Afternoons in this empty, alien place are long and full of terrible sounds. Like in the hospital, noises convulse through the space, working on Nic’s nerves like a sustained electric shock. The planes overhead are as loud as everyone always complained they were. She’d never noticed before. Like death swooping in to scoop you up, changing its mind at the last second. Meanwhile the cars and trucks and bikes are outside but they sound—feel to her shivering limbs—like they are in the room, or at the very least right outside her bedroom window, revving calmly before charging through to crush her where she lies. She asked Will yesterday what they were all doing out there, revving and revving and beeping and revving, barely ever seeming to simply drive on past.
‘A lot of deliveries around here. Groceries, postie, couriers. I’ve seen a lot of those motorbikes with the big heat packs on the back. Uber Eats mostly.’ And he went on to explain what that was as though she were a visitor from the past.
She could tell him that she orders food and groceries and other bits and bobs on a weekly basis. Sometimes more often. He could have guessed that if he’d had the slightest curiosity about how she managed to fill her home and her belly when she has no car and lives blocks away from the shopping centre.
Now she doesn’t even have her phone or wallet, thanks to him and his sister. Now she is hungry and scared and unsure what to do about it. Moving means pain without any certainty that satisfaction of her needs will come at the end of it. Moving means experiencing the rest of the disaster site. It’s too much to contemplate when she is still confronting the losses in here.
Like how always from her bed she has been able to reach out and touch with her fingertips the top that she had worn the first time Tony kissed her. It had been draped, always, from a Freedom Furniture, cow-spot-patterned swivel chair, the first big purchase she made after she started work at fifteen, and which had taken three months to pay for using lay-by, and which is also gone. Screaming Slut Red, Mum had called the colour of the shirt. Nic knew it was Revlon Fire & Ice Red. She couldn’t afford to buy the lipstick but she could pop in to the chemist on Norton Street and slick it on from the tester tube. Perfect match. The fabric was like layered cobwebs. Tony had commented on it, the delicate softness. He was sorry, after, when he noticed the back of it all fuzzed up from the friction of the brick wall she’d been pressed against for so long. So long kissing like that. Fully clothed and his hands mostly on the wall at her sides, her hands on his back, and it was almost too much. In bed alone that night she couldn’t shake the feeling he was inside her. Not the usual way men got inside women; not the temporary pushing in and out of a dick. This was cellular.
Of course the top was wrecked by that. Who wouldn’t be?
And long after she’d said goodbye to him for the final time, she could put her hand on the top and be twenty again. The cold brick against her kidneys, hot mouth against hers, hard-on making promises into her hip. The sound of him—the throaty tormented groan—when the security guard flashed a torch at them, told them to clear out. All of it right there in the fuzzy weave of that ten-dollar top.
Older, junkier stuff, Will had said.
She can’t wait any longer. Has to piss, to eat and drink and take more painkillers. She manages the first with an ease which boosts her confidence but then whacks her hip against the kitchen table, which has been pulled out from the wall for no apparent reason except to cause her both insult and injury. There is no food in the kitchen, and when she makes her way back to the empty lair Will slept in last night and checks the fridge she finds only two bottles of Fanta. She hates Fanta but bought it because it was on sale and the next time someone she knew mentioned that it was their favourite drink she would have a surprise bottle or two ready.
Her tablets, at least, are easy to locate. Sitting on the kitchen table next to her open handbag. She takes only half of what she has been prescribed. She is tired of feeling foggy and uncertain, of letting herself be helpless.
Without the children to stop her she walks through the house, using walls and furniture instead of crutches, taking in the remains. The echoes of her slippers on the floorboards conjure ghosts. Lena and Will running wildly up and down the hallway in their school uniforms, Lena as tall as her brother, Will determined to run faster to make up for it. The narrow space taking the sound of their slapping feet and broadcasting it to the rest of the house.
They are in the kitchen, too, the ghosts of her sister’s children. Summer-brown legs swinging, skinny forearms on the tabletop, sunburnt faces intent on the plates of food in front of them. Always ate like they hadn’t been fed in a year. Those children died when their daddy did, is the fact of it. What if the ones who took their places had been here instead of the ghosts? Been here all these years, running up her empty hallway, scraping plate after plate clean. In that version of reality, the house stays as it was in the years between Mum’s death and Joe’s. It is as it’s always been, a family home. Space to play, to cook, to make up beds for whoever needs them.
Nic makes her way to the only room she hasn’t seen since she returned from hospital. The door is difficult to push open, which is exactly exactly exactly right. The room is exactly right. She closes the door behind her and inches forward, nudging bags and baskets and books with her feet as she goes. She whispers apologies, hopes they’ll understand and forgive. She cannot bend to move them more gently, has to get to the bed before she drops. Once there, she lowers her bum, drags up one leg at a time. The bears and pandas and rag dolls squish together to accommodate her. There’s no way to get the blanket up now that she’s on top of it, but it doesn’t matter. The room is warm and her cuddly friends nuzzle her back, stop air creeping down the neck of her nightie.
