CHAPTER SIX #2
It took longer than she expected to work the old tape loose, brittle now with age, and when the flap finally gave she found exactly what she'd known she'd find and had somehow still managed to forget in specific detail — a handful of paperbacks with a childhood library's worn spines, a school photo from year eight, one of the four schools she could no longer entirely picture the layout of, and, near the bottom, a small collection of postcards she'd bought in every town they'd ever lived in and never once sent to anyone, because sending a postcard implied someone back home worth writing to, and there had never quite been a home fixed enough to write from.
She held the postcards a long moment, turning them over one at a time — a lighthouse from somewhere in Victoria, a wheat silo from some town in the Riverina whose name she'd entirely lost, a beach she was fairly sure was this exact coast, taken from a different angle, a different decade, a version of herself who'd stood on this same sand as a stranger passing through rather than a woman about to sign a lease that would keep her here.
She didn't cry, exactly, sitting there on the spare room floor with eleven years of unopened cardboard finally open in front of her, but she stayed a long while all the same, turning the postcards over, until the light through the window had shifted enough that she noticed the afternoon slipping away from her.
She left the box open when she finally got up.
Didn't put the postcards back inside, didn't reseal the flap the way she'd resealed it after every previous move, when she'd told herself she'd deal with it properly next time and never had — just left it there, lid folded back, contents exposed to the ordinary light of an ordinary Tuesday, a small unglamorous act of unpacking that felt, standing there afterward, considerably larger than the size of the box itself.
She went back to the table. She picked up the pen.
And instead of ringing the agent to ask about the standard twelve-month renewal, the way she had four times running, she found the agent's number and rang, and said, before she'd fully decided to say it, the sentence arriving ahead of her own certainty the way Renz's sentences always arrived important-word-first, "I wanted to ask about a longer lease.
Two years, if that's on offer. Or — however long you've got. "
There was a small pause on the other end, the agent clearly checking whether she'd misheard, a young bloke named Trent who'd handled her last two renewals and had, she suspected, privately clocked her as one of those tenants, the kind who never stayed, the kind you didn't bother pitching the long-term rate to anymore.
"Two years," he repeated. "That's — yeah, that's absolutely on offer, the landlord'll be rapt, honestly, most tenants around here—"
"Two years," Pip said again, mostly to hear herself say it, the number sitting strange and enormous in her mouth, the way any true thing sits strange the first time you say it out loud instead of just carrying it around silently, turning it over in private where it couldn't be contradicted or witnessed.
"Send the paperwork through. I'll sign whatever you need. "
She hung up, and sat back down at the table, and didn't cry exactly, but came close enough to it that she had to sit still a minute with her hand flat on the table's surface, feeling the plain solid fact of the wood under her palm, a table she'd bought three moves ago and had never once let herself think of as a table she'd keep, purchased secondhand from a garage sale specifically because it had been cheap enough to abandon without a pang if the next move demanded it.
She didn't tell Renz. Not that week, not the next.
It wasn't that she was hiding it — she told herself that, anyway, turning the justification over the way she turned over most of her own motives, half-convinced and half-suspicious of the conviction — it was more that the thing felt too new and too tender to hand to anyone yet, even him, especially him, because some superstitious corner of her still worried that saying it out loud too soon might spook it back into the twelve-month shape she'd worn for nine years running, the way you don't tell people about a good thing until it's survived long enough that saying it out loud can't jinx it.
She did, though, without quite noticing she was doing it, buy a picture frame.
Small thing. A market stall down near Rivers, a Sunday morning wander she hadn't planned, just restlessness looking for somewhere to spend itself, and she found a hand-turned timber frame at a stall run by an older bloke who talked at length, unprompted, about the particular grain of the driftwood he'd sourced it from.
"Found this piece washed up after the last big blow," he said, turning the frame over in weathered hands to show her the grain catching the light.
"Takes years for the sea to work timber this smooth.
You can't rush a grain like this — comes from decades of being tumbled about, patient as anything, till it's ready to be something new. "
"Sounds like a lot of effort for a picture frame."
"Everything worth keeping takes a bit of effort, love.
" He wrapped it for her without being asked, the particular unhurried care of a man who'd made a whole life out of small careful things.
He glanced up at her, something knowing in his weathered face, the specific perceptiveness of an old tradesman who'd spent decades reading customers as carefully as he read timber grain.
"You've got the look of someone who's moved about a fair bit herself, if you don't mind me saying. Takes one to know one, sometimes."
"That obvious, is it?"
"Only to someone who's spent thirty years watching driftwood settle.
Some pieces wash up rough and stay rough.
Others just need the right amount of time and the right kind of patience before the smooth comes through properly.
" He handed her the wrapped frame, unhurried.
"You'll know what goes in it when the time's right.
Frames like this, they wait well. Don't rush a thing that's already waited this long to find you. "
She bought it on a whim, paid cash, didn't haggle the way she normally would have out of habit rather than need, and drove home with it sitting upright on the passenger seat instead of shoved in the boot with everything else that lived unclaimed in her car, propped carefully against the seatbelt so it wouldn't slide, and set it on the kitchen table when she got in, empty, no photo in it yet, because she hadn't decided what deserved to go in it — only that, for the first time in longer than she could accurately count, there was a frame in the flat at all, waiting for something to be worth keeping.
She looked at it that evening from across the room, doing the dishes, glancing back at it every so often the way you glance at a strange new piece of furniture to see if you've made a mistake buying it, and found, each time, that she hadn't.
? ? ?
Renz noticed the frame the following Thursday, when he dropped round with a container of something he'd made too much of, the way he dropped round most Thursdays now, an easy unremarked rhythm the two of them had fallen into without either of them formally naming it a rhythm — no discussion of it, no defining conversation, just a container appearing at her door most Thursday evenings and being received, most Thursday evenings, without either of them commenting on what the pattern had quietly become.
He didn't say anything about it straight away.
He set the container down, and made himself a cup of the tea she kept for him specifically, in the mug she'd started keeping for him specifically — a plain green one, nothing special, that had simply, over the last several months, stopped being a mug anyone else in the flat used, without either of them discussing that either — and only once he'd sat down across from her at the table — her table, the one she'd never let herself think of as staying-put furniture — did his eyes go, briefly, to the empty frame propped against the fruit bowl.
"New?" he said.
"Bought it Sunday."
"Nothing in it yet."
"No," Pip said, and found, to her own quiet surprise, that she wanted to tell him the rest of it after all, the lease and the two years and the whole small terrifying arithmetic she'd worked through alone at this exact table a week before, the words arriving with an unfamiliar readiness that surprised her more than the decision itself had. "I signed a two-year lease, Renz."
He went very still, the particular careful stillness he went when something mattered more than his voice was going to let on, the same stillness she'd learned to read across four years of watching him receive news he didn't yet have a rehearsed response for. "Two years."