bathroom to the kitchen behind Louisa, brushing her daughter’s hair as she tried to pull away, when Nathan called out, ‘Is this about the job?’
He had the questionnaire in one hand and a piece of toast in the other. The top kitchen drawer, a no-go zone full of Sellotape and miniature wooden pegs and zoo passes on lanyards and mosquito spray and emergency candles and vivid markers and sunglasses and gift ribbon and keys, where she had hidden the questionnaire, was open. ‘I thought they hadn’t sent it yet?’
The radio news presenter was talking about him, the candidate Evelyn wanted to work for, and she said, ‘Shh,’ hoping to hear something to use in the final final interview, assuming there would be one, assuming they would get over this questionnaire issue. But it was just an item about polls. The job had nothing to do with polls; it was entry-level donation hunting, removed from the candidate by six or seven layers, depending on whether or not you counted the press secretary’s secretary as a superior. But there was still this process. She had to be legitimate. Nobody wanted a diversion.
Nathan handed the questionnaire over. ‘We should do this tonight. You’ve got to get back to them sharpish.’
After a late-morning bike ride along the waterfront, just because she could, Evelyn went upstairs, drew down the rope ladder from the ceiling and climbed up it, swinging from side to side until she found her balance, through the hatch into the attic. On one side of the wide, low-roofed space was an old mattress and wire-wove base, and Nathan’s teenage skis and poles that he fantasised Louisa might one day use, and the last VHS player and boxes of the photo albums and records of wedding and funeral services and the bone mahjongg set that he had inherited when his father died and his mother moved into the home. The rest of the attic was full of cardboard boxes, reconstituted fruit boxes and wine boxes and appliance boxes and shoeboxes, containing all of their lifetime-accumulated shit. To walk across the space Evelyn had to bend nearly double. She was reminded of the old house in Westmere. The dress-up box, the ancient comics, the warm feathery smell, the black cartridge-paper pages in the album of that coin collection, the shapes of the coins, decagons, wavy circles, tiny silver coins with holes in the centre, the layers of cracked yellow sticky tape over the spine. One day, Eve told herself, her chest would no longer squeeze at the thought of her parents. When she had properly adjusted her expectations.
Near the back of the stacks, under a heavy, collapsing box of folded hippy bedcovers, soft and quilted with Indian paisley prints and hand-stitched stars, was the box that held her diaries from the years before she met Nathan. Here was a journal with a dark-red cover and no dates. A photo fell out and she drew her breath sharply. Daniel had taken it and although the sight of herself, the nakedness, her body, made her stomach pitch there was at the same time as this sick feeling a pang of amazement that he had loved her like that once. But this picture, and the diary it came from. They would never be connected to the questionnaire, come on, they so didn’t matter. She was unrecognisable! Why not pretend it was Dorothy, although then she would have to explain why such a photo of her sister might be here in her belongings. Explain to whom? Nobody was ever going to go looking in her attic, this was a symptom of narcissism, bored-housewife syndrome, she was paranoid. Nobody cares! You’re an invisible person! But still she rifled through the diary pages knowing that the negative would not be there, that she didn’t have it. Her mouth felt muffled and silenced, like it remembered, and she stretched it open and moved her tongue around in the air because she could, making a long aahhh sound with the breath that rose over the vocal cords. But the silence had gone inside, where it was meant to be. It was the secrets that made you all alone. Eve remembered blankness, bliss.
On the patio she took the domed hatch off the gas barbecue, removed the slightly greasy grill, lit it and fed the diaries into it, pages at a time, without stopping to read the entries. They frightened her, these words in her handwriting that may as well have been written by