The Hanging Garden (15 page)

He pulled up a chair and sat down beside me at the desk, asked me what I was writing. I told him I was making notes for a school essay we had been asked to write. On what theme? How I see myself. That should be interesting, when you show us nothing of yourself, Irene, how you think or feel, anyone would postulate that you don’t care for us. His voice dried up. He hummed a bit. He must have washed his hair. It had never looked so silvery, it sent out little waves of brilliantine. How is it, he asked, you’re writing this essay when you’re leaving the local school and starting next term at Ambleside? I was dripping by now, choking, what with Harold’s hair and my own stupidity. When I thought to say, with my last gasp, that’s right, but it will come in useful sooner or later, it’s the sort of thing they ask you to write.

Luckily Harold did not seem all that interested in the ‘notes for an essay’. His mouth was pleating and moistening at the corners as I had seen it before. ‘Perhaps you have a literary talent,’ he said, his eyes vague if they hadn’t been concentrated on some intention which made him both sad and, yes, cruel. As concentration increased I was able to slip the diary into the drawer. He did not notice. He was drawing me between his knees. I have never fainted, almost once when Evthymia took me to Kapnikarea on Holy Friday and we kissed the face of the Panayia, now again I was on the point of fainting, what with the floating hair, the pressure of his thighs, and a thrumming sound from inside his shirt. Till I noticed the red lobes to his ears, and a razor nick he had made shaving the cleft in his chin. I despised myself more than I hated Harold.

While taking my head in his hands he is mumbling, ‘Always so clean and neat, Irene, there’s nothing like sluttishness to put a man off, when he has spent his life aspiring after perfection.’ The hands were tightening on my head, the thighs drawing me close to him, the mouth opening, glistening, like a sleepy monster roused by a lone sprat behind the glass of an aquarium. I might have succumbed to this dangerously luscious anenome if it hadn’t been for the smell of turps which had begun to drown the beautiful silvery perfume drifting out of recently shampooed hair. Behind the helmet in which his hands were encasing my head, a harsh halo of turps had almost completely taken over.

It gave me the opportunity to gasp, what were you painting—Harold?

He postponed his meal. Perhaps wondering whether the sprat was a bigger fish than he had bargained for, the silvery blue of the eyes became dazzling underwater spotlights.

‘The movement of forms,’ he told me ‘through space by natural reaction, I mean nothing can resist nature’s will though it may not be immediately visible to the obtuse human eye.’

Harold’s inhuman eye was obviously daring me to resist.

‘I always fail in what I set out to do,’ his chest twangled despairingly ‘and cannot persuade myself, like some artists, that truth lies in failure and the unknowable.’

He suddenly bends, and sticks the thin tip of a tongue which a moment before had been broad and furry, into my right ear, almost as deep as the drum it sounded at the moment of penetration.

‘Do you understand, darling?’ he laughs, ‘I bet you do.’

‘I would like to draw you Irene, on your bed—without your clothes—charming though they are.’

Without waiting for an answer, he picked me up and dumped me on the bed, and started arranging pillows, and arranging, and from there might have begun tearing at my clothes as though they were the wrapping of a parcel which prevented him getting at its contents quick enough.

When I’ve got to know you. Got your form and texture by heart I mean—I think we’ll have a cat to elongate beside you, a big blue Persian with angry eyes and pink tongue.

It gave me my opportunity.

‘I don’t think Aunt Alison likes them. I don’t think I do either. They make me itch and sneeze.’

‘I knew it! You’re turning out to be a dreary Philistine like all the others—and your Greek skin offers enormous tonal difficulties beside the blue cat I visualise.’

Outside, the kookaburra is tearing the garden apart. A cloud of finches and wrens are shedding their breast feathers as they beat against the glass.

‘Let me see your nipples at least.’

Harold’s hands which I had thought soft and pink are as hard and dry as turpentine has made them, with soot in the cracks.

I might have lost, knotting with those hard hands, if a worse clatter had not set up, competing with the kookaburra. I realised it was Alison, those scuffed brogues marching through her house.

Harold breathed, Oh Lord, and slithered quietly in the opposite direction, into the garden, only upsetting a garbage bin.

‘Ireen?’ Alison calls. ‘Where are you?’ and on charging through the doorway of my room, ‘What are you doing?’

