The Child Garden (6 page)

Nine

“‘Nothing in the world
is single,'” I said at the end of the ceremony. “‘All things by a law divine, in another's being mingle—Why not I with thine?'” There wasn't a dry eye in the house.

It would get me struck off if the Humanist Society could hear me. I could just imagine Bryan—the sergeant-at-arms, Miss Drumm called him; actually the HS regional coordinator—choking on the word when he tried to accuse me:
A law divine, Gloria? Divine? If they wanted divinity they'd cough up for a church.

“That was absolutely lovely,” said one of the mothers. She was neck to knee in lavender chiffon, like a mother should be, a fascinator like a giant insect landed on her head. “Are you coming to the reception?”

“Oh, how kind you are!” I said. “If only I could. But I've got to get back to the office and enter all this to make it legal.” I patted the folder where the signed register extract was waiting. That usually did the trick. The thought of the registrar kicking up her heels at the party and the precious documents getting shoved under a banquet table and lost was enough to stop nearly everyone.

“Well, then for God's sake, come to the reception,” sneered the other mother. She was wearing a herringbone suit that had seen better days. Even I was more dressed up, and I try not to be. Neat and smart but no competition. Lynne at work had been kind anyway.

“Gorgeous!” she'd said when she saw me. But no one who dressed like Lynne could think someone who dressed like me was gorgeous. “One of these days, Gloria, there's going to be a jilting at the altar and a groom's going to whisk you away.”

“Not today,” I told her. “It's two grooms.”

Lynne narrowed her eyes. “Bloody gay weddings.” But she didn't mean it unkindly. “I've only just learned the forms for civil partnerships and here we go again. Moderate pace of change, my arse. They never think about the paperwork, do they?”

I ignored the scruffy mother and turned to the giant fascinator one.

“How lucky Carl is to be joining
your
family,” I said, squeezing her hand. Some of Miss Drumm was starting to rub off on me. I would never have been so rude before I started spending so much time with her. But I put it out of my mind. It wasn't as though the torn-faced mother was going to complain about a sour note spoiling her son's wedding when she didn't want her son married anyway. And besides, I had to make the most of the time I was alone in the office this afternoon. Lynne only worked mornings.

Nathan McAllister. Born 17-3-1972. No occupation. Single. Aged 23. Found dead 8.16am 1-5-1995. Stirling University Sports Centre car park. Usual residence: Flat 4, 38 Horne Terrace, Edinburgh. Cause of Death: (amended) (i) suicide
by carb.mon.tox. Certifying physician pppf [signed]. Registered by: Edmund McAllister (brother) Central Reg. Ed. 10-5-1995.

I read it over and over again, then clicked back to the index screen, feeling my eyes start to swim with tears. Twenty-three years old and he'd fed a pipe from his exhaust into his car and sat there in a car park until he poisoned himself. No time of death, just when he was found. And a doctor appointed by the procurator fiscal. His brother registering his death for him. I could imagine the parents, sitting in a silent room with drawn curtains, unable to move, unable to speak. The words danced in front of my eyes, doubling and dazzling.

Then I blinked, leaned forward, and looked again. The words weren't doubling at all. I was reading the next entry down.

Edmund McAllister. Born 17-3-
1972.

Ned and Nod, Stig had called them, and they were both dead. They were twins, otherwise they wouldn't never have been beside each other in the record—plenty of McAllisters in Scotland, after all. They were twins and they had died within a year of each other. I clicked through and kept reading.

Found dead 7.15pm, 8-11-1995. Hermitage, Dunkeld.
Cause of Death: (amended) (i) suicide by drowning. Certifying physician, pppf [signed] Registered by:
Phillip McAllister (father) Central Reg. Ed. 20-11-1995.

