The Insistent Garden

by Rosie Chard

  “Of course, follow me.”

  I had seen his grandma’s house many times before. It stood where I turned the corner on my way to the shops. More than once I had wondered what sort of person would hang balls of human hair on the gatepost.

  “Keeps the deer out,” said Johnny knowledgeably as he pushed open the gate.

  “Will your grandma be at home?” I asked.

  “She’s always at home.”

  “Will she mind?”

  “Mind what?”

  “Me.”

  A look of supreme happiness came over his face. “Oh no, she’ll love you.”

  Johnny’s grandma was asleep when we entered the house, her breath chafing her tongue as she lay slack-mouthed in an armchair.

  “Let’s go out the back,” whispered Johnny.

  “Are you sure she won’t mind?”

  “Course not.”

  The ‘back’ was hardly there. We had to fight to get through the rear door, which was hemmed in by a weather-beaten doormat rooted to the earth with mushrooms. Towers of empty flowerpots lined the fence and an entire section quivered as I squeezed past. Every conceivable type of receptacle had been pressed into service and crammed with plants, yoghurt pots, treacle tins, buckets with holes. An old shoe, host to a trailing spider plant, quietly rotted. As we squelched across a mattress of moss a shrill voice rang out.

  “Jonathan. I’ve got a bone to pick with you!”

  He turned round. “Gran, you’re up.”

  The old lady picked her way towards us, blinking fast. “Now, Johnnie, there’s something I want to know.”

  “What’s that, Gran?”

  “Why you never told me you had a girlfriend.”

  Johnny looked serene but said nothing. I managed to hold onto my smile. “Hello, Mrs. Worth.”

  “She’s come to get a tree,” said Johnny, putting an arm round the old lady’s shoulders and pecking a kiss onto her cheek.

  “John, don’t kiss my surgery!”

  “Sorry, Gran.”

  “What sort of tree does she want?”

  Identical mouths turned towards me. “I would love a crabapple,” I said.

  The old lady nodded. “Any one in particular?”

  I thought of the crack in the wall, fragrant cup-shaped flowers, umbel-like corymbs, edible fruit. “Malus sylvestris,” I replied.

  She nodded again. “Ah, yes. The purifier.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She attempted to lift her shoulders. “People have been using crabapple for hundreds of years, it purifies, gets rid of noxious substances.”

  “Oooh, Gran, do you mean poison?” said Johnny.

  She shot him a withered look.

  “I’d love one of those,” I said, “if you can spare it.”

  Johnny sniggered.

  It took a while to get the crabapple out. The young tree had outgrown its pot and steely roots curled through cracks in the bottom of the container, throttling a nearby log, before wrapping themselves round the edge of a paving slab and disappearing into the ground below. Johnny wrenched out the pot and let out an exaggerated groaning noise, finished off with a childish cheer. I felt rising trepidation as he marched it proudly back to my house and only just managed to stop him from stumping right up to the front door.

  His smile slumped. “Aren’t I going to plant it?”

  “It’s late,” I replied. “I’ll keep it in the shed until there’s more time.”

  “But Gran said we should get it straight into the ground.”

  “I think I’ll wait.”

  “Oh. Well, let me know when you do it and I’ll come round. Here’s my telephone number.” He fumbled in his jacket pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper.

  “Thank you, Johnny.”

  “Pleasure.”

  It was almost dark by the time the hole was dug, lined up with the yellow brick. I eased the roots downwards and piled earth over with my hands. Then, taking a deep breath, I stamped down with my heel. Finally, I poured water around the base of the tree and walked back towards the house, only faintly aware of the curtain in the house next door. The one that twitched.

  37

  I ran down the street; my skirt flew up but I didn’t care. I tripped on the kerb and my skirt flew up but I ran even faster and I didn’t care. April was meant to be the month of showers, of open brollies drying in the hall, but the clouds, heavy with suspense, were holding it all in and the pavement was dry, a firm hold for my feet as I sped towards my friend.

