The Insistent Garden

by Rosie Chard

  I liked it when objects from the outside dropped through our letterbox. Dry-cleaning leaflets, adverts for jumble sales, requests for meter readings all drew me to the doormat in a rush, but most thrilling of all was the arrival of letters. They only arrived occasionally and were rarely addressed to me, but this never lessened the pleasure of hearing the letterbox flip open, seeing fingertips push through and watching an envelope drop onto the mat. Those postman fingers intrigued me, not just the skin bitten down the sides, but the nails, wide and flat and occasionally lined with dirt.

  It was during one of these moments, sitting at the bottom of the stairs, that the letterbox sprang open without warning and I watched two letters fall onto the mat, licked sides facing up. I picked them up and read the first address. Wilf Stoker, Eleven Forster Road, Billingsford, Northamptonshire. It sent a bone of disappointment into my body and slipping the first envelope into my pocket I examined the address on the second one. The handwriting was hard to read — the E partly formed and the B smudged — but after narrowing my eyes I knew for sure what it was. The words seemed to tremble as slowly, very slowly, I held the envelope at arm’s length then brought it up towards my nose, sniffed and drew in a long, papery breath. Then I studied the name further, aware of an eerie feeling prickle down the back of my hands as I examined the bulging belly of the B and the heavy pen strokes that balanced the E.

  Ignoring the rules about noise, I pounded up the staircase. Neglecting the decree that my father must not be disturbed, I tapped on his bedroom door. During the silence that followed there was a moment to reflect. Would several rules broken together lead to greater disapproval? Could shouting while thumping be considered a single offence? My breathing seemed louder by the time the door opened and a draught slipped out.

  My father stood before me in his pyjamas, his trousers white, his jacket tinged blue. Somewhere in the mist of anxiety that damped down my senses I remembered a moment that had come before; the moment when I had plunged his navy sweater into the sink and watched an inky cloud float sideways and downwards and then settle on the pristine threads of his pyjama jacket that was soaking at the bottom of the basin. I’d washed it six times; he had counted.

  “Why are you disturbing me?” he said.

  A simple question. Had it begun with my name, or had it been lengthened with a word of affection, or even been accompanied by a shrug of his shoulders, it would not have caused my heart to thud inside my chest the way it did. But lips drawn into a line completed this sentence. “I have a letter,” I said. I fingered a tissue in my pocket, wanting his reply, yet anxious it might implicate me. He took the letter out of my hand and read the address. “It’s for him,” he said.

  I imagined his heart racing — the persistent thump, thump, the vibration on his ribs, but all I could see was a muscle tighten in his cheeks and a small shudder pass through the envelope.

  “Yes.” I studied a thread that rested quietly on his collar.

  “We have to send it back.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll keep it for now and you can give it to the postman to return,” he said.

  “Alright.”

  The door closed silently and neatly. But not before something sneaked out, a slip of air, a feeling. Or a remnant of something else.

  The timbre of the house had altered by the time I climbed out of bed and tiptoed downstairs later that night. Each stair had a unique creak, fine-tuned by the darkness, which mapped out my downward journey better than any flashlight. I imagined I could feel the changing weight of the air as I groped my way towards the cellar. The door squeaked and then sighed when I felt for the switch. It snapped on to reveal a low room of claustrophobic proportions. A nook awaited me at the bottom of the stairs: a chair, a cardboard box upturned, a folded blanket, all hidden behind a wall of stacked boxes. I wished the chair would not creak so as I arranged the blanket across my knees, reached into the first box and pulled out a book. Page eighteen, stanza twelve.

  Full many a gem of purest ray serene

  The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear.

  The ray was damp. Damper than the ocean bear that narrowly avoided the circle of mildew that had grown across the page. I wrapped my finger inside the hem of my nightdress and wiped the paper, smoothing off the mould, like cleaning the ears of my first doll. This was all I had left. Of my mother. Three hundred and forty-eight books of poetry, hundreds of pages, thousands of words, packed into cardboard boxes and touched only by me. I blew across the page, looking for a mother’s fingerprints, and read on. It felt so lovely to lose myself in the lines but another thought kept interrupting the flow. Where had my father put the letter? Was it on the sideboard? Was it in a drawer hidden beneath his socks? Or was it still in his hand, curling into his thoughts and ratcheting up the fear that blighted our lives?

  I laid a piece of tissue into the margin, slipped the book back into the box and crept upstairs. As I relaxed down onto my pillow, I remembered, not the envelope that had been pushed so intrusively into my home, but the last lines I’d read of the poem.

  Full many a flower is born to blush unseen

  And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

  7

  I knew it was happening again even before I reached the bottom of the stairs next morning. The hall reeked of wallpaper paste and a pair of scratches ran, not entirely directly, across the floorboards towards the living room door. My father was up the stepladder, spread-eagled against the end wall when I reached the doorway, a pasting brush gripped in one hand and a man-sized sheet of wallpaper flapping in the other. Some invisible force seemed to be pulling the glued side away from him, and his dilemma — I realized in the second it took me to throw my cardigan onto the sofa — was how to connect the paper to the wall.

