The Poison Garden (2019 Sphere Edition)

by Alex Marwood

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ I tell her, which when you think about it is pretty obvious.

  So Eden clearly won’t be here. I’m not sure what to do next. Uri certainly won’t think much of my seeking skills. There’s probably something about what happened on the internet, but all I did was look up the address.

  Then I look harder. There’s nobody here any longer, but it doesn’t look derelict. Maybe there’s something inside that can lead me to where I’m trying to go. Their address, perhaps. Then I can go to their house and see.

  I go for a walk through the streets until I fetch up at the back of the building. There’s not much to see. A terrace of red-brick houses and, halfway up, an alleyway topped off with a high wooden gate. I walk down and test it. Locked. Hardly surprising. But it looks like a simple enough lock. I guess I’ll have to wait till it’s dark, though. Till there’s no one around to see me picking it.

  22 | Sarah

  She comes home to a dark house, and she feels surprisingly disappointed. After three years of turning on the lights herself, it’s been nice to find someone else there when she opens the door.

  She switches on the hall light and hangs up her coat. Takes a breath to call out, but something stops her. This quietness is like the quietness when they first arrived. When she would come home to the house uneasy and still and they would emerge from one bedroom or the other, always together, and greet her with that spooky smile. There has been less of that lately. She’s started to look forward to their presence. Sometimes they will even have made a start on dinner. Ilo, it turns out, is a good cook, and she’s eaten better since he volunteered that information than she has since Liam left.

  But now the house is cold and quiet.

  And then she hears a sob.

  Sarah freezes in the hallway, the very hairs on her body listening. As her ear tunes in, she hears voices.

  Who’s crying? It sounds like Eden. And then she hears hissing, angry tones of accusation, and Ilo’s light, breaking tenor, propitiating.

  Sarah hangs on the bottom step. Of course she has known that this would come eventually. But they didn’t do tears in the Maxwell household, especially once the tempestuous moods of the rebel daughter had been dispatched. Liam said that there was something wrong with her. Women cry, he told her. It’s what they do. His little girlfriend cried all the time, she’s sure of it. Cried to display her womanhood, cried to persuade him that his wife had no emotions. But, if your early training teaches you that tears bring penalties, you learn not to show them unless you’re alone.

  What do you do with tears? She’s not trained. No one has ever cried in front of her in her life – well, not anyone who mattered, about anything that mattered, and it sounds as though this matters. She has no idea what to do with it.

  Despite her covenant with herself that she would not be dishonest with them, that she would not be the sort of person who spied on children without their knowledge, she creeps to the top of the stairs and listens.

  The sob was an angry one. Definitely. ‘You’re meant to look after me, Ilo,’ she says. ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I was in the entrance hall. Waiting for you.’

  ‘Well, that’s no bloody good, is it? You’re meant to look after me.’

  ‘It was crowded,’ he says. ‘There wasn’t anywhere to stand.’

  Eden makes a sound of frustration. Of contempt. ‘You’re fucking useless,’ she says.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. ‘I’ll do better.’

  A wail. Despair. ‘It’s too late now! Oh, my God, what am I going to do? I will die without it, Ilo! I will die! Don’t you understand?’

  Sarah tenses. The hyperbole of adolescence, or should she be worrying? Eden sounds … deranged. What’s made her this way?

  ‘I’ll get it back,’ he says.

  ‘How? Go on – how?’

  ‘I’ll ask.’

  ‘Ask? They’ll laugh in your face. You won’t even get close. Ilo, I’m going to die without it. Don’t you understand? You don’t seem to have the first idea how dangerous it is out here, for someone like me. I’m nothing without it. I might as well … just do myself in now … ’

  ‘Eden, I – no – maybe if we ask someone … ’

  ‘Who are we going to ask?’

  ‘I don’t know. Aunt Sarah?’

  ‘And what’s she going to do?’

  ‘Eden, she’s meant to be on our side.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ snaps Eden. ‘Nobody’s on our side. We’re on our own, Ilo. It’s just you and me, so really it’s just me, isn’t it?’

  ‘Eden—’ he begins, but she cuts him off.

