The Hanging Garden (11 page)

He was so hard he got to pulling it off, moaning for the stones, lantana smelling of cat piss and semen, the cold blue enamel of the sky. And lay wilting, not crying, it was sweat—or semen.

He had shrunk right into himself into a kind of guilty purity he had never experienced that he could remember. Wondering what Irene Sklavos would have thought. Why, for Chrissake, this Ireen, who was nothing to do with him. But might have been standing over him looking down, prissy lips pressed together, like she had just been not explaining the bleeding
pneuma
. Haunting him on this wasteland above the culvert.

He sat up presently, buttoned his fly, and started the walk towards Cameron Street. He felt drained. His legs could have been parcels of straw. As he brushed against the hedge of giant fuchsias, he was sprinkled with drops so cold and silver he shuddered for his own enormity. Were they eyes glittering amongst the foliage and fleshy tassels? What odds? She was nothing to him, another kid, a
girl
, a Greek reffo Lockharts said was her mother’s bastard.

*   *   *

When he got in there was no sound from the other side of her door. Must have gone to bed. He could see her lying on that ottoman like a queen on a tomb. He could hear the sounds of furniture and dry rot inside Ma Bulpit’s dunny.

His own room, under the warrant officer’s leaning portrait, was one big yawn tonight. Neither light nor darkness let him alone. He lay remembering forever all that he most wanted to forget. And Eirene Sklavos was advancing on him her plait trailing across the carpet behind her like a long black snake, its tail still had to enter the room when she had almost reached his bedside.

‘… running late … miss the bus if you’re not careful…’ It was Ma Bulpit’s voice twitching him awake.

To do him an extra favour she poured out his tea for him this morning. Her pink chenille had some egg in it.

Sklavos had had her breakfast. Her plate with the slops of crispies in it is standing on the table opposite.

‘Where’s Irene?’

‘Finishing something for school.’ The Bulpit had not yet put in her teeth, didn’t bother at that hour and for kids, her hair still had a sleepy look, she might have been rootling round in her head for something to start complaining about.

Finished his breakfast as quick as he could.

Ireen—she looked like Eirene this morning—was sitting at that table at the end of her room where the stored furniture thinned out and the empty space became hers. A clear light fell around her from the window. The ottoman-bed was already made. When she looked up she might have been suggesting he should have knocked, giving him the cold look of a grown-up woman.

‘What are you doing?’ he heard himself bleating as he advanced.

‘Work,’ she answered, colder than ever, and lowered her eyes.

‘You must have gone to bed early,’ he tried it out cautiously.

Had she smelled him out? The dry scales of it were rustling between his thighs.

‘What’s this?’

She sat colouring in the drawing of a spray of flowers. Beside the paper lay a fuchsia branch, the sap still fresh where torn off, the leaves only just beginning to wilt, tassels drooping.

‘We were set an essay on our favourite flower.’ The purple and cerise glowed deeper as she worked.

‘But a fuchsia can’t be your favourite flower! Nobody would ever think about the fuchsia…’

‘There are roses of course. You’ve never seen a Greek rose.’

He hadn’t but her voice conveyed proud blooms of a noble size.

‘You can like something all of a sudden,’ she said, returning to the flower she was giving life, ‘something you’ve never thought about before. Then you might forget about it.’

She got up briskly after that, gathered her drawing and the pages of her essay, and laid them in her case.

‘We don’t want to miss the bus.’

Her eyes seemed to have elongated, their whites glittered at him for an instant, as the light had through the branches of the fuchsia hedge.

‘Yair,’ he said, ‘the bus.’

And followed her plait out of the room.

*   *   *

That night, after they had shed the bus people, he couldn’t wait to ask, ‘How did you go with your essay and the drawing?’

‘They didn’t seem to think much of them.’

*   *   *

Viva said, ‘I’m gunner get off at your stop, Reenie, because Mumma has a message for Mrs Bulpit, who she hasn’t seen for a long while.’

You could not do anything about it. If you cut off one of Viva’s tentacles, she grew another. She was the Australian octopus.

She said, ‘Remember that droring of the fuchsia—I thought it was beaut, Ireen. My old dahlia—I can’t say I don’t like a dahlia but … fuchsias are different. Nobody would ever think of a fuchsia—the way they hang…’

Viva did not have a limp, her shoe only caught rather often in the cracked pavement as she slommacked along.

