by Rosie Chard
I was sitting alone at the kitchen table when my father returned from work. He took off his jacket, spread his newspaper out on the table and turned to the crossword, running his fingers through his hair, speckling the paper with dandruff — white dots on black squares. He eyed me suspiciously as I read the first clue upside down.
“Would it be alright if I grew some flowers in the garden?” I concentrated on the line where his forehead met his hair. His pencil remained suspended above six down. I could hear the clock tick and secretly, inside my mouth, I counted the seconds, one, two, three, four. . .
He looked up. “Flowers?”
“Yes.”
“What for?”
I fingered my skirt beneath the table. “I thought it’d be nice to make a flower garden behind the house. A small one, I could clear some of the weeds and —”
“No.”
His breathing seemed louder when he dabbed a letter into eleven across. I gazed at the crossword, feeling a bud of nausea as my brain turned round the clue, Bloom’s melancholy toll. Eight letters.
The sky was a square. Seen through my bedroom window its edge was fixed, yet its contents were moving. Objects often passed through my square of sky, travelling from somewhere to somewhere else. Clouds drifted through. Birds flew through, too fast to see. Pieces of the garden passed through: leaves scuffed up from below, handfuls of dust angling faces towards the sun. Once or twice a year snow rushed through. And once or twice a lifetime a petal floated through. And once, just once, a large stick went through my square of sky.
Parts of the garden were moving, all on their way to somewhere else. The only static object was me.
11
No, no, no. . . A single word beat a rhythm in my head. Even swishing the mop round in an exaggerated circle failed to clear my father’s words from my mind and I felt tired and irritable by the time it nudged the doormat and shifted it to one side. My nostrils twitched as, amidst the smell of mildew and disinfectant, I saw something on the kitchen floor. A sliver of dirt had collected in a gap beside the skirting board, brown, moist, and host to a line of tiny seedlings. Squatting down, I saw more: a row of pale stalks starved of chlorophyll and tiny roots, feeling their way into cracks in the linoleum. A miniature garden had grown in my kitchen without my knowledge, seeds germinating as I prepared the supper, seedlings fattening while I washed the dishes, and whole families quietly dying as I folded up the tea towels. I stood up, faintly aware, just faintly, of a new idea gathering in my mind.
Two hours. I had two hours to begin something I might live to regret. ‘Live to regret’ was an expression Vivian used often, a long-standing threat that started the moment it left her mouth and continued until I was dead. Would I regret this act? It was already too late. I had discovered new strength in my arms as I forced open the door to the garden shed. Years of repeated soaking had warped the door frame but the toughened threads of old oak were no match for my newly determined shoulders and soon I was inside, coughing up dust and picking black specks out of my eyes. It was dark in there and I sniffed the air, half repulsed, half addicted to the smell of wood preservative that drifted around me. I sensed a place stripped bare as I peered through the gloom yet signs of past activity were scattered about; soil still striped the workbench and cones of earth dotted the ground, dried-up relics of some long-forgotten spillage. My spirits rose when I spotted a row of hooks jutting from the wall, then sank as I got closer to the solitary garden fork lined with shards old mud, every prong bent.
I picked my way across the floor, grazing my ankle on the blades of a lawnmower until, hidden behind a bag of fertilizer, I found what I had been looking for.
Next morning broke without incident. The white line of day seeped up from the horizon; milk bottles tinkled on the doorstep and a teabag steamed in the sink. But for some reason my father did not leave for work at the usual time. He had to find fault with the shirt I’d ironed the evening before, running an accusing finger across the ripples pressed into the cuffs and he had to fuss about a stray crease abandoned on one of the elbows. Then he insisted on retrieving the previous day’s newspaper from the kitchen bin and wiped tea leaves off the crossword before penciling in the answer to seven down. And finally, he brought a jacket down from his room that I had never seen before and laid it on my lap with a gesture to clean. A few wipes across the shoulders with a cloth seemed to satisfy him and at last he was outside, adjusting his arms inside unfamiliar sleeves and striding up the garden path as if leaving the place could not come quickly enough. I ran up the stairs.
