Bone Meal For Roses

by Miranda Sherry

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Sam.’ Keegan’s voice is low and serious. ‘My mom is freaking out about you. You haven’t replied to any of her emails, your biology assignment is late, and your telephone just rings and rings as if the line has been cut off or something.’

  ‘Oh.’ Shit, thinks Sam. The phone bill. She was positive she remembered to sort out the water and lights one, but now she’s not sure. She’s not at all sure about anything.

  ‘I drove over to—’

  ‘You drove here? By yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’ He’d had to work really hard to convince his mother to let him come alone. Keegan had driven down the road at the pace of a dying snail to reassure her that he was going to take it slow. ‘I’ve got my learner licence, you know. A lot’s happened since…’ Keegan trails off and the silence sinks down between them, heavy with things unspoken.

  ‘Oh.’ Sam didn’t realise that Keegan even knew where she lived, but of course he must. Everyone around here knows of Jem and Anneke’s weirdo little corner of the valley.

  ‘Are you going to open this gate?’

  ‘Right.’ Sam shakes herself from her daze. ‘Just give me a minute to get the key and change out of my… put on something…’

  ‘Sure.’ Keegan’s voice wobbles.

  ‘I’ll be back in a sec.’

  Sam races to the house and freezes in the doorway, seeing for the first time just what a tip the place is. There’s dust on every surface and unwashed dishes in the sink and it smells… unused. Anneke would be horrified. Sam heads to the bathroom and splashes her face with cold water, over and over, until her jaw aches.

  At last she’s dressed and back at the garden gate with the key in her hand. It trembles when she unlocks the padlock and slides back the bolt.

  ‘Hi,’ says Keegan from his waiting spot on the dirty barn floor. ‘Thought you’d done a runner.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Sam says and ushers him in through the gate. ‘We can talk out here in the garden, but not in the house. We have to be quiet, OK? Grandpa’s asleep.’

  ‘Is he all right? He doesn’t seem to be getting better or anything.’

  ‘Being old is not something you recover from, Keegan,’ Sam snaps. She leads him to the bench beneath the lemon tree because it faces the pond, keeping the house, which seems to have grown into something huge and echoey now that Keegan is here, at their backs. Sam can feel it looming behind her, peering at them through the greenery with unblinking eyes. She darts a look at Keegan. Despite his unwelcome appearance, she’s surprised to find that his presence beside her is a relief. He’s not Sussie, and he’s not Yolande. Keegan she can deal with.

  Keegan is the opposite of relieved. Now that he’s seated beside Sam just as if they were two ordinary people looking at an ordinary view, he’s lost the nerve he’s been nurturing all morning. He clears his throat, wincing at the sound, but can’t make any useful words come out. Above their heads, between the yellow globes of the fruit, the little Cape white-eyes, whose round, green bellies give them the appearance of unripe lemons themselves, chatter on with enviable ease.

  Sam gathers her hair at the side of her head, divides it into three, and begins to plait it.

  Keegan watches the deft, automatic movements of her capable fingers. He’s not sure whether he’s in danger of throwing his arms around her, or throwing up. Neither one would be optimal.

  ‘So.’ She finally breaks the silence.

  ‘Yes. So. Like I was saying, my mom is worried. You seem to have dropped off the planet.’

  ‘Oh, come on. I forgot to reply to a few emails, hardly a crisis.’

  ‘You promised her you wouldn’t, though.’ Keegan feels a jolt run through him when she flips her finished braid over her shoulder and turns her head to meet his gaze.

  ‘You’re right. I know I did. Tell her I’m so sorry. I just…’ Just what? The garden seems to hold its breath, waiting for her to finish the sentence and bring some sort of reason to the fever of the past week.

  ‘It was conditional, your doing the correspondence thing. That’s what Mom said. On condition. You’ve not been holding up your end of the bargain.’

  ‘I’m legally allowed, you know.’ Sam turns to stare at the hump of the hill. She imagines being able to look right through it to where the wood-man works in his airy workshop on the other side. Charlie. His name sits soft like a cloud on the end of her tongue, she has to move it out of the way to get her words out: ‘I’m seventeen. At sixteen, you’re like a grown-up or something, and you can drop out of school if you want.’

  ‘Not if people give a shit about you, you can’t.’ Keegan stares down at his hands. ‘My mom’s pupils are like her babies. Her special projects. She’s not going to let you ruin your whole future without a bloody good fight.’

  ‘Who says I’m ruining my future?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Sam, I know you’re all earth-child-luddite and whatever, but really, you live in the same world I do, so don’t pretend you don’t. This is the twenty-first century. You know you need an education to get anywhere.’

  Where would I want to get to? But it bothers Sam that this garden, this sanctuary that has always been enough, somehow isn’t any more. She doesn’t know what she wants. Except for a hot-coal ‘something’ that she can’t yet define, something that has everything to do with what waits on the other side of that hill. The memory of Charlie’s skin against hers, his face, so close, as he’d moved inside her, stops her heart for a moment, and then sets it galloping.

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘It won’t happen again. I promise. I’ll do that biology thingy today. It’ll be in Mrs McGovern’s inbox by morning.’

