Free The Life of Houses by Lisa Gorton

was a great friend of your mother’s. They were always together. Not in that way, I don’t think, but they were…’ Treen pushed the centre of her top lip down before taking a sip of tea. Thoughtfully, she chewed on her scone. She had dropped back into her own existence, a vagueness like depths of water.
    â€˜What were the classes?’
    â€˜What’s that?’ Treen roused. A crumb at the edge of her mouth was about to fall. ‘Oh! Life drawing.’
    â€˜Did he mean I should come?’
    â€˜Well, you could.’ She spread cream over her second scone. ‘It’s a lot of old ladies. And the models…’
    â€˜Oh! I know what life drawing is.’
    â€˜You might enjoy it, then.’ Treen frowned at the scone held halfway to her mouth. ‘Only I thought, your first day…’ Kit could see Treen rearranging her thoughts, like chairs. ‘Of course, if you’d like to. Scott did seem a little…’ Treen ducked her head and started searching again through her handbag.
    â€˜A little what?’ Kit said. Treen’s baffled mildness woke in her a new sense of her own power. Seeing Scott’s face in her mind as she had seen it then—so close she could count the pale eyelashes—she wished that she had been ruder, that she had said something.
    â€˜The thing is,’ murmured Treen, ‘I so clearly remember tucking it in here before we left.’ Eyes glazed, Treen looked back through the morning. ‘Unless we stopped somewhere?’
    â€˜He seemed a little what ?’
    â€˜What’s that, dear?’
    â€˜Scott. You were saying something.’
    â€˜Oh! I think I was saying I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you came along.’

Chapter Seven
    A nna closed the gate and stopped. Night had made the street a single fact. The lights were out in all the houses; the houses had drawn back. The road, which in daytime they would not have noticed, had come into its own: its white line had the force of a vanishing point. Without discussing it, the two of them left the footpath and walked along the centre of the road. She was so tired that she had gone past tiredness into that state, like dreaming, when everything she saw hung before her eyes, separate and without background. His leather-soled shoes struck hollow sounds from the bitumen.
    â€˜What time is it?’
    â€˜After midnight.’ He answered without looking at his watch.
    She said, ‘I don’t think I’ve walked like this, just walked at night, since Kit was born.’
    There was something festive about the trees at night. Their trunks had disappeared into the darkness. The streetlights shone up through leaves that appeared to float in air, ornate mysterious structures, so that walking along the road between them she felt as though she was taking part in some ritual. She thought: ownership, memory, even expectation make no claim here: we are alone as adults never are. She took hold of his arm. Through the material of his shirthis flesh, warm and separate, seemed to give off an electric force.
    She said, ‘I see why they scream and break things.’
    â€˜They?’
    â€˜Teenagers. Disturbing my peace at 3am.’
    He nodded. He was following, along the painted line of the road, his own thoughts. His face, whenever they stepped under a streetlight, looked pinched with exhaustion. So long as they were under the streetlight his face looked close. Stepping into the dark again his face seemed to draw back; the street itself drew back and made one darkness. They went from dark to light, dark to light, until it seemed to Anna that they were walking on the spot while the light swung over them from an imaginary lighthouse at the end of the street.
    They crossed onto the gravel path that edged the gardens, the wrought iron boundary fence rising like strange foliage beside them in the dark. On the other side a possum, watching them, dropped its tail and