  ‘You’re nothing,’ she says. ‘If I die and the world ends, it’s your fault.’

  Sarah feels a sting of hurt. All that effort and Eden, at least, clearly trusts her no more now than she did at the beginning. And then she has a pang of conscience about what she’s doing. You should have learned your lesson about eavesdropping in the toilet on Monday, she thinks. Serves you right. And if they don’t trust you, you need to put more effort in to make them trust you.

  She retreats to the foot of the stairs and calls out. ‘Hello? Anybody home?’

  A ringing silence. The way cicadas go quiet in the night at the sound of a predator. Then the door opens, and there they are, smiling. Smiling, smiling. No sign of ill temper on Eden’s face, no apology on Ilo’s. They’re totally playing me, she thinks, then no, come on. They just don’t know you yet. You’re the grown-up. It’s up to you to gain their trust, not the other way round.

  ‘Hello, Aunt Sarah,’ says Eden. ‘You’re early.’

  ‘Friday,’ she tells her. ‘Poet’s Day.’

  Little frowns of incomprehension cross their faces.

  ‘Piss off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday,’ she says, coming back up the stairs, but not even the mild cuss word seems to amuse them. ‘I was getting a bit worried for a moment. You were so quiet I thought you’d run off and left me.’

  ‘No,’ says Ilo. ‘We were just … up here.’

  ‘How was your day?’

  Come on. Trust me. Tell me. How are we going to move forward if you don’t trust me?

  ‘Okay,’ says Ilo, and Eden says nothing.

  ‘Are you all right, Eden?’ she ventures.

  Eden’s hand paws at her breastbone, where that ugly little pendant usually lives.

  ‘Have you lost your necklace?’ she asks.

  Eden turns round and slams her bedroom door closed. Ilo stands awkwardly on the landing.

  ‘Is she okay?’ asks Sarah.

  He looks forty years old. ‘She will be,’ he says. ‘She’s stronger than she thinks. It’s okay, Aunt Sarah.’

  ‘Would it help if I—’

  He shakes his head. ‘Not right now, I think.’

  Don’t push it. It’s the difference between cats and dogs, she thinks. You go to dogs, if you want them to love you. Cats, you have to allow to come to you.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ she asks.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘D’you want to come and give me a hand? We can take some up to her if she doesn’t want to come down.’

  Ilo even seems to like cooking.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll be a chef,’ she says. ‘You’re so skilled already.’

  He brightens with the praise, dispatches an onion at the speed of light, his blade flashing as he chops. ‘Thank you,’ he says.

  ‘Did you cook much, at Plas Golau? You’ve got amazing knife skills. You’re practically professional!’

  Seems a bland enough sort of question to bring up the subject with.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘In the Guard House. I wasn’t much use for anything else, as I’d only just joined. But it’s good practice.’

  ‘I can see!’ she says. ‘So I have to ask, Ilo. Has something happened at school? I can’t pretend I haven’t spotted that Eden’s upset.’

/>   The knife pauses, carries on. ‘It’s nothing,’ he says. ‘Just stupid stuff. She gets upset. It’s difficult for her. Harder for her, being normal, because of who she is. It’s easier for me. I was never particularly special.’

  ‘Who she is … ?’

  The knife pauses again. ‘Sorry. I thought you knew she was Lucien’s?’ he asks, as though that were explanation enough.

  ‘Oh.’

  How many questions is too many? At what point does it stop being interested and start being intrusive? I must remember that this stuff is still real to them.

  ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Has something happened, though? She seems like … ’

  ‘She’s lost her medallion,’ he says.

  ‘Her what?’

  ‘The medallion she wears round her neck. It’s important to her.’

  ‘How important?’

  ‘It’s a … symbol, really. All of Father’s children wore them.’

  ‘A sort of amulet – a good luck charm?’

  He considers. ‘Sort of. It’s hard to explain. They’re part of them, those medallions, from the day they’re born.’

  ‘So she feels naked without it?’

  Ilo nods. ‘Yes. Like that. Exposed.’

  ‘Oh, God. When did she lose it?’

