The Insistent Garden

by Rosie Chard

  13

  MAY IRRITATE EYES AND SKIN

  DO NOT BREATHE FUMES OR GET IN EYES

  KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN

  Tuesday came round more often than other days of the week. I felt convinced of this as I heaved a suitcase up the stairs with one hand and clutched a warm pair of slingbacks in the other. Vivian had arrived earlier than normal and I was standing on the doormat, listening to her list of chores, when I spotted a dab of green on the other side of the road. It could have been anything; a school cardigan flung contemptuously over a shoulder, or the olive jacket of the window cleaner doing his round of the street. Or it could have been a woman’s suit. Vivian’s checklist had reached a peak, rolling her tongue round the ‘r’ in ‘ironing’ like an over-zealous chemistry teacher, so I reminded her of the tea cooling on the kitchen table and stepped outside.

  The view of the street was better from the porch, empty yet busy. A paper bag bashed against the gate and the breeze sent a shiver through the leaves of the cherry tree on the opposite pavement. Then I saw her. Dotty Hands had emerged from behind a van parked opposite and now she strode down the hill, looking neither left nor right. She attempted a jaunty stride but the spare tyre that circled her waist hindered a purposeful arm swing and she marched along like an out-of-condition soldier. Still she did not turn her head and before I knew what I was doing I raised my hand to wave.

  “Tuh, who does she think she’s going as?” said Vivian, back by my side, reeking of half-chewed biscuit.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “That woman in green.”

  “Which woman?” I felt a smile somewhere inside my face.

  “Her. The madam in the suit,” She glanced down at her own dress. “Green’s such a foul colour. Never suits anyone.”

  Dotty reached our gate, glanced in our direction and then veered back down the street.

  “I’m not sure if I. . . ,” I began.

  Vivian regarded me suspiciously. “I’m going upstairs for a rest, make sure the ironing is done when I get back down.

  “I will.”

  After she had thumped her intentions out on the stairs I sauntered up the path and leaned over the gate. The green suit was gone.

  For someone I had spent an afternoon with, I didn’t know much about Dotty. ‘I’m a listener,’ she’d said when I asked in the car. ‘That’s a job,’ she added when questioned further. I liked the way she did whatever she liked. She seemed to float, a seed in the wind and the best thing was, she didn’t care. I wished I didn’t care. I wished I could feel so carefree that I could climb over fences and clamber over walls just because I could. I took one last look up the street then quietly closed the door.

  Dotty. Perhaps she was coming for me.

  34 Ethrington Street

  Billingsford,

  Northamptonshire

  August 24th 1968

  Dear Gill,

  My God. I thought I’d seen it all! It was this woman, Gill, who came into the shop. This big woman. I’d noticed her a couple of days ago, tearing past the window, doing that really fast walk people do when they don’t care what they look like. I’d been wondering when she’d be coming into the shop for some deodorant when this morning the bell rang louder than I’d ever heard it and without so much as a hello she was upon me. Did I have any elastic stockings? she says. Of course I didn’t have any elastic stockings, they went out in 1959, but nice as pie I managed to say people don’t feel comfortable wearing those these days (I’m learning, aren’t I) and got away with flogging her two tins of sardines and a pair of tights. So what’s wrong with that I hear you asking. Well, this all happened beneath the most terrifying stare I’ve ever seen. You know me, I’m not scared of anyone, but I was sweating Gill, I was really sweating. Then she started on about my bread. Nothing wrong with that either of course — I get the freshest white sliced — but she wanted to know why it wasn’t on the shelf, the right shelf, any more. Honestly, Gill, I almost laughed but then that stare broke out again and I found myself promising to move all the tinned peas just to get the bread back to where it was before. Customer is always right, eh, Gill? And as for her outfit, get this, she had on a red dress, red shoes — not bad I hear you say — but, red lipstick, red necklace and red jacket. Come to think of it, quite a lot of people going up and down the hill look a bit shifty. They like to keep their heads down, not much use when I’ve spent an hour on my window display. Remind me not to stock red ribbons anymore.