  “She’s upstairs doing her homework.”

  “Thanks,” I said, skipping over Una’s doorstep and planting a kiss on her father’s cheek.

  “She gave me a kiss,” he said in wonderment as I raced up the stairs.

  The bedroom door was open and I saw Una’s feet before I saw her, squeezed into white stilettos and waving above the blanket.

  “Don’t you ever leave your bed?” I said, sitting down beside her.

  “Edith,” she replied, “I was about to call you. . . was that you making that racket on the stairs? What’s that on your feet?”

  I lifted my feet off the ground. “Heels. . .” I glanced at Una’s shining stilettos. “Sort of.”

  She sat up and hugged me. “Go on then.”

  “What?”

  “I know you’re dying to tell me.”

  Sweat broke into my armpits. “Tell you what?”

  “All about the Edith Stoker garden.”

  I relaxed my shoulders. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Sometimes I feel as if it’s waiting for me,” I said.

  “The garden?”

  “Yes.”

  “You talk as if it’s a person.”

  “It seems like that sometimes. It’s always waiting to give me something, something I want.”

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “Something beautiful.”

  Una frowned. “I wish I could feel like that.”

  “About a garden?”

  “About anything.”

  “But Una, your life is perfect, isn’t it?”

  “Not perfect. But I suppose I do like it.” She slipped off her shoes and folded her legs up onto the bed. “How’s the job going?”

  “Jean’s nice and you were right.”

  “About what?”

  “The faces.”

  She hugged me again. “I knew it. I knew you’d be all right. But Edith, don’t forget about next year. You’ll need to get your application in soon if you’re going to go to University.” She paused. “You are going in the autumn, aren’t you?”

  “I have thought about it.”

  “You think too much. You need to apply now. You got fantastic exam results, it won’t be hard for you to get in.”

  I felt anxiety plop into my chest. “Please, don’t rush me.”

  She took my hand; I could smell her perfume. “Things don’t change by themselves, Edith. It’s up to you. If you want to make your life any different you have to do something.”

  It hated it when that happened. When I had to think of that place. My picture of university life was blurred yet parts of it were always clear. I could see the feelings I would have: the anxiety of walking into a lecture theatre, the worry of sitting alone in the college canteen, the food scraping my throat as I ate too fast, and the fear of walking the corridors, avoiding the faces, trying to smile through lips that wouldn’t work.

  “If you came to my university we could share a room. It’d be fun.” I thought of my garden. “Do you have a prospectus I could look at?”

  38

  Making a garden takes a piece of your soul. Archie told me that. I could see it in my mind, the molecules drifting inside the fragrance of a rose, the weightless particles drawn up through the microscopic roots of a poppy. But ‘take’? My garden did nothing but give.

  Now that the clocks had been put forward, a new rhythm ordered my life. Buds swelled, young grass fresh
ened and more and more bulbs pricked up through the soil, their tips packed up like parcels. Nothing had prepared me for the thrill of encountering my first seedlings, so terrifyingly fragile, their trembling stalks no match for the weight of a thoughtlessly placed brick. I made new discoveries every day; infant trees must be watered, soil fed and seedlings thinned, their collapsing root systems held like broken glass during the stressful transplant from pot to soil. Life an inch above the ground absorbed me so thoroughly that I hardly noticed another change, a change so subtle that it took a while to lever its way into my consciousness. My father began to look at me. Not just look, but watch while I worked. It was not his habit to look in my direction, not properly, and I had no idea how to behave beneath the weight of his increasingly steady gaze.

  I hardly noticed it the first time. Just a glance through the kitchen window that was longer than normal. But when added to the second time, lingering, and then the third, a level gaze, I realized he was really looking. At me. Then one day, on the last day of April, he joined me out in the garden.

