Paper Flowers

When you first took me to Rose’s place it was September and the powder from the wattle trees fell about my shoulders like snow. The walls were covered in floral wallpaper back then. There was the smell of toast, maybe detergent, as your mother, Rose, first led me through the hall, showing me each of the rooms: the study with her desk — covered in fabric scraps and half drunk cups of tea and wine; the spare room still full of your old things — posters of cars and notebooks full of sketches; and her own bedroom — three different quilts on her bed, a half drunk glass of wine on the sideboard, maybe some peppermint oil, some gin.

Rose wore colourful knits that day, as she always did—even in the spring. She corrected me when I called her Rosemary, saying it reminded her too much of being twenty, of being too young and too proud, ‘I used take myself very seriously Audrey’ she said with a wink. I thought of my own mother then, how she shut herself up in the weatherboard house my father once built; how she surrounded herself with neat green lawns and plum trees that never grew fruit.

I remember picking up a mug from the wooden mantelpiece, still warm from Rose’s tea. I also remember how Rose had it, her tea, with soy and a teaspoon of honey. You said Rose only ever got her honey from the market. Maybe your dad was the beekeeper; he had a short grey beard like you thought you would have one day, which you did. You said his spectacles made you smile— hanging over his chest from a necklace made of ordinary string.

I didn’t believe in marriage, back then, when we lived in that white walled apartment, the one I first called my own. You moved in one rainy June and told me I was drinking too much coffee; I took it with one sugar and full cream milk— no one really drank soy milk except Rose back then. Soon we wanted a backyard, a bathroom with a bath. You told me we could live in Rose’s bungalow in the meantime, that the space would be nice—that there was a bathroom with a bath. You were only working a few hours a week. I had quit my job sorting mail at the post office and was still trying to come up with something to be.

We moved into Rose’s bungalow on a Sunday. We fit everything into your van, only needing to take the single trip. You had your records, two pairs of jeans and a few shirts; I had the roll up mattress, a few baskets of clothes and the little bookshelf my father had once built for me. We stopped at a milk bar, I remember, for cigarettes and fish and chips wrapped in brown paper. You squeezed lemon juice over everything: over the soggy short chips, the potato cakes and the soft bits of Flake I tried to convince you not to order—thinking of the Gummy sharks, the Whiskery sharks and the Elephant fish I used to see uncle Pete pull in from the sea.

You clean Rose’s desk with citrus oil once every few months, now that she’s gone. You tell me, in your deepest voice, that we have to take better care of our things—her things. You say that lemon juice lifts old wax and fingerprints from wooden surfaces, that you read, on the internet, that lemons can do just about anything. They’re versatile, you say. And, if you’re in a good mood, you will smile; you will just nod if you’re not, a vein rising up over your left temple as you work the yellow oil into the wood.

The walls were still like gardens back then—even in the bungalow, with its shaky flyscreen door and the cardboard-coloured welcome mat. I would sit with you while you on read on the weekends; everything seemed calmer without the white walls. I took my coffee with cows’ milk, with no sugar. Rose never seemed to be home those days; by the time we made it into the house for breakfast, her shoes were gone from beside the front door. Sometimes you could still feel the extra heat from her shower and the smell of toast would linger in the hall. Perhaps there would still be detergent bubbles in the sink and the butter knife she’d just used would still be perched on the edge of the bench.

You wrapped your body around me for the first few nights we lived there; in the house Rose gave you just before she died. You spent the days stripping walls, lifting flowery edges up with a putty knife before peeling back the paper to expose the cooler, smoother plaster. You put Rose’s underwear and socks in garbage bags and stored them in the bungalow, just until you were able to put them out with the rubbish, out in a pile by the gravel road, dusty now, from the summer. You took baths more often and told work that you were grieving, but really, you didn’t feel much at all. I rented out movies for us to watch and stopped spending time at the markets. I told you I was there to keep you company. You only wanted me at night.

In summer we would sit out among the lemon trees and the thick bottle brush. It was considered acceptable to burn until you tanned back then. We would turn the chug of the sprinkler in our direction when we got too hot, maybe go to Rose’s freezer for her ice blocks. The house was still painted pink. You laughed at yourself back then; you told me that once you were too embarrassed to invite your friends over. You told me you took Rose to meet your classmate’s father, a house painter by trade. Kevin was his name, and he had been taller than the trees, you said, smiling if you were happy; or just nodding at the memory if you were not.