  “Help me!” he wailed, quarter-turning his head towards me.

  “Can I hold something?” I said, moving closer so I could see his face.

  “Get the end!” he yelled, “The deer are getting out of hand.”

  The deer. I suddenly saw them. They were racing across the living room wall like escapees from a drug-testing laboratory. He’d misjudged the wallpaper seams badly and body parts were everywhere: animal legs projected from heads, torsos were sliced at the waist and clipped antlers were collecting on the edges of the sheets like trophies from a stag hunt. I stepped onto the ladder and eased the paper out of his hands.

  “Do you think we should buy something a bit more. . . geometric next time?” I separated a pair of nostrils from the end of a roughly cut muzzle.

  “Cheap,” was all he said.

  My father had little patience with patterns. Saturday mornings were often spent rummaging inside the sale bin at the hardware shop where he’d discovered a treasure trove of unwanted wallpaper covered with objects: vintage cars, aeroplanes, flowers in baskets and end of line flock. But he rarely stood back and looked at the scenes taking shape on our living room wall, oblivious to the rows of birds flying across painted skies or the roses pressed against the sides of purple-striped pots.

  We’d had them all. Layer after layer, which fattened the wall, shrank the room and soothed my father’s anxious heart. I’d lost track of the number of times he had wallpapered the living room wall. Not every wall, just the ‘party’ wall, as he called it. The misleading nature of this word had confused me as a child, the way it suggested that pasting layers of paper onto it would lead to some sort of celebration, dancing, music, exotic food even. It took a reader’s letter in the newspaper to enlighten me: the party wall is the boundary that separates neighbours

  in semi-detached houses.

  I stepped down from the ladder and looked up at his work.

  “I wonder. . .” I checked his profile.

  “What?”

  “I wonder if that one might be upside down.”

  He didn’t reply at first but something flickered behind his eyes. “It’s getting it up there that matters.”

  “Yes.”

  “I
don’t want to hear,” he added quietly.

  “Hear what?” I ventured.

  “What he has to say.”

  I squeezed the brush in my hand. “Do you hear?”

  “Sometimes.”

  I heard too. I’d never mentioned it to my father but a voice had been coming through our living room wall for as long as I could remember. At first I thought it came from inside my head but I soon realized the only time I ever heard the voice was in that part of the house. I never caught an actual sentence, but maybe you don’t need words to know what someone is saying. No highs, no lows and no changes of pace, the bodiless voice was monotone, an even commentary that came and went and spoke to no one but itself.

  I checked my father’s profile for change. “I thought I might go and see Una for a bit this evening.”

  “Not for long.”

  “No, not for long. An hour, maybe?”

  “I might need you to help me outside, we have to get that bit finished at the back end and. . .”

  I waited. He had me suspended. Every day he had me suspended, waiting for his sentences to end, waiting to find out how he would be. And when it came it was never much, few highs, few lows, no changes of pace, but every word was loaded.

  “. . .alright.”

  His shirt had escaped the back of his trousers as he reached up to smooth a bubble of air out from beneath a deer’s bulging flank. It was going to be a good day.

  Una Bates lived at the end of a narrow alleyway not far from my house. A girl was attacked there once, years ago, but I always walked that way when I visited her home. Vivian would have said I courted danger if she knew the way I strolled, quite slowly, down between the backs of the houses just as light seeped from the sky, but I liked it, the way I could see heads bob in kitchen windows as people unpacked the remains of packed lunches, and the dogs sniffed half-heartedly at the back gates. Una was my only friend. Most of my school friends had faded away during my childhood. Their loyalty — stretched taut over the years by my father’s erratic behaviour — finally snapped the day he came to the school and made a scene. It wasn’t a loud scene, no drawing back of curtains, no announcing asides to an audience, but a small act that drew attention to my family in a way that labeled me as different. He didn’t usually come to parents’ evenings. Mine was always the paper with the cross that excused the absentee parent, yet on that day he sat at the classroom table in crumbling silence, his fingers folding triangles into a corner of my essay and with his foot tapping incessantly on the floor. Then he complained. Not in a measured, reasonable way, but shouting and swearing before he bolted down the school steps like a frightened animal. As word spread in increasingly fantastical sentences, I stopped giving him letters from the school, I kept all mention of parent-teacher evenings to myself and I stopped inviting friends to my home. But my English teacher came to the house once. She’d knocked loudly on the front door and pushed her way into our hall on a wave of shrill pronouncements about my high exam results and eye for detail only to visibly wilt beneath my father’s stare. She left in a hurry, her jacket pulled tight across her chest.

  Only Una still came to the house. We’d met in my final year at school; she was a last minute new girl, thrown into the sixth form a few months before our final exams and she needed a friend. She’d traveled with her parents to India, Thailand, Fiji and places I couldn’t even pronounce. She was new to the country and new to the town; she needed a friend and I was going spare.