  Jean

  14

  Hours of wall-tending meant hours of laundry. Every day I gathered my father’s shirts and limp-seamed underpants out of the laundry basket, sometimes still warm, and washed them by hand in the kitchen sink. Touching my father’s dirty clothes repulsed me. Something about the orange lines gathering inside his collar made me feel dirty myself. I was standing in the kitchen, wringing water from the arms of a sweater, when I heard an object skim the doormat. I rushed to the hall to find a letter resting against the skirting board. Surprised by its lightness, I picked it up and read the address, ‘To the Occupier.’ I smiled. How I loved letters addressed to the occupier. It meant I could open them. Mad moths danced in my stomach as I slid my finger along the seal and pulled out a piece of paper, flimsy with cheapness.

  Dear Occupier,

  As you may have read in the local newspaper

  your area is suffering from a severe infestation of

  Fireblight. This is a serious disease, which affects

  apples, pears, hawthorn and other members of the

  Rosaceae family. It is recommended that you carry

  out a full inspection of the plants in your garden

  and report any sign of blackening or cracking to the

  council immediately. Infected branches should be

  pruned. Fireblight is a contagious disorder and it is

  important to burn all cuttings and disinfect all tools.

  For further advice please contact our horticultural

  advisor at the telephone number above.

  My eyes were glazing over in the dull pot of council advice when I noticed a single word sited innocently on the fifth line. Ten small letters. Contagious.

  The newspaper was up when I entered the kitchen.

  “I think the council might want us to remove some of the hawthorn,” I said.

  My father didn’t reply at first. He picked a hair from his shoulder, grasping repeatedly at the reluctant thread until he held it between his nails. I watched it float upwards as he threw it into the air, then drop down, snagging back onto his arm. But it wasn’t short and black as I expected, but long and straw-coloured, with a bend in the last inch. “What for?” he said.

  “They might be infected.”

  He looked up, but didn’t speak.

  “Poisoned,” I said.

  His eyes snapped into focus, right onto my mouth. “What did you say?”

  “Diseased. . . poisoned.”

  I had no idea which of the two words pulled the trigger but my father shoved back his chair, crossed the floor and stood right in front of me. “What the hell do you mean?” he demanded.

  “In the garden,” I stammered. “It’s the Fireblight. The letter said.”

  “What letter!” he roared.

  “The council letter. I have it here.”

  I felt for my pocket, but my pocket was gone. My skirt had twisted round my waist and the pocket was now helplessly lined up with the centre of spine. I pulled it back round, plucked out the letter and placed it into his outstretched hand. He scanned the page rapidly. “Fireblight,” he said, without intonation.

  I remained still; an itch teased the side of my nose.

  “Get the matches,” my father he said.

  I scurried to the kitchen drawer, pulled out the matchbox and was poking through it, when he yanked the box out of my hands and wrenched open the back door.

  My father was standing in the Little Meadow, arms outstretched, reading the newspaper by the time
I’d found the courage to look outside. The stillness, coming so quickly after the agitation of the past few moments, frightened me. From the safety of the threshold, I watched as a stalk of grass tapped the back of his trousers and dropped a seed into the back of his shoe.

  “North-northeast. Ten miles an hour,” he said.

  Edging forward I glimpsed a weather map between his outstretched arms but before I had time to understand what it meant he began separating the paper into sheets, holding them down with his heel as the wind tugged at the corners. “Get some kindling!” he said.

  Preparing a fire gave me time to think. We gathered up twigs, we screwed up paper, but I couldn’t see where this moment would end.

  Flames, as if waiting for life, jumped into the air the second my father struck the first match. The newspaper writhed, the hawthorn twigs dipped into the fire and the flame took hold with a crackle of sparks, singeing the clematis beards that brushed across the ground before creeping deeper into the bushes. Then a fresh breeze, sent by an unknown sky watcher, tore into the garden and a hot yellow ball cracked twigs deep inside the thicket.

