Non-Sliding Doors

The storage container building was not designed for comfort; it was barely designed at all. A mid-security facility for forgotten armchairs and TV cabinets; an array of identical beach boxes greyed out with a blurgh coloured marker, migrated from the sand to the middle suburbs of Wantirna. All designed to echo, to confuse, to swing thoughts feverishly back around and around on themselves until you’re lost on level two somewhere, waiting for someone to use the elevator so at least you can follow the sound of it. The shiny concrete lends itself to nothing except bad ankle support even in sneakers, and reflect your discomfort with stuff: objects that don’t factor into your current life enough to live in your house.

Most of the shit in their storage unit was devoid of meaning to Vidya – aside from the tangible and related facts that she was sweating too much for a Sunday morning and regretting last night’s bottles of wine. She let one of the pillows fall slowly off the top of the pile of stuff she was holding, watching it flop twice unenthusiastically before it came to a rest on the concrete floor. She considered it, not wanting to relinquish her grip on the stack of laundry baskets and blenders and lampshade, thinking that once all that was sent south so too would the reservoir being held dormant in her face. One more bump and the tears that had been stinging the back of her eyes might just burn right through, and right now blaming red eyes was okay under the guise of allergies. Jasper would make a point of not asking about allergies. He was sick of her sniffling through dinners in the latter half of the year and, come September, would put his headphones in while falling asleep, voluntarily deaf to the spring and her sniff. September had come, and so had the itchy, leaky face. Spring was here in their bunker, crushing her under the weight of its pollen and its wind and its unrealised realities of the year being three-quarters of the way over and nothing having changed.

Well, one change – the new apartment. A smaller place, not bigger; cheaper rent to accommodate a slowly draining bank account from IVF treatments and endless OBGYN appointments and clinic camp-outs. A further out suburb. A more concreted concrete. Fifteen minutes from the train line. A playground but no bakery. School zoned: Box Hill Primary.

Did we really, Vidya thought along with a slow release of breath that could be mistaken for a sigh but could be claimed to just be the counterpart of an inhale if a fight were to start, need to keep all these damn boxes? The boxes, in question, contained years of Jasper’s writing, all noted down in the same black notebook. No variance from the theme. No break from the uniformity. Nothing – though she’d never say this to Jasper – that really stood out, or broke from form enough to be kept in a place that wasn’t a black book in a brown box in a grey storage unit.

She nudged the pillow with her foot half-heartedly; it moved aside limply to reveal one of the black notebooks, loose from its prison of box #13 and lying there insolently. Abandoning the pillow and turning her back on the offending book, Vidya swung around sharply on her heel and started towards the elevator, bearing the laundry basket stack aloft. “Hurry up, Jasper,” she shot at the wall.

Vidya stabbed the elevator button with her elbow and shook her head, trying to get her fringe in a less sweaty situation and line the back of her skull with her tears. She wasn’t sure why she was feeling so close to the edge. Perhaps the lack of sleep last night, or Jasper missing the turn-off for the Waverley Road coffee place she liked and her stubbornly refused his offers to stop by any other café on the way, and now she was light on caffeine and heavy with hangover. Maybe the umpteenth failed pregnancy test yesterday. Or, maybe it was because they’d been inside this self storage facility for hours and this was the fifteenth load to the apartment and she was questioning whether she wanted to move at all.

Their dreams of children had extinguished, one by one, other dreams she’d held burning, small but constant candles. First a year in Berlin; then, roller derby. Then it was living in a different city to Jasper’s parents. Most recently – a backyard; some sort of garden. It was a process, confronting the future that she always thought lay a few steps down the road: a few more candles burning rings onto mantelpieces; a few more smoke detectors taken down for battery changes not reinstalled; a few more poles scraped in her Toyota; a few more full-body cries into her mother’s arms. A few more years of falling asleep on the train and waking up in that state of limbless terror. A few more Rufus Wainwright albums forgotten and rediscovered. A few more oscillations of liking flared pants and hating them and liking her belly and thighs and hating them. A few more eons of Jasper pretending he was properly giving the author thing a go, and dodging the unassailable fact that the last time he wrote anything was years ago. Another bank job for her. Another annual 2000 hours of work.

Jasper brushed her hand as they waited for the elevator, and Vidya didn’t look down, knowing already the touch wasn’t for her. He one-handedly rummaged around in his pocket for his buzzing phone. She’d known; the touch Jasper used for her was finite, direct, dry. Not damp and lingering, not soft and surprising. She was rarely surprised but generally lukewarm, and that generally meant she could get warm. Sometimes hot, but Vidya ran cold. Touch was a leg wax strip at the salon, put on deliberately with the expectation that, once dry and cool, it’d come off with no great fanfare, to be replaced by another identical, to be no big deal individually in terms of pain but then when it was all over and you looked down you were red, raw all over, a shiny new layer after a burn.

