The House That Was Eureka (2 page)

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

KARL MARX,
THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE

...
It was the gun dream he was dreaming. He had it more and more as time went on
.

Crouching in darkness, underneath a bed. Looking up, he saw the criss-cross of the bed-wire, beneath the mattress. Not far away there were suddenly bullet-bangs. Out that way, in front. Though of course in the dream he didn’t know where the bed was, so didn’t know where that way was. He lifted up the counterpane a bit, and peered out
.

There were legs outside the cubby-house of his bed. Legs from the knee down, running back and forth, some in old brown or black-dyed trousers, others in long white underpants, mostly barefoot; and outside the bed too there were yelling sounds, louder than bullets. Some close and loud; a dozen or so men’s voices; though in the dream he could never hear what they yelled. And voices too out that way (wherever that way was); not as close, but loud; a mighty roar of voices, like when you hold a seashell to your ear; then bullet sounds too from the other way
.

Under the bed, he had a gun that now he loaded, carefully slipping in a bullet; then hid the gun inside his coat. The gun changed from time to time: sometimes a rifle, or a revolver; sometimes a machine-gun, or even a red water pistol
.

He held it close to his body and began to climb out from under the bed. Then he’d wake up
.

This is the house that Jack built;

He laid each brick and fastened each board

For wages laid down by State award.

Now Jack lives in the slums

Worried by bums

Who gather the rent

For the noble gent

Who lives in the house that Jack built.

ANON,
THE TOCSIN
, 1930S

Evie was sixteen, but Mum always reckoned she was a very young sixteen. By the time mum was sixteen she’d been working for a year; by the time she was nineteen, she was having Evie. In the album there was a photo of Mum at sixteen and she looked as mature and polished as she did in her wedding photos, when she was twenty-four.

Evie took the framed wedding photo out of one of the boxes. They were moving in tonight, and with all the packing cases around full of plates and saucepans and useful stuff it was more interesting and homelier to decorate the place than to unpack properly. Evie put the wedding photo of Mum and Ted up on the mantelpiece in the downstairs front room. Then the baby photos of Maria and Jodie, and the three baby photos of Sammy. Then the family photo they’d had done by a proper photographer last Christmas in the loungeroom at their old house: Ted and Mum standing at the back, Mum very attractive still, well groomed and made up, tall and suntanned in her green slack suit; and Ted blond, smiling too much for Evie’s taste, with a shirt out over his slacks to hide his beer gut, but still not too bad (Evie gave him that) for forty-three. Then Maria, nine, Jodie, eight, and Sammy, four, sitting at the front on the lounge, all with blond hair like Ted’s, that white-blond colour gone a bit green from chlorine swimming pools. And then Evie kneeling beside them at the end of the lounge, neither sitting down like the kids nor standing up like the adults, neither blond like Ted nor dark-haired like Mum, but a one-out and middle-ey sort of Evie.

‘Evie-Evie-Evie-Peevie!’ Sammy ran in in her pyjamas, singing one of Maria’s Evie-songs. She jumped from the armchair onto Evie’s back.

‘Bed!’ Evie said. ‘Back to bed!’ She’d put Sammy down an hour ago but the kids were being loopy tonight. Everything was everywhere. The beds hadn’t arrived yet and Evie couldn’t find the sheets so they’d all be sleeping just with blankets on mattresses on the floor.

‘I want
Mr Funny
.’

‘I told you, I don’t know where it is.’ Mum had been working all week and so Evie had done most of the packing, and everything was topsy-turvey. ‘I’ll read you something else.’ But Sammy started to howl. ‘You and your
Mr Men
books.’

‘What’s
she
doing down here! I thought I asked you to take her up an hour ago.’ Mum came in and fossicked around through the piles on the lounge till she found the car keys.

‘Listen, love, Ted and I are going back with the trailer for another load, so get those other two to bed will you, there’s a good girl.’

‘You’re going
now
?’ Evie said. It was already dark.

‘Yeah love, I want the sheets and things, God only knows where you packed them. We’ll be back by eleven, twelve at the latest, you’ll be all right.’ Mum often left Evie to babysit when she went to the club, and she knew Evie never got scared.