The Hermitage at Dunkeld. I knew the place. It was a beautiful spot—a high waterfall with a little stone folly. If someone wanted to blend the Eden crypt and the place where Moped Best fell into the river, then the Hermitage at Dunkeld was about as good as it could get. And this time his poor father had to go and register the death himself. Presumably because there was no one else to do it for them. I thought about my colleagues up there in the central office in Edinburgh, in that gloomy looming building, and hoped that Mr. McAllister had got someone kind, someone still able to share a little in the pain, even if they saw it every day.

I printed the two entries then wiped the history and switched the computer off. Sat there looking at the wall of fame, all the babies and couples in their wedding clothes. We never got funeral photographs, not of the flowers or the coffin or even the mourners. And I always wondered if it was worth trying to start the tradition. You heard it over and over again at the funeral teas afterwards: how the family only ever saw each other at funerals these days, how the last time they'd seen the departed was at so-and-so's funeral.
Well, stand up and smile and take some pictures,
I always wanted to say.
Chances are there's someone here today you'll never see again in this life.

But what, I asked myself as I sat there staring, was bothering me? Some thought had flitted over my brain and now it was gone somewhere I couldn't follow.

I tried all the memory tricks I knew as I waited for the clock to tick round to five, then I washed out the coffeemaker, set it up for the next day, put the printouts in a plastic sleeve, and went home, like I always do. If anyone was watching from one of the cottages on the long main street all they'd see was that woman who lives up the hill going home like clockwork, or maybe fat Gloria setting off for another thrilling night at someone's bedside, or that nice registrar who was so kind when Auntie Joyce died; that's her off home.

I didn't usually wonder what anyone thought of me or even whether they did, but tonight I felt like an ant crawling across a sheet of white paper under a microscope, with the printouts in my bag and the unfamiliar groceries in a basket over my arm.

“Been watching Jamie Oliver?” Mr. Slocombe in the shop had asked at lunchtime. “He's the women's Nigella, isn't he?”

“Been on the Internet, Mr. Slocombe,” I said, hoping I wasn't changing colour. “It's all about sugar now. Fat and salt are fine.”

Only now I was worried that he would ask himself
where
I had been on the Internet, because the WiFi at Rough House would make you weep. And I didn't want him to think I had been abusing the machine in the office. Especially because today, for the first time, I had. I mean, there was nothing illegal about me looking up entries, or even printing them, but I had stolen two sheets of paper and a plastic sleeve. There was no denying that.

At first I thought he'd gone. Rough House was as still and serene as ever. The house cats and byre cats were sitting on the wall by the gate, the two camps keeping their distance. Walter Scott was nowhere to be seen. The nets blinding the windows didn't move and no shadow passed behind them. When I opened the back door, though, everything was different, the kitchen fragrant and steaming, but empty.

“Stig?” I called out.

I heard the bathroom door unlocking and he appeared, still in the sweat suit but with Miss Drumm's old crossover pinny on top. Walter was with him.

“Had to be sure it was you,” he said, his voice sounding tremulous.

“What's that smell?” I asked him.

“Meatballs Arrabiata. Or as close as I could get with what I could find. Your cupboards are pathetic.” He saw my look. “I had to do
something
cooped up all day. You didn't give me your password and there's no telly.”

“There's a radio,” I said, nodding at it up on the high mantelpiece above the Rayburn. “Was there anything on the news?”

He shook his head. “An accident on the A75 and a break-in at the furniture showroom in Annan. Ask me anything. I've heard it seven times. I could go on
Mastermind
and my specialist subject would be Southwest Scotland on the eighth of October, two thou—”

“Ssh,” I said. His voice was shaking, as though he was cycling over cobbles, and his eyes were getting shiny too. “Let's just talk about something else for a couple of minutes. Try to slow down your breathing and you'll feel more calm.”

“Oh, yeah great,” he said. “Fucking yoga. That'll solve everything.”

“What's this?” I said, lifting the edge of a tea cloth covering something on the warming rack. He batted my hand away.