  ‘In the playground, today. As we were coming out to go home.’

  ‘Did you find it?’

  Ilo gives her a look that reflects how stupid the question is.

  ‘Sorry. I mean, did you look?’

  Again the look. Back off, old person. If you’re going to ask questions, ask intelligent ones, at least.

  ‘I’m sorry. Is it valuable?’

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone on the Outside would think it was. But she does.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll put an alert on when we go in in the morning. Put a notice up on the noticeboard … ’

  Ilo pulls a face. ‘Someone’s got it, I think,’ he says.

  ‘Well, that’s stealing,’ she says, firmly. ‘There are punishments for that.’

  He pulls another face, scrapes his onions into the casserole dish to fry.

  Eden comes down to dinner, and she’s cleaned her face and plastered that smile on again, but she refuses to look at her brother, ignores him when he puts a plate in front of her at the table, like an Edwardian lady in a restaurant. I’m not going to get anything out of her tonight, thinks Sarah, and tries anyway. ‘Eden,’ she says, ‘if there’s something going on that’s upsetting you, you would tell me, wouldn’t you? It’s what I’m here for. To help.’

  Her voice rises and takes on a tone of command. ‘It’s Ilo’s fault, Aunt Sarah. It’s up to him to sort it out.’

  ‘But,’ she protests, ‘you don’t have to do this stuff on your own, Eden. It’s what I’m here for. There are rules, you know. If you’re being bullied, if someone’s picking on you, they’re breaking them.’

  Those clear blue eyes, gazing straight at her. ‘Oh, in the end, I don’t mind that,’ she says. ‘I want my medallion, but I feel sorry for them. For all of them.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ asks Sarah.

  ‘Because they’re stupid,’ says Eden, ‘and they will all die screaming.’

  Once they’ve retired to bed, she goes out into the garden for her evening cigarette. She allows herself two a day, as much in defiance of rules as for the actual pleasure they bring.

  She sits on one of her parents’ green-painted cast-iron chairs at their cast-iron table and smokes as slowly as she can, tapping her ashes into her mother’s green-and-beige St Ives School cachepot. I’m no good at this, she thinks. Who do I even ask? Everyone I’ve talked to sees the whole Ark thing the way I do, as some sort of crazy world organised around theories we don’t really understand that don’t make sense, but God knows the world’s full of catastrophists waiting for the sky to fall. They’re hardly the only ones. I need help here, and it’s not finding someone I can talk to, it’s finding someone they can talk to. Someone who won’t constantly be biting their lip or saying the wrong thing because they don’t understand what they believe. There’s always going to be a degree of mistrust if I can’t show them in some concrete way that I’m on their side.

  She gets out her wallet and looks through the notes section. Finds her niece Romy’s address. Stares at it as her cigarette burns down to the filter, then makes her decision as she stubs it out.

  23 | Romy

  As I thought, the lock on the gate is simple. I get it open in under a minute with the help of the two metal skewers I bought at the kitchenware stall for £1.35. I check behind me in the alleyway, pull the gate open slowly, in case it creaks, and slip inside.

  I’m in another little courtyard, more flagstones, a line of wheeled bins lying on their sides to stop them filling with water. A dreary outlook for the Lord, though: the backs of other people’s houses, too close for privacy and barely room for a table and chairs in the fresh air. Perhaps he’ll use the front court, so people can watch His Glorious Majesty drink his morning coffee.

  A porch overhangs the back door. A nice bit of privacy for me.

  The door has a mortice and a Chubb. The first will be easy, the second more complicated, but nothing I’ve not cracked before. We did lessons, in the Pigshed. You never know when you might need shelter when you’re in flight. It takes three minutes to hear the satisfying clunk of the mortice and five more before I persuade the inner barrel of the Chubb to turn.

  Inside is pitch black and smells of spiders. I’m tempted to flick the light switch, but control myself. For God’s sake, Romy. You’re trained to face the end of the world. You’re not blowing it because you’re scared of arachnids.