  ‘If it isn’t?’

  ‘It will be.’

  ‘If you say so.’ Keegan looks out over the pond to the dense shade beneath the old oak. A jagged shape pokes up out of the plants. He squints against the glare of the water. Is that a grave marker? Is something buried there?

  ‘OK then,’ Sam says with finality in her tone; she begins to stand.

  ‘You still haven’t explained your radio silence, Sam,’ Keegan says, and she lowers herself back down to the bench. ‘What’s been going on?’

  Sam is utterly lost about what to say. Her whole existence has become a dense forest of lies, but there are no reasonable ones she can think of to explain away her recent behaviour. She glances at Keegan. He is clearly nervous, glaring at the twisting fingers in his lap as if they don’t belong to him. She knows now how he feels, why he tried to kiss her all those years ago. Now that she’s met Charlie and felt the gushing heat inside her own body, the needle-sharp point of focus in her mind, she knows.

  I could use that.

  It’s a horrible thought. She tries to think of something else, anything that will distract him, get him out of here. She remembers, for a moment, the predatory golden eyes of the eagle from her dream, peering out from behind her own. She shifts on her seat, trying to rid herself of the sensation of dark feathers rustling beneath her skin, but what replaces it is worse: her whole being vibrates with a low growl of panic that runs through every thought, even her thoughts of the wood-man: no one can know what I’ve done. A knot of panic, like a fist punching up the back of her throat, almost stops her breath. What will stop him from asking? What can she do to change where this is going?

  ‘Keegan?’ she says, and when the boy turns to her, she jerks forward and places her mouth on his. It’s a clumsy move, at first, but she knows how to do this now. Keegan’s eyes widen, and his breath through his nose comes in little startled snorts. When she pulls away, he stares at her, red faced. She swears she can hear the thudding of his heart.

  ‘What are you—’

  ‘Everything’s going to be fine, Keegan.’ She smiles.

  ‘But—’ Sam silences Keegan with a touch on his trembling hand. ‘Tell your mom I’m sorry I went AWOL for a bit there, but I promise, everything is fine and I’ll be working harder than ever.’

&nb
sp; Keegan leans into her, hoping for more, but Sam uses the momentum of his movement to get them both standing. Before he knows what’s happening, Keegan is being led back to the gate. Her hand on his arm burns into his skin. The garden seems to swim and shift before his dazzled eyes.

  ‘Tell Mrs McGovern I’ll be in town on Monday, and she can check on me herself.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘It’s going to be fine, Keegan.’ Her face is close, she puts a burning hand on his chest, over the place where his heart thunders, runs it down to the base of his belly, stops. ‘Trust me. I’m OK. Everything will be back to normal before you know it, right?’

  ‘Um…’

  ‘I’ll see you next week.’ And suddenly, Keegan is on the other side of the gate. Slices of sunlight dance through the gaps between the barn boards. He breathes in petrol from the Yamaha, blinks at the sight of his mom’s blue car, waiting in the sunlight. Everything is so ordinary.

  But it isn’t.

  The part of him that has ached for so many years feels both full up and somehow emptier than before. Keegan walks to the car on numb feet, gets in and starts the engine, letting the dull grind of it soothe his fractured insides, as if the vibration might shake him back together beneath his skin.

  *

  Sam stares at the gate for a stupefied minute, listening to Keegan start the car, and pull away. Then she hurls herself against the wood, slams the bolt home, and locks the padlock.

  It’s going to be fine, Keegan, she’d said. But it isn’t. It’s all falling down and apart and soon, soon, everyone will know. Her secret isn’t safe. How long did she think she could fool everyone? Even after kissing Keegan, what’s going to stop him from telling everyone how neglected and wild the garden is? How she wouldn’t let him in the house? How Jem was nowhere to be seen?

  With slow steps, Sam turns and walks towards the rose garden. Her stomach churns. Her mouth tastes of earth and tin, and suddenly, she’s right back where she was that morning three months ago when everything changed.

  It was July, a Saturday.

  Sam woke late to the patter of rain on the tin roof, and an astonishing yellow light in her bedroom, instead of winter morning grey. She opened the curtains to see that the sun had found a gap in the grey cloud cover and was shining through the rain, dripping gold onto the garden. She watched bright droplets stream down the freshly pruned rose stems, turning the thorny stalks into lit candles, dripping wax.

  And then, in a moment, the gold was gone and the sky was damp-winter lead again. Sam took Anneke’s old watch from her bedside table and slipped it on. Nine o’clock! The house was too quiet for it to be so late. Jem was always up early, and by this time he should already have brought her coffee in bed and made some comment about her sleeping the day away. She got up and put on her weekend stuff – thick layers of old clothing that were good for garden work – and opened her bedroom door to a silent house.

  ‘Grandpa?’

  Nothing.

  As she walked towards his room, the air felt oddly tight, as if it was threaded through with rubber bands that pulled at her limbs and distorted everything she passed. The familiar bookshelves became rows of grinning teeth, and the floor swung down and away from her cautious footsteps. It was cold. Jem hadn’t lit the stove. He always lit the stove first thing when he woke up on winter mornings.

