The Insistent Garden (4 page)

“In a magazine that came in the post.”

Archie's elbow shifted closer to mine. “Tell me about this garden.”

“It was a place called Snowshill.”

“Go on.”

“I know it sounds strange, but there was something about it, something. . . that I really liked.”

Archie smiled. “I know that place, it's not so far from here. Built by an absolute nutter, Charles I think his name was, but he had a good eye, his collection of. . . what d'ya call it, bits and bobs and, well, stuff, is brilliant, and the garden, . . . you'd love it.”

The kettle whistled, a high insistent cry that made me feel sad for a second. I watched Archie's back as he stood up and spooned tea leaves into the pot. The curve in his spine distorted the squares on his shirt and his narrow frame struggled to support the apron pinned round his waist. “You eating alright, Archie?”

“Me? Oh, yes, I stuffed myself stupid on these yesterday. Want one?” He pushed a bowl of raspberries towards me. “They're whoppers this year.”

Juice flooded my mouth. “Delicious.”

“There's more.” He nodded towards the corner of the room where a red-stained box propped open the pantry door.

I glanced at my watch. “Maybe, next time.”

“So,” said Archie, pulling a cozy down over the teapot and leaning back in his chair, “how did it go with Jean up at the shop? She was keen to see you when I mentioned you might be looking for a job.”

I turned the tea strainer over in my fingers. “I didn't go.”

“Not at all?”

“No, not at all.” I measured his expression. “She would have found someone else by now, wouldn't she?”

“Edie,” he dragged his chair closer, “It would be good to get out of your. . . you know, your routine.”

“I thought it would be difficult, what with everything I have to do in the house and my father —”

“You didn't tell him, did you?”

I looked down at the
Amaryllis,
blood red petals. “No.”

Archie laid his hand on my arm, the touch of a feather. “There's no rush, sweetheart. Something else'll turn up.”

I felt my head nod. It hadn't been so long since I'd left school. After a few weeks of disorientation and wrung-out anxiety, I could still picture the cleverest girls as they marched down the corridors on that last day like conquistadors, wiping out their lockers and squeezing long, lingering hugs into the shoulders of their teachers before striding down the front steps in the direction of distant university towns without looking back. The rest — mooching around the foyer with the hounded look of those soon forced to make a decision — had swapped notes on jobs that everyone had heard about but no one could confirm, then dissolved out of the building as if the last ten years had never been.

The careers office was unlocked when I'd tried the door. Job leaflets —
welders
,
nurses, cooks
— stuffed so carelessly into their holders excited yet scared me, dog-eared promises encased in shiny red covers. I was about to put one into my pocket when I'd remembered the fish fillets we were having for dinner. They had to be defrosted before they could be put into the oven.

6

I liked to be in certain parts of the house when no one was about. Not just any part. Certainly not in the kitchen, where chores always waited for me — a saucepan soaking in the sink, rubbish pushing up the lid of the bin — and definitely not in the living room, where the air was always cold and the gravy-coloured sofa smelt of old flannels, but here, beside the front door. I liked to crack it open and see if anything was happening in the street. It wasn't easy. Our front garden had long since ‘got away,' as Archie liked to describe it. Vague memories of a lawn came to me occasionally, but now a mass of tangled shrubs pressed against the edge of the house like an extra wall.

I liked it when objects from the outside dropped through our letterbox. Dry-cleaning leaflets, adverts for jumble sales, requests for meter readings all drew me to the doormat in a rush, but most thrilling of all was the arrival of letters. They only arrived occasionally and were rarely addressed to me, but this never lessened the pleasure of hearing the letterbox flip open, seeing fingertips push through and watching an envelope drop onto the mat. Those postman fingers intrigued me, not just the skin bitten down the sides, but the nails, wide and flat and occasionally lined with dirt.

It was during one of these moments, sitting at the bottom of the stairs, that the letterbox sprang open without warning and I watched two letters fall onto the mat, licked sides facing up. I picked them up and read the first address.
Wilf Stoker, Eleven Forster Road, Billingsford,
Northamptonshire.
It sent a bone of disappointment into my body and slipping the first envelope into my pocket I examined the address on the second one. The handwriting was hard to read — the
E
partly formed and the
B
smudged — but after narrowing my eyes I knew for sure what it was. The words seemed to tremble as slowly, very slowly, I held the envelope at arm's length then brought it up towards my nose, sniffed and drew in a long, papery breath. Then I studied the name further, aware of an eerie feeling prickle down the back of my hands as I examined the bulging belly of the
B
and the heavy pen strokes that balanced the
E.

Ignoring the rules about noise, I pounded up the staircase. Neglecting the decree that my father must not be disturbed, I tapped on his bedroom door. During the silence that followed there was a moment to reflect. Would several rules broken together lead to greater disapproval? Could shouting while thumping be considered a single offence? My breathing seemed louder by the time the door opened and a draught slipped out.

My father stood before me in his pyjamas, his trousers white, his jacket tinged blue. Somewhere in the mist of anxiety that damped down my senses I remembered a moment that had come before; the moment when I had plunged his navy sweater into the sink and watched an inky cloud float sideways and downwards and then settle on the pristine threads of his pyjama jacket that was soaking at the bottom of the basin. I'd washed it six times; he had counted.

“Why are you disturbing me?” he said.

