The Insistent Garden (5 page)

“No, not for long. An hour, maybe?”

“I might need you to help me outside, we have to get that bit finished at the back end and. . .”

I waited. He had me suspended. Every day he had me suspended, waiting for his sentences to end, waiting to find out how he would be. And when it came it was never much, few highs, few lows, no changes of pace, but every word was loaded.

“. . .alright.”

His shirt had escaped the back of his trousers as he reached up to smooth a bubble of air out from beneath a deer's bulging flank. It was going to be a good day.

Una Bates lived at the end of a narrow alleyway not far from my house. A girl was attacked there once, years ago, but I always walked that way when I visited her home. Vivian would have said I courted danger if she knew the way I strolled, quite slowly, down between the backs of the houses just as light seeped from the sky, but I liked it, the way I could see heads bob in kitchen windows as people unpacked the remains of packed lunches, and the dogs sniffed half-heartedly at the back gates. Una was my only friend. Most of my school friends had faded away during my childhood. Their loyalty — stretched taut over the years by my father's erratic behaviour — finally snapped the day he came to the school and made a scene. It wasn't a loud scene, no drawing back of curtains, no announcing asides to an audience, but a small act that drew attention to my family in a way that labeled me as different. He didn't usually come to parents' evenings. Mine was always the paper with the cross that excused the absentee parent, yet on that day he sat at the classroom table in crumbling silence, his fingers folding triangles into a corner of my essay and with his foot tapping incessantly on the floor. Then he complained. Not in a measured, reasonable way, but shouting and swearing before he bolted down the school steps like a frightened animal. As word spread in increasingly fantastical sentences, I stopped giving him letters from the school, I kept all mention of parent-teacher evenings to myself and I stopped inviting friends to my home. But my English teacher came to the house once. She'd knocked loudly on the front door and pushed her way into our hall on a wave of shrill pronouncements about my high exam results and eye for detail only to visibly wilt beneath my father's stare. She left in a hurry, her jacket pulled tight across her chest.

Only Una still came to the house. We'd met in my final year at school; she was a last minute new girl, thrown into the sixth form a few months before our final exams and she needed a friend. She'd traveled with her parents to India, Thailand, Fiji and places I couldn't even pronounce. She was new to the country and new to the town; she needed a friend and I was going spare.

Una often came to the house when my father was at work, placed her shoes neatly by the doormat, sat with me at the kitchen table and left well before his return. She'd been fascinated by our house from the first day, “Had a funny smell” she'd said, “but not in a horrible way.” Rather like the days her grandma made fish pie and left it in the oven too long. She liked to explore, flicking the tassels of the lampshades as she went through the living room and sniffing Vivian's assortment of bath salts left behind on the bathroom shelf. But what delighted her most was the mangle. She adored the antiquated apparatus that sat in the corner of our pantry and had peeled off her socks at her first sight of it, dunked them in the sink and squeezed them through the mean lips of the roller with unconcealed delight. A bathroom sponge had followed; then in a final thrilling act she had forced through a marmite sandwich, oozing streaky black fat, which left us both weak with laughter.

Una's father was a kind man. He was the one who answered the door whenever I knocked. He looked genuinely pleased to see me and always sent me up the stairs on the back of the same remark, “She
says
she's doing her homework” followed by a mock sigh. He never tired of that even though Una had now left school and I never tired of it either, happy to be part of an ordinary house for a small part of the day.

Una was lying loosely on her bed when I entered her room. She read a magazine, her heels waved above her head. “Edith, I didn't think you'd make it,” she said, shifting her weight up onto her elbow.

“I haven't got long.”

“No need to explain.” She turned a page. “Have you seen this funny thing in here? It's called a hula-hoop.”

I looked over her shoulder. “What do you do with it?”

“Twirl it round your hips, as far as I can see.”

“Why?”

“Fun, I suppose.” She turned towards me. “Are you alright?” Nothing happen at home, did it?”

“No.”

“Something's on your mind though.”

“I saw this photograph, today.”

“What photograph?”

“Of a garden.”

“What sort of garden?”

“One of those big rich ones. It's quite near here, just beyond Stony Ridge.”

“And?”

I sat on the bed. “Have you ever seen something and for some reason been unable to stop thinking about it?”

“Mr. MacKenzie comes to mind, I used to live for English class. Where did you see this picture?”

“In a magazine; it came in the post. I can't explain it very well, but there were these beautiful flowers there, but it wasn't just that.”

She sat up. “What
was
it?”

“I don't know.”

“Was it something about the place?”

I thought. “I really don't know.”

“
You
could plant some flowers, couldn't you? Your garden's big enough. Archie'd give you some seeds, he'd love it.”

“My father would never let me.”

“No.” She looked down at the magazine. “What about a hula-hoop, would he allow that?” She smiled.

For some reason it was Vivian's hips that came into my head, swaying round and round, rubbing red onto the inside of the hoop. “No, of course not, no.”

Una leaned against me. “Edith, you know I'm leaving next week.”