This was years ago though, only a few years after I first met you. Rose’s place wasn’t really our home yet. It was just the big pink house where you grew up. Maybe just the house we lived behind, with its paddocks emptied of animals long ago, and the swirling wind chimes you bought Rose every Christmas hanging from every possible place. The faded wooden spirals and metal tubes hung from the roof gutters, the old swing set, and from the washing line behind little bungalow we began to call our own. Later, you wanted to take them down, to clean up the place. We put them in the car and drove out to the markets, where we sold them all for a dollar a bag, maybe two.

Later still, but before the big pink house had become our own, Rose would spend most days sitting in the flecked cane chair by the laundry. I remember you always wished she would go outside back then. We had moved into another white-walled apartment and left the bungalow, the one behind the pink house, bare. ‘The sun is shining’ you would say and gesture to the open window, through to the lemon trees and the faded outdoor setting. I would follow Rose’s gaze onwards, out towards the endless tea tree green, to the chattering Rosellas high in the gums, ‘Vitamin D mum, you need it,’ you would say. We had already begun to grow old.

We bought a peacock one summer—put it in the empty hen house. This was when Rose was nearly very old; she would have been wearing colourful knits as she always did—even in the spring. She would have still had her tea with soy and a teaspoon of honey, still had her toast thick with vegemite, with butter; her cup of gin would still be sitting, disguised as tea, beside her bed. I think you thought the bird would keep her company out there in the bush, after we left for the city. I remember Rose seemed a little perplexed as we let it out from the back of the van, its tail covered in big black eyes, its feathers like petrol, shimmering purple and green. She watched us fill its water bucket and smiled, ‘What did you bring that thing over for, eggs?’

It was years before you told me about the clothes you put her in— that you’d picked some loose grey slacks and the t-shirt we bought for her on our trip to Queensland. It was the one with the picture of a pineapple on it, you told me over dinner one night, years later. I remembered back to standing in the Brisbane shop— a tourist, thinking that the t-shirt would be a funny present, that Rose would wear it to do the gardening, maybe out walking or for cleaning the house. ‘Put me in this when I die,’ Rose said when we gave it to her. She cracked a smile when you went quiet and laughed her crackly laugh before continuing, ‘I do mean it’ she said. So that’s what you did.

You had been preparing yourself for this moment all along; the fear of Rose’s death dissolved, dried up with her days. You couldn’t have prepared yourself for the lingering sadness though, that angry, empty kind of sadness— no one ever does. I see it in you that afternoon, in the way you rip the paper flowers, the wallpaper, from the walls. You do it quickly, like you’re ripping off bandaids from the hairiest parts of your legs. ‘It’ll be our house once I’m done’ you say, with a forced wink, a nod. And I know we will move into the place before winter, that there will be talk of babies and dogs, again, maybe questions on why we’ve never had either. I know I’ll have to look up at the same ceiling rose as you did when you were ten, that I’ll wash in the same shower that Rose did, back when her hair began to fall out and she stopped being able to drink gin.

Once, Rose and I put coloured lanterns up in the backyard for you; it was your thirtieth and we knew you didn’t really mean it when you said, in that dry hum you had, that you hated birthdays. We smoked till our eyelids were soft and heavy that night. The back fence was missing some planks and you could see out into the bush, out towards the endless tea tree green. The three of us sat on that outdoor setting for hours. I think it was then that we decided to go to Queensland. You had begun to convince me of marriage and we wanted one last holiday before we had to save our money for coloured confetti, for fruit cake and a white dress. There was even talk of table cloths for a new place; a house we thought we would buy, one that was closer to town, one that wasn’t pink, with walls like gardens.

My own mother still called me on the first Saturday of every month back then. She still lived in the house my father once built— surrounded by neat green lawns and plum trees that never grew fruit. ‘Audrey’ she would say in a voice that had gotten smaller with age, ‘you know time is running out for you.’ I had stopped asking her what she meant a long time ago. Whether it was about children, about marriage, or about death— even about all three, I never really knew. I don’t think she did either.

A vein rose up over your left temple as you bent down to kiss me. It was milky blue, the vein, underneath your skin. You smelt like ash and jasmine or maybe it was just cigarettes and cologne; this is when I first met you— you don’t use either anymore. I was sitting in a damp bar, waiting to be saved from the world. You drove me out to the bungalow behind Rose’s place, after more wine and a lemonade for the road. I remember the warm air against my skin on the drive out there. ‘We are lucky’ you said and you smiled. You could have been anyone.

