Smoke in the Room Read online

  Emily Maguire is the author of three novels – Smoke in the Room, The Gospel According to Luke and Taming the Beast – and Princesses & Pornstars, a work of non-fiction. Her articles and essays on sex, religion, culture and literature have been published widely, including in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Observer.

  Also by Emily Maguire

  Fiction

  The Gospel According to Luke

  Taming the Beast

  Non-fiction

  Princesses & Pornstars

  EMILY MAGUIRE

  SMOKE

  IN

  THE

  ROOM

  CONTENTS.

  Cover

  About Emily Maguire

  Also by Emily Maguire

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Acknowledgements

  First published 2009 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Emily Maguire 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Maguire, Emily, 1976–

  Smoke in the room / Emily Maguire.

  9780330424820 (pbk.)

  A823.4

  Typeset in 12.5/17pt Minion by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  These electronic editions published in 2009 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Smoke in the Room

  Emily Maguire

  Adobe eReader format: 978-1-74198-647-1

  EPUB format: 978-1-74198-759-1

  Online format: 978-1-74198-591-7

  Macmillan Digital Australia

  www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online.

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  Is there smoke in the room? If it is slight, I remain.

  If it is grievous, I quit it.

  For you must remember this and hold it fast,

  that the door stands open.

  EPICTETUS

  1.

  Katie’s last flatmate was taken away by ambulance at the end of November and, despite a Sydney-wide housing shortage, the spare room stayed empty until the first week of January. Katie was irritated by her grandmother’s assertion that it was worth going without rent for awhile if it meant finding the right tenant. As though it had been the past tenants who had mucked everything up for Katie and not the other way around. Katie knew that Gran’s re-writing of history came from love, but it frustrated her all the same. Blind love was one thing, being seen and loved another.

  She watched from the window as the chosen one came up the front path. He wore a long-sleeved business shirt even though it was beach weather and Saturday. The shirt was tucked into dark blue jeans which had creases ironed down the front of each leg. A child’s yellow backpack bounced on his shoulders as he walked.

  ‘So what’s wrong with him?’ Katie asked her grandmother as the man disappeared into the foyer below. ‘Is he autistic or something?’

  ‘For god’s sake. There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s American.’

  ‘He doesn’t look American. Unless . . . Gran, he’s not a Mormon, is he?’

  ‘I didn’t ask him his religion, Katherine. If you’d met some of the weirdos who applied for the room . . . Believe me, this bloke is a prize. Steady job in a shoe shop. Doesn’t drink or smoke –’

  ‘Oh, god.’

  ‘And he looks fit. Strong. I worry about you here alone. There are some real boofheads in this building.’

  ‘Harmless boofheads. Anyway, I’m safer with boofheads down the hall than some religious nut-job muscle man in the flat with me.’

  ‘He’s not a nut-job. He’s a nice, quiet bloke who wants a nice, quiet place to live. I’ve got a really good feeling about him. I think he’ll be good for you.’ Gran reached for the door handle. ‘So, please try to be nice, okay?’

  Up close he was no more attractive, although he was more interesting. His teeth were toothpaste-ad-white but his eyes belonged to a man in a drink-driving commercial. White scar tissue squiggled down past his left ear ending with a pea-sized blob on his chin. His sandy hair was slicked back with enough oil to fry a bag of potatoes, and its ends kicked out over his buttoned-down collar. When he wriggled his backpack off, his shirt threatened to tear across his chest and around his biceps.

  ‘You must be Katherine.’ He flashed his big smile, placed his cardboardy suitcase on the floor and extended his hand. ‘I’m Adam.’

  Katie glanced at his smooth, pink nails and clasped her own hands behind her back. ‘How did ya get the scar?’

  ‘Katherine!’

  ‘This?’ He covered it with his palm.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Gran said, picking up his suitcase. ‘Excuse my granddaughter.’

  Gran took off down the hallway towards his room and the American skittered along behind her saying It’s fine and I can take that and Please, Ma’am and It’s heavy.

  Katie followed them and stood in the doorway of his bedroom as Gran demonstrated how to operate the venetian blinds, ceiling fan and window locks, as if these were high-tech devices he would never figure out all on his own. He said Mmm and I see and Well, thank you which made Katie wonder whether he was stupid or just a big suck-up.

  ‘Out of the way, Katherine. Let me show Adam the rest of the place.’