  He stood ten feet away, not near enough to speak, but too close to be out of earshot and comfortably ignored. His vague occupancy of a space on the borders of conversation unnerved me, and my trowel sat heavy in my hands. I glanced round hoping that he had gone, but he remained, arms stiff by his sides, chin at forty-five degrees to his chest. But he did not speak. Why did he not speak? He just watched me work through dark impassive eyes. I opened my mouth to say something but someone else’s voice came out.

  “We’ve run out of bread.” Vivian was at the back door, perched on the threshold.

  Muscles tightened on my father’s face. “Edith can go,” he said as Vivian approached him. “She’s not doing anything.”

  His words floated then settled.

  “I am doing something.” I closed my mouth but it was too late. Once airborne, an escaped sentence can never be recaptured.

  “Doing ‘something,’ are we?” Vivian said icily, coming up beside my father.

  “I was weeding,” I said.

  “Do you really imagine that wasting your time out here is more important than taking care of your father?” She glanced in his direction then nosed her toe into the soil, twisting out an ‘O’ shape. “I think you understand, sweetheart.” She turned to her brother. “Wilf, I’ve seen a crack down at the end. Are you coming?”

  He hovered. “Yes, I’m coming.”

  Left alone, I stared down at the ‘O’ carved into the mud. Sweetheart. Blossom shivered on the crabapple tree beside me and I looked up to see a flush of red seeping into the emerging petals. As I studied the veins criss-crossing the flowers I heard the sound of digging coming over the high wall. Heavy-sounding, it was accompanied by a low noise, a person humming in time with the spade.

  I returned to the back door slowly, wanting to leave yet wanting to stay. I collected my bag from the kitchen and walked down to the shop. Jean looked surprised and a little impatient when I walked in the door but soon she was bobbing about by my side seeking out a story to dissect. I told her of the conversation in the garden and the ‘O’ carved into the soil and she looked at me longer than normal, then sighed.

  “You’ve got to toughen up a bit, Edith.”

  “I. . .”

  “Don’t let them walk all over you all the time. They’ll only keep doing it if you let them.”

  I pictured myself in Vivian’s body, glaring and scowling and ordering and controlling. I’d see what fear looked liked. “I’ll try.”

  Toughen up. The cracks in my ceiling seemed to have grown when I lay in bed that night. Why must I hate a person I had never met? How could I change things? I pulled the sheet up beneath my chin, and as I perspired with anxiety, wrestling a strange internal desire for something undefined, I imagined toxic guilt seeping out of my body onto the sheets beneath me.

  39

  The sun was pulling a gold line onto the rooftops by the time I reached the top of Adlington Street. I was late getting to most of my destinations these days as Vivian had introduced what she grandly called the ‘house list’ into my life and my natural scheduling, based on sights and sounds and smells, had been replaced by a crisp page of chores that threw off any natural calibration of time. She’d bought paper for this very purpose, exposing the rarely seen innards of her handbag and spending her own money on a notebook, which sat on the kitchen table and silently regulated my day. It had a life of its own, that list, the way it shrank to almost nothing during the day as I crossed out each chore, then reverted to its original length during the night. But one chore made me happy. With the heels in my household wearing thin I’d been back to the cobbler’s and so on to the bookshop several times since my first meeting with Harold.

  I stood at Harold’s gate for a long time, wondering what this place had meant to my mother. I tried to imagine her inside the room, feeling the spines of the books as she tidied the shelves, not thinking about her work but trying to decide which book my father would like, or which words would make him sit back in his chair and listen. Suddenly, a figure loomed out of the dark: Harold, dragging a bag of rubbish around the side of the house.

  “Edith! You scared me.”

  “Sorry, I was hoping to catch you before —”

  “Wednesday’s early closing,” he said. He lifted up the dustbin lid and dropped in the bag, which huffed out the scent of decomposing fruit as it collapsed downwards. “Would you like to go for a drink? The pub’s not far. Loosen us up a bit?”

  “I don’t think so, I —”

  “Or get a hamburger, there’s a Wimpy at the bottom of the hill.”