What would’ve become of these snuggly fellows if the children had had another week or two to wreak their havoc? Charity bins if they were lucky. More likely the forever hell of the tip. And she would be living in a tomb without a soft, safe space to lay her head.
The irony is that Nic rarely came into this room before, but now that they’ve destroyed everything else it’s the only place she can breathe easy. The toys behind her, and piled-up clothes behind them. The lumpy sea between her body and the door patrolled by a fleet of misshapen boats. A stripy travel bag containing gifts and cards from boyfriends and workmates over the years; a shoebox of certificates from school that proved she was polite, was kind, was conscientious; laundry bags holding outfits she’d worn on days and nights that had been particularly sparkling; photos (in albums or in yellow envelopes waiting to be put in albums) of birthday parties and christenings; the treble recorder she played at the Opera House (in a group of one thousand school kids but only seventy of them with the treble recorders and Nic was in the front row with a bottle-green ribbon in her hair and when the audience applauded it was the proudest she’d ever felt up to that point).
A whole plastic laundry basket filled with all the letters and paintings and drawings and craft projects Lena made her in the years between birth and Brisbane. Snuggled in there the locket with a snippet from Lena’s first haircut, snatched from Michelle’s kitchen drawer, where it lay in a ziplock sandwich bag nestled with rubber bands, paperclips and lockless keys. Shamelessly snatched and right to do so, as Michelle had evidently never noticed it missing whereas Nic feels its protective presence every day and night.
A smaller basket, woven cane, not full, but almost, of the cards and pictures made by Will in those same years. He drew less, gave less, than his sister, but the things he did make and give were heart-busting. A pastel-coloured, pencil-drawn, comic strip in which he is Super Will, with cape and tights and all, rescuing his aunty from a snarling dog and dropping them both into a vat of whipped cream at the end. A paper clock with the words Time for kisses across its middle. She remembers him explaining it to her, his little face thrilled with the cleverness: See, whatever time you want a kiss, you just move the hands to the time it is! See?
And at the far shore of this lumpy, lovely sea, in the middle of the top shelf of the wardrobe, is the box she needs to have but never needs to open or touch. She knows its contents by heart.
Dear Daddy Dear Daddy Dear Daddy Dear Daddy Dear Daddy Dear Daddy Dear Daddy and never a Dear Nicole, Dear Daughter, Dear Nicky, Dear Nic in return.
In the first little while after Steve found their family, he would take Michelle and Nic up to Norton Street for gelato and ask them endless questions about their father. Michelle always said she didn’t remember anything, tried to change the subject. Nic didn’t remember much either, but what she did—a big, hard belly you could play like a drum; a laugh that sometimes turned into a coughing fit and, just when you thought he was going to choke, back into a laugh again; thick, furry arms that would lift you up until you could touch the ceiling with your fingertips and then bring you down onto his wide, fuzzy shoulders so you could bury your fingers and sometimes face in his thick, brown, curly hair—she gave to Steve. Michelle glared at her—they weren’t meant to talk about Dad, not ever, to anyone—but hearing about him made Steve smile. He said that maybe there’d been a mix-up and the man he met in the prison meeting room wasn’t their dad at all. That man was scrawny with wispy, white hair and gave the impression he’d never smiled let alone raucously belly-laughed in his life.
After a few months of this Michelle slammed her little palms on the plastic table, sending gelato cups skittering close to the edge. The only thing we need to know about our dad, she told Steve in an end-of-conversation tone, is that he loves us very much and can’t wait to get out and see us again. Nic had agreed, of course, and poor Steve must have known it wasn’t true, but he’d hugged them both to him, one under each arm, and said, True words, last words, yeah.
It was only after their mum dumped the letters out on the floor that Nic brought up the subject of their dad again with Steve, who was by then twenty-five or twenty-six and already in the grip of his addiction, though she didn’t yet know how irredeemably. She told Steve how for years and years whenever she did anything good, like get 10/10 in a spelling test or come first in the fifty-metre sprint at the sports carnival, she would write about it to Dad as soon as she got home. If a whole week passed in which she’d done nothing good (and this was lots of weeks, even though she tried very hard all all all the time) then she’d write a letter anyway, because otherwise he might think she’d forgotten him. In those letters she sometimes told him good things Michelle had done (there were lots of those) and sometimes good things Mum had done (not as many), but mostly she just told him whatever she could think of that wasn’t bad: the funny dog she saw on the way to school; the chorus of the song that was her favourite that week; the colour of the new dress Nan had given her for her birthday; the funny show she and Michelle watched on Saturday mornings while they ate their Rice Bubbles. Just all the things that, if she was the one in prison, would make her think, Hmmm, that sounds pretty good, I’m going to be very well behaved so I can go home soon.
