pressed into, this mirror-fronted built-in wardrobe she checked for monsters then ghosts then serial killers before sliding the doors closed and climbing into this bed. And now … now, goddamn it, this room was just another warehouse for Nic’s shit. The hope—one she hadn’t known she held until this moment—that she might crawl into the creaky old bed tonight, curl up and watch the headlights of passing cars dance across the wall until sleep swamped her, was smashed. She kicked the bag of clothes nearest to her foot; it shuddered but remained in place, held tight by the boxes, bags, baskets surrounding it.

Back down the hall, a glance into Nic’s room and with it the concrete loosening nausea swimming in. There was clear space from the door to the stained carpet marking the spot where Nic had lain, leaking.

Lena continued to the bathroom, stood in the doorway for long minutes staring at the full-to-the-brim bathtub, the cluttered shelves over the sink. The shower stall at least seemed useable. The toilet, too.

Back out and into the kitchen. She would start with the table to give her some clear space to work with. The closest pile of papers was also the smallest, reaching only to her bellybutton. On top was a flyer asking for help finding a lost bulldog. The pet’s puffy, wet-eyed face looked the way Lena imagined her own did right now. The back of the paper was sticky—Nic had clearly ripped it off a telegraph pole. Why? Had she seen the dog and planned to call the owners? But no, underneath this poster was another: a poodle this time. Below, a lost budgie, a tabby, a Persian. Dogs, birds, cats all the way down. The thought hit Lena like a fist to the chest: had Nic taken all these animals, kept the ‘lost’ posters the way a serial killer collects newspaper clippings of their crimes? Were there live or—Jesus, no—dead animals hidden somewhere in this house?

Calm down.

Checking with you as promised: can I chuck the lost pet posters on kitchen table?

The phone rang immediately. Nic, panting as though she’d run flights of stairs: ‘Leave all that, Lena. I need it.’

‘Some of these notices look years old. What do you need them for?’

Heavy breaths. ‘What if I see one of the pets? I won’t know who to call!’

‘But—’

‘Lena, they’re out there. Lost. Alone. Probably hungry. How will I know who to call if I find them? Please. Think about it.’

This Nic—wild with panic, delusion and fear, panting, weeping, helpless, mad—this Nic she could imagine in this house. This Nic she had never met.

‘Okay, yes. I get it. It’s fine. I’ll leave them. How are you feeling today?’

‘This whole thing is so stupid. You shouldn’t be there. You don’t know what you’re doing. Please, just leave it, okay? Please.’ ‘Yes, yes. Of course. Whatever you want. I’m sorry I upset you. Try to calm down. Drink some water. Maybe have a sleep. It’s all fine, here.’

‘Will you leave?’

‘Leave?’

‘My things. My house. I need you to leave, Lena. I can’t bear it.’

‘Okay.’

‘Do you promise?’

‘I promise. Don’t worry.’

She hung up, pushed the stack of posters into a garbage bag, started on the next pile.

The kitchen cupboards were filled with cookbooks. It was like a history of food trends: The Women’s Weekly Cookbook, Campbell’s Easy Summer Recipes and Margaret Fulton cookbooks Lena remembered from childhood, along with Microwave Cooking With Style, 50 One-pot Meals and In the Kitchen with Rosie: Oprah’s Favorite Recipes. A bunch of low-fat and heart-health books, high-fibre, Mediterranean, low-carb, organic. Some were very recent: paleo and keto. In between were more timeless collections: Italian, Cantonese, Potatoes and Pasta, Vegetarian and Vegan, Soups, Desserts. There was one, still in its plastic wrap, written by an Instagram diet guru Lena had told Nic about only a month or so ago. She imagined her aunt going straight from their lunch together, finding and purchasing the book. Did she think, as she handed over her credit card, about how she’d invite Lena over and surprise her with Caris’s clean-eating feast? Did she think, I’ll just have to tidy the kitchen a little … Did she imagine the two of them in this room, eating slices of Paleo Apple Spice Coffee Cake, their laughter echoing in the clear, empty space that surrounded them?

She bent and wrenched open the oven. You couldn’t see its walls or racks. Couldn’t see through to the back. Enough paper in there to burn down the neighbourhood.

People have died of sadness, Lena knew. Was this what it felt like, just before?

Will, she texted, how have we gone all these years and not known our aunty is completely and utterly batshit crazy?

Speak for yourself, he replied. I’ve long known EVERYONE in our family is batshit.

I’m serious tho! There’s a stack of books on feng shui and home decorating stashed … wait for it … behind the DUNNY!

That’s hilarious

It’s devastating

Devastating but hilarious

Our family motto