Like a House on Fire Read Online Free PDF

standing on the end of the jetty in her red blazer.
    â€˜Pick up the box,’ he calls, peering into the viewfinder. She hesitates, then lifts it, holding it close against her chest, square and plain against her flowered scarf. Chris imagines her looking in the mirror that morning, trying the scarf on, lifting her chin in that way she has, every small decision an aching effort. He wishes he’d told her she looked nice, when he’d arrived at her door. Her expression as she faces the camera, obedient and tremulous and trying not to blink, makes his throat feel tight; there is a stinging behind his eyes. He takes the photo, then hurries back over to her and slices open the tape. He lifts the lid off and sees conflicting emotion on her face as she takes one panicked glance into the tub, her jaw clenching as she jerks her eyes away, over at the water again.
    â€˜You,’ is all she says.
    No possibility that Chris might be permitted to feel the same violent shirking resistance, no likelihood that he will just be able to stand and upend the box and shake its contents into the water without touching them. No. Now that push has come to shove, it’s going to be him.
    A handful of coarse sand is what it feels like. That’s all. He pinches some of it between his fingers and lets it sift down into the water. He remembers that they had both crouched here with saucepans and cleaned them with river sand, then filled them to pour onto the grey ashy coals of the campfire, the day they’d broken camp to go home. His father had trodden the coals down, crushing them neatly, scattered some soil over the top just like Chris is scattering the contents of the box now over the water. Small handfuls. That smell of wet ash, and the cicadas beating like the ticking of a clock, and his father giving the site one last glance around and saying, ‘Great spot anyway, don’t you reckon, Chris?’
    Why hadn’t he answered with enthusiastic assent? What would it have cost him to give his father that, instead of a shrug, just for the small mean pleasure of feeling his father turn away, defeated? He scoops up another handful and spills it into the water. A drift of grey and white particles swirls on the surface and disperses. He can’t believe this is all that’s left, this dust and grit, pounded down from something as hard and unyielding as bone.
    â€˜Goodbye, Alan,’ he hears his mother whisper, over and over, until the box is empty.
    The two of them stand there as she mechanically folds and refolds the calico bag, weeping, shifting in her uncomfortable shoes.
    Why hadn’t he answered? He stoops and rinses his hands in the shallows, sick with the memory, the waste of it. The heat of the afternoon makes a chorus of cicadas gust up; still that throbbing tick like a heartbeat, measuring out the uncounted hours.
    â€˜You OK to go?’ he says finally.
    By the time they are back at the car, she’s recovered herself sufficiently to wonder if they might get back to that gift shop before closing time, so she can buy those other frames. They can be gifts, she tells him, her animation returning with this new sense of purpose, for the ladies in the book club, to thank them for all the support they’ve given her.
    Chris thinks they can probably get back there by 4.30. As he nods and agrees what a nice gesture it would be, he sees a small smear of ash on the lapel of her jacket, and absently, tenderly, without interrupting her, he brushes it off.

Laminex and Mirrors
    Laminex and mirrors, that’s me. Or at least that’s meant to be me. That’s my own particular jurisdiction, I discover when I arrive at dawn on my first day at the hospital and am solemnly handed gloves, a cloth and a spray bottle.
    The other cleaners have got their pace down to an art, and it is the pace of the patients themselves, shuffling along the hospital corridors with their drips and tangled tubing; the slow, measured