unfinished house. The walls would go up tomorrow but they had laid the floor first, which made no sense to me. It looked like a dance floor, polished wood running straight and shiny from one side of the house to the other, still open to the elements. I stood on the polished boards and imagined the tracks of kangaroos bouncing over the floorboards, brown snakes propelling their sinewy bodies over the slithery surface, cane toads, hundreds of them, congregating in what would become my bedroom.
It was like two houses conjoined. Our side of the house had three bedrooms, one each for my mother, my sister, and me. Their side of the house had three bedrooms, for my aunt, my grandfather, and my grandmother. There were two doors between the divided camps
and we could lock them, separating into our natural divisions. In the middle, a shared space the size of a lounge room. No manâs land. A room to be fought over, just like the place where my grandmother was born. There had always been a divide in the family, and here it had been drawn out, the differences between us made explicit by the pattern of the rooms.
Dragonhall itself would be on the adjacent property. My grandmother stepped us through it, walking through the jaws of the dragon into the entryway where you would pay your money, buy your gifts. Beyond this there were rooms set up with different tableaux. Fairytales in one part. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin, Puck and the Fairy Mountain, the Little Match Girl. Then the real life. Dinosaurs, Egyptian mythology. They seemed to have abandoned the idea of the chocolate lake and the little train for children to ride from room to room. Scaled down, it still seemed that Dragonhall would be a proud monument to their years of work.
For the moment they had built a Besser Brick shed and all the models were stored in this. There were damages. My grandmother pulled Alice out of a box. Alice had appeared in libraries across the western suburbs, peering out from behind a giant mushroom at the riot of a tea party gone wrong. The plates upended, the guests asleep in coffee cups. A mother nursing a pig in a baby suit, a rabbit checking his watch. Now I saw how her fingers had been bent, the surface layer of plaster cracked, the paint chipped and peeling. I
touched her damaged face, brushing aside the wave of sandy blond hair. Real human hair, from the head of a school friend of mine who had told me she was cutting her long blond ponytail off. (I had been distraught, pretty girls should never lose their hair. My own hair was a harsh and scratchy mat of dark curls and I stroked the softness of these locks and wished I could exchange my hair for hers.) I had told my family the story and my grandmother was ready with an offer for the soon-to-be-abandoned hair. Alice looked beautiful wearing my friendâs hair tied back from her face by a blue band of silk.
Now I touched her shattered cheek and stroked her hair. I remembered the transaction, a scalp paid for in full, but I could barely remember my friend at all.
Â
Â
I walked through the grounds of the schoolyard, such a little place, a few portable classrooms, a permanent building, a little stretch of asphalt for the kids to play on. The school only held classes up to grade ten. I noticed the bored teenagers clustered around the park, sneaking cans of beer under their sweaters. They scowled at me distrustfully. New kid, city kid, fat kid. It reminded me of the kids at Blacktown, watchful creatures waiting for their opportunity to strike.
My mother told me that most of them just dropped out after grade ten. There were jobs on their parentsâ farms. Plenty of work to be done. I noticed the groups of older boys, their predatory glances as they leaned together on the balcony of the pub.
I sat in the middle of our yard and there was something settling over me that I couldnât shake, a sense of dread, a tight feeling in my chest, a howling loneliness like wind
It was like two houses conjoined. Our side of the house had three bedrooms, one each for my mother, my sister, and me. Their side of the house had three bedrooms, for my aunt, my grandfather, and my grandmother. There were two doors between the divided camps
and we could lock them, separating into our natural divisions. In the middle, a shared space the size of a lounge room. No manâs land. A room to be fought over, just like the place where my grandmother was born. There had always been a divide in the family, and here it had been drawn out, the differences between us made explicit by the pattern of the rooms.
Dragonhall itself would be on the adjacent property. My grandmother stepped us through it, walking through the jaws of the dragon into the entryway where you would pay your money, buy your gifts. Beyond this there were rooms set up with different tableaux. Fairytales in one part. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin, Puck and the Fairy Mountain, the Little Match Girl. Then the real life. Dinosaurs, Egyptian mythology. They seemed to have abandoned the idea of the chocolate lake and the little train for children to ride from room to room. Scaled down, it still seemed that Dragonhall would be a proud monument to their years of work.
For the moment they had built a Besser Brick shed and all the models were stored in this. There were damages. My grandmother pulled Alice out of a box. Alice had appeared in libraries across the western suburbs, peering out from behind a giant mushroom at the riot of a tea party gone wrong. The plates upended, the guests asleep in coffee cups. A mother nursing a pig in a baby suit, a rabbit checking his watch. Now I saw how her fingers had been bent, the surface layer of plaster cracked, the paint chipped and peeling. I
touched her damaged face, brushing aside the wave of sandy blond hair. Real human hair, from the head of a school friend of mine who had told me she was cutting her long blond ponytail off. (I had been distraught, pretty girls should never lose their hair. My own hair was a harsh and scratchy mat of dark curls and I stroked the softness of these locks and wished I could exchange my hair for hers.) I had told my family the story and my grandmother was ready with an offer for the soon-to-be-abandoned hair. Alice looked beautiful wearing my friendâs hair tied back from her face by a blue band of silk.
Now I touched her shattered cheek and stroked her hair. I remembered the transaction, a scalp paid for in full, but I could barely remember my friend at all.
Â
Â
I walked through the grounds of the schoolyard, such a little place, a few portable classrooms, a permanent building, a little stretch of asphalt for the kids to play on. The school only held classes up to grade ten. I noticed the bored teenagers clustered around the park, sneaking cans of beer under their sweaters. They scowled at me distrustfully. New kid, city kid, fat kid. It reminded me of the kids at Blacktown, watchful creatures waiting for their opportunity to strike.
My mother told me that most of them just dropped out after grade ten. There were jobs on their parentsâ farms. Plenty of work to be done. I noticed the groups of older boys, their predatory glances as they leaned together on the balcony of the pub.
I sat in the middle of our yard and there was something settling over me that I couldnât shake, a sense of dread, a tight feeling in my chest, a howling loneliness like wind
Similar Books