‘Thinking.’

She was looking like a thin hen somebody with evil intentions had been chasing through the heat.

‘Not very healthy, lying on your bed, on a fine afternoon.’

It was Alison who was looking unhealthy.

‘Who won the match?’

‘It isn’t over. I left because I have a migraine coming on. The Parmores will bring the little ones back. The men can look after themselves.’

Apparently satisfied nobody else was in ill health, she went stamping out to the bathroom. ‘Cricket!’ she moaned, tablets rattling like dice in a tumbler, till a slosh of water silenced them.

‘I don’t expect somebody kind would like to make me a cup of tea,’ she called back.

‘That’s just what I’m doing. Or at any rate I’ve put the kettle on.’ It was Harold in the kitchen.

Ally could not have known what to answer. So I left them to their shared silence, or the argument they were brewing for when the kettle blew its whistle. I went into the garden.

This sad, sandy patch, all clothesline and failed vegetables, lacy cabbages, scribbley peas, rambling pumpkins. In Australia it is virtuous to grow your own vegetables while conning the greengrocer into selling you his wilting varieties cheap. The Lockhart garden is full of Ally’s failures—and Harold’s avoidances. And birds which nobody notices as they knock off the grubs Ally’s vegetable ventures encourage. And cats—here for the birds, and more particularly, the overturned garbage bins—toms with swollen cheeks growling over chop-bones. Harold does not recognise cats, unless the aesthetic ones with tonal values. Ally sees them only when she drives past in her old car through a loneliness of lantana scrub.

Does Ally’s car correspond to the tree-house Gil and I built and left behind. No, we didn’t. We were only forced.

One of the predatory cats stalked across the scuffed sandy ‘lawn’ flicking an angry tail. She sat for a moment preening herself with a licked paw. I should not have dismissed cats in my conversation with Harold, saying they made me sneeze and itch. A handy lie—I have never
known
a cat. But would like to. I feel very close to them. I would love to stroke a cat’s fur, from its bat’s ears down to the tip of its snake’s tail. Cleonaki would not have permitted an animal.

After she had done her face, (this slinky tortoiseshell could only have been a female—no swollen-cheeked, moth-eaten tom) she loped swiftly across the lawn into the lacy cabbages, and re-appeared in exit over the grey paling fence.

Almost at once the back door whammed. Harold, too, was making an exit. Where the lovely tortoiseshell loped, Harold stalked while hoping any observer might see it as a normal walk. Harold was taking the shortcut through a gap in the fence to the track which leads to the ferry. As he crossed the lawn I might not have existed. He looked through me, dismissing an experience which had not turned out the way he would have had it go. Only for an instant the eyes turned on, and you felt he might be saving you up for the future. Squeezing sideways through the gap in the grey palings (the stomach would only just make it) a shred of the exquisitely tonal gear was left behind on a rusty nail. The last of Harold drifted back as a muttered, ‘Fuck.’

There was nothing to keep me, so I went back inside.

Ally called, ‘Who’s that?’ and at once more hopefully, ‘Is it Ireen?’

She was stretched out on her bed in her slip, a strip of wetted lint covering her eyes. Her temporary blindness should have made it easier to face her. But I felt guilty. It wasn’t only for Harold’s behaviour, and her relationship with my mother, it was for the whole undisguised shambles of Ally Lockhart in an old beige slip: the bruises on her shins, the thin strips of what had been breasts, the flaking lips in a face the weather had roughed and reddened. I have never stroked a cat. I should have been able to stroke my aunt if I hadn’t felt so paralysed. At least she would have hated it (or so I think), and that let me off a little of my guilt.

Perhaps it was from not being able to see me that she became more confidential than ever in the past. What she resented most was callousness in human beings, by which she meant men—husbands. She went so far as to name him. Men’s bodies last better than women’s and husbands take advantage of it.

‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this,’ she said. ‘A child. But children, specially you, Ireen—know more today—too much—and at the same time not enough. You can’t—the experience of life. I wish I had had a
girl
child…’ After letting you see everything to put you off womanhood. But wanted you to share her suffering. ‘Those boys of mine will grow into men and despise me for being old, ugly, and their slave. Sometimes I think I’d rather have a poof. Might too. Good God, no. I can’t
possibly
.’