Mrs Bulpit wasn’t home. Gil must have escaped quickly from the bus mob, put together his bread and dripping, and vanished. The aluminium dripping bowl still looked to be rocking on the kitchen table.

Viva eyed the bowl while combating her saliva. ‘Isn’t this a spooky house?’

‘I haven’t noticed.’ Viva’s presence made you defend what had become once more your property, it was more yours than Mrs Bulpit’s and this afternoon, even Gil Horsfall’s.

‘Where’s that nasty bugger of a Horsfall boy?’

‘I don’t know.’ You could truthfully say.

‘I don’t like him,’ Viva persisted.

‘You don’t know him—only at school.’

‘I know enough. Ooh, I don’t like this house! He might jump out and interfere with us.’

‘He’s never tried to interfere with
me
.’

‘Must be a perv then—like they say—and I’ve always thought.’

‘He’s my friend.’

‘Wouldn’t want a perv for a friend—or any nasty boy.’

Their conversation was leading them out of the kitchen and down those ricketty steps which led to the back yard and garden. The steps threatened to pitch Viva into it too quickly.

The need to protect Gil increased Eirene’s feeling of power.

‘You didn’t show me your room,’ Viva complained as she landed in the yard flat on her feet.

‘No, I didn’t.’ It’s only a sort of box room. You could not bear the thought of Viva staring at the hard narrow ottoman-bed and fossicking amongst dusty objects which from time to time had furnished your dreams.

What she had been spared inspired Eirene to leap, missing out the short flight of ricketty rotting wooden steps. Her sense of power and release made her feel she was flying. She landed lightly at Viva Jenkins’ heels, and at once let out a cry filled with disgust, pain and giggles.

‘What’s up, Ireen?’ Viva had turned, frowning under her dark fringe.

‘I squashed a—long—black—
slug
!’

As proof the slug lay mashed and quivering on its deathbed of disintegrating concrete, while Eirene sounded as though she might die of all that was churning out of her.

‘Only a slug! You’re the real loop, Ireen.’

If they had not drifted deeper into the garden and come across something of greater interest, Viva Jenkins might have reconsidered her friendship with this loopy Greek reffo.

‘What’s that up there?’

‘That’s a house—a cubby.’

‘Who built it?’

‘We did—Gil and I.’

‘And you go up there together?’

‘We used to—sometimes…’

Eirene Sklavos feels the power fainting inside her.

‘Can we go up?’

‘It isn’t safe. The boards are rotten.’ Fainter and fainter Eirene Sklavos hears herself. ‘Mrs Bulpit forbids it.’ The school language she has learnt to speak is ebbing out of her.

Worst of all, Gil could be up there listening.

As Viva suspects, ‘Could be up there all the while.’

The evening is drawing in. Bats have begun flying.

‘Ooh, it’s grooby! Land in yer hair. Can’t stay all night waiting for old Essie to show up.’

The light has intensified her fringe and her mole.

‘When you come to my place, Reenie, I’ll show you what my father brought from Brazil,’ she stands threatening an instant at the gate.

*   *   *

Viva was standing at the gate, waiting. ‘Thought you wasn’t coming.’ She might have preferred it that way. ‘Mumma said you wouldn’t. Said from what she’d heard you’d be too grand.’

The kind of remark you had learnt to ignore.

Jenkins’ place was an ‘old’ house. The gate might have fallen down if Viva hadn’t been persuading it to stand. The weatherboard house had once been painted, but by now the paint had almost flaked away. It had the look of some old Arab house outside Alexandria which had soaked up a lifetime of sunlight, and this absorption was perhaps what helped it hold together. A one-eyed house, with a lace curtain veiling that. There were several additional windows, but all of them bare, which gave them a blind glassy look. A pretty fretwork balcony above the porch had a couple of floorboards hanging from it.

‘I like your balcony,’ you told her for something to say. ‘I’d spend half my time up there, looking out across the water.’

‘It isn’t safe,’ she warned as though getting her own back.

She was leading you up the front steps. The wooden uprights were each decorated with a pyramid, the point of the one you put your hand on so metal-sharp it made you squeal.

‘Ooooh! That’s dangerous!’

‘That’s what my father said when he fell off the balcony and landed on it.’

‘He could have been killed. Was he badly hurt?’