“I know. Tuesday at ten o'clock.”

“London's not so far, you know and I'll be in student digs. You could come and visit me. You'd have to sleep on the floor of course.”

“I probably wouldn't get to sleep if it was just the floor.” I laughed.

“No, you probably wouldn't.”

“What are going to do now school's over, Edith? Have you thought any more about it?”

“Oh, you know, there's so much to do in the house —”

“Edie,” she squeezed my arm, “there really isn't.”

“But my father, he can't cope on his own.
You
understand.”

“Of course I understand, but one day you're going to have to leave him.”

“I know. I'm just not ready, I. . .”

“When will you be ready?”

“Oh, Una, don't make it so hard.”

She put an arm round my shoulder. “Edie, you can do it you know, everyone leaves home sooner or later, you just have to look towards the horizon rather than at what's behind you all the time.”

“I know that. Please don't talk about it. I will move out — when I'm ready.”

Dusk had settled grey onto the street when I set off for home, yet Una's house looked welcoming when I turned to look back. She was starting a new life in another town. She'd be living in a place I'd never seen.

I used to think about leaving home when I was a child. A bag stuffed with clothes was a regular part of my more adventurous dreams and I'd even brought home a train timetable from the station once but when I'd rummaged at the back of my father's wardrobe then slithered beneath his bed looking for a suitcase, I couldn't to find one. It's still there, that timetable, lying at the bottom of my drawer, all departure times long past.

The horizon looked limp when I looked up the hill beyond my house, sagging at the edges where the trees met the sky. And there it stood, the stranger in the wood, its branches sticking out in every direction, uncomfortable with itself.

Blackbirds were warming up their throats when I looked out of my bedroom window later that evening. The brick extension built onto the rear of my house forced my gaze towards the back fence beyond which it settled on a vanishing point deep in the woods.

The far end of the high wall looked solid enough from here in my room and I took comfort from the ninety-degree angle between the bricks and the ground, but occasionally I wondered how many more years it could brace itself against the wind that buffeted round the garden seeking out weak points and gouging honeycomb spots into the bricks. Hawthorn bushes filled the middle of my view. Dull and lanky, they had colonized a large area behind the house and any routes through were testimony to movements in the garden: a path of flattened weeds along the base of the high wall, a faint trail from the back door to Archie's side of the garden and a groove along the back fence where animals came through during the night.

Ground lay beneath the hawthorn bushes, but I rarely saw it. Only on the most blustery days would the wind tear back a branch and expose the soil below, bare and anemic and dry.

The remainder of the garden was grass; it began the season pointed and green and ended it matted and yellow, empty of sap, empty of the smallest sign of life. Occasionally I questioned. From the safety of my head I sometimes wondered if we might drip oil between the joints of the lawnmower and cut the grass or even run a piece of sandpaper across the blades of shears and clear out the old hawthorn. But my father had no interest in the plants crowding round his back door. He only had interest in the wall.

I opened the window and leaned out, trying to widen my view but as I did so a breeze leaned in, dragging up goose pimples, so I drew back into the room and closed the window. Creases lined the Snowshill garden when I sat down on my bed and pulled the photograph out of my pocket. I thought of my own garden as I rubbed my fist across the page, trying to make the hedges stand straight. I turned the photograph over and noticed a poem printed on the other side.

Elysium is as far as to
The very nearest Room

“Elysium.” I said the word aloud; it felt warm on my tongue. I reached over, lifted a dictionary from my bedside table and flicked through. The
E
's arrived quickly.

Elysium
/
I'liziem
/
noun & adjective.
A place of perfect happiness.

New details jumped out as I looked back down at the photograph: a broken gate at the bottom of a hill, a cloud stuck in a tree. I could almost smell the apple blossom that peeped out from the top left corner, and in spite of the smear of butter running up the trunk of the pear tree, none of the beauty had been lost. As I fingered the edges of the photograph I became aware of a mixed feeling, a simmering resentment tied to an unspecified fear. How I'd love to find out what lay behind the apple tree in the bottom left hand corner. I looked down at the poem and down there, hidden inside the second stanza, I thought I saw something.

8

It was the unmistakable thud of a spade hitting the ground that woke me the next day. For a moment I couldn't recall where I was but when I saw light squeeze through a hole in my curtains I remembered — yet another day was about to begin.

I peeled my ear from my pillow, got out of bed and stood to one side of the window. Only a sliver of garden was visible when I looked down at the hawthorn shrubs below but I could just about make out the shape of a person half way down the garden. Falling hair obscured his face, but his stance was unmistakable. My father was digging into a pile of sand that lay at his feet. A rhythm was going, elbow up, elbow down, followed by a bend in his body as he dug, lifted and stirred. His shirt had come loose from his trousers and the tongue of it flapped across his back with every stab at the ground. The urge to slip back into my bed — possibly still warm — was immense. I wished I could sleep longer, but today was the same as any other day, same pace, same texture, and same heavy weight.