The Insistent Garden (30 page)

“Watch out!” yelled my father.

I moved to the side as he swung the ladder horizontal but when I looked back I had the object in my sight. Brown, crumpled and still.

“That's enough for today.” He picked a piece of dry mortar off the back of his hand. “Let's clean up.”

I wrung out the cloth while I eyed my father. I watched him balance the ladder against the house. I watched him smack dust off the back of his hands. Finally, as the back door groaned shut behind him I turned round and walked down to the end of the garden.

I saw a dead rabbit once. It had collapsed beneath the end of the high wall, a dandelion leaf still stuck between its teeth. I had longed to stroke its poor dead ears but something had held me back, and now, standing four feet from the object — in the grass — the same set of conflicting feelings came over me. I elongated my body, stretching my calves and lengthening my neck, until I could see what it was. A sock lay in the grass. Just a simple sock, curled up in the grass like a small animal inside its nest. I glanced at the wall, and then inched closer. I was almost upon it when I heard my name being called. Quicker than a sparrow pecking at worms, I snatched up the sock, stuffed it into my pocket and hurried up to the house.

“What were you doing down the end?” my father asked.

“Clearing up.”

“Well, hurry up. It's time for tea.”

I returned to the garden and started my ritual; I gathered up the tools, I closed the bag of mortar before dragging it to the side of the shed, all the time aware of the damp patch forming at the side of my skirt. Anyone could see it. Anyone with a sharp eye would know about the sock in my pocket, wouldn't they? I sidled through the back door; the newspaper was up.

Sixty percent cotton, forty percent acrylic, foot size ten. I turned the sock over in my hand as I sat on my bed. It felt cool on my fingertips and the temptation to slip it over my hand was immense. I sniffed the toe, drawing in a heady mixture of washing powder and soil. Then I lifted up my leg and pulled the sock over my foot, stretching its baggy cuff halfway up my calf. My toes tingled. Never in my life had my toes tingled. It took a moment to identify the feeling as pleasurable before I succumbed, slipping into the feeling, so damp, so sensuous, so deliciously cool. Then I wrenched the sock off and threw it across the room. What was I doing? I had hidden something from my father; I had lied, and now I was doing something unthinkable, obscene. I was wearing
his
clothes.

49

The high wall had small feet. I discovered this as I dug a hole for the climbing vine. The foundation was eaten away at the edges and cracked concrete showed just below the surface. The plant seemed smaller now that it had been removed from its pot and sunk into a hole. I wondered how fast it could really grow.

“You opening a brewery?”

I looked up from my work. “Archie! What are you doing up so early?”

“Someone starts digging and I come running. You have purchased the plant of the impatient gardener, I see. Wilf not around, is he?”

“No. Why?”

“Just checking.” He began his routine, demonstrating an unusually limber power kick as he came over his wall. He landed neatly, then scanned the house, swiveling the top half of his body round on moss-stained trousers.

I looked at the plant at my feet. “What do you mean, a ‘brewery'?”

“Didn't they tell you? You're planting a climbing hop, the ornamental one. Come autumn, that vine will be up the bricks, onto your roof, and mine, and we'll be knee deep in hops. Might even help hold that wall up.”

“Does it really grow that fast?”

“Oh, yes,” He looked over my shoulder. “Oh, Edie, the garden's coming on a treat.”

I smiled. “Come and look with me, Archie.”

We settled down to a serious inspection of the plants. Archie slipped into Latin without realizing he was doing it and it was during a discussion about
Brunnera macrophylla
that I heard the noise.

“Can you hear that sound?” I said.

“What sound?” Archie replied.

“That clipping sound.”

“Sweetheart, you know my ears are worn out.”

“It's coming from the tree.”

We looked towards the old oak tree that straddled the high wall. Something flickered just above the top. Hands. They were moving hands, snipping at twigs, brushing away clippings, and then snipping again. I stared in horror, unable to look, unable to not.

I gripped Archie's sleeve. “It's him!” But before he had time to respond the sound ceased. The hands disappeared behind the wall and I was aware of nothing but the wind poking around the garden, lifting leaves then dropping them.

“Archie,” I whispered, “he's trying to look over.”

“Calm down, he's just trimming the tree.”

“How did he get so high?”

“He must be on a ladder.”

A ladder.
I
had a ladder. “Archie, help me.” I ran towards the house.

“Edith, wait! What are you doing?”

“I want to see.”

“It's too heavy for you.”

“I have to see.”

“Mind your head.”

“Archie, get the end.”

“Careful.”

“Push it up. Higher.”

“Here?”

“There!”

“Archie, can you stand on the bottom rung?”

“Edie, are you sure?”

“I have to see over.”

“Edie!”

The rails shuddered; I moved up a step, grinding the top of the ladder into the bricks.

