The Insistent Garden (27 page)

I walked up to the bathroom more quickly than normal. As I scrubbed my hands at the sink I looked in the mirror. With a sombre heart I recognized the Stoker chin, fatherly traces overlaid with fragments of aunt. I sighed. To be so connected, so inextricably threaded to my family.

I held my hands up to my cheeks, dragged back the skin and tried to squeeze out a new face.

44

“You alright, sweetheart?” Archie stood beside the garden wall when I came out of the back door.

“Yes.”

He ran his fingers through a memory of hair. “I saw what they did.”

“Oh.”

“Come here over please, Edie.” A thread of saliva had collected into a corner of his lips. It moved when he spoke. “I think I need to speak to him.”

“My father?”

“Yes. Or her.” He leaned over the wall and took my hand. “Edie. I'm not sure I can stand by and watch anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

He rubbed his hand across his head again, “I'm worried. . . about you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I thought I'd try and talk to him, and, you know. . . talk to him.” He tried to smile.

I took his hand. “Archie, please. . . don't.”

He rubbed his eyebrows, dislodging dandruff. I'd never seen him look so sad. “I think he's ill, Edie.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, who else do you know who — you know — does what he does, what with the wall and well. . . the wall.”

“There's the inside too.” I said.

“He's building a wall inside?”

“No, not building exactly. He likes to change the wallpaper in the living room.”

He looked relieved. “We all do that.” “I pasted up a fresh flock of pigeons myself recently. My living room looks a treat.”

“He changes it monthly, sometimes more.”

Archie sucked in a breath. “The room must be getting very. . . small.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think he would talk to someone, a doctor or something?”

“No. He never goes to the doctor.”

“That's the best reason to go. You could suggest it, couldn't you?”

“No, Archie. Please don't ask me to do that.” I gazed across the garden. “Archie?”

“Yes?”

“There's something I want to ask you.”

“What's that, sweetheart?”

“It's about the wall.”

“What about it?”

“What are those little shoots coming up along the base?”

“What shoots?”

“Those red ones, along the bottom. My father treads on them all the time but they keep coming back.”

“They're suckers,” said Archie.

“What are suckers?”

“They're the beginnings of new trees.”

“But I don't have a tree there.” I said.

“They probably come from a tree, you know, next door.”

“You mean they're coming under the wall?”

“Yes.” He held his gaze.

“Archie, why do trees send out suckers?”

“It's a survival instinct.”

“Survival?”

“Yes, they do it because they think they're going to die.”

I can still remember the damp in my armpits. Every morning, of every week, Show and Tell had been my teacher's way to make you explore the world, to make you think. But most of all it was the way to make you speak. It began with a scraping of chairs, a mass rummage in satchels and the clearing of thirty throats. Then the slow, methodical
turn
would start to make its way round the circle, closer and closer — a prayer for the bell to ring — closer and closer, until all eyes stopped on me.

“Edith Stoker?”

The sharpness of the voice broke my reverie and it took a second to relocate myself as I scrabbled to gather my bag from beneath my seat. I stood up and walked stiffly across the waiting room.

“Why do you need to see the doctor?” demanded the receptionist, popping a peppermint into her mouth.

“Pardon?”

“What's wrong with you?” Her pen was poised over a pad, hovering beneath a bold
chest pains
written in overly large letters.

“I. . . it's personal. I can't say it. . .” I glanced round the waiting room, “. . . here.”

The woman sighed, jotted
menses
into the pad and waved me in the direction of a door marked ‘Dr. Winsome.'

No one answered when I knocked on the door so I pushed it open and chose what I assumed to be the patient's chair, smaller, worn on the arms and with exactly three crumbs gathered into the low point of the seat. I felt like an intruder. A chip of mud had fallen off the side of my heel and an incriminating trail followed me from the door to my shoe. I tried kicking it beneath the desk but it broke up and I was attempting to nudge it beneath my seat when a large man barged into the room, all stomach and bursting buttons.

“Now,” he said settling himself in the ‘big' chair, “what can I do for you, Miss. . . erm. . . Stoker?” His voice didn't match his stomach. It was high, the squeaky greeting of a teenage boy. I tried to gather my thoughts but couldn't take my eyes off the stomach. It punctured his shirt and triangles of flesh poked through.

“Miss Stoker?”

I drew in a breath. “Am I allowed to ask about someone else?”

“Which ‘someone else' is that, may I ask?”

“My father.”

Something signaled in his eyes. “Go ahead.”