The hacksaw I’d found in the shed bared its rusty teeth at me when I pulled it from the back of wardrobe. I carried it down into the garden where a trapped tissue waved its fingerless hand at me as I stood on the edge of the hawthorn bushes, wondering where to start. I pushed back a branch, knelt down and clambered inside the thicket but as I crawled along on hands and knees I forgot what I should have remembered: Giant hogweed lived here. It stroked my arm with its acidic touch so I bent low and crawled beneath. Further progress was slow; a thistle pricked the inside of my thumbnail, a nettle stung my wrist and my hand sank into a sandwich of newspaper half buried in the soil, its pages glued together with rain. The saw dragged behind me, catching on the ground and I was forced to crawl slowly until I reached the centre of the thicket. It was a man’s saw, I discovered, its handle too big for my hand and it bent as I pushed it back and forth, forcing out a bite. I cut my thumb so I laid the saw down and grabbed the branch in my hands, bending it back, winkling out its green underskin, before picking up the saw again and attempting to cut.
Twenty minutes later I sat back on my heels and cried. Not a real cry, with swollen eyes and a wet handkerchief, but something inside that left me catching my breath and blinking fast. I had imagined a secret place in the bushes. Hidden from my father, hidden from Vivian, and hidden from him. But everything was too difficult. Too stupid. Then a noise made me jump; twigs quivered just beyond my feet and a head popped into view. Bald and marked with a red scratch, someone was tunneling towards me. “Archie!”
The bald patch flipped upwards, pulling a face into view, that was stretched at the neck and buckled at the forehead.
“Shove up.” He heaved himself upright, pushed on the ground for leverage and wheezed like a constipated donkey.
“What are you doing in here?” I said.
“Rescuing my trousers,” he replied, grabbing his belt and heaving fudge-coloured corduroys up to his armpits. “Nearly lost my dignity back there. Bloody hawthorn hooked onto my pocket and wouldn’t let go.” He grinned. “So. What are we doing?”
“I can’t get the bushes out.”
“Edie, what are you talking about? Why do you want to get the bushes out?”
“I had this idea. . .”
“What idea?”
“About making a place of my own.”
“What do you mean?”
“I went to that garden.”
He shuffled closer to me. “Which garden?”
“The one in the photograph.”
“How did you do that?”
“I met this woman, Dotty. She took me there.”
“Wait, Edie, who was this woman?”
“I met her in the street.”
He seemed to smile and frown at the same time. “And she just took you there?”
“Yes, she was nice.”
“And she just ‘took’ you there?”
“Yes, we walked around together.”
His shoulders relaxed. “What did you think?”
“It made me feel happy.”
“And. . . ?”
“I thought I could make a place of my own, like that, well, not like that but somewhere that I could go and be alone and grow flowers. It would have a special smell and be. . .”
“Private?”
“Yes, private, but more than that. Secret.”
“Secret from who?”
“My father.”
“But Edie, y
our father will be just over there working on that wretched wall of yours. Had you thought of that?”
“I had. . . but. . . It’s all so stupid, isn’t it?”
Archie raised one eyebrow into a dome. “Look, love, why don’t you just ask him if you can plant some flowers? His answer might surprise you.”
“I did.”
“And?”
“He said no.”
Archie scraped a crumb of soil out from under his thumbnail. “You know you can always help me with the vegetables, there’s a show coming up next month. We’d make a good team, you and I. Wilf would never know.” He hesitated. “It’s not the same, is it?”
“No.”
He ran his hand over his head. “So, do you have a plan for getting out of here?”
“Keep your elbows in and cover your eyes.”
“After you, Madam.”
It was harder getting out. The branches seemed to have woven themselves back together and Archie was repeating a word that sounded like ‘fudgit’ by the time we reached the outside.
