She couldn’t see anyone else there, but she felt an overwhelming sense of welcome. Strangely she did not in the least feel like an intruder. In some miraculous way it was “hers” to enjoy. Why? She had only just stepped onto the lawn and now she was feeling like she had belonged here forever. Had she experienced something like this as a child perhaps? Was she in some kind of dream? Yet she had her bag in her hands, and was still dressed in her deep green floppy T-shirt with the large smiling sun on the front. She looked down and saw that her trainers were making little dints in the lawn and she instinctively took them off like someone stepping on “holy” ground. The cool, gentle grass caressed her toes and instep. She felt herself being drawn further into the garden and tiptoed to a rustic wooden bench beneath a tree laden with pink blossom, sat down on it and looked about her. This was, beyond doubt, the most beautiful place she had ever been in, she thought.
For the next ten minutes, she deliberately pushed the question of how she had arrived in such a place to the back of her mind, and just absorbed its wonders. Jalli was the kind of person who would make the most of anything that came her way, and she was not going to waste this miraculous moment. She revelled in the delightful scents of the blossom and the chirping of the birds that she caught sight of every now and then as they crossed from one bush to another. She wondered who lived in the house with the grass roof. All the houses she knew in Wanulka had flat roofs – you only put grass over grain stores. In fact, come to think if it, this house looked like a very big grain store. The straw roof was crossed with ornate binding. It wasn’t really grass, she observed, or even straw. (Much later she learned that it was reed from the marshes, called thatch – but that was some time in the future). Jalli crossed over to the house and peered in through one of the windows. Inside there was furniture and furnishings, so clearly someone lived here. Then she pulled herself together – however she felt about the sense of welcome, she was being far too curious, she told herself.
Then it occurred to her. If she had “passed over” then she had left Wanulka behind forever. She had never imagined going before Grandma, and the thought of leaving her all alone in the world after all that had happened to her was almost unbearable. But the white gate was still there in the hedge. She hurried across to it, and over the top, to her relief, she could still see the street in Wanulka. Jalli picked up her trainers and stepped through. The gate now seemed to be on the inside of the two metre thick hedge. Pushing her way along the little path she felt stones beneath her feet and then the hot pavement of Wanulka City Centre. The sun beat down and the traffic was deafening after the silence of the garden. She turned, and the white gate was now on the outside of the Municipal Gardens’ wall. When she looked over it, however, the lawn and trees and the straw roofed house were still there. She turned and bent down to put her shoes back on. Not fifteen metres further on people were going in and out of the usual iron gates of the Gardens, but no-one gave a glance towards the white gate.
Jalli took several paces to the iron gates and entered the Gardens. She turned up the path that ran around the edge of the Gardens and looked at the other side of the wall where the white gate should have been – not a sign of anything but a herbaceous border and a solid wall. Then she walked back outside the Gardens. The white gate was still there, bright and newly painted. She measured the steps and went back along the pavement and counted the same number of steps along the edge of the border. The white gate simply did not exist on the inside. A gardener was weeding the border and Jalli asked, “Excuse me. Is there a white gate anywhere in that wall?”
“No love,” he replied, “no white gates anywhere in these gardens. And I should know, I’ve been working here for the past thirty years.”
“Thank you. The gardens are always lovely. It’s just that I thought I saw a gate on the street side of the wall.”
“No. Never been any gate in that wall except the big iron gates you came through. They are always locked at night.”
“Thanks,” said Jalli, “it’s just that I thought I had seen one on the other side.”
“No, not here, love.”
“Thanks.”
The gardener smiled to himself. “Young people get stranger all the time. White gate? Still, she seemed a nice sort of person.” He went back to work happy that someone had noticed him – especially a cheery sort of person like Jalli. He smiled as he hoed. Without knowing it, Jalli had spread another little blessing!
Jalli reverted to her original plan and crossed the Municipal Gardens, but not before popping outside once more to check on the gate. It was still there, bright and new looking with the lawn beyond it. She decided she was not going to tell Mr. Bandi about Musula, well not today anyway. Her mind was too full of the garden with the straw roofed house.
From the school she took the bus home. For the second time in four days Jalli kept something from her grandmother. This time she had decided not to lie, and had worked out what to tell Grandma that simply left out the man and the white gate and the garden.
Going to sleep that night she wondered whether just not telling someone constituted a lie. But she couldn’t possibly tell her grandmother everything forever. Some things you needed to keep to yourself, she concluded. After all, that’s exactly what Grandma had said when she had asked some years ago what it was like making love to Grandpa.
“Some things you just don’t talk about!” she had said. Could this be one of those things? Well, for the moment, yes. But somehow she didn’t feel in the least like keeping it a secret from God. It was something she and God already shared because, of course, He knew everything – He already knew about the events of that day.