‘We don’t know. He disappeared.’

Viva’s mum had been waiting for them somewhere in the dark interior behind the lace. When she showed up, she was wearing an easy cotton dress in no particular style. Standing side by side with her daughter, she was not much taller.

‘Hello Ireen,’ Mrs Jenkins said, ‘I’m glad to meet Viva’s friend at last.’ She had a smile which came and went, like thin sunlight, and several teeth were missing in one side of a pink denture. The dark room made her skin look whiter. She was one of those women who had been steamed rather than baked by the Sydney climate.

She said, ‘I expect you’ll have a lot to tell me,’ and planted herself on the edge of a sofa.

Did she really expect? It could have been expectation which caused her white calves to bulge when she wrapped her arms around her knees. Her feet were bare except for a pink corn plaster.

Viva was scowling with embarrassment. ‘Aren’t you gunner give ’er something to eat?’

‘You’re just like your father! Think of nothing but feeding your face. Nice people when they come to see you expect a bit of intercourse. Viva,’ she confided in Irene, ‘can never hope to become a lady.’

Viva could have been suppressing a whimper somewhere inside her muttering.

‘Do they live in houses like this in Greece?’ Mrs Jenkins asked her visitor. ‘Are they Christians?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Mr Jenkins was a pagan.’

‘He was
not
!’

‘You can’t expect anything of most men.’ Mrs Jenkins was becoming vehement. A wind swept through her listless hair. ‘There’s the gas—he promised me to come last Thursday and it’s now this Tuesday. We could die of it for all he cares.’ She opened her small white ringless hands and glanced not so much at the hands as a nothingness she was holding in them.

There was certainly a smell of gas in the room. It became the stronger for your noticing it. The coloured plastic flowers seemed to exude the smell of gas.

Mrs Jenkins must have noticed you noticing. ‘I love plastic flowers, don’t you? I think they’re more artistic than the real, which die on a person anyway.’

The gaseous colours of the plastics glowed.

Suddenly Mrs Jenkins jumped up so quickly she had to steady herself on the end of the sofa. ‘Suppose I’d better bring you something to eat or this girl of mine will go crook on me. You’ll have to entertain Maureen, dear, while I’m out of the room.’

‘She’s mad,’ Viva said, ‘Mr Horan—that’s the gas feller—came on Thursday, but she wouldn’t let him alone. He left without finishing the job.’

‘Why don’t we open the window—let the gas escape?’

Viva became more agitated. ‘Wouldn’t be worth it. She doesn’t want anything to escape. That’s why Carlos disappeared.’

‘Carlos?’

‘My father—Charlie to his mates—but Carlos was his name. I’ll tell you all about that. No pagan,’ she glanced at the doorway through which her mother had just gone ‘my father was a mystic.’

Irene Sklavos felt her eyelids snap as though she were awakening to a state she had sensed but never been able to put a name to. From Aunt Cleonaki she had learnt about the Saints, all of them far too Orthodox and rigid for the word to apply. She suspected Cleonaki would have disapproved of anything so fluid. If you knew about mystics yourself it was from associating with the state in certain dreams and an imagination you had to keep hidden.

She could feel her heart palpitating like a rubber bulb. ‘You must tell me about your father, Viva, because I think I understand—sort of,’ she added to appease the part of herself which had learnt to be Australian.

Viva brushed back her fringe. ‘I’ll tell you and show you—when she’s out of the way. But you must promise never to tell. It will always be our secret.’

In speaking of her father Viva’s speech seemed to improve, her voice vibrated like some stringed instrument—a ’cello?

Irene saw that Viva might be acquiring power over her, but could not resist promising. A moment of complete physical repugnance occurred as she visualised herself sharing a warm bath with Viva Jenkins. As the water lapped against the sides of the bath it revealed a greasy highwater mark.

‘Ssh!’ Viva warned. ‘She’s coming.’

Mrs Jenkins had restored her face with smiles and a forced tranquillity. She was carrying a dish, on it a clutch of little cakes, and a jug of what looked like lemonade, but as remote from the lemon as her plastic flowers were from soil, sunlight, and natural grace. The jug of pseudo lemonade shared their gaseous glow.

‘These are very special cakes,’ Mrs Jenkins smiled, ‘from a recipe of my grandmother’s.’

‘Ah, them.’ Viva sounded disenchanted.