NICK AND THE WALKER SISTERS

The walls were Helena's resume as decoration; painterly photos of flowers and turbo illuminated club scenes. She shot a lot of the brochure work in the living room she told him. The light fell well in this space, casting shadows that make for the backdrop so prized in lifestyle brochures. There was to be no smoking inside, under any circumstances. Maybe in the sunroom with all the windows open. Joints were different; it was the smell of cigarettes she couldnt stand. He could smoke joints inside all day if he wanted to, Christ knows I want to! but not cigarettes. "They're stupid and evil and they stink. Joints don't stink. Actually they smell quite nice. Anyway here's the key. Leave it under the thing by the barbecue if you go out, I'll get another one cut later, and don't forget to deadlock the door and also lock the screen door, that's how the girls down stairs got broken into. I've got heaps of stuff here and I'm not insured. Ok, well I'm off now; you've got my mobile number? Here, I'll write it by the phone, anyway I'll see you later tonight." Nick had got Helena's number from an old mutual friend. At first his name meant nothing to her, but then she said Oh my god! Nick! She said he could stay at her place if he got stuck. Nick scanned the fridge, helping himself to a couple of slices of organic rye and some goats cheese. He brewed some coffee and took his brunch out into the sunroom. A waft of cigarette smoke met the crisp morning air, and the chime of children playing evaporated after a recess bell. The fish circled inside the cylinder on the dining table.
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The guestroom had a sort of monastic quality about it: bare brick painted white. Nick checked the window, even though Helena told him it was stuck shut, it was. I really will be going out to the sunroom a lot. He lay down and flicked through a magazine he'd bought with him. He'd already read every line in it. He just killed time with the pictures.

Helena came home that night with a bottle of wine and some Thai takeaway. She plonked the bags on the table and tossed a cursory hello over her shoulder as she marched into the kitchen to get some plates and glasses. Nick had forgotten her short mannered approach to most movement and conversation. "I, err, I don't drink anymore Hel." "Oh that's right I remember you saying, um, oh! I think there's still some cranberry juice. They ate at the coffee table watching the news, Helena admonishing the world for its crimes through mouthfuls of basil chicken. After dinner she brought a box of photos out from under her bed and dug out a dog-eared packet. There they were, caught in the gelatine, shiny faced, at a party Nick couldn't remember, and that leather jacket, he'd forgotten all about that as well. Helena's hair was all teased up and a smirk was puzzled on her lips. They looked like bright, well-scrubbed toys in Toyland. A cigarette dangled in her fingers. Helena smoked back then, Nick didnt. Later that night they went to Lauren's. Scott answered the door and bid them in with a solemnity explained by Lauren's report that their cat had died. Nick already knew this because Helena had told him on the way over. She said
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that her sister's fianc was taking it particularly hard. "I loved that cat," he said as he prepared a joint on the coffee table. Scott checked his watch and apologised for getting in the way of the television as he placed a large blue candle on the coffee table and lit it. He'd found a site on the Internet that was dedicated to people that were mourning the death of a cat. The thing to do at a particular time each night was light a blue candle. People were doing this all over the world, it helps with the healing. The flame flickered in front of the television as the joint was passed around. A flood in India had killed thousands of peoplethe cat was dead interest rates were going up. Whats happening to the world? The sister's tutted and shook their heads.

Years ago, back in Adelaide, Helena and Lauren used to live together in a house scratched by sunflowers. Nick met Helena when he woke up in bed there with her older sister. Helena was at the kitchen table having a cigarette when Nick got up. She gave him a short look and said something approaching hello. Nick continued to wake up in Laurens room, a ramshackle affair of drunken repeats if they ran into each other at a club. He soon found himself engrossed in longer and longer conversations with her flint tongued sibling. Lauren smiled past their sneering kitchen table banter on her way out to work. Dont do anything I wouldnt do. Helena used to wear a gold locket her grandmother had given her. She
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left it in his flat once in her rush to get to the hospital, she was a nurse then. Nick found it by the bed and let it dangle in his fingers, studying the finely engraved surface, looking for her smell on the antique metal. He gave it back to her in the pub that night. She gave him a peck on the lips. I feel naked without it, the whole day was weird. In his flat, headlights traced up the walls and along the roof as he undressed in front of her. Her hand drifted up and moored on his skin.

Up on the roof of Lauren's apartment they looked out over the city. Scott had a pair of binoculars and was still going on about the cat. "It's funny," Lauren kept saying, meaning to see Nick again. "Nick and the Walker Sisters." Scott said it like it was a film. He knew all about it and thought it was pretty funny as well. Lauren laughed. "I havent changed a bit have I?" She wasn't drinking any more during the week. She lit up a joint and watched the rose coloured clouds deepen with the dissolving sun.

Back at her own apartment Helena sat in the sunroom and skinned up. Nick thought he'd forgotten her mannerisms, the world of her face, the way she used her hands, the slope of her freckled shoulders. Sitting there watching her prepare the spliff, fanning his own smoke away before it could offend her, he found new fireflies of familiarity joining the gathering swarm. Little details lacing the past back into now, and yet, strangely
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separate from it. He couldnt remember if she'd always talked this way. The far off look in her pale hazel eyes, little glanced hooks that engaged him briefly and let him know she still realised he was there. In those brief flickers he caught snatches of a tune his heart recalled. She talked about her new friends and their adventures with the resuscitated glee of a tired child reciting their Christmas day. Deep night caramel grooves purred from the stereo as she clapped her hands remembering another addled tale.

