The Hanging Garden (18 page)

You must have begun to shiver.

‘What’s wrong, Ireen? Are you sick or something?’

Could be. The sweat is running down your skin.

‘Nothing. Could have the flu coming on. Better go home. Tell your mother I…’

‘But come down to us. I’ll ring Dr Keep.’

‘No. I’m going home.’

‘We’ll run you there.’

‘Walk a bit. Sweat it out.’

Trish obviously thinks you’re quite crazy, or could she know? Not possible Gil didn’t mention Eirene Sklavos, this black Greek and oddball character. As you fade away alongside this long ribbon of undulating bitumen, out of reach of Trish’s eyes, if not her laughter, you will not trust anybody again.

At Turramurra where this little pocket of leftover bush fringes the road a middle-aged man unbuttons himself with his left hand. He has an iron hook where the right should be.

You hurry past. In the dwindling glare a car pulls up. An elderly clergyman offers you a lift. Says he noticed the ‘Ambleside’ uniform. So much respect for your Miss Hammersley, a really exceptional lady. You accept his lift, from despair as much as anything. In spite of the respect Miss Hammersley has roused in him, why should an elderly clergyman be any more reliable than a middle-aged bloke with a hook for a hand unbuttoning himself and beckoning from a pocket of bush? Anything can happen. But nothing does. He puts you down at Lockharts’ gate.

‘Your mother is a lucky woman.’

Oh God, can’t recite family history. Thank the old boy for his kindness. You are mincing your words, simpering through these silly little baby teeth.

Nobody at home. Only the silence inside it keeps this house from falling apart, it is so fragile. The familiar objects, even in your own more or less private room, so unnecessary. Keep your hands off that diary. Better to explode in a shower of pus than to wallow in what I expect the secure, the ‘adults’, would see as a stream of self pity.

*   *   *

An extra spurt of week-end energy gardening for neighbours, running old ladies’ messages, shopping for the sick, has got Bruce his motorbike. Alison and Harold helped towards the end.

The tarnished monster stands propped on the broken concrete to the right of Alison’s garage.

‘It’s a second-hand BSA. Can’t be choosy in wartime, Reenie.’

Hardly remember what wasn’t wartime, but we all act and talk as though we did. A cloud of happiness envelops what we think of as before the war.

Bruce has been working on his bike. Chrome is beginning to gleam again through the veils of baked oil and patches of rust. The rigid grid above the rear wheel is what he refers to as a pillion.

‘When I’ve had a few practices around the place, I’ll take you for a ride, Reen.’

Ought to feel grateful for Bruce’s promise. He is inviting you to a celebration of power and fame. Sitting at the rear of Bruce Lockhart’s bike you will act as the equivalent of the flowing figure on the bonnet of Maxwell Fermor-Jones’s Rolls. What if Trish, swirled by Gil Horsfall in the Rolls, ever caught sight of you bumping along dislocated on Bruce Lockhart’s pillion. But Vaucluse and Cremorne are worlds apart.

*   *   *

The invite is issued on one of those evenings of early winter when a razor is running its edge over the skins exposed to it, and every bay round this almost landlocked harbour is roughed into leaden waves. Regardless of a difference in hemisphere and climate, you see the same razor skinning the prisoners of war across the straits up north, when not lending a hand in cutting throats. In Greece Greeks will be dying of this wind, gunfire, and the starvation which comes from a diet of weeds.

Greeks are fated to die, when here a pseudo-Greek is only numb from the south-easter and the very remote prospect of death. Unless a crash is thrown in your way, as you cling to Cousin Bruce’s ribs from the pillion of the second-hand BSA. We are on the ride to celebrate speed and status. B. has opened his mouth and is screaming into the face of the wind. You can feel his lungs expanded inside the cage of ribs. You can visualise Bruce’s skeleton, from the taut ribs, and the mouth and the eye sockets, which you cannot see but know.

‘Okay, Reenie?’ He calls back over his shoulder.

‘Okay! Okay!’ We are all okay since the Yanks came.

I can feel my forehead drained white below the roots of lifted hair. Eyes staring like Bruce’s in their sockets. Teeth not grinning, but clenched. Because this pseudo Australian is the crypto-Greek expecting the death which is aiming at her. But Brucie doesn’t envisage death for a moment. Australians are only born to live. To end in a cemetery or crematorium doesn’t bear thinking about. So you don’t think. When here is this morbid Greek thinking about the death which will release her. Whamm! You are floating back rejoining the bloodstains on the Pindus snow the brains mashed into the paving outside the National Gardens the choirs of worm-eaten saints all that you have ever known and felt and cried about and prayed for, on your knees, and in cold beds.