*
Jack’s good mood had filled him with a sense of curiosity. He stepped through the hedge and emerged onto the lawn. Wow! He was in a different universe! This wasn’t a conversion of the school yard he had played in as a boy at St Paul’s. It was so different, but he didn’t feel at all like a trespasser. Amazing! He was in a country garden with a thatched cottage in it. But somehow he didn’t expect anyone to yell out of one of the bedroom windows, “Get off my lawn! Before I send for the police!” as had happened the last time he inadvertently strayed onto someone’s private property whilst trying to take a short cut home. “OK, mate. Keep your hair on!” he had barked as he scampered back the way he had come. What amused him on that occasion, after he got over the shock of being shouted at like that – like being hit in the back by one of the school bullies when you weren’t expecting it – was that the man was completely bald. “Unfortunate expression,” he had said to himself.
But, here, now, he felt entirely different. He had never visited a place like this before. It was not like anywhere he had ever been, and yet he felt he, somehow, “belonged”. Odd that. Jack could honestly say that “belonging” anywhere was not in his experience. He lived with his mother but he felt that he was only there till he could move. Secretly, though, he had to tell himself, he would never abandon his mother as his father had. He was not going to be a sod like him. He had not even felt he belonged in Persham, and certainly not St Paul’s Middle School. In fact the nearest he had come to feeling acknowledged in the world was that very morning when he had amazed everyone with his exam results. But this was not that world. It was so completely new – and yet he seemed to belong here. It was home! But how could that be?
He looked around for some sign of another person. He shouted, “Hello!” but instinctively not too loud. His voice rang with a timbre that seemed to fit in with the place. There was no response. “Anyone there?” he called. All he sensed, in a way that he couldn’t really describe, was a welcome. He surveyed the scene. There were trees with lots of blossom – some pink and some white – around the soft green grass. The garden was quite big and was surrounded by hedges, as far as he could see, on all the sides. Only one entrance was apparent, the white gate through which he had come. Behind the cottage he could just make out the corner of a greenhouse.
Consumed by curi
osity, Jack crossed the lawn to the cottage door. He knocked. There was no response. He knocked again, louder. By this time he would have been surprised if someone had come – and, in truth, he did not want them to. He tried the handle – the door was unlocked. He opened it and peered in. There was a hallway with a flight of stairs leading up from it. The plaster walls were painted an off-white and the doors and stairs were in plain varnished wood. “Medium oak,” thought Jack thinking of the colour charts in the DIY store he had worked in last summer holiday. To the left and right were doors that, he guessed, led into the front rooms with the windows that gave out onto the lawn. The door on the left stood open. He looked in and saw an inglenook fireplace with a country landscape painted in oils above it. There was a dresser laden with plates and earthenware against the inner wall, and a fine table in the centre of the room complete with four solid looking oak chairs. In front of the window was a window seat with a fitted embroidered cushion. The full-length curtains were pale green with a delicate flower pattern. It was like the pictures that you saw in some of the holiday brochures advertising country accommodation; but this was real. It was “lived in”. It was a home.
Jack decided to touch nothing, just look. He explored the other front downstairs room which was a sitting room to match the dining room he’d already seen. There was a kitchen with modern equipment, and a sink with taps above it. Beside the long work top was what he guessed was a fridge but he didn’t open it. The larder beyond smelled richly of vegetables and fruit stacked on the racks. From the kitchen window he could see the greenhouse and beyond that more grass. Next to the kitchen was a bathroom with a beautiful enamelled bathtub against the far wall, a toilet pedestal and sink that matched the bath, and a shower cubicle. Jack had never had a shower in his life. When he was a child his mother had a great struggle to get him to wash at all! Even now Jack scanned the bathroom but did not linger like his mother would have done. She would have admired the tiled walls and floor, the full-length mirror and the electric light fitting in the centre of the ceiling. But Jack was mounting the staircase two steps at a time and, gaining the tiny square landing, encountered three more wooden doors, and to the right, above the sitting room, a narrow corridor lit by two small windows. He began with the room on the left. This was above the dining room. As he entered it his heart sang. There was a strong feminine presence. To the right was a huge double bed with a plain white cover. On the wooden floor were three rugs made of coarser material. A dressing table stood beside the window through which he could see the garden seat under a tree with pink blossom, and beyond that the white gate that led back to his world. But he did not want to leave this place. He felt so welcome. There was a delicate fragrance about this room that intrigued him. He opened the wardrobe opposite the bed. It was filled with dresses, skirts and blouses in cheerful colours and pretty lace. This was a young woman’s room he decided. After a while he felt that perhaps he should leave, and not pry further.
The second door opened onto a room that overlooked the greenhouse. “This would be above the kitchen,” he surmised. It contained two single beds, a wardrobe, a chair and a low chest of drawers. He strode across the room and opened the wardrobe. Men’s clothing. It was a mixture of smart and casual, and also some overalls that seemed a little incongruous because no-one appeared to do any work about the place. He hadn’t thought about how the house kept clean, or the grass mowed, or the clothes washed, but someone must do it. From the window he surveyed the hedge at the back of the garden, the entirety of which he could see above the greenhouse. There was no back entrance visible. He decided he would walk the perimeter when he had finished surveying the house. He tested the beds. “Just right!” he said to himself. For a moment he felt guilty that he was behaving like Goldilocks invading the privacy of the “Three Bears”. But the feeling was immediately dispelled. No. He belonged here. Sitting on one of the beds he reflected that he shouldn’t feel that. In fact he couldn’t belong, could he? But, somehow, he just could not shrug off the gentle and insistent embrace this house gave him.
