The Child Garden (9 page)

He had probably had girlfriends before, I told myself. It didn't mean anything. In fact, he might be playing it up just to make me jealous. I wished I could have told him that I had an old boyfriend staying for a few days and return the favour.
Golden Boy Tarrant
, he had said, which sounded jealous already. Then suddenly, the rest of his words struck me.
Nowhere to be seen and no one ever asked why.

Finally I knew what had really been troubling me about the bridge and swing and the huttie and the clearing—what I had so nearly grasped last night. I had a firm hold of it now.

Fourteen

Incarceration was starting to
show on him. His scalp, which had been so gleaming, was dull now, even flaky in places, and the corners of his mouth looked dry and sore too. His eyes were hollow above and puffy below, his glasses magnifying both.

“You don't look well,” I said. He was kneeling in the living room laying a fire, with Walter Scott lying on his feet and both cats watching him, one on each arm of the couch.

“Glad you're back,” he said. “Can you get some coal? I'll carry it from the back door.”

“Stig, you can go outside,” I said. “Honestly, no one ever comes and you can hear them from the top grid anyway.”

“No one except those cops,” he said.

“And it's logs anyway,” I told him. “In the wee shed by the bottom door. Through the scullery, through the old farm office, and out the far end.”

He blanched, gazing at me. “There's a third door?” he said. “Is it locked?”

“Maybe you'd feel less tense if you weren't keeping so many things quiet,” I said to him. I picked up Dorothy and tried to use her as a muff, hoping she'd stay draped over my hands as long as we were in here—there is nowhere like Rough House for cold—but she wriggled, all four legs splayed and all claws out, then she jumped down, going to sit near Walter and giving me an imperious look.

“What things?” said Stig.

“I'll go first,” I said. “No, don't turn away; look at me. I want to see your face when you hear this. Duggie Morrison is Nicky's dad.”

For a minute it looked as though he couldn't understand me, as though he couldn't parse the words to make the meaning. And then his eyes opened so wide that his glasses slipped down his nose.

“Van the Man was your husband?” he said. He sat right back, trapping Walter's paw under his leg. Walter struggled free. “
You
were married to
Van
?”

“What's giving you all the trouble?” I said. “That he snagged me or that he let me go?”

Stig hung his head then and tried not to laugh. “Sorry, Glo,” he said, rubbing his face. “No offence, but … Van was always a bit of a … flash git. And you're … with the books and—”

“So you being here is quite a coincidence,” I said, ignoring him.

“Hand to God, Gloria, I hadn't even thought about you for thirty years when I saw you driving the other car. If you'd changed your hair like everyone else, I'd have kept driving.”

“Twenty-eight years,” I said. “And none taken.” He started to bluster, but I shushed him. “It's okay. I know how uncool I am. I know what an odd couple we made, Duggie and me.”

“Don't say that!” said Stig. “Don't put yourself down.”

“Is that what you heard me doing?” I said, and he blushed again.

“What went wrong?” said Stig. “Was it … you know?”

“No!” I said. “Was it Nicky? No, of course not. I mean, a new baby's a strain on any relationship. But no.”

The truth was I found it hard to remember the end of my marriage. I was clear about the beginning. Duggie swept me off my feet. He brought flowers and little stuffed animals with satin hearts and messages written on them.
Be mine
and
Sweetie-pie
and once a white kitten with blue glass eyes and a pink velvet tongue that said
Your Purr-fect
.

My purr-fect what?
I had asked him, but he didn't understand.

He had come for Sunday lunch with my mum and dad. My mum flirted with him and my dad simply stared as if he didn't believe it. That hurt me more than anything in our five years of marriage: the thought that my own father didn't get what a tall, good-looking, successful, confident man like Duggie Morrison saw in me. That hurt more than I could say.

When he proposed, when we were planning the wedding, decorating that first flat above the kitchen and bathroom bit of Morrison's, I was happier than I had ever expected to be. I gave up my job, like some fool from the fifties, concentrated on the house and the wedding plans. I thought I'd get work in one of the shops after the honeymoon, join the family business, learn all Mrs. Morrison's family recipes and have her and the old man and the rest of the clan round for supper at our new place, show them how well I'd look after their boy.