“Rosemary flatbread,” he said. “That wouldn't be you subtly trying to distract me, would it?” But at last he did take a big breath in and let it out again. “Pretty good herb garden you've got out there, but you'll need to wrap the bay before the frost comes.”

“You're a cook,” I said. “And a gardener.”

“Not a gardener,” he told me. “But yeah, I'm a chef. Why did you have a two-pound bag of bread flour and no yeast?”

“I bought it by accident,” I said. “A chef ?”

I remembered cooking classes in primary seven. We studied a country, learned the dances, made the national costume out of crepe paper and then, for a finale, went over to the new bit of the school and cooked a traditional meal. Moussaka, burritos, chow mein. I remember Stig and Bezzo mixing up flour paste and bits of carrot and corn to make a puddle of sick and freak out the teacher, then thinking of Bezzo reminded me of Moped and the double entry under
McAllister
, and I had to sit down quickly in one of the kitchen chairs.

Stig didn't notice. Looking down into his pot, he just kept talking.

“Wee J did business studies and hospitality so he could be the manager, and I got a chef's apprenticeship so I could stay in the kitchen. My mum trained to run the spa and my dad was going to stand behind the bar and tell jokes. A perfect little empire with BJ at the top, like the fucking Godfather.” He lifted a spoonful of sauce out of the pan and, holding his other hand underneath it so it didn't drip on the dog, he turned to let me taste it.

“You swear quite a lot,” I said.

“All chefs swear a lot,” said Stig. “If you had a telly like normal people, you'd know that.”

“I'd rather have a cheese toastie and no effing,” I said.

“What's wrong?” he asked, looking properly at me for the first time.

“Are you sure you'll be okay if I tell you?” I said.

“I promise,” he said. “I'm sorry. Being cooped up is—”

But still I chickened out of telling him at first. “I got April's address.” He raised his eyebrows. “And I looked up Nathan's record.” I took the plastic sleeve out of my bag and handed it to him.

“Fucking hell,” he said, reading the two printouts. “That's three, Glo. Ned, Nod, and April.”

“Four counting Mitchell.”

“It can't be coincidence,” he said. “But what's the connection?” He stared at the paper, as if he could work out the answer from those few brief notes. On the Rayburn, the pot was bubbling harder, sending out splats of sauce that sizzled on the hotplate.

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't understand. I suppose it's possible that the trauma about Moped affected Nathan so badly he killed himself, and that that might do his twin brother's head in. And then April saw the death notice and that finished her off.” I was babbling, but I couldn't stop myself.

“I could have stopped this,” said Stig. “If I'd listened to her. Insisted on seeing her. God, if I'd even got to the huttie a bit quicker. I don't suppose you looked up any of the others?”

I flushed. “I don't know their real names. Or couldn't remember them, anyway.”

“Alan Best?” said Stig, and I flushed deeper. I could feel the angry blotches creeping over my chest and was glad that I still had my coat on.

“I wasn't thinking straight,” I said. “Look, I really need to go and see Nicky, but while I'm out you write down all their names. Full
names if you can.”

“I've already done it,” said Stig. “I've written everything I can remember, like you said.”

“I'll go over it when I get back. Over dinner.”

“Can't you take it with you?” he said. “Read it while you're there?”

“Read it to
Nicky
?”

“No! Sorry! Sorry.”

I was too angry to speak. I just stood up and walked out. I'd stay longer than usual, I thought, getting in and slamming the car door, and if his Meatballs à la Profanity were dried up when I got back, then tough cheese.

Ten

The McAllister brothers, April
Cowan, and poor Moped faded a little as I rolled up to the home to see Nicky. It was always my favourite bit of any day, rolling up to the home to see Nicky. Even Miss Drumm was like family now after ten years.

It used to be that I'd stop in on her every few days, let her know how Walter Scott was getting on, reassure her about the stone, share news of the brambles in the hedgerows and how the potatoes were doing. I sometimes wondered if she knew that I had never made a pot of bramble jelly in my life and wouldn't know potato blight if I caught it, but I thought maybe she liked the pretence, found it harmless, since she'd never see the garden again or find out that the vegetable patch was overrun with those sunflowers and the great-great-grandchildren of her last lettuces.