He steadied his body as he struggled to his feet. “So, your father knows nothing about this?”
“No, nothing.” I picked a twig off his back.
“How is he these days?”
“My father?”
“Yes.”
“He’s alright. Why?”
“Just wondered. I saw him in the surgery the other day.”
“You mean Dr. Granger’s?”
“Yes, I was getting my Achilles checked and he came in.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing.”
“But he never goes to the doctor.”
“Lucky man.”
“Really, Archie, he never, ever goes.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
Archie frowned. We both turned towards the high wall, as if the bricks would provide an answer.
“I dream about it,” I said. “I dream that it will fall over one day and I won’t be there to stop it.”
He looked into my eyes. “When will it stop, Edie?”
I didn’t answer. I had never asked Archie about Edward Black. Never, during all the years that I had talked and he had listened.
I was scared of the answer.
I knew my father’s bedroom intimately. I knew it as the person who stretched the sheet over the corner of the mattress. I knew it as the person who emptied tissues from the bin. But I did not know it as a daughter. Never once had I been read a story between warm sheets, never sat on the chest of drawers and tucked my toes between rows of socks. Never laughed at nothing.
I sat down on my father’s bed and succumbed to the question. Why did my father hate Edward Black? I’d wanted to ask. So many times I’d had the questions laid out in my head, but my father’s lips stretched tight into a line had always stopped me.
I pulled open the drawer in his bedside table — a daring whim — and found a box of small, grey pills. I picked one out and held it above my tongue before slipping it back into the box. Then I opened the door of his wardrobe. The acrid perfume of mothballs soared out as I slipped my hand into the pocket of a suit jacket. The silk liner caressed my finger when I felt inside a second pocket, and another, then another, saddened by the emptiness. In his most private places, there lay nothing.
12
Secrets. Everyone had them, I imagined. My father spent most of his evenings in his bedroom yet I never saw any sign of activity when I brought him a sandwich or tapped on the door with a cup of tea in my hand. No book open on the table, no crease on the bed. Yet a distinct sound clicked beneath his door at ten o’clock every night. Even Vivian, with her loud voice and barging ways, was secretive sometimes. She would snap her handbag shut with the ferocity of a cornered badger if anyone tried to look inside and sometimes, just sometimes, when I entered the kitchen unannounced, I would glimpse another Vivian. One that was worried.
I was lying in bed early next morning when someone knocked on the front door. Persuading myself it was only the tail end of a dream, I turned over. But the knock came again, louder, so I forced myself out of bed and hurried downstairs. The shape of a cap rippling through the frosted glass greeted me as I entered the hall. I tightened the belt of my dressing gown and opened the door; a fresh voice jumped into the house.
“Morning, Miss. This is for you.”
The greeting surprised me, accompanied as it was by a small envelope pushed towards my stomach.
“There’s been a bit of a mistake,” continued the postman, “the letter went next door.” He smiled. “Accidentally. But it’s back now.”
I looked down at the letter lying in my hands: just an envelope, just tape reinforcing a badly licked edge.
“You alright, Miss?”
The postman’s name tag was pinned on his other lapel today. “Yes. Thank you, Mr. Worth.”
“Call me Johnny.”
“Thank you. . . Johnny.”
“The bloke next door gave it to me. He said it was for you.”
He said it was for you. Something quivered in my chest. The words ‘Edith Stoker’ had been inside my neighbour’s mouth. “For me?”
“Yeah. Odd bloke. Only seen him this once.” He tilted his head. “You sure you’re alright, Miss?”
I re-read the address. “Oh, it’s for my father.”
“Is it?” The postman stretched out his neck to check the envelope; I could smell ketchup on his breath. “Same difference.” He glanced at my hand. “Hey, you’ve got a splinter.”
I looked down.
“There, on your thumb. It looks nasty.”
“Oh, it’s nothing, it’s old.”
“Mustn’t let it get old, here, let me have a go at it.”