“He's been getting upset. . .”

“What about?”

I was ready. I had decided on the part I was going to mention. The manageable part. “He keeps repeating himself.”

“I see. . . how old is he?”

“Fifty-eight.”

Something was jotted onto the pad trapped beneath his hand, more than a number “And what does he repeat?”

“He does a lot of things twice. . .” The pen waited. “Sometimes three times.”

“Miss Stoker, what sort of things are we talking about here?”

I began to speak. I described the trips to buy wallpaper and the time we papered the living room wall twice in one week. The doctor scribbled furiously, rushing to keep up.

“Is that all?” he asked.

“Yes.”

The stomach triangles shrank as he leaned back in his chair. “Twice in a week seems a bit much but it doesn't sound like it's anything to get alarmed about. Are there any other worries?”

The brick, dripping onto the tea towel, came into my head. “No.” I crushed a crumb between my fingers. “No other worries.”

“Perhaps he didn't like the pattern.” The doctor smiled.

I smiled back. “No. Perhaps he didn't.”

My jaw tensed up at exactly a quarter to five. My father, collar turned up in spite of the heat, entered the kitchen, threw his jacket over the back of a chair and began to unpack his briefcase: newspaper, shoes, empty lunchbox buttered beneath the lid. Something rattled at the bottom. It always did.

“Those look good,” I ventured, looking at the shoes, “Did you get them at the factory?”

“Duds,” he replied, unzipping the outer pocket of his case and pulling out a tin of shoe polish and a screwed up handkerchief.

“What's that?” I asked.

He scooped up an object that had fallen onto the table and stuffed it back into his pocket. “Nothing, just an old bird's egg.”

“Was it from a blackbird?”

He shrugged. “I've no idea.” He loosened his tie. “I found it in the street.”

“Is it empty?”

His eyes met mine. “Yes, it was empty.”

“Did you have a nice day at work?”

He sniffed. “The usual.”

I breathed. “Are we working outside today?” The fridge rattled, and then belched.

“No, inside. I've just picked up some more wallpaper.”

“But, we only just. . . the paste isn't dry —”

He took the egg out of his pocket and held it up to the light. “We need another layer.”

45

“Edith. Edith! Eeedith!”

Everything I did was interrupted now. Vivian disturbed even the simplest of tasks and a trail of uncompleted chores gathered in my wake: half polished shoes, unbuttered toast, a laundry basket of damp clothes breeding creases.

I put down my cloth, turned off the tap and walked to the top of the stairs. “I'm just coming.”

“Hurry up. We're going out.” Vivian's coat was on.

“Where are we going?” I asked, descending the stairs.

“My house.”

Vivian's house
. I had never been to Vivian's house, not once. I had imagined it often enough, its red tablecloths, its red-papered walls, its fridge, loaded with slices of beef pooling watery blood into the Tupperware, but I had never in all my years as a niece stepped across its real threshold. Transfer from the imagined to the actual scared me. I took comfort in my imagined world. I chose its carpets; I picked out its curtains, but now I had to go there with Vivian, never to fantasize about red velour armchairs ever again.

The walk was surprisingly short, no more than ten streets. I was musing over the hundreds of taxis Vivian had hailed in order to reach my house over the years when we stopped in front of a squat, semidetached house. A small-scale relative of my own, it was built of the same orange brick, had the same pitch on its roof, yet thin strips of concrete had replaced the stone above the doorway and aluminium windows replaced the timber frames found in every other house in the street. It resembled a face whose eyelashes had fallen out.

A rancid smell, reminding me of over-ripe Stilton, drifted from Vivian's handbag as she rummaged for her keys; I glimpsed a sandwich sweating inside a bag just before she snapped it shut. She stepped into the house. Bracing myself for redness, I followed.

A sofa wrapped in plastic was the first thing I saw. A wrapped shade of red, it sat in the centre of the room like a domesticated altar. I hesitated, unable to make a connection between my aunt's stinginess and a piece of brand new furniture. Looking round I saw more: a pair of armchairs dressed in plastic dresses flanked the sofa, a lamp wore a plastic skirt and a small television wrapped in a blanket waited by the door. As I tried to absorb the strangeness of the scene, a strip of plastic carpet led my eye across the room in a prescribed diagonal. It passed the foot of the sofa, ran towards a large cupboard on the opposite wall, then doubled back towards me. I inched my left foot, which had strayed onto the carpet, back within the confines of the strip and looked at my aunt. She was watching me.