This house saw all of me at almost my worst. Adultery, drunkenness, crying sprawled on the floor of the shower, screaming, sighing, watching Elliot as he began again his life’s work of drinking himself to death while two hours out of the city, in my home, my partner went mad and jumped straight out of reality into psychosis.
The whole house felt blue, like its dull-skied harbour-blue exterior, sunken and rusting. A whale fall of a house making food for hagfish. Mr X tells me the inside was white and mouldy, threaded with cobwebs and dust, there was no sunlight and it was unclean. But it all felt blue to me.
Yesterday at the hardware shop I stared at samples of blue paint to try and remember. It could have been any one of six or seven of them but the names uncomfortably incorrect. Snap-shot, Regatta Bay, Galaxy Blue, Integrity. I remember not in house paints but as an artist’s palette. Payne’s Grey, Phthalo, Prussian, Indigo, Cobalt. I suppose I’m just trying to elevate tragedy to grandeur.
The front door gawped open like a mouth onto a hallway strewn with clothes and shoes and guitars. Widened out into a lounge room like a crawled-to cave. Nothing but filtered elsewhere-light lending dull shimmers to glass fishing floats suspended in nets. I wanted to trail up a stretched out set of fingertips but Elliot was always pouring a drink, crying about having drunk one, or vomiting them back up again.
I first came to the house because Elliot rang me, he’d quit his sobriety and called from inside a bottle of vodka. I’d only know him sober so I believed the urgency of his words. Only knew his hands as steady back then. I drove from two-thirds sky in the country to the fouled yellow-city night on Catherine Street. Less than three hours later Elliot had extinguished anything good in my life and I was standing on the front porch wearing someone else’s clothes swaying in the wind in sympathy with the cobwebbed ceilings.
Elliot’s housemate Mr X came home while I was swaying. I had no idea they were his clothes. I pulled on the shirt and slippers in the hallway while I was fumbling with a pack of cigarettes and the front door. The front path was short, terminated in a creaking gate I don’t remember ever walking through, like I was transported suddenly and against my will.
Mr X. walked up that garden path tall menace and shadow. I didn’t know him them, still not sure if I know him now. Panic came with his shadow. He stooped, staring down at me like he was kicking tyres, I remember his half-drunk growl, “You’re wearing my clothes”. Half a thought skipped like a stone, I could marry this man, but he was gone, sunk like a stone from sight. The matt-flat dusted deep blue pushed the night into new blackness but the house held me up all the same. I lit another cigarette and let the thought go.
Elliot turned like a slow-motion corkscrew in his alcoholic sleep. The room expanding with every unconscious breath, rushing back in with inhalation. There were doors in there I never opened. A room off the room, cupboards taller than anyone could ever reach. One small front window, the single invisible eye at the front of the house where rain always snarled and the weak light made fat drops on a streaked pane.
The house ran backwards from the street like a mare’s tail blown out in high wind. Kitchen reeked of empty tins of dog food, cigarettes and vodka. Somewhere in a back room a piano waited and beyond that a paved yard lousy with dog shit and small dogs grinning and scratching.
The bathroom seemed to have a wall of translucent glass, exemplary vision of a side-of-house pathway. The shower floor was vast and flat. Room enough for two people to lie side by side and cry and push vomit down the drain.
No other house is so slippery in memory as this one. Details emerge and blur back into silence before I can see what was really there. I remember hazed moments, naked, drunk, high, always sliding across the bed into gin-soaked arms. The clanking of empty of vodka bottles piling higher and higher underneath the bed. Mr X appearing as if from nowhere then vanishing again. I have no idea where he slept, where the other rooms were.
This house pulls at me still, if I happen to pass by. It’s sunk-harbour flat blue burns against the green park next door. It has an extra storey now. Rises high and angular from the grass. Elliot has gone, come out of rehab and gone back again. He sent an email three months ago saying he was up north holding planes in the sky. I’m almost beginning to count Mr X as a friend and most of the time I forget how he growled at me, drunk and looming like a dark star on the front porch at Catherine Street. But I’ll never shake how the house itself sucked me down that hallway and flumed my existence from the ordinary into disaster.
