The Insistent Garden (37 page)

Every piece of Vivian's clothing had a place. The bottom drawer was home to blouses, the middle drawer held trousers, and the top housed underwear, some indecently worn. Folding them was mindless work but it had advantages over other chores. It gave me a chance to think. The methodical buttoning, the straightening of cuffs all gave up thinking time that had a rhythm of its own. Why did Vivian want to live with us when she still had her own house sitting empty a few streets away? The question was beginning to burn.

I slipped a folded sweater into the drawer and returned to Vivian's washing basket. It was vile in there, it really was. Dried sweat lent extra weight to the clothes and I could see the shape of my aunt's feet inside a sock, distorted by a recently held bunion. Then there was a vest, bulging with huge temporary breasts, and as I held it between my fingertips I was struck by a thought. I dropped the garment back into the basket and, holding my breath, plunged my arm in deep, pulled out a blouse and laid it on the bed. Just smoothing out the creases brought nausea to the back of my throat but I continued, I buttoned the collar, I folded the arms then I slid my hands behind its back and lifted it up. Finally, I walked over to the drawer and slipped it inside. So childish, I thought as I padded silently down the stairs. So childish and pathetic and quite mean. So, I wondered, why did I feel so unbelievably good?

67

It was dark when I entered the living room that night. Not pitch but the faded grey of an over-washed sock and I didn't notice my father was sitting there until I'd sat down on the sofa and slipped off my shoes and curled my feet under my bottom.

“Everything done for the night?” he said.

“Oh. . . yes.” I slipped my feet back onto the ground. I could see the tip of his cigarette move through the air and I could hear his hand rubbing across the wall in the dark.
And so faintly you came tapping,
tapping at my chamber door, that I scarce was sure I heard you.
“What's. . . under there?” I said.

The rubbing stopped. “I could show you. . . if you want.” His sentence hung in the dark, just hung.

“I'd like that.”

“Turn on the light.”

I didn't want to turn on the light. It might expose us for what we really were. “I'll put the hall light on.”

He'd pushed back his chair by the time I returned to his side and was down on his knees, picking at a corner of wallpaper. I felt scared, wanting to know but wishing I'd never asked. Slowly, so slowly, the paper released its long-held grip and crawled up the wall with a long, low growl. I peered at the dusty underskin. “I can't see. . . anything.”

“It's gone. . .”

“What's gone?” I said.

A sound came out of my father's mouth. I couldn't see tears; the light was too bad, but I could hear them, down in his throat. I would pull a handkerchief from my pocket. I would put my arm round his back and try to make it stop. But I could think only of the wall outside my back door, the massive wall that protected me from something unseen. Something he'd always said was
really
there.

“We have to go,” he said, getting to his feet.

“Go where?”

“We need more wallpaper.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now!”

“Won't they be closed?”

“Not if we run.”

He fumbled in the cupboard and then dragged on his coat; I was vaguely aware of his hand groping for the sleeve, pushing through, missing, and then pushing again. I shoved on my shoes, threw on my cardigan and chased him up the garden path.

The hardware store was getting ready to close by the time we arrived. The owner dragged up a smile and nodded at the shopgirl who was organising a pile of coins on the counter.

My father turned his head from left to right. “Where's the wallpaper gone?”

“We've put it away for the night. Janice, bring it back out for Mr. Stoker, can you.”

Scowling, the girl jotted a number down on a pad then disappeared behind a screen. Moments later she re-appeared, dragging a bin full of wallpaper, then plodded back to the till.

“You choose.”

I looked up at my father. “Me?”

“Yes, pick out a pattern.”

There wasn't much left, just some shiny roses, a winter scene with cast iron lamp posts and snowmen cavorting in scarves and right at the bottom a damaged roll with one corner bent back revealing a small pair of webbed feet. “I'd like that one,” I said.

My knees seemed to have lost some of their strength as I climbed up the ladder that rested against the living room wall. I took the objects from my father's hands one by one, the cloth, the big wallpaper brush, and finally the sheet of paper, heavy with paste, ready to tear.

He looked older from above. A circle of grey sat on the top of his head; I imagined it would slip off if he looked to one side. As I stretched out my arm to line the paper up with the picture rail, I glimpsed him below me passing his hand over the place on the wall, smoothing and pressing, feeling the ‘thing.' Had there really been something hidden beneath the wallpaper? I did not know. I did not know
how
to know. I thought again of the high wall waiting outside my back door. A person dwelled on the other side. A person my father told me to fear but whom I had never once seen.

“How does it look?” I said, stepping off the bottom rung and looking up.

“Nothing quite so vulgar as flying ducks,” said Vivian from the door.

My thoughts sneaked into my neighbour's bedroom that night. No need to knock on the door, just step softly on the carpet and slip my hand beneath his bedcovers and feel if pockets of warmth still remained there. Perhaps there would be something under his pillow, something small and precious. And beneath his bed I might find something, a lost letter, the envelope torn in haste, and he'd never know that I'd opened the wardrobe and felt inside his pockets. Would I find his bed pressed against the wall in the same position as mine? And his clothes, would they be folded into drawers or would they hang carelessly on the back of a chair? Like mine? No-one would ever know that I'd sipped water from the glass beside his bed and left an imprint of my body on the cushion of his chair. And the wallpaper on his side of the wall, might it even tell the same story as mine?

68

Something lay on the grass.

Instinctively, I glanced up at Edward Black's house, its face still, its windows black as liquorice. When I looked back down, I saw it to be a square of yellow grass imprinted on my lawn. The grass felt damp when I knelt down and touched the flattened blades. Something had been lying here and starved the young shoots of chlorophyll. Something had been moved.

I ran my hand across the faded shoots. The patch marked an absence. Something lying on the grass had been taken away. Something had been taken from me before I even knew I had it.

A layer of skin was tightening the surface of my porridge when I stepped back inside the kitchen. Vivian sat at the table, a piece of paper in her hands and I paused in the doorway, sensing something was about to be thrown. She put on her reading glasses, held up the paper and cleared her throat. “I wish to read a poem to the audience.” She paused, fixing her eyes on me. “A poem by Edith Stoker —”

“That's not mine —”

“Shh!”

“But it's not —”

“Quiet!” Vivian cleared her throat, revoltingly, and continued. “What we behold is cens. . . censured by our eyes. Where both deliberate, the love is slight.” She looked at me, her nose wrinkled into a sneer. “Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?”

She laughed; her head tipped back, the roof of her mouth exposed like the ribs of a gutted fish.

“I didn't write that,” I said.