Helena was watching television. Her eyes fixed on the screen while her expert fingers fashioned another spliff. She tutted and told the TV what was wrong with everything. Nick felt compelled to slip reports of his house hunting under the door of their mostly silent time together, little notes from the teacher that he was doing his homework well. The truth was that she scared him. She seemed bigger now, a more solid force than his recollection weighed. It was strange to reconcile her sitting there now with the same person who had clung to him in his single bed in that ratty flat with a need that was as tender as it was irritating, stabbing into his own sleep. There was no room for their story, Nick thought now, no crag for it to cling to, or crumbs to coax it forward; all was polished and put away. "Well goodnight then" he said, and it felt strange after swallowing so much wordless time. He flicked through his magazine and heard Helena's
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bedroom door close.

Maybe she had invited him to stay not out of some divine sense of circularity but merely to be civil, he thought. She'd do the same for anyone; she knew what it was like trying to get started in a new city. It was from the past, sure, but not for old times sake. He crept about, or kept to the guestroom. He cursed the clatter of crockery and cutlery as he put them away, and the Niagara of the toilet flushing. On occasion Helena's bedroom door closed with more force than was necessary; it could have been an absent flick of the wrist like a million people do in private. He accidentally broke the lamp she had lent him. Mixed into this distance, that grew grain by grain, were unexpected enquiries of concern. Was the guestroom warm enough? Had he eaten? Did he need anything from the shops? Warm bursts of sunlight through a sky pacing towards rain. Nick felt that he was a burden, that thing generating noxious fumes in the sunroom. Her car keys clicked onto the table next to the fish and she said "oh hello" as if she hadnt expected him to be there. What had he expected? If he told her he would feel even more foolish, because it was just a jumble of feelings in some vague arena of faintly glowing emotion. He did not expect a physical re-enactment, although it had of course crossed his mind, but for them both to somehow swim in the diaphanous residue of that mythic summer. Nick had come to realise in retrospect that his time with Helena, though fleeting, was the first significant relationship of his adult life. What sunspots were left?
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The rent was due; she reminded him, and some shopping money. "Of course, of course." Helena sat down in front of the television and shook the day out of her hair. Nick hung over the ashtray, a statue someone was supposed to collect in the corner of her eye.

The sisters sat together in front of the television. The cat candle flickering while Scott made sandwiches of leftovers in the kitchen. Dope smoke slowly curled, a raft on a balmy palm rustled night. Helena and Lauren were talking about their grandmother. She was sick, their mother was worried and there were things that needed to be discussed, relatives would need somewhere to stay when they visited, and Lauren listened intently when Helena's nurse training poked around what the doctor's had said. Mostly though, they discussed memories. The bright summer filled rooms of their Grandparent's house when they were young, the smell of fruit pies, their bare feet bristling through dry grass in pyjamas still warm off the washing line. Scott smiled to himself when he heard the harmonising lilts of their laughter. He liked being around them together. He thought they softened each other. There was an ease they had in each others company that others could only chip away at. He laid the sandwiches on the table and took the joint when it was passed to him, glad to be a guest to their bright-eyed smiles.

How did it end? Nick remembered he was sitting in her room, miserable, a beer in his hand.
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"I'm sure it's going to be fine" she had consoled from behind her book. He remembered looking out at the sunflowers. A grey cat was snuggled in the corner of the window, he went to stroke it and it shot off into the garden. He took this as further proof of his hopelessness and his self-concern gurgled to a deeper, even more pathetic level. Rachel had left him, or he'd left her, he couldnt remember now. And he was seeking comfort from Helena, who he had left, for her. Is that how it happened? It was something like that. Being in the room was clear but the end was uncertain. Rubbings randomly selected from a sketchbook that seemed to belong to someone else. She did not expel undue energy; he remembered that, the sense of it. He remembered the plaintive chords her face suggested through that time. He couldnt remember leaving the room, or entering it, or the walk there, or what happened immediately before or after, but being in her room that day, clear and separate to the mud around it, was a sunspot.

Helena felt good after talking to her sister. Like her soul had more oxygen. She'd ask Nick to leave. It was nothing personal; it was about clean rooms, clear spaces, the feeling after rain. When she got back to her apartment it was locked. The keys were under the thing next to the barbecue. Nick had left some money on the kitchen table and a scribbled note of thanks. She went to check her messages on the phone and saw that he had not taken the top page of the sticky pad where she had written her mobile number. She opened all the windows in the sunroom and felt the clean embrace of late night air. She saw the stars
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frosted pinpoints piercing the sky above the trees. She remembered it was raining the night of the party. Nick had got into an argument with someone and huffed off. She remembered following him out onto the street. She asked him what he was doing and he said he was leaving. She asked him not to. They both stood there, rain shivering down their necks. Nick asked her to come back to his flat; it was only a few streets away he said, they could stop off at the bottle shop. Helena remembered stepping towards him. She remembered the smell of his leather jacket as she huddled under it. She remembered they walked under the leaves.