The Insistent Garden (2 page)

My father stretched out his arm, ignoring the drips racing down his wrist and wiped the face of the wall in a rough, irritated circle. “Pass up the rest.” He lobbed the cloth back into the bucket without turning round. I loaded up the mortarboard, stabbed in a trowel and passed it up into his waiting hands.

“Do we need some more mortar in that crack up there?” I ventured.

“Where?” my father said, snapping his head towards me.

“Above your left hand.”

“I see it.”

“And there, what about there? Just to the left of your thumb.”

“Where?”

“There,” I said, pointing upwards.

“Any more cracks,” he said.

“Yes, down there, just to the left of your knee. Yes there.”

He stretched out his arm and pressed a dollop of mortar into a hairline crack. A blob oozed round the edges of the knife and fell soundlessly onto the grass.

“Did I get it?” he asked.

“Yes. But I think I see another spot.”

“Here?”

“Yes, there. And there's a small hole by your elbow.”

“Where? I can't see it.”

“There — no, an inch to the left, yes, there.”

He stretched out his arm and ran the trowel across a joint, a father soothing his child.

“Any more or shall we move the ladder?” he said.

“One more, beside your hip. No, I meant your right hip. Sorry.”

“For God's sake, right or left?”

“Right.”

I looked up at the top of the wall and, in spite of the warmth of the morning, shivered. “Shall I make some breakfast now?”

“Yes, I need to get to work.” He climbed down the ladder slowly — stupid, exaggerated steps.

“Can he. . . see us here?” I said.

“Speak up. I can't hear what you say.”

“Do you think he can see us when we work on the wall?”

His eyes met mine. “Yes. He's watching.”

“Now?”

“Yes. Now.”

I took one more look at the wall; it seemed wrinkled in the early morning light, a skin almost shed. “I'll go and put the kettle on.”

“Rinse the spare trowel first. I'm going back up for a second, I've just seen another crack — that wasn't there yesterday.”

I hung the cloth on a low rung, glanced up at my father's ascending heels and made my way towards the garden tap whose drips left a permanent puddle beside the back door. The rattle of water hitting the drain was enough to drown out all other sounds in the garden but as I levered the mortar off the trowel with my knife I thought I heard something. I turned off the tap and listened but all I could hear were
other
sounds, the distant moan of the milk van straining to get up the hill and the deep, repetitive cry of the song thrush unable to shake off its obsession with notes grouped into three. My ear seemed to angle itself towards the high wall, trying to absorb something,
anything
, from the other side. But only the sound of wind sorting through leaves came back.

My ears often deceived me. Most days I thought I heard sounds from over the high wall, strange, faintly human sounds that conjured up pictures of a life led there. They seemed tentative, those noises, coming from hands laid down gently, or from a voice kept low but the place on the other side of the wall, if I let myself just think it, occupied a room in my mind.

“I'll have two bits of toast today,” called my father from the top of the ladder.

“Alright.”

“Oh, and Edith.”

“Yes.”

“Don't forget it's Tuesday.”

3

Tuesday was always noisy. It was the day Vivian came to stay, and she liked to arrive rudely. She always had. I couldn't remember a Tuesday morning free of sheet-changing and pillow-plumping and now, as the first shouts slipped beneath the front door, I looked out of the window and saw what I expected to see.

A short, stout woman was scolding a taxi driver, her shoulders lifted up into a square and her finger jabbing into his face.

“Aunt Vivian.” I said, opening the front door and walking towards the street.

“That man tricked me,” she replied. Her shoulders lowered, her accusing finger disappeared into the folds of her dress and the taxi driver scrabbled to find his keys, all hope of a tip dashed. “Edith, come and get my suitcase.”

My mouth opened, then closed. Vivian blew out her cheeks and, although she only carried a dainty handbag, looked as if it were she who had just dragged a heavy suitcase out of the car. Sweat had gathered round the unventilated parts of her body and I could see dark blotches seeping into the neckline of her dress.

She stepped into the hall. “You've moved that table.”

“Only a little bit.” I replied. I lifted her suitcase over the threshold.

“Well, put it back where it belongs.”

“I'll just —”

“I'm going to my room.” she said, “You can bring the case up after you've made the tea.”

I was watching my aunt's crease-lined backside recede up the stairs, hoping for the right words, when an unusual question came into my head. “How are you, Aunt Vivian?”

She paused. I noticed a layer of neck squeeze up from inside her collar. “Can't you see that with your own eyes?”

“Yes, sorry.” I concentrated on the bit of stair carpet that meets the skirting board, the bit that holds dust.

Why did I do it? Why did I imagine, even for a second, that my aunt would ever be different, ever be the slightest bit friendly towards me?

Vivian was my father's only sister. She possessed a booming voice — the sort that causes real pain to sensitive eardrums — and spoke in small, clipped sentences, pared to the bone and finished off with a tiny smacking sound as her tongue collided with the inside of her teeth. Younger in years than my father, yet older in looks, she had been visiting our house every Tuesday for as long as I could remember. It would always be the same: the disturbance at the front door and the struggle with the big case, the re-organisation of the bathroom shelves, the silent supper with my father followed by arguments over the crossword puzzle all finished off with the radio news, a cup of warm milk and an early night. The bulky suitcase always suggested a lengthy stay but by ten o'clock the next morning she'd be gone, back to her own house on the other side of town; the whiff of freshly-shaved legs in the bathroom just a memory.