She told Steve how she stupidly stupidly stupidly imagined the letters Dad was writing back to her but for some reason not managing to send. She imagined his letters said, My precious girl and I love you more than the world and I think about you every day and I’m very proud of you. And she imagined what it would be like when she finally saw him again. How she might come out of school at the end of the day and he’d be there waiting at the gate, and even though she hadn’t seen him since she was tiny and they both had changed a lot since then, they would recognise each other straight away and she would run run run and he would run run run and then in the middle they’d nearly crash into each other but he would grab her hard but not hurting-hard around the middle and lift her into the air and spin spin spin and all the other kids would be watching so that she felt embarrassed but at the same time prouder even than at the recorder concert at the Opera House.
Or if it was longer away, the day he came home, it might be even better. Because good things come to those who wait. And if she waited, then the day he came home might be when she had finished high school and was wearing a straight black skirt that stopped at her knees and black shiny high heels and a white shirt with a sheer collar and short, puffy sleeves, and Daddy would say, Who is this grown-up beautiful young woman? And Nic would say, It’s me, Dad! I’m just off to my job in an office in the city, and he would pretend to nearly faint with amazement but it would be pretending because of course he recognised her with love’s gaze and of course he wasn’t surprised at her city job because he always knew she was smart and would make something of herself.
Or maybe one night—any night! Maybe this one!—she would fall asleep like normal but then a racket would wake her and she’d stomp into the living room to rouse on her mum for being so noisy and there he’d be, a beer in one hand, ciggie in the other, like he’d never left. He’d say, What are you doing up at this time? And even though her heart would be bursting she’d be so so so so cool and she’d say, Some noisy bugger woke me up, and Mum’d say, Nicole! Language! and Dad’d laugh and say, Can the noisy bugger get a hug or what?
She spilt all this out to Steve as they sat with their backs against a wooden playground fort, her sipping the beer he’d given her, him halfway through his third already. He was silent, listening, and when she was finally done he said, Geez, I’d love to have a read of those letters, Nicky. Catch up on all the stuff you done before I knew ya. And even though he never mentioned the letters again, and the few times she thought of giving them to him without his asking, her whole body cringed with embarrassment and so she never did. Even so, every time she looked at the little box after that a wave of love washed over her.
The wave still comes when she looks at the box now, but it’s polluted by the pain coming from the plastic bag nestled at its side. The ordinary, standard-sized white plastic shopping bag containing all that is left of the brother who never read the letters but made her believe he wanted to. It was the worst thing she owned and the most important, this pathetically small and crumpled bundle of ‘personal effects’ deemed worth keeping by the people who cleaned Steve’s flat after he died. (Crime scene cleaners they were called. As though being fatally weak and sad was a crime.)
As she lies here closer to the bag and box than she has been in years, she remembers that they once caused only shallow surface cuts when she’d glimpse them as she moved around sleeping bags and pillows, board games and tape recorders, all the things kids needed for sleepover fun.
Something happened. Something terrible.
She remembers pulling down Lena’s sleeping bag, knowing it was the last sleepover before her mother took her to Brisbane. And that made her sad, of course, but it wasn’t the thing she had forgotten. The thing that happened.
It hurts hurts hurts but it’s important.
Something happened here, to do with the bag and the box.
Her blood itches and she sees her boy, her Will, heading off to court in the suit he wore to his dad’s funeral, his hair cut too short, showing the prickly heat rash on the back of his neck.
She didn’t see him after that and it was months along, that last sleepover with Lena, pulling down the sleeping bag and seeing the space it left on the shelf and a thought slammed into her: I can put Will’s stuff alongside Daddy’s and Steve’s.
Treacherous mind, killing off her nephew when he was alive, if not necessarily well, fifteen kilometres away in Silverwater. Treacherous space provoking her to imagine it filled in that way. Imagine the things that might happen to him in prison. The things that might happen to him if he made it out and had to live in the world with an unscrubbable stain on his life.
It had been a moment and it passed and the shelf filled with other things. Soft and kind and sweet things. The box and bag surrounded by so much goodness there is no room for anything else. It is a good place now. Safe.
It is important to acknowledge gratitude in even the hardest times, Mum used to say, having learnt it from Oprah. Here is what Nic is grateful for, lying alone in the dark on her childhood single bed in significant physical and psychological pain: the room in which she kept the most important things—painful and lovely both—is the room the children left alone. They had tried to erase her life but here she was embedded in the best of it, more in touch with its aching, profound, important beauty than she had been for years.