Fall Read Online Free Page B

still bumped and butted around the attic room, red balloons of hate floating.
    Why do you call your mum ‘Joanie’, Tara?
    Doesn’t she love you?
    Tonight Tara stood by the windows looking over the park and watched the night falling, the bats rising, and remembered her mother. It was nine months since Tara had woken from her coma, nine months since Joanie had gone, but Tara could still hear her voice sometimes, hear her footsteps in the hall as she readied herself for some party or dinner or charity function, as she pulled on her silk-lined coat and checked herself in the hall mirror. Joanie with her elegant ash-blonde hair falling everywhere in filigree curls.
    In time, all the light of the warm day dissipated, replaced by a wonderful darkness. Tara stood by the window and watched the runners on the paths in Centennial Park recede into shadows, only blinking lights indicating their jolting journeys as they continued, round and round, round and round. Then rolled away.
    The Tara who watched them now was very different from the one who had watched them when her parents were still alive. Tara hugged herself in the little window, let her fingers wander over the new landscape of her body. Bumps and ridges and flaps of flesh as hard as stone, lines of scars running upher arms where the fatty flesh had been sucked dry, cut, pulled taut, stapled. Bones poked through the mess at her hips and ribs and collarbones. Her face was a mystery. She hadn’t looked at herself since that first glimpse as she was waking from the coma. She spent the first month in the hospital in silence, lying, feeling herself. Neurologists came and played with her, confirmed that she could, indeed, understand them. Then a nurse had emerged from the fog and quietly told her what she’d done to herself. Tara had looked at her new self in the mirror. Touched the glass, made sounds. To her it had been laughter, but to the nurse it had sounded like snarls.

 
    I stood in the kitchen of my house in Paddington and looked at the burned walls, the fingers of blackness reaching up the bricks to the charred roof beams. The tiles had fallen and disappeared, revealing blue sky and orange leaves. I smiled. The oven had been cleared away, the cupboards stripped off, the sink unscrewed and discarded, leaving black eyeholes in the wall. The flames had warped the floorboards leading down to the bathroom and tiny courtyard. I folded my arms and looked at it all, smelled the plasticky taint of melted things.
    I’m well aware that traditionally first houses are purchased by people much younger than me, and in much better condition than this one. The terrace in William Street was a write-off, advertised to attract developers who might be tempted to buy the row, knock it over, put in a flashy deli and be done with it. The kitchen was a bombshell, the backyard a wreck and the upper floor wasn’t safe for human habitation. The elderly owner had let the place go for decades, and the floorboards had taken it the worst. By order of the City of Sydney Council, I wasn’t even supposed to be sleeping in the building, and I was supposed to be working on it wearing protective gear. But I ignored that. My home base was the front bedroom, where I’d dragged a mattress and a few laundry baskets of clothes, myphone and some snack food. The bathroom worked. I still had the apartment in Kensington and there was always Imogen’s place. But for a couple of nights a week I had been sleeping in my new house, just so I could drift off listening to the creaking and cracking of the building, the unfamiliar noises of the neighbours coming home from work, their kids playing in the street. City ambulances racing for St Vincent’s and drunks singing as they wandered home. Rats scuttling somewhere close. It was dingy, but I owned it. I’d committed to something. That was big for me.
    Committing to things. Listening to my girlfriend. Getting off the drugs and the