  I moved towards my father. But he wasn’t watching the fire; he wasn’t even checking that the house was safe. He was staring at the balls of grey smoke pouring over the high wall.

  North-northeast.

  My father and I stood together in the garden two hours later, looking at the broken-down scaffold of hawthorn. We rarely ‘stood together.’ Occupying the same square yard as him, a hair’s breadth from touching, was a novel experience. I had no idea what he was thinking, or feeling, or about to do next. I thought of the fire. As it rushed through the hawthorn, Archie had appeared, shouting frantically through the smoke. But my father had ignored him and the last sight I had of him was as he desperately hauled a pair of overweight pumpkins towards the far side of his garden. The flames had cut the hawthorn to the ground and now the garden looked bigger, the wounded earth dotted with singed grass, stumps, and weeds so black they lay on the soil like strokes of burnt paint. Archie’s side of the garden remained intact but a ghostly mark smeared the top of his wall as if a grey veil had been dropped from a great height.

  But despite the flames and fear and smoke-filled eyes, it was not the fire that remained in my thoughts. It was a small event that occurred later. I was washing up, watching my father through the kitchen window, when I saw him bend down and pluck a handful of grass, untouched by fire. He ran a stalk between his fingers and popped off the seeds, one by one. Then he cupped them in the palm of his hand and sniffed. I had never seen such a gentle gesture from my father, never imagined it possible. But it was his final movement that made a saucer slip from my hand. He flicked his hand upwards and cast the seeds high into the air.

  Then, he smiled.

  15

  “My God! What happened?”

  I had never seen Vivian’s face so shocked before. Normally so in control of her expressions, she arrived in the back garden early next morning with her face redder than usual, her lips rounded out into a capital ‘O.’

  “The Fireblight got it,” replied my father.

  “What do you mean, ‘The Fireblight got it?’”

  He rubbed his eyebrow, working against the grain. “The disease. It was in the garden. I had to get rid of it.”

  A flicker of confusion crossed Vivian’s face then she relaxed. I relaxed too. But I couldn’t help but watch her tongue traverse her bottom lip as she studied the blackened stumps. “It came from next door of course,” she said.

  “Not Archie!” I said without thinking.

  “Don’t be ridiculous! Archibald Bishop wouldn’t say boo to a goose. It was him.”

  “Of course it was him.” My father tilted his head in the direction of the high wall. “I sent the smoke over.”

  “Clever man.”

  “The wind was perfect.”

  “The wall wasn’t damaged, was it?” Vivian said, scanning the brickwork, “I’ll check.”

  I felt a breeze as my aunt walked past, laced with garlic. She was halfway down the garden before we heard the scream. Her hands flew up to her cheeks. “He’s made a hole!” she screeched.

  My father ran. I ran too, my fastest ever, suddenly gripped by an intense longing, to see, if only I could get there first, to see.

  Vivian stood like a woman caught naked. “Wilf, get a cover, a plug or. . . something! Anything!” she yelled, clamping her hand across the hole. “Just cover it up. Hurry!”

  “I’ll get some mortar.” My father rushed back up the garden, stiff and awkward, as someone who never ran.

  Moments later he was raising dust and sluicing water over a heap of cement. I blinked, aware of my teeth drying inside my mouth. “Aunt Vivian,” I said, “Would you like me to mind the hole? You might like to take a rest.”

  “Don’t be absurd!”

  So I waited. Waited and watched, absorbing every last detail of the hand pressed over the hole. I counted the rings; I studied the fingernails; I watched the veins bulge across the back of her hands every time she changed position. My father raised the trowel loaded with mortar and Vivian’s back bobbed across my view.

  “Better check the whole wall, Wilf. And get it built higher,” she said.

  “Yes. Higher.”

  I stared at the wall, mesmerized by the blob of mortar already changing colour at the edges. Isn’t it high enough?