They clambered awkwardly into the elevator and Jasper pressed “G” without looking up from his scrolling, the blue glow of his Facebook feed perverse against the grey gloom, his scroll echoing the roller door's axis, but his thumbs infinite and the door finite. The black notebook from the floor, Vidya noticed with a sharp pang of irritation, had made its way into his back pocket, rolled up. “What’s up in Facebook land,” she asked. Teeth gritting was easy to disguise when you were talking into a lampshade. “Yeah. Ah, not much,” Jasper answered, gaze still glued downwards. The elevator doors closed. He locked his phone, and attempting to slide it back into his jeans, missed. He fumbled; it bounced off his shoe onto the concrete floor. “Shit!”

Vidya sighed upwards, blowing her sticky fringe away from her forehead. “Why’d you bring that book?” she asked, at the same time that Jasper bent down to pick up the phone, which also happened to be in the same moment that the elevator lurched. Jasper was thrown forward onto his hands and knees and Vidya dropped the basket and grabbed onto the wall, a reaction despite the elevator having stopped moving immediately. The jerk had come and gone, but they seemed now to be hanging between Level 1 and G. Limbo came in many forms, and hanging between two levels of a Fort Knox on a Sunday morning was one of them.

“What the fuck?” Jasper said. He checked his phone, of course: no reception. The elevator hung resolutely where it was. “What the fuck are we supposed to do?” He threw down the one box he was holding, and it upended immediately, spilling its contents. Books; mostly black. “Nice one. Now we’re stuck in here and you’ve just brought your books,” Vidya snapped, still clinging to the wall and trying hard to keep her breath level, her voice in its mid-range, her reservoir to herself. She failed on all counts.

“Do you have to cry? About? Everything?” Jasper snarled, but by the word ‘everything’ he’d retreated slightly and the ‘ng’ sound turned into him sighing and stepping towards her, unwilling to alienate his co-captive in the tiny space. She turned away, wiping her face sideways onto her jumper. “Vids, there’ll be a phone.”

There wasn’t.

Ten minutes passed, or maybe it was ten seconds. “I don’t want to do this,” Vidya spoke, carefully, through the pillow she’d picked up again.

“Yeah babe I don’t want to do this either but like,” Jasper widened his eyes at the floor, “we don’t have a-“

“I don’t want to do any of this.” Vidya said, jerking the pillow downwards away from her mouth. He was silent. She wiped her nose with her jumper sleeve; the right side of it was already sodden with snot. Trails of promises and mucus. “We’re broke. I hate Box Hill. I’m done.” She closed her eyes, lifting her chin and facing Jasper, bracing herself for the splashback.

But none came. “Maybe you’re right,” came instead. She opened her eyes; Jasper had put his phone away. “Maybe it isn’t for us.”

“Being parents?” Vidya asked him, looking him in the face for what felt like the first time all day.

“Being parents together,” Jasper answered. “We’ve got things we want to do” – he motioned at the black book – “separately, I guess. And we can’t afford it anymore. We really can’t.” His eyes, like his thumbs on his phone, scrolled her face infinitely, searching for meaning.

“Yeah. We can’t,” Vidya swallowed; gulping down the weight of three years of expectations and failures. “So that’s it.”

They lapsed into heavy silence, so complete it ate at the air and created a thrum with its weight. But within it, her throaty lump digested, Vidya felt light.

Then, suddenly, a beep. One bar of reception. A call swiftly made to the number underneath the “G” button on the panel. A promise of rescue in half an hour. And a missed call, a voicemail checked, Jasper searching for something to fill in the density.

“Vids.”

“Huh?” She’d been in planning mode, turning over which of her friends had a spare room in her head (Shyla, maybe Jenny).

“I got it. The Richter Grant. The $20,000 one. It’s….I got it.”

A writing grant, an amount of money somewhere between modest and monumental. A stack of green giving sudden meaning to the black books. Money used not for hormones and appointments and carseats and cribs. Money used for a dream no longer held dormant in boxes, but spilled out over the floor of the elevator. Fulcrums abandoned in a grey box.

Men with the necessary tools came, soon after, and freed them, clinching open a narrow opening just wide enough for them to be pulled through, and the lamp somehow too. They were spat out on ground level with no modicum of grace, just Vidya clambering to her feet through her sticky fringe and Jasper trying and failing to pick up all the books in one movement.

They sat, in the front two seats of the rented van, quiet. Tables and cabinets and the couch were still up there on Level 1, beyond a broken elevator and an argument held in stasis; a cracked phone screen, an infinite scroll of minutiae.

“Shyla’s got a spare room,” said Vidya.

“Might go live with my parents for a bit,” said Jasper, leaning his head to one side and peering between the bars of the steering wheel.

“God, I need a coffee. Can we-?”

“Yeah,” said Jasper, starting the van. “Let’s go.” He indicated left and turned out of the parking lot, and Vidya slipped Rufus Wainwright’s ‘Poses’ into the CD player and blasted the volume up high.