“And don't forget, milk in first,” she called from the top of the stairs.

I knocked on Vivian's bedroom door a few minutes later, a cup and saucer rattling in one hand, a suitcase dragging sullenly on the other.

“Yes?” came a voice from within.

“I've brought the tea.”

“Bring it in.”

I went to grasp the door handle but the teacup tipped to the side, slopping a hot mouthful of liquid into the saucer.

“I said come
in
.”

“Just a second.” I put down the case and emptied the saucer back into the cup.

“Edith. What
are
you doing?” The door opened and Vivian's face lunged towards me, the smell of meat and Polo mints on her breath. I tried to smile but I could think only of her pointing finger, the one I had seen in the street. But it was safely by her side and indignation was now lodged in a new part of my aunt's body, beneath her eyebrows, which had gathered into formidable peaks.

“The tea spilt. . .” I began.

“Well, don't dither, bring it in.”

I followed her inside, placed the teacup on the bedside table and stood back, held inside a slot of time with no obvious beginning and no foreseeable end — the sort of slot where you re-acquaint yourself with the familiar details of your life. The spare bedroom was the only room in our house that offered any real comfort. The duvet, although worn on the edges from years of rubbing across Vivian's chin, could still be plumped and the chair, in spite of its hard back, hosted a folded blanket that I imagined might hold heat in a cold place.

Whenever I prepared the room for her weekly arrival, wiping dust from the dressing table and tightening the sheets across the mattress, it felt a bit like mine, but with Vivian now lining up medicine bottles on the dressing table, the atmosphere had changed. Now it was Vivian's room, an alien territory, out of bounds and reeking of Vaseline and coal tar soap. I gazed at the wallpaper, not with any sense of exploration but as something to pass the time. The rose-flowered pattern had remained unchanged since my birth and I knew its details intimately, the yellow petals, the stems a faded green and the buds that never, ever opened. Slippage during pasting had formed a curious new species at the join between the sheets and I tried to imagine a name for these strange creatures, with their broken stems and double-headed blooms.

“Aunt Vivian,” I said, “do you like flowers?”

She pulled her hands out from between a layer of blouses deep inside her suitcase. “What?”

“I mean. . . do you grow flowers in your garden?”

“No, I don't.”

She returned to her case, lifted out a gigantic bra and draped it over the back of a chair. I continued to wait, my hand resting on the newly endowed furniture.

“Should I help you unpack?” I said.

“Yes, but don't touch anything.”

The auntly hands returned to the suitcase, straightening the collars of slowly decompressing cardigans and moving bottles of hand cream from one side to the other. They were wide hands, freckled with age spots and decorated with tight, silver rings, which squeezed her flesh close to the joints. I gave my own bare ring finger a squeeze and watched as each item of clothing was held up for scrutiny, categorized, then placed in a drawer. Vivian liked red. Red shirts, red shoes, red polish painted on her toenails. She dyed her hair red too, an unforgiving orangey-red that came from a mouldy-looking bottle she often left behind on our bathroom shelf. It reacted badly with her skin.

“Let's go down.” Vivian said at last.

‘Down' was the garden. Awaiting inspection.

It was hot by the time we got outside and I held my hand over my eyes as I stepped across the threshold. Vivian set off immediately, striding along the base of the high wall, swallowed up by its vast shadow. I drifted in her wake; I knew the routine. First came what she liked to call ‘the reconnaissance,' checking the whole length of brickwork during a march from the house to the back fence. Next the detailed study, several bricks below eye height fingered, rubbed, and tapped with rings. Finally, words of criticism would fill the garden, ‘crooked,' ‘sloping' and ‘rough' rushing out of her mouth, like seeds shooting from an over-ripe balsam.

With my body still oriented towards my aunt, I looked up at the house on the other side of the high wall.
His
house. A mirror image of my own, it gave no clue to its inside. No potted plants on the windowsills, no ornaments, not even a glimpse of a shelf. Nothing even hinted at how life might be spent on the other side of the wall. But as I scrutinized further, I
did
see something, a flicker of movement, high up. I stared up at the attic and saw it again, a tiny deflection in the glass. Then nothing.

My breath had sped up by the time I returned to the slew of ‘rotten grout' and ‘chipped edges,' which had continued unabated at ground level.

“Aunt Vivian, would you like some more tea?”

“Yes. Three sugars.”

I turned towards the house and looked again at my neighbour's attic. The window was black, and still. I looked at my own attic. Black too. I had never been inside the room at the top of my house. I had never been allowed. “
Three
sugars,” barked Vivian, “And Edith, check if the post has arrived.”

The postman's uniform was visible at the end of the street when I looked out of the sitting room window. He traversed the horizon in a slow, lazy motion and by the time he reached the middle of my street I recognized all the idiosyncrasies of his walk, his shoulders tipped back at an angle as if invisible hands were pushing him up the hill and his feet plopped down in a soporific rhythm that only sped up as he approached my house. He lingered in the street, fiddled with the badge on his lapel and then pushed open the gate and made his way up the path. The slap of paper on the mat confirmed that something heavy had arrived.