‘Listen, you make up your bed in here on the divan tonight – you can fix up that back room tomorrow. Night-night, sweetie…’ Her lipstick left a kiss on Sammy. ‘Be a good girl for Evie. And put the skids under those other two, won’t you, love.’

Evie heard the car start as she hauled Sammy over her shoulder for an upside-downer. She struggled out the dark obstacle course in the diningroom, then up the pitch-dark narrow stairs. Ted had told Evie to buy light bulbs and she had, but then she’d gone and packed them somewhere she couldn’t remember.

‘Can’t that girl do anything right?’ Ted had complained to Mum. ‘No wonder no one’ll give her a job.’

By the time Ted had gone to put the light bulbs in and Evie realized they were lost, it was too late to buy any more. Mum had gone in next door to 201 and borrowed two bulbs from Mrs Cavendish, so they had lights now in the loungeroom and kitchen, but the upstairs was like a tomb.

‘Oopsadaisy. Oh don’t carry
on
.’ As Evie turned on the tiny landing where the stairs divided, Sammy bumped her head. Sammy bawled and Evie plodded on past the bathroom to the back room that was to be Sammy’s, felt around with her foot for a mattress, and plunked Sammy down. ‘What a weight!’

‘She’s ten-ton-Sam, the fatso-man,’ Evie sang as she held Sammy to stop the tears. Then found a blanket and tucked it around her. ‘Go to byes now. Evie will stay with you.’

Evie felt guilty, because it was her fault about the darkness, and about the
Mr Men
books being lost. So she’d stay till Sammy went to sleep, and then go and fight those other two. She could hear them jumping and squealing up in the front room.

‘Oooooo, I’m a ghost…’
Crash
. ‘Watch it, Jodie!’

‘How can I watch anything in the dark?’ Jodie said reasonably.

Evie knelt beside Sammy on the mattress, knelt and looked out the open back window. There was a bit of moonlight, you could just make out a few shapes. About a metre and a half below the window was the corrugated-iron roof over the old breezeway and scullery. It was joined on to the roof over next door’s scullery, for on this side 203 and 201 shared a wall right the way along.

‘Make up a story,’ Sammy murmured.

‘Once upon a time,’ Evie said, ‘there was an old, old house, and a new family moved into it.’

‘What were their names?’

‘Oh, Evie, and Sammy, and Maria and Jodie.’ Evie was bad at inventing things.

‘
Then
what happened?’

Sammy’s voice was drowsy; she was about to drop off. Evie watched the cloud shadows moving over the corrugated-iron roof. There was a narrow passage running down beside the kitchen and scullery on the right side, next to 205’s fence. In this light it was a long dark pit, disappearing into the blackness of the tiny backyard. The shadows made Evie shiver.

Silver now, a foot-shape of silver formed itself on the roof below her as the clouds shifted. Then a black lump moved fast up the wall beneath her, to the window-sill. Down along that passage was blackness. Evie shivered.

For down there, in the scullery, Evie would be all alone. The family upstairs would be tight in their beds, and anything could creep along down the dunny-can lane, in the back gate, down the passage, up the breezeway, and into Evie’s room. Evie was to sleep in the old scullery.

Maybe she should do what Mum suggested, and keep her things up here in Sammy’s room and make up the divan in the loungeroom each night. Or follow Ted’s idea, and sleep up here with Sammy. (Or do what she wanted to do, and move out.)

But it’d be good, down there alone. If she was upstairs, she’d spend half the night getting drinks of water for Sammy and taking her to the toilet, and if she slept in the lounge she’d have to wait till Ted finished watching television. In the scullery, she could lock the door so the kids couldn’t muck up her things.

‘But what happened?’ Sammy drifted awake again, her voice cutting into Evie’s thoughts.

‘Nothing.’ Evie was bad at inventing things.

‘But what happened to the lady?’

‘What lady?’

‘The one you were telling me about. In the story.’

‘There wasn’t any lady.’

‘Yes there was. The one that was talking to you.’ Then Sammy stuck her thumb in her mouth and went to sleep.