Jack continued his tour. The third door was a small upstairs bathroom with just a sink and pedestal that he passed over quickly. (His mother would have declared, “A second toilet!” and rejoiced.) Jack continued down the low corridor under the pitch of the roof. On the left were two small windows that gave onto the rear of the house, and on the right two doors, exactly like all the others. He opened the first and stepped inside. Whoops! He shouldn’t have done that without knocking! Why? The room was not occupied any more than the rest of the house was. The furniture was simple and differed little from any of the other bedrooms. There was one single bed. To tell the truth, at this moment he felt exactly like he would have done had he entered his mother’s bedroom at home without knocking. Her room was her preserve. When she was in there she wanted to be private. When he needed her as a small child, he would knock and wait and, mostly, she would come to him. But he had never crossed the threshold. Jack quickly withdrew from this room back into the corridor and closed the door firmly behind him hoping his incursion would not be noticed.
The last room was at the end of the little corridor and he made his way towards it. This time he knocked, waited and then opened the door. After the last room he was quite nervous about going in. He quickly checked the room out. It was a twin of the other one he had just left but not quite as forbidding. Why that should be when they were so similar he didn’t know, but he firmly closed the door before retracing his steps to the top of the stairs. Perhaps he should leave the house now. Regaining the little landing he saw that he had not closed the door to the first bedroom he had entered. He laid his hand on the doorknob and was again filled with a great desire to enter the room. This was definitely a lady’s room. And yet that seemed to make it even more irresistible! It just seemed to invite him and as he stepped over the threshold so his heart warmed and the room seemed to smile. He stole over to the chest of drawers and pulled open the first drawer. There were things that young women wore in their hair, bangles and other trinkets. There was no real jewellery. This is what thieves would do, he recollected, but he touched nothing. The second drawer contained underwear. He slid the drawer shut and opened the bottom drawer which contained night clothes. The nightdress on the top had a big bright yellow sun on it with a smiling face and, as he looked at it, he fancied it was smiling at him. “I would like to meet your owner one day!” he told the sunshine, and the embroidered eyes seemed to dance a reply that perhaps he might. In fact, he thought, she might be coming home right now and he blushed at the thought of being caught in her bedroom. He hastily shut the drawer and stepped out of the room making sure all the doors were shut as he had found them. He descended the stairs and out into the garden, closing the front door behind him. He stepped into the middle of the lawn and surveyed the house. It was even more attractive now he had been inside. His eyes looked up to the bedroom window on the left above the dining room and wondered if he would ever meet its occupant.
He then walked to the white gate from which he had come. He could see the street in Persham as it always had been, but he turned to his right and walked around the garden with the hedge on his left. It was quite a long way, and the whole length of the hedge was thick and dense. At no point was it possible to see through it. He confirmed the conclusion that the white gate was the only way in or out and no sounds from outside seemed to penetrate the thick hedge. In all his scrutiny of the place, however, Jack saw no evidence of anyone. There were things that belonged to people, the whole place belonged to people, but there was nothing to indicate that anyone had been here recently – except, just inside the hedge a few metres before he regained the gate, the dent of a shoe much smaller than his own. He glanced across the lawn. The whole of it was covered by similar dents, but they were all made by him. No-one would have any difficulty in realising he had been there, yet this person had left just one single dint. But then he noticed that all around it the grass had been trodden on, but very lightly, and wi
th care.
Jack was proud of himself. Perhaps he should look into being a sleuth as a job! But whom could this footfall belong to? He examined the hedge behind the dint, but it was just as dense there as everywhere else. How could, whoever it was, manage to step here without coming through the gate or from the house? The person looked to have stepped straight out of the hedge. It belonged to someone with much smaller feet than his, a woman perhaps. Jack thought of the girl whose bedroom he had recently explored. He reflected with surprise again at just how he had gently invaded its secrets. He couldn’t believe he had done that. In fact, how could he have gone into the cottage uninvited at all!? There seemed to be some force outside of himself inviting him in. With the exception of the one upstairs bedroom, had it not just opened itself up before him, and told him to feel “at home”?
Jack checked his watch. It was now too late to go to the library, it would be closing in ten minutes. He decided to make his way straight home. It just occurred to him that now the white gate appeared to be on the inside of the hedge and open outwards, away from him on the inside. He was sure it was on the roadside before or he would not have seen it. Strange again. He lifted the latch, stepped the two metres through the hedge and was back in Persham. An old car was mounting the street making a huge racket and children were shouting from the school yard. The sounds, smells and atmosphere of the town flooded back into his senses. He turned. The gate was now on the outside as he remembered it, shiny and new and looking oddly “out of place”. He spotted the school caretaker leaving his house next to the school and hailed him.
The Kicking Tree Page 3