A simple question. Had it begun with my name, or had it been lengthened with a word of affection, or even been accompanied by a shrug of his shoulders, it would not have caused my heart to thud inside my chest the way it did. But lips drawn into a line completed this sentence. “I have a letter,” I said. I fingered a tissue in my pocket, wanting his reply, yet anxious it might implicate me. He took the letter out of my hand and read the address. “It's for
him
,” he said.

I imagined his heart racing — the persistent thump, thump, the vibration on his ribs, but all I could see was a muscle tighten in his cheeks and a small shudder pass through the envelope.

“Yes.” I studied a thread that rested quietly on his collar.

“We have to send it back.”

“Yes.”

“I'll keep it for now and you can give it to the postman to return,” he said.

“Alright.”

The door closed silently and neatly. But not before something sneaked out, a slip of air, a feeling. Or a remnant of something else.

The timbre of the house had altered by the time I climbed out of bed and tiptoed downstairs later that night. Each stair had a unique creak, fine-tuned by the darkness, which mapped out my downward journey better than any flashlight. I imagined I could feel the changing weight of the air as I groped my way towards the cellar. The door squeaked and then sighed when I felt for the switch. It snapped on to reveal a low room of claustrophobic proportions. A nook awaited me at the bottom of the stairs: a chair, a cardboard box upturned, a folded blanket, all hidden behind a wall of stacked boxes. I wished the chair would not creak so as I arranged the blanket across my knees, reached into the first box and pulled out a book. Page eighteen, stanza twelve.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear.

The
ray
was damp. Damper than the
ocean bear
that narrowly avoided the circle of mildew that had grown across the page. I wrapped my finger inside the hem of my nightdress and wiped the paper, smoothing off the mould, like cleaning the ears of my first doll. This was all I had left. Of my mother. Three hundred and forty-eight books of poetry, hundreds of pages, thousands of words, packed into cardboard boxes and touched only by me. I blew across the page, looking for a mother's fingerprints, and read on. It felt so lovely to lose myself in the lines but another thought kept interrupting the flow. Where had my father put the letter? Was it on the sideboard? Was it in a drawer hidden beneath his socks? Or was it still in his hand, curling into his thoughts and ratcheting up the fear that blighted our lives?

I laid a piece of tissue into the margin, slipped the book back into the box and crept upstairs. As I relaxed down onto my pillow, I remembered, not the envelope that had been pushed so intrusively into my home, but the last lines I'd read of the poem.

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air
.

7

I knew it was happening again even before I reached the bottom of the stairs next morning. The hall reeked of wallpaper paste and a pair of scratches ran, not entirely directly, across the floorboards towards the living room door. My father was up the stepladder, spread-eagled against the end wall when I reached the doorway, a pasting brush gripped in one hand and a man-sized sheet of wallpaper flapping in the other. Some invisible force seemed to be pulling the glued side away from him, and his dilemma — I realized in the second it took me to throw my cardigan onto the sofa — was how to connect the paper to the wall.

“Help me!” he wailed, quarter-turning his head towards me.

“Can I hold something?” I said, moving closer so I could see his face.

“Get the end!” he yelled, “The deer are getting out of hand.”

The deer. I suddenly saw them. They were racing across the living room wall like escapees from a drug-testing laboratory. He'd misjudged the wallpaper seams badly and body parts were everywhere: animal legs projected from heads, torsos were sliced at the waist and clipped antlers were collecting on the edges of the sheets like trophies from a stag hunt. I stepped onto the ladder and eased the paper out of his hands.

“Do you think we should buy something a bit more. . . geometric next time?” I separated a pair of nostrils from the end of a roughly cut muzzle.

“Cheap,” was all he said.

My father had little patience with patterns. Saturday mornings were often spent rummaging inside the sale bin at the hardware shop where he'd discovered a treasure trove of unwanted wallpaper covered with objects: vintage cars, aeroplanes, flowers in baskets and end of line flock. But he rarely stood back and looked at the scenes taking shape on our living room wall, oblivious to the rows of birds flying across painted skies or the roses pressed against the sides of purple-striped pots.

We'd had them all. Layer after layer, which fattened the wall, shrank the room and soothed my father's anxious heart. I'd lost track of the number of times he had wallpapered the living room wall. Not every wall, just the ‘party' wall, as he called it. The misleading nature of this word had confused me as a child, the way it suggested that pasting layers of paper onto it would lead to some sort of celebration, dancing, music, exotic food even. It took a reader's letter in the newspaper to enlighten me:
the party wall is the boundary that separates neighbours
in semi-detached houses
.

I stepped down from the ladder and looked up at his work.

“I wonder. . .” I checked his profile.

“What?”

“I wonder if that one might be upside down.”

He didn't reply at first but something flickered behind his eyes. “It's getting it up there that matters.”

“Yes.”

“I don't want to hear,” he added quietly.

“Hear what?” I ventured.

“What
he
has to say.”

I squeezed the brush in my hand. “Do you hear?”

“Sometimes.”

I heard too. I'd never mentioned it to my father but a voice had been coming through our living room wall for as long as I could remember. At first I thought it came from inside my head but I soon realized the only time I ever heard the voice was in that part of the house. I never caught an actual sentence, but maybe you don't need words to know what someone is saying. No highs, no lows and no changes of pace, the bodiless voice was monotone, an even commentary that came and went and spoke to no one but itself.

I checked my father's profile for change. “I thought I might go and see Una for a bit this evening.”

“Not for long.”