Besides, since they were in adjoining rooms, I could hardly visit Nicky and ignore her. It was good of her to have him, really; he still cried out back then, and it wasn't a noise you'd choose to hear if you didn't have to. It wasn't all that different, when I came to think of it, from the noise Walter Scott made when I tried to get him to leave her behind, the few times he visited. Miss Drumm turned her head away, her mouth trembling, and Walter dug his toenails into the polished floor of the hall and sat down hard. If the doors on that side of the corridor were open and the morning sun was shining, you could still see the scratches on the parquet where I'd dragged him.

But Walter hadn't been here for nine years now and Nicky had stopped making any sounds at all about six years back, so now the arrangement worked perfectly for everyone. Miss Drumm listened in on the nurses to check they weren't teasing him, and he was the only resident who didn't mind a connecting door with “that chopsy old B” as Mr. Ainsworth called her.

“Do you know, Gloria,” he'd said, “she had the cheek to tell me well-done steak was wasted beef and I might as well have a slice of luncheon meat and leave the fillets for more discerning palates.”

“Why did you tell her?” I asked him. “She's blind. You could have said it was oozing with blood and she'd not have known any better.”

“She could tell from the sound of me cutting it,” Mr. Ainsworth said. “She's got ears like a bat.”

But it was her bat ears that I valued most, her chopsy ways too, and even her hectoring. I couldn't think of anyone better to be looking out for Nicky all day.

Little Deirdre was sitting on her stool just inside the front door as ever. She was only in her fifties, but her hair was like thistledown, her cheeks as withered as week-old balloons.

“Hello there,” I said.

Deirdre beamed at me. Her teeth were gruesome; she'd neither brush them herself nor let anyone else brush them for her, and a rinse with strawberry mouthwash twice a day over the years had fallen far short. When the pain got bad, they sedated her to get her in the car and then knocked her out completely at the dentist. It wouldn't be long before the next visit was due.

I usually paid no attention to the house as I made my way to Nicky and Miss Drumm, but tonight I found myself wondering about all it had seen in its years. About when the Drumm family used to hold balls and shooting parties in the winter, about the soldiers from both wars who recuperated here, the years it stood empty, ringing with silence and filling with cobwebs, then those children at Eden and the morning that Miss Whatshername was screeching and the kids were terrified and the police were at the gate trying to get in. And a boy in a bright orange anorak was facedown in the river, turning with the current, all his secrets locked inside him forever.

“You're late,” said Miss Drumm. She put out a hand and slapped the outsize button of her clock.
Five-fifty-three
, said the robot voice.

“Are you bursting with news for me?” I managed to get my tone very breezy, but even just asking had made my pulse beat faster. Could I fake surprise if it had broken?

“News?” said Miss Drumm. “In this place? Chance'd be a fine thing. Then I could give up on those soap operas that are rotting my brain like ergots.”

“So no gossip then?” I asked.

She moved her thumb over the nodule on her chair arm that controls the direction until she had swung round to face me. “What is it?” she said.

The light shining in from the bright corridor bounced off the lenses of her spectacles and hid her eyes. If I hadn't known she was blind, I'd have sworn she could see right through me.

“What?” I said. “Nothing. What do you mean?”

“Is Walter all right? Have you had the vet out? Has some nosey parker come sniffing?”

“Walter's fine. No one's been anywhere.”

“Are you rocking the stone?” she said.

“Of course,” I said. “I did a wedding today. Two lovely boys who've been together for seven years. And old Mr. Thorne died. His children are coming to register it tomorrow.”

“Oh?” said Miss Drumm. She couldn't care less about weddings, but a death in the village was always something.

“Yes, he went to a nightclub in Glasgow and snapped a vertebra break dancing.”