  I close the door behind me and switch on my new torch. I’m in a plain little room that looks more store cupboard than anything else. A couple of broken chairs, a line of empty coat hooks, a pile of missals on a battered console table. On one of the chairs, a cardboard box. Please respect the Lord’s House, reads a sign taped to the front. I look inside. A collection of white cotton bonnets, tapes hanging from their undersides to tie beneath one’s chin. They’re spotted with mould. It must be damper in here than it smells. They’re the same bonnets as Hester Lacey wears in the portrait on Wikipedia. Imagine. Wanting to dress up like that warty old monster. What a strange way to show your faith. My mother must have worn one of these, every Sunday till she was seventeen. A door leads out the other side, a heavy bolt holding it shut. It slides back easily, with a satisfying clunk. I try the handle and it turns.

  A huge space, for its shrivelled occupants. I play the torch about, drinking in the detail. I recognise it all from her stories. My mother did her homework here, in the back pews, as her father talked of hellfire from that ebony lectern to my left. White walls. Black wood. I walk inwards, head for the high arched door at the far end. Turn and look where I’ve come from. A plain table on which sit two brass candlesticks, a pewter chalice and a pewter plate on a square of linen. Above it on the wall, painted on the stone surround of an arched window, the words The Lord Thy God Is a Jealous God; above the door I’m aiming for, The Wages of Sin Is Death. Cheerful people, my forebears. But so caught up in their imaginary afterworld that they didn’t give a thought to the calamity howling towards them in the real one.

  No decoration, no embellishment. We didn’t use the Plas Golau chapel for religious purposes, obviously – it had long since become food storage, with its nice cool even temperatures – but it still retained impressions of a jollier era: death’s heads carved into memorials, a brass eagle designed to hold an opened bible, fluted pillars holding up the roof, winged babies weeping at the feet of a crabby old couple, fixed forever in marble on a carved marble bed. They suggested a playfulness, a level of morbid enjoyment, buried in there somewhere among the serious business of worship and death. Here, it is clear that God allows no fun at all. It’s years since I believed the stories about the Christians eating Jesus, but it’s clear that my grandfather’s church was no barrel of laughs.
/>   Father saw rage in me, he said. Even as I proved, over and over, how obedient I was. And even as he said it, I felt fizzing bubbles of rage between my shoulder blades, and my scalp contracted in preparation for the fight. And then I saw that maybe he was right. Rage does drive me, in many ways. It consumes me now. Rage with the world, rage with my grandparents, rage with Eden and Ilo because they’ve disappeared and left me on my own, rage with Uri because of what he is asking me to do. But everything, everything, comes back to these people, the people who used to worship here. Cold and judgemental and destructive in their pursuit of their morality. Wallowing in their own superiority. I’m going to find them, and I’m going to make sure they understand the true meaning of wickedness.

  You killed my mother, I will say. You couldn’t have killed her better if you’d used a knife.

  Revenge, Father said, is a self-destructive urge. Father knew freaking nothing. Vita knew more about the world than he did. Far more. And Uri. That’s why Uri’s still alive and they are dead. Father clearly never had someone to hate, and with such good reason, as I do, and that means that for all his fine words he knew nothing.

  I look around this place where my mother’s misery began and realise with a shock that maybe the rage comes all the way from them. No one gets pleasure from the thought of eternal hellfire if they’ve not got a load of rage stored up inside them. No one enjoys the thought of eternal damnation unless they hate the world.

  My mother was so lucky, getting away from them. Well. Maybe not, in the end. But she saved me, and I can only ever be grateful for that.

  I never knew it until this moment, but I am their grandchild.

  It smells of dust and, faintly, of wood polish. I run a finger over the back of the nearest pew and the pad comes up grey. There’s been no one here in a long while. I head for the door and go and look for the basement. I remember my mother saying that that was where they kept their offices. If the information I need is anywhere, it will be there. So damp. It hits me the moment I step onto the stairs. It’s been shut up, unheated, for as long as the rest of the building. Which gives me hope. Because if it’s been shut up, that means nobody’s been in to take away the paperwork. They’ve literally just locked it up and walked away. I wonder where they are now. Was the man who died my grandfather? A bit of me hopes so, because the sooner he discovers his own hellfire the better.