But the job never happened, the Morrisons never visited the flat once, and cooking turned out to be a lot harder than it looked.
Now you're wishing you'd done something sensible at college, aren't you?
my mother had sneered one day towards the end.
Romance literature!
I didn't even try to explain that Romantic Literature was nothing to do with love and marriage and happy endings. I just looked for a job where they wouldn't mind what degree I had, and then for a job where they wouldn't mind that I had a degree. Assistant registrar at Dumfries came up, I applied, they accepted, and I fell into my round hole. The third one. The first one was being Nicky's mum, and the second one was Rough House. In the end, I think I barely noticed Duggie leaving me. My mother probably had a point there.

“And speaking of lies, Stig,” I said, “one last chance for you to come clean and then I'm going to have to ask you.”

“I haven't lied,” he said.

“And I quote,” I said to him, “‘Golden Boy Tarrant was nowhere to be seen and no one ever asked why.' That's word for word what Duggie just said to me about the night Moped died.” Stig had turned to carry on with the fire, and I stared hard at the back of his head. “I wondered what was troubling me about your story. It's this: you went to sleep in a grassy clearing surrounded by birches and you woke up in the pine trees with dew on the cones and needles.”

He said nothing and after a minute of watching the way his scalp moved above his ears as he worked his jaw, I turned on my heel and went through to the warm kitchen.

He followed, but reluctantly. Walter came along the passageway in front of him, that's how slowly he was moving.

“Wee J's the golden boy,” he said, once he was inside the kitchen. He came over to the Rayburn and put his hands down on the closed lid to warm them. Cold as he was, I could still smell a faint sweat on him and I could see the line around his sweatshirt collar where it had soaked in.

“What?”

“For the record.”

“Where were you, Stig?”

He groaned and put his head in his hands. I could see sweat stains under his arms.

“You need a bath,” I said. “And different clothes. And you need to go outside and get some fresh air. You look terrible. But first you need to tell me the truth about what happened that night at Eden.”

“Eumovate,” said Stig. “My eczema's going to be a riot unless I get some soon.”

“Tell me.”

“It's nothing,” he said. “It's really nothing. It's just embarrassing.”

I took the pad of paper full of his notes, pulled off the written on sheets and slowly ripped them into pieces, staring hard at him.

“No!” he said. “Don't. Most of that was absolutely true.”

“I've copied the biographical details into a notebook of my own,” I told him. “Now you speak and I'll write down the new version.”

“Like I said,” he began, “it's embarrassing. We'd been cooking these sausages on the campfire and pretty much as soon as we settled down to sleep for the night my guts started acting up, so I went to the bog.”

“Back at the school?”

“We didn't use the bogs in the school,” he said. “Well, we did—or the girls did—for peeing in. The boys peed on the compost. Miss Naismith rigged up—what were they called?—big woven fence things.”

“Willow screens?”

“Could be. She was nuts about all that stuff. Green materials and reclaimed materials, years before anyone else gave a stuff about it. The wood to mend the footbridge was so full of nails it took twice as long to get them out as the whole rest of the job put together.”

“Tell me!”

“Anyway, when it wasn't a pee we went outside to these dry toilets, not as disgusting as they sound. There was a bucket of sawdust and a wee shovel and you”—he mimed sprinkling as if he was feeding a goldfish. “The girls hated them, even Cloud, Sun, and Rain, and it was their dad who'd come down to build them and show us how they worked. But twelve-year-old boys? Well, you know.”

I thought of Nicky when he was ten, his eyes huge and scared when the spasms started, his arms waving wildly, and how I cried when I had to hold out a rod for him to grip instead of his mummy's hand. But the rictus was so severe by then that if he took hold and froze, I was stuck, knuckles grinding, trying to weep quietly. And then there was that one time he'd really got me in a hold and the ends of my fingers were turning purple and Rod, one of the nurses, found us and took hold of Nicky above the elbow and whacked his hand so hard against the bed frame that he let go. The sound of his cry will never leave my ears as long as I live.

“I know, darling, I know, I'm sorry. Oh you wee sweetheart,” Rod had said, cradling Nicky and shushing him, but then over the top of his head, he said to me very calmly, “You caused that, Gloria. You have got to start offering the grip until we get the relaxants recalculated for him.”