“Typical,” said Miss Drumm, grinning to show me she appreciated the joke. “I remember Sandy Thorne when he was a paperboy for Slocombe's back when it was Ainslie and Sons. He used to bring our
Times
on his bicycle and leave it in a tin box stuck to the gate. I had a bit of a soft spot for him when he was fifteen and I was seven, and I used to swing on that gate for hours waiting to catch a glimpse.”

“I think that's the box that's on the gate at the Rough House road-end now,” I said. “For the postie.”

“Don't interrupt,” said Miss Drumm. “And one day I turned up a bit late to find Sandy trying like billy-oh to stuff the
Times
into the slot. But it wouldn't go. I had the key for the box, being a child of the family, and I opened it up.

“Well, lo and behold, inside there was a robin's nest with two blue eggs and the fiercest little robin ready to defend them with her life.”

“How marvellous!”

“Marvellous indeed. Sandy Thorne took both eggs and pelted them at the trunk of a rowan tree, then he swiped the nest out of the way, put the newspaper inside, and slammed the door shut.”

“No!”

“I never spoke to him again. I can still hear that little robin crying if I listen.”

I should be used to her by now; Miss Drumm delights in the sort of mawkish stories even Thomas Hardy would edit out with a blue pencil in the second draft. Normally I can roll my eyes and ignore them, but the horrors of the day had built up inside me until I was fit to burst, and for some reason the two blue eggs and the grieving robin mingled in my imagination with Mrs. McAllister and the two dead boys, and suddenly tears were very close. I had never cried in front of Miss Drumm, who was savage about what she called
blubbing
.

“Gloria,” she said, “I'm going to ask you again. What is wrong, my dear?”
My dear!
“Has there been bad news about young Nicky? None of these nurses ever tells me anything.”

“No,” I said again.

“So why are you troubled? You
have
been rocking the stone, haven't you?” This was what I hadn't wanted to tell Stig. Miss Drumm and her stone. “Twelve times, mark you!” she said. “If you miscount and do thirteen, carry on till twenty-four, I mean it. Don't you scoff at me, young woman! Don't think I don't know just because I can't see you.”

“Every day. Twelve times.”

“Hmm,” said Miss Drumm. “And yet you seem to be exhibiting just the same malaise as engulfed our old shepherd's wife when she stopped. They tested her for everything under the sun and none of the doctors could tell what ailed her. Then when she was too ill to carry out her duties anymore, and her husband took over, she rallied. She'd been to see that dreadful Billy Graham fellow in Glasgow, you see, and got the idea that rocking the stone was godless.”

“It's good to hear a story with a happy ending,” I said, ignoring the sideswipe at Billy Graham, who'd brought me great comfort when I read his sermons.

“Happy ending, my eye,” said Miss Drumm. “Once she was better the stone was neglected again, and she died a year later with a growth the size of a medicine ball in her belly.”

“For crying out loud.”

“And even the hallowed place couldn't save her,” Miss Drumm said.

“Lourdes, you mean?”

“Popish claptrap.”

“Walsingham?”

“Next door to the same thing.”

“Mecca?” This was just devilment but I couldn't resist it and, recognising that, she smiled at me. “Well, what then?” I said.

Miss Drumm sucked her teeth for a minute. She had good strong yellow teeth, not many at the back these days (although more than Walter), and she sucked them with relish whenever she was thinking hard. “I've never told you about the hallowed place,” she said at last. “And I make no apology for that. You didn't need to know.”

I had the oddest feeling I knew what she was going to say.

“But you must have seen it,” Miss Drumm went on. “The little place in the woods half a mile from the footbridge at William's Leap?” She paused, but I knew if I tried to speak my voice would betray me. She really
was
talking about the huttie. “My uncle William leapt across the gap on my father's mare taking a shortcut on the Boxing Day chase in 1920 and ribbed Fa about it until the day he died. Fa didn't dare to try and couldn't bear it that his brother had bested him. So he built a bridge—against my mother's express wishes and his own better judgement. He built a wooden footbridge.”

