The Insistent Garden

by Rosie Chard

  “What do you mean?”

  “Edith, pen friends. You must know how that works.”

  “Well, a bit. Some of the girls at school wrote letters to children in France. But how do you meet someone like that?”

  “You don’t. That’s the problem. I fell in love with the idea of him.”

  “What idea?”

  Dotty paused. Crumbs were defying gravity, forming into a steep-sided pyramid. “Darling, you’re taxing my tired brain.”

  I picked up the photograph and examined the eyes. “Was it his face that you fell in love with?”

  “No,” she replied. “It was the words.” She looked wistful. “I poured myself into those sentences. We have a connection, you know.”

  “But, you’ve never met?”

  “No.”

  “And you have no idea how he smiles or smells. . . or stands?”

  “No idea.”

  “And the eyes. . . did you never get to see his full face?”

  She paused. “Not. . . yet. Maybe that is all he wanted to reveal of himself.”

  “What did you reveal of yourself?”

  She curled a lock of hair behind her ear. “I can’t remember.”

  Edward Black’s house was dark by the time I walked past two hours later. I traced out the edge of his garden with my hand, the privet leaves cool beneath my fingers, and then looked at the bedroom window. It exuded an incredible stillness, a house holding its breath. I knew then I wanted more, more than a silhouette. I wanted something that lay between a glimpse and a complete, clear view.

  My door key turned in utter silence and I tiptoed upstairs, balancing on the quietest corner of each tread. The blankets felt itchy when I took off my clothes and slipped into bed. Retracting from the cold rubbery skin of yesterday’s hot water bottle, I slid my feet deeper between the sheets, but my toes refused to warm up, so I made a nest inside my nightdress with my heels tucked high against my buttocks.

  I thought of the eyes. The ones from down under. Dotty had fallen in love with a pair of eyes. Not the nose, nor the mouth, just a sliver of a person’s face. She was probably sitting at the desk at this moment, feet stuffed into slippers, teeth unbrushed, writing words of love to a person she had never met.

  Then I heard a noise on the other side of the wall, the sound of a person moving through a room. Then — did I imagine it? — the creak of bedsprings compressed beneath the weight of a body. I stared at my bedroom wall, my sight ambushed by the darkness. I tried to make out the pattern on the wallpaper but more thoughts crept in, vague, transparent thoughts, teasing my brain with their skittishness, then solidifying, gathering round a single question.

  What was he thinking now?

  43

  AVOID USE ON POROUS SURFACES

  KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN

  IF SWALLOWED CALL DOCTOR IMMEDIATELY.

  Vivian arrived again. Only a day had passed since she’d departed but now she had returned and I stood in position, watching the taxi driver leave the street, his resentment marked by a screech of tyres and a groove sliced into the grass verge.

  “Bring in the bags, Edith,” she said, stepping across the threshold.

  “You have more luggage than usual.” I slipped my fingers through the handle of the largest case.

  “I’m staying longer than usual,” she replied, drawing a gust of sweat-laden air into the hall and heading towards the kitchen. She had swept out of the back door before I managed to catch up. “Your father has ordered more bricks, hasn’t he?” she called over her shoulder, coming to a halt beside the crabapple tree.

  “A hundred,” I replied. “They’re coming today.”

  “Only one?”

  “Yes.”

  “We need more. What about cement?”

  “We have two bags.”

  “Get six.”

  I drew in breath. “Aunt Vivian?”

  “What?”

  “Do you think the wall is safe?”

  “Of course it’s safe,” she said. “Your father knows what he’s doing.” She glanced up. “What’s that thing doing up in the tree?”

  “The coconut?” I replied.

  “Yes, what’s it doing up there?”

  “I put it there for the birds.”

  “What birds?”

  “The birds in the garden.”

  “Ridiculous.” She turned towards the high wall, scanning its face. Then, she began to count the courses, breathing in numbers and jabbing her finger at each line of bricks in turn. Suddenly, she stopped. A low sound had halted her hand. Someone was humming, very softly, very deeply, on the other side of the wall.

  “Edith, take my bags up to my room,” she said, the gaps in her words evenly spaced.

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  “Are you coming in too?”

  “In a minute.”

  I heaved the bags upstairs before rushing back down to the kitchen. Vivian was visible through the window. She hadn’t moved; she stood uncharacteristically still, her shoulders frozen into a square. I thought I saw her lips move yet the rest of her body remained motionless; she could almost have been an ordinary person in an ordinary place. Then she saw me and walked quickly up the garden. “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So what are you doing standing there like that?

  “I have to be somewhere.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I was about to go somewhere.”

  “Well, get there, just get there, and stop getting in my way.”

  “Order for Stoker?” Massive shoulders filled the doorframe, cutting out light.

  “Yes. Can you leave them in the front please, on the pavement.”

  “Can do. That’ll be twenty-seven pounds and ten shillings. Sign here please.” He thrust a paper into my hand; I smelt engine oil. “Round it up to twenty-eight if you like.” He winked. “We’ll bring ’em round to the back in the barrow for another couple of quid.”