Without waiting for a reply he took hold of my hand and pressed the splinter between his thumbs. No one had held my hand since I was a child. It was a strange sensation, the postman so close, pressing his nails into my palm, rubbing prickly sleeves against my wrist, tickling my arm with his watchstrap. I rarely felt the touch of another person; I could not remember the embrace of my mother. I had been about five years old when Vivian had told me she hadn’t ‘gone away’ as I’d always been led to believe, but that she’d died. Not kindly, not putting an arm around my shoulder, she’d rushed out a vague description of events that she’d never been willing to explain. There’d been no one to extract an eyelash from the corner of my eye or ease a splinter out of my hand. The thorn popped out.
“Voila!” cried Johnny, “Right, this won’t get the baby bathed. I better get back to my round. Goodbye, Miss Stoker.”
I felt forced. “Call me Edith. And thank you.”
He smiled. “You’re welcome. Goodbye, Edith.”
The postman’s silhouette rippled in the glass as I closed the door behind him, his footsteps faded, and I was left alone with the letter. I placed it on the table and started the washing up, glancing at it every now and again. Then I returned to the table and held it up to the light. Were his fingerprints on the envelope? Had my fingers almost touched his?
“What’s that?”
I turned to see my father standing in the doorway.
“It’s a letter,” I said. “For you.”
He picked it up and slipped it into his pocket. No comment, not even a dot of curiosity in his eye. I continued to wash a plate, blowing away a soap bubble that floated aimlessly in front of my face. The envelope no longer had anything to do with me. It was forgotten. It was marked with a tiny spot of blood.
It felt good to lie in the bath. Eleven o’clock at night was the safe time of my day when my father went no further than calling occasional instructions through the keyhole, which, I sometimes couldn’t hear. I gazed up at the wallpaper, at the pattern of seahorses swimming towards the window and remembered times that had gone before. My father had only papered the bathroom once, a stressful occasion cut into my memory of shouting, of ladder’s feet sliding across the bath and of grey, granular, wallpaper
paste floating in the toilet. Mould had now bruised the creatures into pathological shapes and the sheets were peeling, their remnants clinging to the wall on ancient glue. Yet this was a place I could relax. A place of gentle steaming and quiet. Breathing in deeply, I closed my eyes, stretched out my spine, uncurled my fingers and felt myself growing.
Something made me open my eyes — a small sound maybe — and to my horror I saw a spider in the bath with me; it floated towards me on a wave of suds, rolling back and forth inside the current from my body. I jerked my knees up to my chest, scooped up the bedraggled creature and pressed it against the side of the bath before accidentally submerging it again in a second wave as I sank back down. I picked up a flannel, pinched its crumpled body into the folds then pressed it onto the rim of the bath where it lay glued to the enamel like a piece of black cotton.
I didn’t like spiders. They cleaned the house, they ate flies, yet they had eight eyes in their heads. I could hardly bear to think of it, eight eyes, eight lenses, eight pictures of everything projected into their minds. But I managed to relax down beneath the water line and set about studying the tiny corpse. It was then that I noticed the hole. Just a black triangle, it marked the spot where two wall tiles had failed to line up; I’d never noticed it before. I tried to remember the last time my father and I had done any work on the bathroom but as I examined the hole more closely I was convinced I saw a tube of darkness piercing the communal wall that joined my neighbour’s bathroom to mine.
A heavy hand thumped on the door.
“Hurry up in there!” said my father’s voice. “You need to get the spare room ready.”
The water chopped into waves. “I’m coming.”
“I need to use the toilet, so hurry.”
“I’ll be out in a second.”
With a towel tightened across my chest, I walked over to the window and pressed my nose against the frosted glass. I could just make out the outline of the oak tree in the back garden, swaying back and forth like a cloud on a string. Not for the first time, I fingered the edge of the pane and picked at the putty lining the glass, but it was impossible to open the window and draw a breeze into the room as it was welded to its frame with years of layered paint. I turned round to look at the spider. The spider was gone.