I catch you crying in the study one Wednesday afternoon, back when we were almost very old. You have been looking at photos, remembering days you thought you’d forgotten. I sit down at Rose’s desk and wait for you to speak. I notice that the bookcase is overflowing, that a water stain has started to spread in the ceiling. The smell of dried up adhesive, from the albums, fills the air. You tell me you’ve never felt nostalgia this heavy before. You say it has been lingering at in the back of your throat for weeks. The rims of your eyes are as pink as fairy floss when I kiss you.

You have your coffee with milk and two sugars now. I moved from the house into the bungalow to work on this story, which I never ended up finishing, but really, I think we just needed space. We meet in the kitchen at around eight every morning, you cook the toast and I poach the eggs and set the table. After we’ve eaten you sit by the laundry and look out at the lemon trees, at the broken outdoor setting. The sun comes in through the window to light up the vein across your left temple. ‘Audrey’ you sometimes say, ‘Let’s move house.’

Mum and Dad:

We stood on a nature strip in Northcote, on the night of Black Saturday—back when we were still comfortably unaware of the fires. I remember looking at the clock many times that weekend— the digital figures embedded in the dash, the shiny numbers of my phone and the scratched face of my brother Will’s watch— but I can’t say what happened when, not even to the hour; there are just two days and they are Saturday and Sunday, the seventh and eighth of February. And although Saturday was black for others, for me, Sunday was the real day of no colour at all.

So, whatever time it was, standing with Will that Saturday evening, maybe 6pm, perhaps later, it is easy enough to remember that the sun was still in the sky. The hot gusts of February wind had eased and a few heavy drops of rain fell over the faded blue bonnet of the car, splashing colour back into the tin. We stood there on the nature strip long enough to hear the most recent weather report run through the stereo and to find comfort in the hum and drone of ABC radio.

I noticed a few things alongside my brother Will on that night of the fires. At only seventeen his strides covered double the distance that mine did, as we walked along that Northcote footpath towards my auntie’s house. I noticed that his hair had grown long, that it almost touched his shoulders and that the blanket of freckles covering his skin had gotten darker from the sun— dense patches of pigment had bloomed over the backs of his elbows, his neck and across the backs of his hands.

Looking at my brother made me realise why my father had sometimes joked that we were never made for Australia. I remember my back blistering from sunburn some years, the sprawl of tiny bubbles bursting under the weight of my t-shirt, usually making the polyester blend cling to my skin. Even the sticky gel from my mother’s aloe vera plants couldn’t help me then. My father would sometimes get me to soak in the bath those summers. He’d run the water cool and deep. And, despite the discomfort I was in, I remember being excited; baths were rare, especially in summer when the water tanks were low. I would wait in the tub for what felt like hours—my baggy t-shirt and shorts slowly lifting from my softening skin to float all about me like a big, strange fabric jellyfish.

My mother had always struggled in the heat too; during the warmest parts of summer beads of sweat sprouted up all over her forehead and upper lip and her eyeliner melted down into the smile lines of her eyes. She had come straight from work that Saturday night, February seventh, still wearing her shire badge and a stiff lanyard around her neck. She wore a tie died dress too— black with big white loops covering her body. Later, when my mother found out it was the only piece of clothing she had left—that everything she’d once owned had turned to the softest ash you could imagine—she did not complain. She replied calmly to anyone who apologised. Usually it was a softly spoken sorry, sometimes it was a sorry in whisky form or in gifts of donated towels, nail clippers and boxes of glassware, sometimes boxes of cutlery and second-hand shoes. After a quick blush; a little embarrassment at the flood of generosity, my mother would say, “We are the lucky ones. Don’t worry. Really.”

Silvia Loves gets home from the aquarium at 5.45pm. She puts on the radio and eats a piece of toast, no two pieces of toast, both spread evenly with blackberry jam—both cut into perfect, triangular quarters.

This is one of my favorite photos. It is lucky I stole it from my parents' album before our house burnt down in 2009. Mum is so pretty here. She is even lovelier now.


Again. See, it's good to be sneaky sometimes:

Everything had been going a bit too well that summer. Tess had stopped disappearing during tea time. She sat, pink-skinned and smiling, opposite us as we served up pasta and bread. The hens in the garden clucked and fluffed their feathers in the dust.