I had calmed my breaths enough to talk again. “So the hallowed place is the crypt?”

“Never!” said Miss Drumm. “Monstrous! The Drumms wouldn't dream of such a thing. Every Drumm there ever was is decently buried in the good earth at the parish church at Corsock, where I shall be before too long, I hope. Crypt! What nonsense.”

“Sorry!” I said. But still I was sure. And bewildered. In ten years she hadn't so much as mentioned it until today, when April's body lay under its floor.

“What do you mean, ‘hallowed place'?” I asked, trying to sound as interested as I guessed I should, but no more.

“Gloria,” said Miss Drumm. “You are unnerving me.”

“Is it a chapel?” I asked, guessing that would be as bad as a crypt in her eyes and, if I annoyed her, she might stop scrutinising me. But Miss Drumm, for the first time since I'd met her, looked—there was only one word for it—
shifty
.

“Consecrated,” she muttered at last through gritted teeth.

“And what is it you've never told me about it?”

“You've tired me out with your nonsense,” she said. “Get on through and see that boy of yours. Let me rest.” Then she set her jaw as though she would never open it again, slightly off-centre but tightly shut.

Nicky's room must have been the old serving pantry, adjacent to the breakfast room, back when the care home was a family house. It was smaller than the others, so between that and the connecting door, I got it for a good price. Or rather the money I gave the home bought more one-to-one care than I could have afforded if I'd insisted on a bigger bedroom. He didn't need the space. His narrow bed with the oxygen on one side and the fluids on the other left enough room for a chest of drawers where his pyjamas were kept folded. An armchair for me and a lamp to read by and there was no need for more. It was quiet, warm, tidy, and softly lit—my favourite place in the world.

“Hallo, my darling boy,” I said, bending over to kiss him. “Hallo, my little Harlem Globetrotter. That's some excellent dribbling you're doing today.” I picked the top pad from the pile of soft gauze we keep by his bed and wiped his chin. They used to use kitchen roll and once I was shocked to come in and see a toilet roll there. Then I was given these pads at the dentist one time after I'd had a tooth out, and they were so soft and so snowy white that I went back in and asked the receptionist for the company name and then told the home to buy them for Nicky.

“I've had quite a time since I left last night,” I said, settling down. “I don't want to burden you with any of it, but believe me—it's like a day at the beach coming here.”

“I'm not listening,” shouted Miss Drumm through the open door. “Say what you like and don't mind me.”

“I spoke to an old friend,” I said to Nicky, ignoring her. “Someone I haven't seen since I was younger than you. People don't change though, do you know that? You haven't changed since the first minute I set my eyes on you, not in any way that matters. And neither has my friend.”

“I have,” Miss Drumm shouted. “I used to have feet. And eyes that worked.”

“I thought you were tired out!” I shouted back and went to close the door, picking up the book on the way back again.

“Now then,” I said. “‘The Moon'. Except there isn't one tonight. ‘The Moon has a face like the clock in the hall … '”

The poem was so familiar after all these years, that I could let my mind drift, read it without thinking. What I should have foreseen, though, was that my mind would drift to that other night when children hoped for a moon as they lay in a clearing.

“‘And flowers and children close their eyes till up in the morning the sun shall arise.'” Stig and the dew and his moment of perfect peace. I remembered his voice saying
I was wet through and never slept another wink until Van was shaking me
.

“That's not right, Nicky, is it?” I said. “If you're awake you don't get shaken. Why did he say that?”

I turned the page.

“‘The Swing,'” I read and felt a jolt inside me. A Tarzan swing used to hang over the river near the bridge. Stig had said
the footbridge by the swing
. And the huttie was the hallowed place half a mile away. And Dunkeld, where Ned McAllister had gone to die, had a huttie of its own, by a waterfall. Something about all of that bothered me.