The Insistent Garden (18 page)

I lay down my pencil and went to the front door but before I reached it, the letterbox flipped upwards and a pair of flattened lips was forced through.

“Miss, are you there?” The lips bulged then flattened again. “Miss?”

Johnny Worth was bent forward when I opened the door. He snapped upright and smoothed an imaginary crease from the front of his trousers.

“Mr. Worth?”

“Call me Johnny, please.”

“What are you doing. . . Johnny?”

“Sorry to disturb you, Edith — Miss, but I noticed the hedge needs a bit of work. I thought you might need some help to — you know — patch it up.”

“Is there a hole again?” My voice held steady.

“A hole? You could get a horse through that. Come and look.”

Elastic bands lay on the front path, some broken, some muddy, all twisted up like dried-up earthworms. “What happened?” I said. “Did you see anything?”

“Dunno,” he rubbed his chin, “looks like something came through in a hurry.”

We bumped shoulders as I leaned forward to examine the hedge; I caught a whiff of after-shave.

“Can we fix it?” I said.

“Yeah, but I've got to work out how to do it.”

“Please hurry.”

He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a handful of elastic bands. “I've got a new load — we can use these.” He winked; it went badly. “They shouldn't leave the stationery cupboard unlocked, should they?”

“I hope this won't make you late for your round.”

“Don't worry, it's my day off —”

I glanced at his chest. “But you're wearing your uniform.”

He attempted to tuck his tie inside his jacket. “It's quite smart, don't you think?”

I stepped back and looked at him properly for the first time. Not at his accessories, the cap with the shiny peak, the nametag pinned on a skew, but at his face. It was held at an expectant angle and I noticed a wispy moustache clinging to his top lip. But it was his eyes that held me. They were saying something. But I did not know what it was.

Afternoon light had rubbed the texture off the bricks when I looked up at the high wall later that day. I looked hopefully for signs of fatigue in my father's movements but all I saw were his shoulders flexed for work and the trowel loaded with a blob of mortar. The garden was quiet, punctuated only by the creak of the ladder and the occasional grunt from above, but the rhythm was soothing, so soothing that a question slipped from my mouth. “When will it be finished?”

The trowel paused. “When will what be finished?” A comma of mortar flecked my arm.

“The wall.”

“When it's done.” A full stop dripped to the ground.

“Is it. . . safe?”

He looked down at me, the skin of his cheeks puckering beneath his eyes. “
He
might be standing on the other side of the wall at this moment. Do you realize what that means?”

I squeezed the rails of the ladder. “The wall —”

“Yes, the wall!” he thundered. “That's what makes
you
safe.”

I gripped the ladder more tightly then looked away. The accusatory ‘you' was a powerful beast.

I was eleven years old when I discovered the key to the cellar. It had languished in a gap at the back of the kitchen drawer for longer than I knew, jammed between the cutlery rack and a long-forgotten spatula. Cold and clunky and smelling of iron, it had sent a shiver down my arms as I pulled it out. A key with no lock is a thrilling object and I'd turned it over in my hands for several minutes before setting out to find the place it fit. Doors, drawers, cabinets, cupboards, trunks were all attempted with childish optimism and I can still remember that feeling of triumph as it turned a full circle in the cellar door. But I'd felt scared too, scared of the room. Still I went down, through the freshly embroidered cobwebs, down to the place where I found something. Something I didn't know I was looking for. For weeks the room remained a mere thought in my head until I realized that no one ever went down there so I began my regular descent, rising silently out of bed as my father's snores slipped beneath his bedroom door and creeping down to the room at the bottom of my house.

The cellar felt colder than usual when I pushed open the door. Even the book covers gave out a papery cold when I searched through the box. I dug deeper than normal and before long my fingers brushed across an unfamiliar title, gold letters embossed into the spine of a thick red book. I heaved it onto my lap, curled a nested blanket round my feet and opened onto a fresh page.

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kissed
.

I stared into the dark. Two living, breathing, people shared my house, heat seeping constantly from their bodies, yet every room was always cold.

27

The birth of a new garden made little impact on my father. He seemed oblivious to the tide of freshly turned soil appearing in front of the back fence; he continued to drag the ladder along its usual path and he mixed mortar in the same spot he had been using for years. The only way to protect the plants from stray chips of masonry involved changing the way we worked. I fashioned some concrete slabs I discovered behind the shed into a crude path that skirted round the new seedlings and I dragged the bags of cement to a new location, so keeping the plants out of range of the ladder's swing. Working on the garden was solitary work but I was never completely alone; a robin always accompanied me. He perched on the handle of my fork whenever I left it unattended and he pecked constantly at the soil, throwing crumbs across the ground like the beads of a broken necklace. And occasionally I would hear the sound of another person's spade digging. Somewhere close, or somewhere far away. I could think only of the days ahead, of new shoots, of leaves unfurling, and of hidden flowers making their way slowly out from their casings.