A couple of hours later, Evie sat in the upstairs front room that was to be Mum and Ted’s. She was sampling the whole house, like playing musical rooms. From this one she could just hear Jodie snoring in the room behind. Then that was drowned by the cold whine of a mouth-organ, coming from next door. And now a voice took over, a kind of nasal chant, as if whoever was singing had a blocked nose. Evie could just make out that it was that Bob Dylan song about the answer blowing in the wind. As the mouth-organ started up again she realised that whoever was playing was going over and over the same bit, then changing songs midstream. This time he was singing about how it was all over now.

(What was?)

Evie went out onto the balcony, stepping gingerly for the boards were gappy and she was scared they mightn’t hold her weight. It seemed okay. From out here you could now catch a boy’s voice floating out the balcony door of 201. He wouldn’t want to sing up here at night when Ted wanted to sleep, or Ted would blow him in the wind all right. Though come to think of it, Ted couldn’t do much, because 201 were the owners and Ted said he’d been lucky to get rent so cheap around here.

The music stopped. Evie studied the street. There was still a bit of noise, people getting in and out of cars, though it must be half past ten or so by now.

It was sure going to be different, living in here in Newtown.

Out at Campbelltown, where they’d lived before, houses were all separate, on blocks of land, and the streets were wide and quiet. Here in Liberty Street you were only allowed to park on one side, and even then it was hard for two cars to pass. And out at Campbelltown all the houses were new, at most only as old as Evie.

‘I don’t know, darl,’ Evie’s mum had complained when Ted had decided on the move. ‘If your boss wants you for that big contract in the city, then we’ve obviously got to move. And if this is the only house we can afford, well, we’ll make the most of it. Somehow, but, I just don’t go much on the idea of living on top of a hundred years of other people’s dirt.’

And Evie’s friend Roseanne had been even more extreme. ‘Just think, in a place that old, people must have
died
there! I’m never going to live in a second-hand house.’

…A second-hand house full of dirt and dead people, Evie thought now; and Evie all alone, with only the sleeping kids.

What if someone did break in? Or if a gang came? You read about gangs hanging around suburbs like this.

Evie imagined them breaking in the back door to the kitchen, or climbing over the scullery roof and getting in Sammy’s window, or even getting in from the next-door balcony – the partition between the balconies of this place and 201 was only wood, and there were cracks and little holes. Evie felt eyes through the partition.

Don’t be so stupid, Evie.

Evie stopped thinking about eyes through the partition. Evie was renowned for being dull. English teachers at school had always complained of her lack of imagination.

Down in the street a car backfired like a bullet, and Evie jumped. Mum and Ted would be home any minute, and there were gangs at Campbelltown anyway, so it wasn’t any different from being alone at their old place…

Still, if a gang
did
want to break in, Evie thought, that was how they’d do it: in the kitchen door or (if they couldn’t do that) over the scullery roof, or through this partition (though that’d mean they’d have had to have got into 201 first; unless the owner of 201 was a friend of the gang).

Evie screamed. Not loudly, but loudly enough, loudly as would anyone who saw eyes move behind two neat round holes. Then much more loudly when the gun barrel slid fast out at her through a crack.

The boy stuck his head and the gun around the partition, and laughed. ‘Bang!’ he said. Evie recognized the gun as a toy rifle of Maria’s.

The boy was funny-looking, or at least his head was; that was really all Evie could see. There was something old-fashioned about it, though Evie couldn’t pick the style immediately. The face was thin, the nose long with a bump in the middle, the neck was long and thin and the dark eyes were narrow and slanty. The mouth was wide, but the lips were thin. The face looked pale and a bit sickly in the streetlight. But the most noticeable thing was the boy’s hair. It was dark, and grew right down to his shoulders; and it was fuzzy on the ends and a bit greasy on top. One long strand kept flopping over his left eye as he laughed.

He pulled his head back from round the partition, then leaned perilously far over the balcony and pointed the rifle down into the street. ‘Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang…’ he yelled as he mowed down the cars.

‘Of course, it should be a machine-gun,’ the boy said when he’d finished. ‘That’s what they use in the movie.’

‘What movie?’

‘
If
, of course.’ The boy stared at her as if she was stupid. ‘Didn’t you see it? They had it on TV again last week. That’s the third time on TV. The seventh time I’ve seen it. It’s my favourite movie.’