Brooke was reluctant to help her mum and dad clear out her grandparent’s house but they let her best friend Portia come along up the coast, and it was the school holidays and what else was there to do?
They shared music in the backseat of the car for two hours, Brooke with the left earbud in, and Portia with the right. When they stepped out of the air-conditioning into the heat, the house looked almost normal.
The girls went ahead inside and Portia, who’d never been in the house before, was immediately lured to the spiral stairs.
‘Where does it go?’ she peered over the edge fearlessly, balanced on her toe-tops, her belly squished by the top railing of the staircase.
‘Down.’ Brooke limited her sarcasm. Portia was a bit of a dill, but they’d come into the house at street level so she couldn’t yet know how steep this block was. That the land fell away and there were three storeys of house, two down below them.
Portia was quickly at the first curve of the stairs. Brooke clung to the railing as she put her foot on the first step. She felt a resistance in her chest. She was not scared of falling. She had to hang on so she didn’t throw herself down.
Portia sang as she skipped down. ‘So French, so chic.’
French? Chic? It was surprising to think of the stairs in her grandparent’s house as something sophisticated. Rather than a thing of taste, the family was pretty sure Oma’s choice was part of her frugality. Spiral staircases simply take up less room. As evidence, there were no mid-European art deco flourishes in the wrought iron and each step had a honeycomb of holes like a standard step onto a train.
Through the gaps and the holes, Brooke could see down. The crown of Portia’s head raced past below her feet. She wanted to tell her to slow down but the idea of shouting was impossible. Don’t disturb your grandfather, Oma would say on repeat when she was little. Neither of them were here now, him nor her, but some people have a presence that lives on long after they have gone.
*
Neither Portia nor Brooke stopped at the floor with the extra bedrooms for when the family had stayed over at Christmas or when Brooke’s mum needed a break and the kids were palmed off for a bit. Brooke only caught up right at the bottom. Portia was already poking around the workbench hard up against the edge of the space.
‘What’s this?’ Portia asked.
Maybe that’s why Brooke liked her friend. She was never afraid to ask a question. Brooke joined her by the rough bench, an antique shop of old and foreign objects, neglected now, dusty now. Brooke worked out Portia meant she didn’t have a clue what the hefty lump of metal stuck on the side was.
‘That’s my grandfather’s vice,’ she explained.
Portia brayed. ‘Oh Rill, you are funny,’ she snorted through her amusement.
Brooke suddenly saw both meanings of the word side by side. Vice and vice. Wondered at the power of names.
She was still getting used to being called Rill. That year – the start of high school – there were three Brookes in the form so Ms Wright had demanded they sort out some other method of nomenclature. What’s that, Brooke had wondered while Brooke with the twin brother quickly snaffled the name River, which was so cool. She and the other Brooke then scrambled for something as good, until Portia looked up the dictionary and christened her friend Rill, leaving the last Brooke the lucky last keeping hold of her name. Rill: a shallow stream of water. Brooke couldn’t help worrying that someone called Rill was a shallow person and that nothing was interesting about her. Like, Portia was surely only her friend because of happenstance. But it would have taken a stronger girl than Brooke to shake off a nickname.
*
Once Brooke had caught her breath from the dizzying flight down to the bottom storey, she explained about the vice. ‘It’s to clamp things steady while you, while you do stuff,’ she said. ‘My grandfather made things. He was a carpenter. Hobby you know, not like Jesus.’
Portia didn’t laugh at that. She didn’t know how funny the joke was, and didn’t understand the allusion; her parents were pinko-greenies so Jesus might as well be a waiter from Barcelona.
They’d never been allowed to touch the vice when the family carpenter was alive. Brooke approached it slowly. I tried to remember how it worked; tried not to remember. The metal of the crank handle was cool to the touch on this hot day. It ground rust against rust the first few turns, then ran true, the long screw on the other side twirling quickly.
Portia impulsively put her hand in the grandfather’s vice once Brooke had wound the two jaws, stationary and sliding, far enough apart. Brooke widened the space further around her friend’s dainty hand with the ring in the shape of a cat on her rude finger and the pink-gold bracelet drooping from her wrist across her knuckles. The jewellery Brooke coveted. Portia was the trendsetter of the class. Brooke was wearing denim shorts and a halter top because Portia was wearing denim shorts and a halter top.
Portia’s hand dropped away. She’d lost interest, in the vice, in the moment, her curiosity a mouse scuttling ever on and rummaging out whatever could be of interest in the empty old, old-people’s house. She started opening the cupboards around the workshop, mimicking the work happening upstairs where Brooke’s mum and dad were intent on finally getting the house ready to sell, Oma had passed over to a better place and Brooke’s grandfather had gone to one far worse; well they’d seen how awful nursing homes were in movies. A huge rubbish hopper had been delivered by the tip people and sat like a gaping mouth on the high road near the driveway.
*
While the decisions up above were about chucking or selling, Portia merely poked around in the downstairs cupboards. She rattled her fingers through tubs of nuts and bolts and different-sized nails, all carefully classified in separate containers. The bungle head screws, the hex head screws, all the fucking screws, thought Brooke still at the workbench. The clink of metal on metal made a different note in each tub. Portia played a tune back and forth between them and got bored with that too.
Brooke was content to watch her. Too scared by lifelong training to rifle through herself. Look don’t touch, her mother’s mantra. The rule had never applied to everyone in the family.
