‘You always blame me. How was I to know? Did I have a crystal ball?’
‘You were warned.’
Margaret sniffed. ‘I was young. I’m still young.’
‘Yes, you were young. That’s true. And so is Matthew—very young. He needs security. Let him live with the angels a little longer. His Paradise is already tainted.’
‘Like mine. Gone years ago. You couldn’t say fate had been kind to me.’
‘Fate! What had fate to do with your choice?’
Margaret’s voice rose: ‘Everything. Everything! It’s a wonder I can be as brave as friends say I am—vital, courageous, making the best of my personal tragedy.’
It was Gran’s turn to sniff. ‘Then be more understanding of Matthew. His burdens should come a little at a time.’
Matthew washed himself half-listening to their bickering. He did not return to the kitchen preferring to avoid its risky eddies of feeling. Instead he took the little path that passed around the side of the house. The captured yabbies and their pitiful helplessness had left him troubled. Only yesterday he had come upon the cat growling over the body of a bird, softly dead with feathers plastered, askew. When he appeared the cat grabbed its prey, the deep mewing in its throat a subterranean threat to Matthew not to intrude.
A few days earlier he had rescued a tiny drop-tail lizard from the same cat. Cunningly, this time, he had offered the cat some of his yabby meat, dropping it on a string and then twitching it out of reach. Tantalised the cat dropped the truncated lizard, which then skittered into the warm recesses of the stones by the path. It had looked ignoble without its tail, mutilated, only half a creature. But it was alive, like the yabby with one huge claw.
Matthew wondered if it had hurt the lizard to lose its tail and once or twice he experimented by pulling his own hand as hard as he could. He wondered what it would be like to have a detachable hand and visualised the skin folding over to close the hole. The lizard didn’t bleed when the tail dropped off. He wondered why. In his imagination he saw his hand lying on the path and shuddered. There was something threatening in wholeness being destroyed. It was like a worm in an apple, insidious, disgusting, a message from the present intruding into the future.
As he approached the side verandah his step slowed and he sidled forward. The verandah was sealed three quarters of the way up the outer and end walls. Above the wooden slats heavy canvas covers closed but did not seal the entrance between roof and wall. A wooden door at one end was partially covered by wire mesh. Another door from the inside wall of the verandah opened into the house.
Matthew’s father lived in this improvised room. The doctor had said he needed plenty of fresh air but he must be kept away from the rest of the family. He had his own plates and knives and forks, always kept in a special place in the kitchen and washed separately. His apartness worried Matthew. Gran and his mother were whole people not just because they were healthy but because they lived each day in a normal, predictable, undisturbing routine. The security they gave to Matthew did not merely rest on his relationship with them. It was acquired through his feelings about their relationship with the house, the garden, the neighbours, the streets where they shopped and the river and the beach where they sometimes indulged their leisure. They belonged comfortably in the busy world of sunshine and the quieter world of moonlight. The outside world filled their lives and made them whole.
His father lay forever in one place—a little grey room—cocooned and entrapped in his bed. Its half light was the half light of death.
Matthew tiptoed to the door and holding his breath peeped through the wire mesh into the room.
‘Piss off, you little bugger!’ the breathless voice with its suppressed rage sent him scrambling backwards. He fled to the sound of thin rasping coughs interspersed with the high whine of breaths caught in bronchial tubes, thrumming like wind protesting in high wires.
Matthew had never been inside the room on the verandah. His father had lain there for a long time now. Sometimes he emerged, a gaunt shuffling creature leaning on Margaret’s or Sarah’s arm to visit the lavatory at the end of the garden. He wore an old brown dressing gown in all weathers, and a towel, draped over his head and around his neck, gave him the hooded look of a large bird with hunched white head and long brown back. The clothes hung on his frame as if the body inside them had dissolved.
Sometimes Matthew watched covertly these painful and exhausted efforts to maintain the remnants of privacy and dignity. He tried, as he had tried with the lizard, to imagine what his father’s feelings must be. But he could not overcome his aversion and fear. The lizard had been little and vulnerable lying in the sun amid the glossy pink pig-faces. It was a part of the brilliance of the morning. His father he could never imagine in sunlight. His father was a creature of greyness, of half-light, something you trembled to meet when you scuttled out to the lavatory in the night, seeing his grotesque shape in the shadows across the path, expecting it to loom over you and reach out greenish half-dead hands.
His mother and grandmother never knew it but for Matthew death became an evil and terrifying presence in the house. Sometimes he imagined the women as angels in heaven in their tented white aprons and his father in the grey room as the devil. When they told him at school that the devil tempted people to come to him Matthew saw himself creeping up to the hellish outside room and wondered what would happen if ever he opened that door and stepped inside. He suspected he would die. His fears were
