Free From Under the Overcoat by Sue Orr Page A

in.
    He was wearing a suit but it made him look scruff y, not sophisticated. You had the feeling that he could have been a rich businessman once, but he had gone to seed, as Mum would say. His shoulders were stooped and he had quite a belly on him. He looked as though things had got on top of him.
    He shook Mrs Button’s hand. They talked for a while. I wondered whether he might be a friend of hers. Mrs Button waved her hand at him, as if to say Go on ahead , then she got back to the task of packing up.
    The guy disappeared. I wondered which room he would pop up in first. He appeared in the main lounge, walking slowly around, stopping to look at the photos on the mantelpiece. I thought this was a bit rude, but to be fair, he might have been checking the wallpaper.
    Then he appeared upstairs, in my bedroom. He didn’t spend long in there at all. He probably had no kids.
    Finally, he stood in the doorway of Mum’s room. He looked like the little man doll off a wedding cake, stiff and formal, hands by his sides. I felt as though I could reach out and pick him up with two fingers. He stood there for ages, then he walked in and closed the door behind him.
    You wouldn’t believe what he did next. He picked up Mum’s Chanel from her vanity table, walked to her big bed and sprayed the perfume on her pillow. Then he laid down on it.
    He was only there a minute or two. Finally, he stood up, smoothed the bed down, and turned the pillow over. He left Mum’s room.
    I felt dizzy; I’d stopped breathing. My lungs hurt. I took quick, sharp suck-ins of air, as though I’d just run a race. I wasn’t close enough to the window to smell Mum’s perfume. But I definitely could. Heavy, sweet, suffocating. Straight away, I remembered the night Mum and Dad had argued about her going back into work; the night Dad disappeared.
    I climbed down the tree as fast as I could and ran around the block. I rushed along the street to the front of our house.
    By the time I got there, Mrs Button was loading her stuff into the car.
    ‘Oh hello, Katie — good timing. We’re done for the day,’ she said.
    Who was he? I went to ask but the words stuck in my throat. ‘Is the house sold?’ I said instead.
    She laughed. ‘No. It doesn’t happen that quickly.’
    In the distance, a car disappeared around a corner.
    The open homes carried on. At each one, I took my place in the oak tree and watched. I didn’t think the sad man in the suit would come back, but he did. Not every time, but when Mrs Button got another real estate agent to do her open homes. He must have parked and watched, waiting to see who was in charge. He slipped past the agent, not bothering with the kitchen, and wandered in and out of the rooms. Every visit was the same as that first one; a whizz around the house, then into Mum’s bedroom, closing the door carefully behind him. Then, the perfume on the pillow.

    SOMEONE DID BUY THE house. Not the weird guy, and not straight away, but nearly a year on. After heaps more open homes and torture sessions between poor Mrs Button and Mum.
    When Mum and I packed everything up, we found some portraits of the original owners of our house. They were big people: stiff, formal. There were two kids in the photo too. My mother was triumphant, holding those photos in one hand, the photos of her own parents in the other.
    ‘You see, Katie. This was a grand house in its day. Owned by people of great gravitas. Of very high standing in society.’
    I realised I had never known exactly why our house was heritage listed. You don’t care about things like that when you’re a little kid. I thought about asking Mum then, as we bundled our stuff into boxes. There were lots of things I could have asked her about, including perfume-man. But by then I had some of my own secrets to hide, some of my own plans in the pipeline. And I guess I’d given up on question-asking as a waste of time. The trouble with specific questions was that they got specific answers.