  I paused. Where was I on the list? “Yes, yes, I’d like that.”

  The cafe was almost empty when we arrived, just a man in a raincoat sitting alone at a corner table and two children by the counter, machine-gunning each other with straws.

  “What are you having, Edith? My treat.”

  “A hamburger, please.”

  “And chips?”

  “Oh. . . yes.”

  “Can I interest you in a Pepsi to wash it down?”

  “Yes, but I can get that.”

  “’Salright.” Harold waved in the direction of the counter and a waitress appeared beside our table; her pen hovered above a small pad held in her hand. I felt overwhelmed by the size of her collar, so white, so frilly, and it seemed to point as she talked, first at Harold, then at me. She jotted down our order, pulled out a carbon copy and slipped it beneath a large plastic tomato that sat in the middle of the table. Harold leaned forward — I could smell something — and briefly touched my hair. “Rather like hers,” he said.

  “What is this? “I said quickly, lifting up the fruit and sniffing the stalk.

  “Edith,” said Harold, “You have been in a Wimpy bar before, haven’t you?”

  “I. . . no.”

  He leaned back on the bench. “There’s ketchup in there. Generally appreciated for its ability to disguise the taste of the burger.” He smiled. “You didn’t come to the shop to buy a book, did you?”

  “What happened to all my mother’s friends?” I said.

  He leaned towards me. “I didn’t know any of them personally but I saw quite a few at her funeral.”

  A hundred questions poured into my head, uninvited. “You were there?” I said.

  “Yes.” He removed his hat and laid it on the bench beside him. “I nearly didn’t go, there was this woman —”

  “Vivian.”

  “Yes, I think that was her name; a bit on the hefty side I remember. . .” He paused. “Anyway, she was extremely unfriendly when I called your house. She sounded like I’d woken her from a nap or something, grumpy as hell, but in the end she told me the address.”

  The plastic on the bench stuck to the bottom of my legs as I shifted in my seat. “What address?”

  “The crematorium, on Primula Drive.”

  “Who was there?”

  “Well, the grumpy woman of course, she stood guard at
the door — enormous elbows as I recall, and I’ll never, ever forget that handshake and — is she a relation of yours?”

  “She’s my aunt.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to —”

  “She sort of lives with us now.”

  “What do you mean ‘sort of ’?”

  I sighed. ‘She used to come and stay with us once a week, but lately she’s starting coming some weekends too.”

  “Doesn’t she have a home of her own?”

  “Yes, she does.”

  “What about a husband? Children?”

  “She never married.”

  “So why does she keep visiting? Why not just move in?”

  “I don’t know. She hardly talks to me. Except when she wants something done.”

  “Sounds like she’s staking out her territory.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, nothing. Don’t listen to me.” Harold pursed his lips. A blob of ketchup had dropped from the plastic tomato onto the back of his hand and he wiped it with his napkin as if it were an open wound. “Not much fun having her around then?”

  “You don’t have to love your relatives,” I said.

  He looked startled. “No.”

  A meaty smell wafted between us as the waitress arrived and placed two plates on the table.

  “That was quick,” said Harold.

  “Had them half done,” said the waitress guiltily. “Watch the plate, it’s hot.”

  “Please tell me more,” I said, opening out the napkins and laying Harold’s knife and fork beside his plate. “Did you speak to any of her friends?”

  He bit into his burger. “Sorry,” he mumbled, “a bit starving.” He swallowed. “It was a long time ago, I can’t remember any names but I do know we weren’t welcome. That woman, the aunt — I’m sorry, Edith, but I have to be honest, she behaved abominably, she swept us out of the place like a pile of old junk, it. . . well, it hurt.”

  “Who else was there?”

  He put his burger back down on the plate. “Let me see, there was a middle-aged man whose hands smelt of soil, honestly, I remember that clearly because he sat down beside me and passed over a hymn book and there were some others, couples mostly, about your mother’s age. . . and of course, making the most almighty racket, there was you.”