My sister was never allowed to go over there, but then one afternoon she did. The house was just along from mum's friend John's, where we house-sat one school holidays. It never stuck out before that afternoon picking Christina up, because why would it: most of the houses in the area were colonial villas with front steps and external garages, all painted white, and from the outside Rachael's looked much the same as John's and everyone else's. The area they lived in wasn't given a name to differentiate it from any of the surrounding roads and reserves, but those who lived in it maintained that it was special and it seemed that way to outsiders as well. The difference was palpable: the roads hadn't been widened in over half a century, and along every street were trees that changed colour in autumn and grew so tall that their branches could reach out and shake hands with those on the other side of the road. Being a hillier, greener place, the shadows that stalked grim in the day were so unrelenting that they would turn the grass into the coldest mud. Even when the sky was blue and the light was dappled you could see the breath leave your face to be lost in the cold forever.
Rachael and Christina became friends when Rachael joined her class in term two that year. She and her family had arrived from somewhere like Singapore or Canada and on hearing their daughter tell stories about the year six curriculum in New Zealand, her parents decided that she needed to be put with the year eight students. Principal Barrett put forward the compromise that Rachael could move in with the year seven class, as the school had a fairly rigorous intermediate education programme designed to prepare students for the high school experience in year nine, but Rachael's parents had made up their minds and were very much used to getting their way with these things. When Rachael started in her class, Christina found her precociousness every bit as insufferable as the other kids did, but she felt bad about the ostracism Rachael faced as a consequence of this behaviour, and started sitting with her out of pity. In the beginning Christina picked Rachael's prickliness as a sort of defensive thing to cope with her family's always moving, but over time it became clear that to remove the prickles from Rachael would be to expel her very being, leaving only a desiccated husk of the child that would in a second float down with the newspapers, rotting leaves, and ACT party brochures, to be enveloped in the cold mud that followed her wherever she went.
When I asked Christina in the car home why before that evening she had not been invited to Rachael's, she explained that the house was currently under the tyranny of a man named Uncle Chambers whom the family all feared with such intensity that they felt they had to endure alone. Rachael, teary eyed on the way there, had bemoaned the fact that not even her grandmother was allowed into the house when she was visiting from Toronto, and that her mother and father would instead leave to meet her at a nearby café. She also took that walk as an opportunity to give Christina a rundown of the method that the family had decided on for best navigating the house and avoiding Uncle Chambers. Doors in the house, Rachael said, could only be opened if Uncle Chambers had without a doubt passed the door and so would not be waiting outside. When Christina asked how one might know for certain whether or not Uncle Chambers would be standing outside any given door, Rachael explained that he would rush to any door that had just been opened, and so the only way to leave a room would be to listen out for another door in the house opening, at which point you would be given safe passage to the room of your choice (barring of course the one that now had Uncle Chambers waiting outside it). Christina asked why one could not just take a peek to see if Uncle Chambers was currently outside the door, but Rachael went pale and said that such a gamble doesn't bear thinking about. The thought of actually encountering this Uncle Chambers was evidently too much for her to handle. Any number of pulleys, intercoms, and radio systems were discussed on the walk but it all came down to the conviction held by Rachael's family that in order to avoid Uncle Chambers one must believe with certainty that he is at all times outside your door until you hear another door open at which point he is certainly on his way to that door instead.
Christina has said that whenever Rachael comes to mind she will have generated more questions than the last time, least of which is how the door opening cycle would each evening begin. The answer, Christina understood implicitly at the time, and still accepts now, was that a member of the family would every night take a sort of leap of faith for the sake of the other family members; breathing deeply, opening the door with the belief in their heart that Uncle Chambers would not be there waiting for them. The one detail she remembers from the walk, and she thinks about this regularly, was regarding the name Uncle Chambers, which Rachael failed to elucidate in any helpful way, as the man, she explained, came with the house.
July 2018