  “Oh, no. It’s alright, the street is fine.”

  “You got a permit for that, love?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You need a permit now to leave bricks in the street, that’s unless you can move them within the hour.”

  “It’s alright, I can move them before. . . then.”

  He looked me up and down. “No offence, love, but can you manage by yourself?”

  “Yes. I’m used to it.”

  He gave me a long look. “Oh, go on love, I’ll move them for nothing, I can’t have you doing your back in.” He turned round. “Terry. Get yourself over here. The lady needs some help.”

  “Oh. . . no please, I can do it.”

  He frowned, “I said, we won’t charge you a penny.”

  Light poured back into the hall as he plodded back down the garden. I looked over his retreating shoulder; the driver of a large lorry shuddering on its frame, waved. I waved back.

  They had nearly brought all the bricks into the back garden by the time I had finished folding the laundry and gone outside. Vivian was there, up from her nap and shouting instructions over the clunk of bricks being stacked into a pile. I drifted towards the circle of activity, distracted by the bustle, by the squeak of the wheelbarrow, the dust. It took a second for me to realize. “Aunt Vivian, where are the flowers that were by the wall?”

  Vivian glanced in my direction. “Can’t hear you.”

  “The flower bed!” I cried, “They’re dropping the bricks on the new flower bed.”

  The man paused. “Is there a problem?” Sweat glistened atop a large friendly nose.

  “No,” said Vivian. “Carry on.”

  I touched my aunt’s sleeve. “Aunt Vivian. . . please.”

  “Carry on,” she said again, flicking her hand in the direction of the man.

  At that moment my father stepped out of the back door. I ran up to him, forgetting to check, forgetting to be me. “He’s crushing the plants!” I said.

>   He surveyed the bricks, his face a plaster cast of concealment. I waited, holding my hand in my pocket, feeling the line of the seam. He gazed at the ground as if looking for something. Then he turned his finger in a circle. “Continue.”

  The barrow wheels turned.

  I separated.

  I was here; they were over there. My father stood talking to Vivian beside the pile of bricks, but I did not care what he was saying. Why should I? It was too late to save the plants crushed underneath. Yet something compelled me to watch their faces: mouths widened with volume, hands cupped behind their ears, the slow deliberate nods. Something ingrained. Then I noticed an aspect of their faces that I had never seen before. A sibling resemblance, brought out by the shouting, was visible in their profiles. Although the skin was different, my aunt’s slack, my father’s taut like the membrane of a paper kite, an identical bone structure showed through.

  I walked up to the bathroom more quickly than normal. As I scrubbed my hands at the sink I looked in the mirror. With a sombre heart I recognized the Stoker chin, fatherly traces overlaid with fragments of aunt. I sighed. To be so connected, so inextricably threaded to my family.

  I held my hands up to my cheeks, dragged back the skin and tried to squeeze out a new face.

  34 Ethrington Street

  Billingsford,

  Northamptonshire

  May 17th 1969

  Dear Gillian,

  Told you Edith was full of secrets. This woman came in today who I’d never seen before. All lovey-dovey, she goes on about some rose bush at the top of the street. I’m thinking I never noticed some rose bush at the top of the street when she starts talking in a flowery foreign language I couldn’t understand. Funny thing is Edith seemed to know what she was on about and she brightened up and smiled in a way I’d never seen before. Another aunt I’m thinking when Edith introduces her as Dotty. Auntie Dotty? I enquire, just to get everything straight, when she says no, my friend Dotty. Where does she get these friends, Gill? She hardly ever goes out as far as I can tell. She has changed a bit though lately. Might be because I told her to stop letting them treat her like a doormat. To be honest, I could have bitten my tongue off the moment I said that but at least she’s stopped wearing those falling down socks and I saw her in a pair of tights last week. But even so there’s dirt under her fingernails a lot of the time — perhaps I’ll slip a nail brush into the loo, see if it gets used. Anyway, Edith goes out the back and I asked the flowery woman — a bit mean I suppose — doesn’t Edith have any friends of her own age and this woman says, even more lovey-dovey, true friendship doesn’t notice age. Blimey, I think, that’s straight out of a greeting card, but it did make me think for a bit. Edith can be friends with whoever she wants, can’t she? Even I could be her friend. You still with me, Gill?

  Jean

  44

  “You alright, sweetheart?” Archie stood beside the garden wall when I came out of the back door.

  “Yes.”

  He ran his fingers through a memory of hair. “I saw what they did.”

  “Oh.”

  “Come here over please, Edie.” A thread of saliva had collected into a corner of his lips. It moved when he spoke. “I think I need to speak to him.”

  “My father?”

  “Yes. Or her.” He leaned over the wall and took my hand. “Edie. I’m not sure I can stand by and watch anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He rubbed his hand across his head again, “I’m worried. . . about you.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I thought I’d try and talk to him, and, you know. . . talk to him.” He tried to smile.

  I took his hand. “Archie, please. . . don’t.”

  He rubbed his eyebrows, dislodging dandruff. I’d never seen him look so sad. “I think he’s ill, Edie.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, who else do you know who — you know — does what he does, what with the wall and well. . . the wall.”