My father was working at the sink, shirtsleeves wet, back bent, when I entered the kitchen. Scrubbing noises slipped out from beneath his armpits. I hovered in the doorway, my toe on a tile, and released a small cough. He turned. “Yes?”

“Could I could help you with somethi —”

“No.”

He turned back towards the sink and the scrubbing sound started up again. I edged forward. Orange water filled the sink, chopped into furious waves; something thrashed below water level.

“What are you washing?” I asked.

The thrashing stopped and he pulled out a brick and shook it in the air. Silently, as if holding a precious creature, he laid it gently on a tea towel and sat down at the table.

I eyed the brick nervously, transfixed as orange liquid leached onto the tea towel “I was up at the corner shop this morning,” I said.

He folded a triangle of cotton over the brick. “Did you get milk, we're short?”

“Yes. I. . . spoke to Mrs. Wordsworth today, the new owner.”

“Mmm?”

“She needs some help in the shop.” I sat down beside him and ran my fingernail along the seam of the tablecloth “I thought I might apply for a part-time job there. She's looking for someone.”

He looked up. “A job?”

“Yes, helping in the shop. Mornings only. . . at first.”

He ceased folding and sighed, not so much a movement of air, more a spreading of his chest. “You have a lot to do here, you know.”

“I'll make sure everything gets done.”

He sealed the tea towel over the brick and turned to look at me. “Everything?”

“Yes.”

“Alright.”

28

It was hard to walk into the shop unnoticed. I eased down the handle. I cracked open the door, but still the bell rang.

“Edith! Welcome! You're just in time. Hold onto that a sec, will you, love.”

Jean Wordsworth, tall, gaunt and flushed around the eyes, thrust a tin into my hand. “We're going to be busy this morning,” she continued, shoving a cardboard box to one side with her foot, “Penman's are dropping off a delivery, so stick your coat in the back and I'll show you round.”

“What shall I do with. . . ?”

“Let me see. . .” She held my wrist and turned the tin back towards herself. “Rice pudding, bottom shelf, right behind you. No, yes there, there.”

I'd worn a dress with large pockets for my interview two days earlier. Those wide flaps of cotton had been useful, a place to store my hands, but after the third question my fingers had become sweaty and I had had to find a way to hold them somewhere outside my clothes. Jean didn't delve too deeply, but she did look at my face, not just once but several times, as if she didn't quite believe what she saw. I was beginning to think I had dirt on my face when she'd come out with it, ‘Edith, don't you wear
any
make-up?'

“Now,” Jean continued, her face towards me, but her shoulders oriented elsewhere, “you need to learn all the shelves, what goes where and whatnot, and then I'll teach you the till.”

“The till? But I thought I was just stacking shelves?”

“You are, but you need to know how to use it when I'm having my coffee.”

“Your coffee?”

“We get ten minutes each.” She smiled. “You know how to clean shelves, I suppose? There is a method.”

“I think so.”

“Good. First, I'll give you a tour.”

At first I couldn't see a pattern as Jean rattled through her inventory. Bleach leaned against beans, biscuits jostled polish, but when I noticed all the ingredients for baking a cake lumped together on a single shelf I began to relax. But it was hard to take it all in: the special offers, the drawers of price tags, the bulging ledgers of Green Shield stamps.

“Wear glasses normally, do you, love?”

“No, I — ”

“Me neither.” She smiled. “Right, now I've shown you everything we can get cracking. I'll find you a fresh cloth and you can make a start on the top shelf. It needs a good wipe down. Give me a shout if you need anything.”

The metal of the stepladder felt cool when I gripped the frame, yet I felt a tingle in my fingers as I climbed higher, past semolina, past flour, past bottles of vegetable oil all lined up like bottled sunlight.

The shop looked different from above. Spilt rice had gathered in cracks and a path, invisible at ground level, showed as a line of white worn into the linoleum.

“Do you want me to wipe all these puddings?” I called down.

“Yes, freshen them up, if you can, but don't bother about the ones at the back.”

Patches of scalp showed through Jean's hair as she bent over to open the next box. I suddenly felt an urge to stroke her head, to see if it was soft. I returned to the shelf in front of me and proceeded to work. Forgotten things lay here: a lone glove, a caramelized cloth and a gloomy line of rice pudding tins long past their sell-by date. I stretched out my hand and moved them, one by one, wiping and re-stacking until I happened to notice a small window at the back of the shelf. I could see right inside the neighbour's garden. A young girl emerged from the back door as I watched, skipped across the grass, paused, swung her arms back and forth then flipped into a handstand against the wall — just pointed toes, sagging vest and an upside-down dress. I moved the tin a fraction, lining it up with the tips of the girl's toes. Then a voice raced up towards me.

“We can see your knickers!”

I cranked my head round to see a pair of freckled faces staring up from the bottom of the ladder. The cloth slipped from my hand.