Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine.
A man takes a trip with his overbearing, difficult mother to scatter his father’s ashes. A new mother returns to work from maternity leave, feeling dislocated and empty in a suddenly uncomfortable environment. A young girl writes in her journal about her unstable family, longing desperately for a beautiful set of 72 Derwent pencils.
Intimate and familiar, Like a House on Fire takes a close look at domestic life and the quiet frustrations that simmer beneath the ordinary. This is Cate Kennedy’s second collection of short stories, returning to the form of her highly acclaimed Dark Roots, which earned her a reputation as one of Australia’s most masterful writers of contemporary short fiction. With her characteristic lightness of touch, Kennedy guides us quietly in and out if fifteen carefully distilled worlds, letting unexpressed aches and pains reveal themselves through simple actions.
A common thread throughout the collection is the underlying sense of dissatisfaction experienced by her characters. From a seventeen-year-old girl spending each day of her summer working as a hospital cleaner and yearning to start a new life overseas, to a woman feeding her anguish by endlessly trawling the internet for clues about her ex-partner’s new life (“I don’t know why they call it surfing. They should call it drowning”), to a young mother trying to gather herself, her newborn baby and her unreliable, delinquent boyfriend for a discount family portrait, the stories of Like a House on Fire explore the many ways a person can feel incomplete.
In several stories, these latent tensions, stresses and boredoms are brought to the surface when a character suffers an injury or illness. In Flexion, the opening story, a farmer is almost killed after being crushed by his tractor. As his bored, unhappy wife struggles to help him through his rehabilitation, his broken and crippled body becomes a symbol for their atrophied relationship. In the title story, a father is reduced to watching his family live their lives around him from the living room floor, suffering from a back injury that may or may not be psychosomatic, and that leaves him feeling paralysed, frustrated, unable to connect. In Waiting, a woman waits for an ultrasound, sick with despair and knowing already that the baby will be dead, just like the many others she has lost before it.
Yet despite their preoccupation with the discomforts of life, these stories are not as miserable and gloomy as they could be. Kennedy treats her subject matter with a deft and nimble touch, gently propelling each narrative along in an easygoing pace. The language reveals the beauty in small displeasures, so that each narrative comes across as bittersweet and often almost soothing rather than purely distressing.
One of the most understated and affecting stories is Tender, which takes place the night before a woman is scheduled to have a biopsy for a small lump she has found under her arm. The growth nags at her subtly, “like a pea, buried but resilient, a small sly sphere nesting disguised between layers of flesh and tissue.” While her husband and children are asleep, she stays up all night putting the finishing touches on a diorama her son is making for a school project. Distracting herself against “something dark and airless trickling through her bloodstream,” she trawls through the house and garden for materials to add to the little cardboard world. Kennedy allows us to watch her quietly, sharing in the woman’s meditative state through sensual details that create a subtly swelling sense of catharsis: “She crouches by the pile of paving stones. Her fingers search blindly into the damp crevices of the stack. Somewhere in here, she knows, is some moss: cool and velvety, perfect for the distant green hills behind the open gate in that little microcosmic landscape.”