  Gran backtracked through the living room to show him the kitchen and bathroom, and then returned to the hallway to point out the door to Katie’s room. As they walked in single file towards the study, unused since Katie had dropped out of secretarial college two years
ago, she placed her hands on Adam’s arse.

  He spun around. ‘What are –?’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said Gran from the doorway of the study.

  Adam looked as though his lunch had been ground into the dirt by a bully’s heel.

  ‘Sorry,’ Katie said, feeling like both the bully and the sandwich.

  He smiled like he was about to break bad news. ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘What’s fine? What happened?’

  ‘Nothing. Just a little collision,’ he said. But she knew it wasn’t nothing. That look in his eyes: like she’d hurt him very, very badly. Like he wouldn’t recover from this terrible injury for a long time.

  But maybe she hadn’t hurt him, maybe he was already hurt, but super good at covering it and her touch had caught him off guard. That look probably had nothing to do with her at all. Most things didn’t have anything to do with her. This was something she needed to remind herself of often.

  Gran narrowed her eyes. ‘This is the study, Adam. Come on in and have a look.’

  ‘What are you studying?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Gran said. ‘This room is wasted.’ She gave Adam an apologetic smile. ‘I’m planning to turn it back into a bedroom. I did mention there’ll be another tenant moving in, didn’t I?’

  ‘Maybe, uh, I don’t remember. It’s fine. I keep mostly to myself, anyways. Speaking of which, I might go and . . .’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of his room.

  ‘Yes, go on and get settled,’ Gran said. ‘I’m leaving in a sec, but give me a call if you have any problems. My number’s on the fridge.’

  ‘Another tenant?’ Katie asked when he was gone.

  ‘Yep.’ Gran had already started clearing the piles of old magazines off the desk and placing them by the door.

  ‘What? You just decided, did you? I suppose I don’t get a say at all? I’m the one who has to live here.’

  ‘Yes, and I’m the one who has to pay. It’s not just the mortgage, either. Council rates and utilities keep going up. Everything keeps going up. It’s not easy doing it all on my own. It wouldn’t kill you to show a bit of gratitude.’

  Katie stepped in between Gran and the doorway. ‘And it wouldn’t kill you to let me have some say over who lives here.’

  ‘You know Josie from work? Her husband’s an estate agent and he says I could be renting this place out to a family for five hundred a week. Maybe five-fifty. Reckons I’m mad not to.’

  ‘So go ahead and rent it out. I can find somewhere else.’

  Gran dropped a stack of magazines onto the floor at Katie’s feet. ‘Your name’s magically off the rental blacklist now, is it? Or were you thinking of going back to one of those junkie slums without running water? Maybe you could find a nice little out-of-the-way bridge to sleep under? Should be comfy enough, at least until autumn.’

  Katie wanted to get up and go and not look back, but she was old enough now to see the future as a real thing that must be protected against. She was frightened of ending up shoeless and mindless, picking cigarette butts out of gutters and shouting at people on buses. She felt in her pocket for her smokes, then, not finding them, she took a deep drag of the study’s stale air instead.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be ungrateful. I was just surprised.’

  Gran twisted her thick black hair up in a bun, held it there for a second and then let it fall over her shoulders. ‘The other solution – money wise – is to sell my place at Bondi. I could move up north. I never see Sue anymore and your brother must be –’

  ‘Half-brother. Gran, come on. Mum doesn’t need you; I do.’

  ‘I’d still pay the bills, don’t worry. You can do all that over the internet now, you know.’

  ‘That’s not why I need you.’ Katie put her arms around her grandmother and pressed her cheek against her neck. It smelt like backstage at a school play. ‘I need you for lots of things.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘You know, all the things people mean when they go on about family being important.’

  ‘Silly girl.’ Gran shook free, crossed her arms and looked around the room. ‘I’m going to have to invest in some new furniture. A bed and lamp table, at least. Curtains, too. The view from in here’s awful, if I remember right.’ She went to the window and leant out, her hands on the sill, her masseuse sandals barely touching the floor, denim shorts riding up her thighs. From the back, and ignoring the chunky purple veins clustered behind the knees and dripping down the calves, the body hanging out the window could have belonged to a teenager.

  Katie stood behind Gran and looked down at the car park of the building next door. ‘Could be worse,’ she said. ‘The bathroom has a view of the bins.’

  Gran sighed and leant back into Katie. ‘Guess I should get started on this mess.’

  ‘You’ve got enough to do, Gran. Leave it to me.’

