Like a House on Fire by Cate Kennedy Page A

thinking of that scalpel like an apple corer, going into her flesh, pushing in and twisting.
    â€˜You haven’t written it on the calendar,’ says Al when he comes in.
    â€˜It’s at 9.15.’
    â€˜So you’ll — what — get the 6.35 train?’
    â€˜Yeah, I’ll drive down and leave the car at the station for you to pick up. Then back in time for after school.’ She pauses, then mutters, ‘Hopefully, I mean.’
    â€˜Why didn’t you write it up?’
    She stops grating cheese, stares at him. ‘Why do you reckon?’
    â€˜Chris, the kids know. I told them last week you had to have a test at the hospital. They’re fine about it. No point making it worse for them, keeping it all secret.’
    â€˜It’s not going to be worse for them. They don’t even need to think about it.’ She looks down at the piece of roughened cheese in her hand, turns it to a new edge.
    â€˜What do they call it again?’
    â€˜A lumpectomy.’
    She hates that word. Lump. The ugliest word in the English language. Lumpen . Lumpy . She thinks fleetingly of the story Hannah developed an obsession for when she was three, which she’d demanded over and over, night after night. The princess with all the mattresses who still couldn’t sleep because of that tiny lump disturbing her all night long; that hard, resilient pea rising cruelly and insistently through all those downy layers.
    â€˜Want a hand with something?’
    â€˜No,’ she replies, taking a teatowel out of the drawer and pulling open the oven. ‘I’m right.’
    Hannah is off that story now. She’s on to another one about a family who end up bringing two stray dogs home from the pound instead of one. Christine had fantasies when the kids were babies: of Jamie, three years older, reading to his little sister of a night in the big armchair. She’d imagined a golden halo of lamplight, polished floors, the straw-bale walls finally rendered and whitewashed, everything as clean and wholesome as a cake of handmade soap.
    Instead, Jamie is forever setting up complicated wars of small action figures that bite painfully into your bare feet when you have to get up at night, battalions of tiny medieval knights with pointy plastic armour and shields. Hannah couldn’t be less interested. Christine is having a few second thoughts, now, about the old nature-versus-nurture argument. What is it with boys and fighting? One hour of sanctioned TV a night, and still Jamie sprawls on the floor relishing battle scenes, while Hannah flounces and squeals like some miniature Paris Hilton demanding to wear nail polish to kinder. Where have they absorbed all this from, this nasty flotsam leaking in like battery acid?
    You couldn’t have told her, seven years ago, she’d be worrying about this stuff, any more than she would have believed they’d even have a television or electric heaters.
    She remembers Al and her arguing over whether to render the walls with mud and cement or just mud — statistics about toxicity, about pure environments, about every bloody thing, things that buckled in the face of practicality and time. Now the solar panels are just a booster for an electric system like everyone else’s, and to Christine that seems to sum up the whole experiment: it’s a bonus, a gesture, a grand theory of sustainability modified to a more prosaic reality. The trees outside, which she’d imagined sprouting into a shady arbour, are taller and stalkier now but still unmistakably seedlings, painstakingly hand-watered from the dam and the bath. The piles of clay turned over by digging the house site still glint exposed through the thin groundcovers, and Jamie’s BMX track has worn a looping circuit through the landscaping, turning her plans for terracing into an assortment of jumps and scrambles. Christine puts more wood in the firebox and, with a familiar mix of guilt and