  “There’s the inside too.” I said.

  “He’s building a wall inside?”

  “No, not building exactly. He likes to change the wallpaper in the living room.”

  He looked relieved. “We all do that.” “I pasted up a fresh flock of pigeons myself recently. My living room looks a treat.”

  “He changes it monthly, sometimes more.”

  Archie sucked in a breath. “The room must be getting very. . . small.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think he would talk to someone, a doctor or something?”

  “No. He never goes to the doctor.”

  “That’s the best reason to go. You could suggest it, couldn’t you?”

  “No, Archie. Please don’t ask me to do that.” I gazed across the garden. “Archie?”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s something I want to ask you.”

  “What’s that, sweetheart?”

  “It’s about the wall.”

  “What about it?”

  “What are those little shoots coming up along the base?”

  “What shoots?”

  “Those red ones, along the bottom. My father treads on them all the time but they keep coming back.”

  “They’re suckers,” said Archie.

  “What are suckers?”

  “They’re the beginnings of new trees.”

  “But I don’t have a tree there.” I said.

  “They probably come from a tree, you know, next door.”

  “You mean they’re coming under the wall?”

  “Yes.” He held his gaze.

  “Archie, why do trees send out suckers?”

  “It’s a survival instinct.”

  “Survival?”

  “Yes, they do it because they think they’re going to die.”

  I can still remember the damp in my armpits. Every morning, of every week, Show and Tell had been my teacher’s way to make you explore the world, to make you think. But most of all it was the way to make you speak. It began with a scraping of chairs, a mass rummage in satchels and the clearing of thirty throats. Then the slow, methodical turn would start to make its way round the circle, closer and closer — a prayer for the bell to ring — closer and closer, until all eyes stopped on me.

  “Edith Stoker?”

  The sharpness of the voice broke my reverie and it took a second to relocate myself as I scrabbled to gather my bag from beneath my seat. I stood up and walked stiffly across the waiting room.

  “Why do you need to see the doctor?” demanded the receptionist, popping a peppermint into her mouth.

  “Pardon?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Her pen was poised over a pad, hovering beneath a bold chest pains written in overly large letters.

  “I. . . it’s personal. I can’t say it. . .” I glanced round the waiting room, “. . . here.”

  The woman sighed, jotted menses into the pad and waved me in the direction of a door marked ‘Dr. Winsome.’

  No one answered when I knocked on the door so I pushed it open and chose what I assumed to be the patient’s chair, smaller, worn on the arms and with exactly three crumbs gathered into the low point of the seat. I felt like an intruder. A chip of mud had fallen off the side of my heel and an incriminating trail followed me from the door to my shoe. I tried kicking it beneath the desk but it broke up and I was attempting to nudge it beneath my seat when a large man barged into the room, all stomach and bursting buttons.

  “Now,” he said settling himself in the ‘big’ chair, “what can I do for you, Miss. . . erm. . . Stoker?” His voice didn’t match his stomach. It was high, the squeaky greeting of a teenage boy. I tried to gather my thoughts but couldn’t take my eyes off the stomach. It punctured his shirt and triangles of flesh poked through.

  “Miss Stoker?”

  I drew in a breath. “Am I allowed to ask about someone else?”

  “Which ‘someone else’ is that, may I ask?”

&n
bsp; “My father.”

  Something signaled in his eyes. “Go ahead.”

  “He’s been getting upset. . .”

  “What about?”

  I was ready. I had decided on the part I was going to mention. The manageable part. “He keeps repeating himself.”

  “I see. . . how old is he?”

  “Fifty-eight.”

  Something was jotted onto the pad trapped beneath his hand, more than a number “And what does he repeat?”

  “He does a lot of things twice. . .” The pen waited. “Sometimes three times.”

  “Miss Stoker, what sort of things are we talking about here?”

  I began to speak. I described the trips to buy wallpaper and the time we papered the living room wall twice in one week. The doctor scribbled furiously, rushing to keep up.

  “Is that all?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  The stomach triangles shrank as he leaned back in his chair. “Twice in a week seems a bit much but it doesn’t sound like it’s anything to get alarmed about. Are there any other worries?”

  The brick, dripping onto the tea towel, came into my head. “No.” I crushed a crumb between my fingers. “No other worries.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t like the pattern.” The doctor smiled.

  I smiled back. “No. Perhaps he didn’t.”

  My jaw tensed up at exactly a quarter to five. My father, collar turned up in spite of the heat, entered the kitchen, threw his jacket over the back of a chair and began to unpack his briefcase: newspaper, shoes, empty lunchbox buttered beneath the lid. Something rattled at the bottom. It always did.

  “Those look good,” I ventured, looking at the shoes, “Did you get them at the factory?”

  “Duds,” he replied, unzipping the outer pocket of his case and pulling out a tin of shoe polish and a screwed up handkerchief.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He scooped up an object that had fallen onto the table and stuffed it back into his pocket. “Nothing, just an old bird’s egg.”

  “Was it from a blackbird?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve no idea.” He loosened his tie. “I found it in the street.”