Presently we hear the little ones clattering in from the street. Ally’s back arches on the bed and she tears the bandage off her eyes. ‘What if the Parmores? That would be the last straw! No, Col and Wal will have given them enough. And they wouldn’t want to face the boring mother…’ So she sinks back. ‘Be a darling, Ireen, and feed them. You’re so capable…’ she sighs.

Fortunately Col and Wal are still munching popcorn and sucking lollies. They want nothing. Hardly notice you are there. Run into what was once their room, to fetch a few toys. You hear the door slam in the writing table. As you go in to protect your secrets, the key tinkles on the floorboards.

Col asks, clutching his Donald Duck, ‘What are you always writing, Reenee? Is it a story?’

‘Yes, a story.’

Wal asks ‘What about, Reen?’

‘The lot of us.’

They have a giggle.

‘Will you read it to us?’

‘No need.’

More giggles as they run out to the veranda, Wal scattering bits of his meccano set.

Tonight I am the meccano set no-one will ever put together, even if all the bits are there.

*   *   *

Whatever got into you to keep a diary. Safer to share your secrets with a mirror. Shan’t write any more. Ought to destroy it but think of all those little white moths taking wing, spreading the news. Burn it? Under the wad of tinkling carbon the core of the matter will lie waiting to be read. Steamy emotions are difficult to kindle. You have strung the key to the drawer on a chain, and wear it round your neck. Even this is dangerous.

‘Ah, keepsakes,’ Harold says at breakfast in the toneless voice with which he clothes his most feeling censure. ‘I wonder
whose
snap has pride of place in Irene’s locket.’

Bruce sniggers, ‘Lionel Manley perhaps!’

Keith comes in with ‘Lionel Manley? You don’t say! There’s a fair few of the girls have crushes on Lionel the Lily. You’d be surprised. Hot or frigid, it don’t make no difference!’

Harold speculates with dead indifference, ‘To which category I wonder, does our Irene belong?’

Bruce says you are a dark horse, no-one has found out yet, unless it’s …

Just then her aunt appears with another dish of snags to appease her men.

‘Oh Ireen’s the passionate type like me. Aren’t you, darl?’ Ally gushes.

Everybody joins in the laugh then the boys settle down to wrapping their teeth round food, their lips soon as greasy as sausage skins, bloodied with tomato sauce.

But whose face would Bruce consider you might be wearing in the ‘locket’?

Bruce and Keith are growing at the same rate as Gilbert Horsfall—or as Gil was when you last saw him. The Lockhart brothers are growing hairier every day. If ever at table Bruce lays his arm alongside yours it prickles like horsehair in some old burst mattress. On these occasions his breathing grows more noticeable. He says he’ll take you for a drive riding pillion when he gets that motorbike—‘if you’re not afraid.’ You aren’t because it’s likely to be some way off. He is saving money from the jobs he does at week-ends and in the holidays when the climate doesn’t damp his enthusiasm. Yes I think I’m safe from Bruce (or ‘Bruise’ as they pronounce it.)

It is Bruce who is bringing you this letter on the last Tuesday before term starts at ‘Ambleside’. Know it as Tuesday. You will always remember it as Tuesday because this is the first letter you ever received with an Australian stamp on it, and Ally has finally bought you the uniform for the next terrifying phase of life in an Australian school.

The letter itself is frightening enough—‘Bruise’ has been up to the box. He advances into the back yard holding the envelope by a corner. You turn to face him.

‘A formal letter for Miss Irene Sklavos.’

He minces towards me. His attempt at a refined accent, and the hairy wrist with its metal watchband as he jiggles the letter under my nose is meant to make the situation humiliating. The key on its chain lies cold between your painful breasts. Yes, you are humiliated.

If he leaves you to the letter it doesn’t mean he isn’t watching from inside the house. They are all watching, Alison and Harold for once united in boring into the contents of the envelope.

Kyrie eleison amongst the fretted cabbage leaves and silver snail tracks. Dragging at the corner of the envelope you make this prayer of joy and fear, crumbling into the Greek reffo you will always be.

  The last must be first

       Just a line from your fellow reffo

           Gil

Doxa to Theo for these palpitations, this elevation, under the empty clothesline tingling with its droplets of moisture.