  Una often came to the house when my father was at work, placed her shoes neatly by the doormat, sat with me at the kitchen table and left well before his return. She’d been fascinated by our house from the first day, “Had a funny smell” she’d said, “but not in a horrible way.” Rather like the days her grandma made fish pie and left it in the oven too long. She liked to explore, flicking the tassels of the lampshades as she went through the living room and sniffing Vivian’s assortment of bath salts left behind on the bathroom shelf. But what delighted her most was the mangle. She adored the antiquated apparatus that sat in the corner of our pantry and had peeled off her socks at her first sight of it, dunked them in the sink and squeezed them through the mean lips of the roller with unconcealed delight. A bathroom sponge had followed; then in a final thrilling act she had forced through a marmite sandwich, oozing streaky black fat, which left us both weak with laughter.

  Una’s father was a kind man. He was the one who answered the door whenever I knocked. He looked genuinely pleased to see me and always sent me up the stairs on the back of the same remark, “She says she’s doing her homework” followed by a mock sigh. He never tired of that even though Una had now left school and I never tired of it either, happy to be part of an ordinary house for a small part of the day.

  Una was lying loosely on her bed when I entered her room. She read a magazine, her heels waved above her head. “Edith, I didn’t think you’d make it,” she said, shifting her weight up onto her elbow.

  “I haven’t got long.”

  “No need to explain.” She turned a page. “Have you seen this funny thing in here? It’s called a hula-hoop.”

  I looked over her shoulder. “What do you do with it?”

  “Twirl it round your hips, as far as I can see.”

  “Why?”

  “Fun, I suppose.” She turned towards me. “Are you alright?” Nothing happen at home, did it?”

  “No.”

  “Something’s on your mind though.”

  “I saw this photograph, today.”

  “What photograph?”

  “Of a garden.”

  “What sort of garden?”

  “One of those big rich ones. It’s quite near here, just beyond Stony Ridge.”

  “And?”

  I sat on the bed. “Have you ever seen something and for some reason been unable to stop thinking about it?”

  “Mr. MacKenzie comes to mind, I used to live for English class. Where did you see this picture?”

  “In a magazine; it came in the post. I can’t explain it very well, but there were these beautiful flowers there, but it wasn’t just that.”

  She sat up. “What was it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was it something about the place?”

  I thought. “I really don’t know.”

  “You could plant some flowers, couldn’t you? Your garden’s big enough. Archie’d give you some seeds, he’d love it.”

  “My father would never let me.”

  “No.” She looked down at the magazine. “What about a hula-hoop, would he allow that?” She smiled.

  For some reason it was Vivian’s hips that came into my head, swaying round and round, rubbing red onto the inside of the hoop. “No, of course not, no.”

  Una leaned against me. “Edith, you know I’m leaving next week.”

  “I know. Tuesday at ten o’clock.”

  “London’s not so far, you know and I’ll be in student digs. You could come and visit me. You’d have to sleep on the floor of course.”

  “I probably wouldn’t get to sleep if it was just the floor.” I laughed.

  “No, you probably wouldn’t.”

  “What are going to do now school’s over, Edith? Have you thought any more about it?”

  “Oh, you know, there’s so much to do in the house —”

  “Edie,” she squeezed my arm, “there really isn’t.”

  “But my father, he can’t cope on his own. You understand.”

  “Of course I understand, but one day you’re going to have to leave him.”

  “I know. I’m just not ready, I. . .”

  “When will you be ready?”

  “Oh, Una, don’t make it so hard.”

  She put an arm round my shoulder. “Edie, you can do it you know, everyone leaves home sooner or later, you just have to look towards the horizon rather than at what’s behind you all the time.”

  “I know that. Please don’t talk about it. I will move out — when I’m ready.�
�

  Dusk had settled grey onto the street when I set off for home, yet Una’s house looked welcoming when I turned to look back. She was starting a new life in another town. She’d be living in a place I’d never seen.

  I used to think about leaving home when I was a child. A bag stuffed with clothes was a regular part of my more adventurous dreams and I’d even brought home a train timetable from the station once but when I’d rummaged at the back of my father’s wardrobe then slithered beneath his bed looking for a suitcase, I couldn’t to find one. It’s still there, that timetable, lying at the bottom of my drawer, all departure times long past.

  The horizon looked limp when I looked up the hill beyond my house, sagging at the edges where the trees met the sky. And there it stood, the stranger in the wood, its branches sticking out in every direction, uncomfortable with itself.

  Blackbirds were warming up their throats when I looked out of my bedroom window later that evening. The brick extension built onto the rear of my house forced my gaze towards the back fence beyond which it settled on a vanishing point deep in the woods.

  The far end of the high wall looked solid enough from here in my room and I took comfort from the ninety-degree angle between the bricks and the ground, but occasionally I wondered how many more years it could brace itself against the wind that buffeted round the garden seeking out weak points and gouging honeycomb spots into the bricks. Hawthorn bushes filled the middle of my view. Dull and lanky, they had colonized a large area behind the house and any routes through were testimony to movements in the garden: a path of flattened weeds along the base of the high wall, a faint trail from the back door to Archie’s side of the garden and a groove along the back fence where animals came through during the night.

  Ground lay beneath the hawthorn bushes, but I rarely saw it. Only on the most blustery days would the wind tear back a branch and expose the soil below, bare and anemic and dry.