  Gran saw the magazines as garbage and wanted Katie to put them in garbage bags, whereas Katie thought of them as historical records and real-time accounts of unfolding lives. She’d tried to explain this to Gran once, but she called her silly and sentimental, which was funny coming from a woman whose house was stuffed with wedding invitations, theatre programs, birthday cards, dinner menus, newspaper clippings, faded holiday snaps from the sixties and baby pictures of every member of the extended family, most of whom Katie had never even heard of.

  Funny, too, that Gran nagged about the magazines even as she tried to turn Katie into a ‘reader’ by bringing around novels and short story collections and dragging her down to Glebe Library to sign up for a card. Katie had tried Gran’s books and a few others that different flatmates had left around. She enjoyed the reading part but hated the way they ended. She hated that they ended at all. People got married or divorced, they arrested the killer or they died of a terrible disease; they won the race or bought the house or moved to France and then nothing else ever happened or if it did no one ever knew.

  But magazines – Who and Celebrity and Famous and New Weekly – followed the story for as long as something was happening. Weddings were followed by babies and divorces and second or third weddings, and the babies grew up and got in trouble with the police and then fell in love and had babies themselves. Illnesses went on for years or got cured and then came back, but even when someone died it wasn’t over, because someone else had set up a charitable fund or climbed a mountain and the memory of the person was reignited. The biggest star with the greatest happiness would soon enough be down-and-out scrounging for work and love; the D-list starlet whose sex tape had made her an international joke would, in time, have a hit movie and three adorable adopted babies. Nobody was safe and nobody was doomed.

  Katie’s phone beeped and she glanced at the screen. Gran. How’s the clean-up going? She looked around the room which seemed messier than it had been an hour ago. Almost done she replied. Taking bins out now.

  She carried armfuls of magazines into her room and stacked them inside the walk-in wardrobe. She had to take out most of her clothes and all of her shoes, but the clothes were easily heaped on top of the dresser and the shoes piled on the floor under the window.

  She closed the wardrobe doors feeling fizzy with accomplishment. Next, she would drag the old desk and bookshelf out of the study and vacuum the carpet using that vanilla powder from under the sink. She would clean the windows with Windex and the sills with Mr Sheen. She would wipe down the furniture and put it back in place. She would make the room so clean that Gran would slap a hand over her mouth and say, Katherine! You’ve outdone yourself! and would not think to ask about the magazines and whether they had taken up all the room in the wheelie bin.

  2.

  It took Adam barely ten minutes to unpack: five shirts, three pairs of long pants, a couple of T-shirts, underwear, socks. He carried his toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream, razor and deodorant down the hall to the bathroom and placed them on the shelf he guessed had been left clear for him. Above sat a bottle of
Dove moisturiser, an open packet of disposable razors, a tube of Clearasil and a jar of hair gel. The shelf below his held antiseptic cream, cotton balls, more hair gel and a supersize bottle of Brut aftershave. On the edge of the basin was a green toothbrush, its bristles worn down to a single mat. The antiseptic and bleach in the air made his eyes water.

  Back in his room, he crawled under the bed and placed the yellow backpack up against the wall, under where his head would be each night. Then he lay down and listened to what might have been furniture being dragged down the hallway until he fell asleep.

  He woke in silent darkness. Sitting up, his head met wood and his heart slammed in his chest, his throat closed over. He forced a breath and remembered the new flat, reached behind and felt the soft fuzz of his backpack. He lay back down until his breathing slowed, then rolled out into the room.

  He rocked back and forth on his heels, one hand on the door frame. His new flatmate was two quick steps away, scrunched into the corner of a rust-coloured sofa, a magazine in front of her face. Her pale, skinny legs were bare, a tiny denim skirt just covered her arse. The pink tank top with a rainbow across the chest was something his ten-year-old cousin would wear.

  More magazines were scattered over the white laminex coffee table and piled up on the lamp table next to the armchair. A game show played silently on the TV behind the girl’s head. There were no books or photos; the only thing on the pale peach walls was a framed watercolour print of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. If not for the haze of cigarette smoke, he could have been in a doctor’s waiting room.

  ‘Ah, hi,’ he said.

  The girl sighed and tucked her feet up under her thighs. Adam swayed in the doorway to the count of three and then cast himself across the room, landing on the edge of the armchair across from her. He was close enough to see the blonde down on her forearms and the stiff, tiny hairs sprouting on her calves, but still she did not look up.

  ‘Um, hi, Katherine, do you have a minute?’