“Archie, can you hold it more firmly?”

“Are you really sure about this?”

“Yes, yes, I'm sure.”

“Hold tight, please,” he urged, flashing a pale tongue.

The ladder trembled as I climbed higher but the fear of falling off was eclipsed by a greater fear. The ground dropped away; the sky widened; leaves tickled my face. Then a new voice entered the garden. A roar. “Get down!”

My father looked different from above. I saw a face tipped upwards that I hardly recognized. Gravity had pulled his cheeks back into a smile and his eyebrows were stretched into friendliness. But the words shooting up towards me were familiar.

“What the
hell
do you think you're doing up there?”

“I. . .”

“Get down!”

I climbed down quickly, misjudging the bottom rung in my haste, jarring my heel onto the ground.

“What were you doing?”

“I'm sorry.”

He took a step towards me. “What
were
you doing?”

“Wilf, don't!” said Archie.

My father turned to the old man, his face creased with fury. “You can leave now, Archibald.”

Archie swallowed; I saw his Adam's apple plummet down his neck.

“That wall will destroy you,” he said, quietly.

“That's none of your business,” snapped my father. “Get off my property. I don't want to see you sneaking round here again.”

Archie glanced in my direction then walked towards his garden wall, the backs of his slippers crushed flat.

“What were you doing?” My father's face was close.

“I don't know, I'm sorry, I saw hands. . . I —”

“Hands! Whose hands?” Panic flickered in his eyes. “You mustn't go up the ladder. Ever. Do you understand me?”

“I understand.”

Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night.

Damp cellar air seeped beneath my clothes, yet the book warmed a square of skin on my lap. The words were blurred on the page and nothing could sharpen them. Archie was gone. Another line had been drawn on the page of my life, in a thick black pen. Yet I couldn't help return to that moment in my thoughts. The moment I had started to climb. The moment it had felt good.

50

Hands. Hands holding twigs
.

I could think only of the bodiless fingers next day. The big boulder felt rough against my legs when I sat down on it and settled my body into the depression in which it fit. When I looked up at the oak tree I saw drops of sap oozing up from the pruning circles left behind, a softly bleeding cut. Then I remembered the yellow brick I'd found back in November.
My
yellow brick. I hadn't pulled it out since that first time, scared of what I might see. But my yellow brick, I realized in a flash of panic, was gone.

I jumped up, rushed across to the wall and ran my fingers back and forth across the brickwork until at last I found it. Still yellow, still mortared with moss. I held my palm there for a few seconds before returning to the boulder, secure in the knowledge that no-one else had found it. But as I looked back up at the wall I failed to suppress a cry. The yellow brick had disappeared again.

I was calmer this time. I got to my feet slowly, took a leisurely route back to the wall and found the brick easily. I stood confounded. It felt like something had dragged my whole garden out of skew. I returned to the boulder and looked back up. It was then that I realized. The brick had not moved. My boulder had been turned.

My toes reflected in the bath taps, little skin stones that looked like they belonged to someone else. In spite of the sea horses racing across the wallpaper it was hard not to dwell on the last few hours. A person had moved the boulder in my garden. I tried to imagine the weight of it as it rubbed the skin of an unknown shoulder. A dog had barked in the night — somewhere far or somewhere close — but that was the only sound I had heard from between my sheets. I tried to relax, dropping my body beneath the water line, throwing off the rapidly cooling pool that had gathered between my breasts, and savoured the last pockets of warmth that swirled in eddies beneath the small of my back. I felt soothed by the sounds of the house: a teaspoon hit a saucer one floor below, someone opened a drawer. I looked towards the spider's hole. Only air seeped through from his bathroom to mine. Then, the house let forth a new sound as someone dropped an object, close by. My thoughts raced,
teaspoon, drawer
. But no match could be made with the sound inside the bathroom. Then I realized. It was coming from the other side of the wall.

I let my knees slip beneath the water line, covered my stomach with my hands and thought of the
other
bathroom. Was he brushing his teeth at the sink? Was he pulling a shirt up over his head? Or was he lying naked in the bath, his hands folded across his belly? Just like me.

51

It was the last day of June when I glimpsed my mother. Grinder had agreed to go for a walk and the usual battle with the lead ensued: the lunge for the collar, the snap of metal clasps, the fur-clad knees locked into position, but suddenly the dog took a spirited interest in exercise and I managed to get him outside.

There was debris on the front path, twigs and leaves and an apple core — half-eaten and brown on the edges. I picked it up and, examining the bite marks in one side, drew up a quick inventory of the teeth I knew: Vivian's tombstones, my father's neat squares, and Archie's rocks, which constantly flaked and split along fault lines. Yet none matched the marks cut into the apple. I slipped it beneath a pile of leaves and continued up the front garden.