  A thread of air poked through the kitchen keyhole an hour later; it chilled my ear. Without the aid of body language I had to concentrate to catch the words coming out of my aunt’s mouth. ‘Burnt’ jumped from the muffle of words, then ‘Edith’ rose up.

  Vivian was talking about me but the usual edge to my aunt’s voice was missing, replaced by a dull, business-like inflection. She might have been discussing how to replace a missing roof tile; how to gut a fish. Suddenly the sound level rose and I caught a full sentence from my father’s lips. “Don’t keep on, Vivian. I don’t care what she does.”

  I waited in the living room for Vivian to leave the kitchen. I knew she would. I knew her hour of rest beckoned and she would soon thump up the stairs, close her bedroom door and flop down onto the bed.

  I slunk into the kitchen, pulled a chair up to the table, lifting it slightly so it didn’t scrape. “I have something I’d like to ask you.” I said.

  “Yes?” My father held his finger on a line of text.

  “Now the hawthorn has gone, I wondered if I might grow some flowers in the bare patch. Just a few.”

  He still didn’t look up, but he did speak. “If you like.”

  It was dark on Archie’s doorstep, almost too dark to find the letterbox. I spread a piece of paper over my knee and then scribbled out a note.

  He said yes.

  Part Two

  16

  It hurt to ride a bike after such a long time. I cycled slowly, trying my best to avoid the chain, which dabbed oil into my skirt and scratched the inside of my ankle. The saddle hurt too. A man’s saddle, it ground leather between bones I never knew I possessed. The brow of the hill came into view just as I was ready to slow down, tempting me with its fake proximity, so I revved up my legs and pedaled harder, enjoying the burn in my calves. The ground flattened, then dropped, and I adjusted my body, the slow, laboured movements of the previous few minutes replaced by a stiff brace. Free-wheeling on straight legs gave me a delicious sense of freedom, whipped up into a frenzy by the twigs that slapped my shoulders and breeze that moulded my shirt across my chest. My skirt flew up, I wanted to laugh, to shout, to cry out loud until my throat hurt, but I held it all in, content to just smile and stretch out the muscles around my mouth.

  A family of ash trees obscured the bottom of the hill and I had cycled several yards along the lane before I noticed a wooden sign lying on the ground. McIntyres Plant Nursery was only just legible beneath the grass that had grown through a hole in the centre of the ‘P’ then sprawled sideways. I braked, lifted my leg over the crossbar, and wheeled my bike back t
o the sign. It was a relief to abandon the merciless saddle and I adjusted my underwear as I walked towards the building at the end of the path.

  A rustle of newspaper greeted me when I entered the shop. I stepped across the threshold, feeling guilty for disturbing the occupant and encountered a woman perched on a stool at the reception desk. She brushed a crumb from the side of her mouth as I approached, then smiled, revealing tiny wedges of dough slotted into the gaps in her teeth. “Good morning.”

  I glimpsed a white-smeared tongue between her teeth. “Morning.”

  “Come to collect some bulbs have you dear, I — Wait a minute, I know your face.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I definitely know your face. Let me look at you.”

  “I don’t think so, I’ve never been here before.”

  The woman moved round the side of the counter; I smelt the tang of burnt biscuits. “Let me have a good look at you.” She stroked her upper lip, caressing a faint moustache, and then stroked the hairs that circled a mole. “Are you a. . . Stoker by any chance?”

  Her words disturbed me. A category was suggested, a type. “Yes, my name is Edith Stoker.”

  The woman drew in a breath. “No, my mistake, I was thinking of another. What were you looking for?”

  “I’d like some seeds, please.”

  “They’re over there.” She pointed at a display of packets on the far wall. “Take your time, dear.”

  The seed display had a tired look to it and slovenly browsers had left their mark, cramming Batchelor’s Buttons into Marigold and abandoning several dog-eared packets of Poppy on the table below. I could feel the crunch of seeds beneath my shoes and was considering scraping them off my soles and slipping them into my handkerchief when I noticed the woman was watching me.