Like a House on Fire Read Free Page B

criticising someone’s book. His mother keeps photos of the grandchildren of the Book Club Women on her own fridge, like a silently accusing rebuke every time he walks past.
    â€˜Dear little Justin started his swimming lessons last week,’ she’ll say, smiling out at something through the screen door.
    â€˜Sorry? I’m not sure I know who Justin is.’
    She’ll tut impatiently. ‘Oh, of course you do, Christopher. Sandra’s grandson.’
    He’ll be struggling to place Sandra while she continues on another tangent.
    â€˜Well, Caroline’s really in a tizz over this wedding. She wants Pam to go up there to help her, all the way to Brisbane. She’ll have to change her tune pretty quick smart once she marries that James fellow. Can’t be calling on her mother to be at her beck and call all the time.’ She’ll hesitate, as if reluctant to betray something confided in her, although Chris has heard this postscript every time Caroline is mentioned. ‘You know they had to get counselling when she was a teenager once. Ran right off the rails.’
    Chris will nod, follow her gaze out through the glass door to the leaf-littered garden. She’s talking about hiring a gardener now, to deal with it. His father’s rakes and brooms stand stiffly to attention beside the locked shed.
    Since his father died, Chris keeps coming across small reminders everywhere, set like mousetraps ready to snap, like little buried landmines. Today, for instance, they’re in his father’s car, which his mother says she can’t bear to sell. It smells so characteristically, still, of shoe polish and peppermints, and in the back seat lies the woollen tartan scarf his father had worn for years. Each detail had assailed Chris as he’d opened the door, reaching over to stow the box in its calico bag on the back seat.
    â€˜Here, here,’ his mother had remonstrated. ‘At my feet.’
    Where else? he’d thought sourly, finding the right key for the ignition, as the lifetime habit of keeping his responses to himself closed his mouth in a firm and well-worn line. A line that suggested nothing, broached nothing, gave nothing away.
    â€˜Five dollars for those scones,’ his mother says as they walk out of the cafe. ‘Honestly.’ The Book Club Women, Chris thinks, will hear about this. Back at the car, as he waits for her to catch up, he fumbles for the self-locking device on the key ring, finding the one for the boot so he can take the bag out again. His mother had insisted they park the car in view of the cafe so she could watch it for potential theft. ‘It’s bad enough leaving him there in the boot like that,’ she’d said, digging in her bag for a tissue, ‘without risking someone stealing him.’
    â€˜Take the bag in with us, then,’ he’d suggested.
    She’d glared, aghast. ‘I couldn’t possibly.’
    He’s noticed she can hardly bring herself to touch the box. It’s like some huge supernatural power emanates from it.
    When they’d gone to get it from the crematorium, she’d stood silent, locking her hands tightly together, leaving it to him to pick it up, sign for it, and ask for a carry bag. It wasn’t until they were outside that she’d burst out with a tirade about how disrespectful it was not to provide families with an urn, or something appropriate. A box, she’d hissed all the way home, fuelled by the outrage of it, nothing but a box. He expected tears, but there were none. Instead, once home, she’d led the way to her antique cabinet, unlocked it, and stood back while he pushed the box inside, in there among the gold-leaf dinner service he remembered so well from his parents’ dinner parties when he was a child. As he’d straightened up after putting his father’s ashes inside the cabinet, he longed so much to be with Scott that it almost hurt.
    It hit him