Let Gil Horsfall stay alive in Australia, it is what he deserves.

You cling even closer to Brucie’s ribs when there is no need, he is slowing down, coasting in the approach to some sort of destination.

We have arrived at this suburban mixed business with jerry-built milk bar added on. Bikes similar to Brucie’s are propped in the dust and devil’s pitchforks outside. The browned out light in the interior has turned the milk bar or soda fountain into a devil’s cave. Brucie’s mates are gathered at the bar gulping the stuff out of the metal floats, spooning up the ice cream, those of them who have scrounged or snitched cigs dragging on their loot, jerking out unintelligible information in their new, men’s voices. You would like to hear and understand, but you aren’t invited to come inside. No girl has been added to the circle of relaxed males stretching their thighs and their adam’s apples. Only the proprietor’s wife, more a priestess than a woman, sets the drinks whizzing, or drizzles from on high green or crimson synthetic flavours.

You walk about the other side of the road. It is no longer cold, but you warm your hands one in the other. They have absorbed the journey’s dust and some of the grease from the BSA. Down through the lantana scrub, the jungle of gums, pittosporum and looped vines, the harbour sets up a mauve glitter.

What are you here for? Will nobody tell you what to do? You are almost mewing like one of the unwanted cats their owners dump in the suburban bush, when Bruce comes out from his magic cave, carrying one of the battered floats.

He crosses the road. ‘Strawberry,’ he says, and turns back.

Strawberry must be for girls, whether they like it or not. Sipping the sickly stuff is at least an occupation, even though you feel you may fetch it up. Pour the contents into the dust, but what to do with the empty float in the next half hour, or eternity.

When eternity is Gil’s, Bruce and his mob have no part in it. Boring pseudo-men. And this float, with its pseudo-strawberry stickiness.

A greater raucousness in the brown mists of the cave across the road. A couple of indistinct figures are detaching themselves from the frieze strung out against the counter. Arrogance and self-importance give the giants a drunken look. They lurch out pulling up their belts, feeling their crotches.

‘Hi, whataboutit?’ one of them calls. All masculine confidence. The two stand there swaying and braying, thumbs hooked into the corners of pockets tighten the stuff round hips and crotches.

The second gallant has widely spaced pointed teeth, rather large, anaemic gums, and a fine fuzz on his bony chin. ‘Don’t tell me you’re so uptight, a bloke wouldn’t stand a chance of getting it in.’

They chortle for their own wit. Stumble against each other for support as they prepare to cross the road. What is both possible and impossible hangs like a pale globe above the three of us. The scrub the dusk are toppling over in a rush towards sea and the light that still skirts the bay. Bones and sticks are for breaking. Didn’t the Souliot women throw themselves off the precipice?

Till Bruce elbows his way between his mate, ‘Comoffut—waddaya thinken—she’s me sister.’

‘Go on! didn’t know you had a sister.’

‘… the relative—me
cousin
…’

‘On with your cousin, eh?’

Their sniggers are feathered with relief. ‘Cousins’s allowed, aren’t they?’

‘Well, good luck, Brucie.’

Bruce has become a gangling amateur of a man. He has let the side down. He kicks the stand from under the bike.

‘Come on,’ he orders sulkily.

Doesn’t sound as though he will ever forgive you for his offence against mateship.

You settle yourself as he kicks free of the stationary earth. After the first explosions, the wheels splatter some obstruction flat—the battered old aluminium float? We are toiling uphill in a cloud of fumes. Bruce’s ribs have contracted inside the cold shirt. The face you cannot see has not become the skull of the outward journey human eyes will be glooming in the sockets, eyebrows ground into each other.

You would like to say something consoling to Bruce. ‘Do you think she’ll make the hill?’ Which makes it worse.

Ally asks, ‘Where have you two been?’ If she condemns, there is a flicker of unwilling pride inside her condemnation—and gravy stains on what was once a pretty, floral apron. ‘Your tea’s in the oven—drying up fast.’ She has no time to waste on kids.