‘Hey, look at this.’ Portia was on her knees in front of the cupboards that acted as a screen between the workshop and the laundry. Old retrofitted kitchen cupboards divided the space, set there long before recycling was lauded as good for the planet, long after the wooden red-painted cabinets were en vogue if they ever had been. To Brooke, their survival was more evidence of the embarrassing family frugality.
‘Look. Magazines,’ Portia continued, spreading the vowels out to soundtrack the spilling of pages onto the cement floor.
Brooke imagined carpentry magazines. Front covers with men in tan aprons displaying a new kind of bandsaw or a bird box you can build in a day. Portia brought one of the piles over to her near the vice.
Portia was speechless for once. And Brooke was thinking things far too intensely to allow for the mechanisms of speech to get a look in. Portia spoke first.
‘So old blokes like your pop… They had to use their imaginations. They only had photographs of women in the nudie, not ladies moving all over the screen.’
‘Writhing,’ Brooke offered. Her tongue re-engaging.
‘Writhing all over the screen.’ Portia turned the magazine 90° to better view the pull-out centrefold. There hadn’t been much left to the imagination.
There was so much hair. The young woman in the photograph had a bush that was dark dense and impenetrable. Portia flipped the page, leaving the centrefold hanging out like a limp penis. Brooke took in the next images too. A montage. Penetrable after all. The woman licked her fingers in the last shot.
Portia reached past Brooke to place the magazine on the workbench. Her arm pinned Brooke there against the wood. Portia’s pelvic mound briefly ground into hers. ‘That’s how the sex thing works,’ Portia explained. ‘I saw it on…’
Brooke didn’t hear the rest. The windows were open behind them. Late morning, the heat intensifies. The windows were open up. One storey above was the window into the bedroom Brooke was given when she stayed, and the one above that was into the kitchen on the top floor. Noises filtered down. The clattering of pans. A low hum of a radio crooning. Oma making bread ’n butter pudding out of yesterday’s stale loaf to be ready in time for tea. His hot breath burnt her neck. The pain. Her grandfather’s gnarly hand across her mouth choked words before they could fly. But couldn’t he hear the screaming resistance coming from every pore, every bone in her body, every milligram of her spirit? Until her essence too was silenced. Whispering a last wish to herself. If I stay still, this will stop.
*
The memory passed. Only the smell of OMO and wet mops would always threaten to bring it back.
Portia took Brooke’s left hand and made it squeeze the tiny mounds of flesh on her chest. As if Brooke was a glove puppet. ‘I want knockers like that lady,’ Portia mused, pronouncing the word from the magazine’s cover with the ‘k’ still there.
Then she withdrew her lemonade breath from Brooke’s face. Her sweaty leg from her leg. Her impulse was washed away by her desire to explore the next thing that grabbed her notice.
‘There’s a garden out there,’ she said because to her this was a revelation when she’d peered through the window. She raced out the back door, leaving Brooke. She marvelled at a flat backyard, turning to stare up the hill, remembering the flat front yard. At least, that’s what Brooke had done as a child. I saw two plains and the vertigo drop between them, wondering how.
The squeak of the washing trolley wheels turned and turned in Brooke’s head. Echoes chasing echoes. A passionfruit vine had all but covered the window during her grandfather’s slow decline but Brooke could see Portia through a gap in the leaves. She was running the trolley around the washing line, like a go-cart on a go-cart track, going. The passionfruit flowers were blown, their purples and whites rotted to brown. The fruit shrivelled to hard scrotal sacks.
Brooke put her left hand in the vice. Turned it over, let it lie like a dead fish on the bench. Flipped it back into a fist. With her right hand, she turned the handle of the vice smoothly. One metal jaw approached the other with only her hand in the way. The teeth on both sides touched her flesh, almost tickled. Her right hand continued with the motion, turn, turn, turn, flattening her left fist sideways. The knuckles under the flesh were white. Whiter. She could feel it now. The pinch. The crush. The teeth punctured the skin on either side of her fist where the knuckles pressed back, bone putting up resistance. Blood the colour of rust trickled down her wrist. She welcomed the pain. Kept working the vice. Metal is stronger than bone. There is no competition.
‘You’re fucking mental,’ Portia shouted from around the Oma’s repurposed kitchen cupboards.
Their eyes locked.
‘Don’t swear. It’s not nice,’ Brooke said. Her right hand moved the crank handle in the opposite direction. Her left hand escaped. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘You?’
She raced Portia back up the spiral staircase. There wasn’t enough room for two abreast. Portia was at Brooke’s heels.
‘Hey Rill,’ she laughed, clutching and tugging at the bottom of Brooke’s shirt.
Rill. That was how everyone saw her. Just a shallow stream of water. Probably because she’d made herself small, hoping to pass without notice.
Brooke did not turn. She could not look back down. She’d never been given the chance to put up a fight and yet by some miracle, she realised she was at the top.
*
She wanted to tell her seven-year-old self that she would never have to go down there alone, ever again. She wanted her thirty-year-old self to come back in time and stand there at the top of the spiral stairs, with her now, and tell her it would all turn out okay. She could be a mighty torrent. She could roar.
The girls drifted into the kitchen where her mother was wrapping old china in butcher’s paper. ‘What have you been up to down there?’ her mother asked, too late.
Jane Downing’s stories and poems have been published around Australia including in Griffith Review, Big Issue, Antipodes, Southerly, Westerly, Island, Overland, Meanjin, Canberra Times, Cordite, and Best Australian Poems.