That was why I couldn't stand to use a robot-voice in the car. The first time I heard it, I felt bile rise in my throat.
Recalculating!
said that disembodied stranger and I was back in all those case meetings, all those times they had tried to persuade me to go for it.
Full sedation, Gloria.
Even kindly Donna was against me towards the end.

“You poor dear soul, with the heart of a mother,” she'd said. “I know how precious these times are when it's balanced and he's given back to you. But he's a growing boy and the seizures are getting worse, and that's two different factors pulling two different ways. How long did it take us to get a balance last time, Gloria my love, and how long before we were recalculating again?”

“I'm not ready to lose him,” I'd said. “I was reading to him this afternoon and he was laughing.”

“Right,” said Mr. Wishart, the consultant. “Recalculating for Nicholas Morrison. But this might be the last time, so you must prepare yourself. Nicky's distress weighs more with me than yours.”

“So you went to the toilet,” I said to Stig.

“Big time,” he said. “I was in there for hours. Thought I was going to die. I mean I'd had Delhi belly before—from buying juice off a pomegranate stand at the roadside in Saudi—and there was a pretty wild night after some steak tartare in Brussels about five years ago, but that night in the woods is the only time I've really believed I was dying. I just sat there, bare-arsed, crying for my mammy until I fell asleep.”

“And woke up covered in dewdrops,” I said.

“Like I said. Then I had to deal with what had happened.” I cocked my head at him. “God Gloria! Do I have to spell it out? Dry lavvies are meant for healthy hippies that live on lentils and kale, not for wee boys who eat cheap sausages half-raw. It was more than a bucket of sawdust could cope with.”

“Sorry.”

“I cleaned myself up and went back to where the rest of them were camping and lay down and tried not to go to sleep, in case I got caught short again. But I must have zoned out because I never noticed Van until he shook me.”

“So it doesn't actually make any difference where you were?”

“It could have. If Miss Naismith had really come out to check on us, she'd have known that one of us was missing.”

“And she didn't know?”

“The kids blew it. When there was all the argy bargy the next morning, Van shouted at her something like: ‘Oh yeah? Well, if you were there taking care of us so perfectly, how comes Stig spent the night sitting on the kludge with his arse in tatters?'”

“What happened to her?” I said. “After Eden.” Stig shrugged. “You didn't overhear anything from your mum or dad while they were shutting down the school?”

He went very still. Only his chest moved. The grey plain of sweatshirt that was stretched over his front rose and fell gently for several minutes, then rose hugely as he took a deep breath to start talking again. “Yeah, that was stupid of me to keep that quiet,” he said. “It's not as if you couldn't have found out if you asked someone.”

“Why did you?”

“I dunno. I didn't get it, I suppose. I never understood what that was about, starting a school. It wasn't a business thing, like the station-yard development or the hotel. It never really made any sense. And then Moped dying at my dad's school made it seem like I was responsible.”

“That makes no sense whatsoever,” I said. “You were twelve.”

“But, it was like I should have—I don't know—taken the lead or stopped it or remembered a bloody torch. Or at least made sure the sausages were cooked so I was there when Moped left.”

“Is that when you vowed to become a chef ?” I said.

Stig turned to face me, and I was sure I saw tears in his eyes. “Go on and laugh,” he said. His voice was rough and angry, but I could hear the break in it too.

“I'm sorry,” I told him. “I didn't mean to touch a nerve.”

“Hit the nail on the head, more like. The next morning we were all just milling about in the hall in the big house. You know where I mean? In that bit under the gallery that's like a room?”

I did. It was one of my favourite places in the house, because it was the only place they still lit a fire. The health and safety regulations were tight and getting tighter all the time, and Mr. Lawson, one of the long-term residents, had terrible bronchitis as well as his Alzheimer's so it wouldn't have been fair to have wood smoke in the lounge or dining room. But since there was a front door and a back door out of there and it was open to the top landing, sometimes in the winter Mrs. McTurk, the housekeeping manager, would light a fire. And if it was Christmastime with a tree at the bend in the stairs, you could almost imagine what Milharay House was like in its pomp, full of servants and guests and music.