Harold comes in this other evening. He is carrying an evening paper. He is out of breath from that uphill short cut he takes from the ferry, or something could have excited or frightened him out of his normal composure. He is almost at the point of telling what makes his lips tremble, but it is against his nature to give anything away if he can help it. Perhaps he has been caught out soliciting girls or he’s been promoted at the Department.

He says in this funny voice, ‘The Germans have had it. The war in Europe is over.’

‘What—only in
Europe
?’ Bruce shouts. As though Europe hadn’t even been their affair. ‘The war won’t be over till we’ve socked the Japs.’

You are less than ever one of them though Alison the aunt lets out a little whimper. ‘Poor Gerry!’

‘Gerry?’

‘My sister—your aunt…’

Bruce sticks out his lower lip. Above it the eyes look blank. Heard of her of course, but forgotten. No more than a name and the face in a snap. What can a dead aunt mean to the living?

Harold who is not a soak, or at any rate not in the family circle, where he makes a parade of his ginger ale, says with careful solemnity, ‘This is an occasion where I propose to wet my whistle.’

Ally whose eyes have been straying towards the cupboard where she keeps her gin behind the Fowler preserving jars, throws back her head and screams through veined stringy throat. ‘Never heard you use such an old-fashioned expression!’

‘It’s what my father used to say.’

‘Your father! When you’re so keen on sounding up to date.’

Harold isn’t going to be deterred. He fetches out the stashed bottle of Scotch and wets his whistle. Harold who has always been bored by fatherhood except as a means of keeping Alison quiet, borrows his father’s virtue, old Dr Lockhart, to help celebrate the end of the war in Europe.

Ally cries, ‘Oh God!’ in what is between joy and despair, and makes no secret of the gin behind the preserving jars.

When the middle boys come in they say oughtn’t we go somewhere to celebrate the end of the war in Europe.

They’ve forgotten about you. It’s your fault of course—if you don’t tag on. It’s the best way to be forgotten. Outside this lopsided moon is hung above the empty clothesline and the fretted vegetable leaves. Anonymous cats are taking over. The boys’ laughter is swallowed up in the run towards the ferry. The little kids are breaking their toys and grizzling for their supper. A cold dew is settling on your hair.

‘Ireen?’ Ally calls from habit through the screen, but soon gives up to cut slices of stale sponge for her Col and Wal, and resume her whistle wetting session with her unusually considerate Harold.

Now that the war is over—the
real
war—
your
war—Cleonaki will surely write, and you will return to what belongs to you. And Gil to London? To the bomb craters and his mother’s coffin, and his friend Nigel Brown’s ghost. Gil himself a ghost haunting the garden on the precipice in Cameron Street, as you are haunting this mouldy back yard. Twin ghosts in the one haunting.

Is this where we belong then?

When you go in the two little boys are growing drowsy in the last stages of a squabble over the open pages of the atlas.

Gin-drowsy Ally murmurs, ‘This is the kind of night when children are got. Thank God I’m past it!’

Harold of the wet-whistle and careful enunciation, ‘No-one was ever cruder than Alison Pascoe when she sets out to be!’ His laughter implies neither approval nor censure, as he passes plump fingers and meticulously clipped nails through the silvery hair-do.

They look only vaguely at you—at the ghost who has been haunting them.

Afterword

A Note on
The Hanging Garden

DAVID MARR

Patrick White took one last look at
Flaws in the Glass
on the Australia Day holiday in January 1981 and posted the ‘self portrait’ to his publishers in London the next day. Hours later he began work on
The Hanging Garden
. As he had so often before, White would cope with the agony of waiting for his publisher’s verdict by plunging into the next book.

‘I have another novel coming along hot and strong in my head,’ he told the critic James Stern after Christmas. Friends who heard the news in those weeks worried White was working to the point of exhaustion. He had been so ill in December he feared he would die, and there had then been terrible storms in the house on Centennial Park when his partner, Manoly Lascaris, read the scathing portrait of his family in
Flaws in the Glass
. But White told the stage designer Desmond Digby he had no time to holiday. ‘He’s got to get this other novel off his chest straightaway.’

White wrote steadily through February. By happy accident,
Flaws in the Glass
was taking a long time to reach Jonathan Cape. On 20 February, Digby noted White was ‘pleased with start of new novel’. There is no sign White was ever anything but pleased with his work on the book. When his writing was going badly, he would moan about it freely to friends and publishers. He had abandoned two novels in the 1960s after tearing them to shreds in his letters. There was none of that with
The Hanging Garden
. Trouble lay elsewhere.