  Sam paused on the threshold of Jem’s bedroom with her hand on the door. The wood seemed to pulse beneath her touch. Just then, the sun must’ve made another grab for the sky, because a sudden flood of bronze light lit up the lounge behind her and lines of warm colour glowed around the edges of the door. Her grandpa seldom slept with his curtains closed.

  Sam opened the door, blinked at the light, and peered in. She didn’t need to take another step to know, she could see right away from where she stood that whatever it was that had made Jem Jem, was gone. She pulled back with a gasp and slammed the door shut. She swayed on her feet and her ears hummed as if a hundred bees were beating their busy wings against the inside of her skull.

  If I look again, it will be different. He will just be sleeping. His eyes will not be open and staring like that. She tried to push the handle down and take another look, but she couldn’t. Instead, a hideous wash of hot bile swept up her throat and she stumbled from the doorway and into the bathroom. It was a long time before she could lever herself up from the icy floor.

  By the time Sam managed to drink water from the bathroom tap, the last of the opportunistic sun glow had gone, and the rain had stopped, leaving a damp, dripping hush behind. She was shaking so much that the whole bathroom seemed to vibrate around her. Slowly, she walked back towards the closed bedroom door and pushed it open.

  ‘Grandpa?’ she whispered, although she could see it was pointless. ‘What happened what happened what happened what happened…’ The words tumbled from her mouth and lay scattered and unanswered at her feet. Jem was on his side with his eyes open wide and his mouth in an awful shape as if something mechanical had crept in and pulled it this way and that during the night. Sam’s tentative touch revealed that his forehead was cold. Everything inside her wanted to climb out of her skin. Her legs lost their bones and she slipped to the floor in a shuddering pile of grief.

  Time passed, or maybe it didn’t. And then suddenly Sam sat upright and thought: the survival book! There was something in there, she was sure of it. Something that would tell her what and how. Something that would tell her why. She ran from the room to find it. The pages felt damp and fragile beneath her fingers.

  Searching.

  Sudden cardiac death.

  Sam could only guess that this was what had happened, and the fact that her grandfather’s body was rigid, meant that, according to the book, he’d died some time ago. Hours ago. Alone, in the night. There was no way to bring him back. She clutched her book to her chest, closed her eyes and screamed.

  She screamed long and loud and hard. It felt as if the sound was coming from the centre of her spine, carrying splinters of bone with it that ripped against the sides of her throat as it poured out. She gasped and panted for breath. She tasted blood.

  What am I going to do?

  She went back into the room. It was gloomy now without the sun, and starting to smell slightly of urine. Ouma wet herself too that time. Her beloved grandpa’s face had become strange in death, but not a stranger’s. With a start, Sam finally saw the family resemblance it had been impossible to spot before: she could see her mother’s face in Jem’s dead one. With Jem’s features now slack and vacant, she was reminded of how Yolande had looked, passed out on the couch in a drugged stupor.

  Yolande.

  No.

  Now that she was without an adult guardian, they could force her to go back to Yolande, couldn’t they? And what if her mother hears the news that her father is dead and comes back to claim her house, her inheritance? Her daughter.

  Sam left the house, and in the garden, gulping down mouthfuls of fresh wet garden air, she paced back and forth beneath the olive tree, churning the ground to mud beneath her sodden slippers as a hundred awful scenarios played themselves out in her head. Every single thought led back to one, unavoidable truth: she was going to have to hide this. Nobody could be allowed to find out that she was now alone.

  Yolande cannot, under any circumstances, know.

  That evening, as the light began to dim, and the drizzle started up again, Sam began to dig a grave for her grandpa. The obvious spot was beneath the oak tree, beside Sam-the-horse’s resting place, but with raw hands and aching shoulders, she finally had to give up in a rage of tears and exhaustion. There was no way she could dig through the roots that snaked and snarled through the compact ground. Sam trudged back to the dark house, ran herself a bath, and sat in it, sobbing, until the water was too cold to endure any more. She spent the rest of that endless night buried in a pile of blankets on the couch. Awake.

  When the light changed and the birds began to sing, Sam went back outside, jerking lik
e a marionette on stiff, sore legs. The sky was clear and the air mild. She marched to the oak tree to review the damage she’d made on the root-twisted earth. Definitely not an option. She needed a patch of ground that had already been cleared and dug over, somewhere where her puny muscles wielding a gardening spade could make some kind of progress.

  The roses.

  Only last week, she and Jem had laboured to prune each one. Then, they’d dug down deep to lift the root balls of the dormant plants so that they could dig in fresh compost and bone meal beneath.

  Bone meal. Grandpa.

  Sam’s stomach heaved, but after a minute the feeling passed and something calm crept in to take its place. Yes, her grandpa, nourishing her ouma’s precious roses for decades to come. He’d have liked that.

  It took Sam the whole day to dig a hole large enough. Her grandfather had been tall, and she didn’t know how deep she would have to make it. Tears leaked out as she worked, and she imagined the hole to be full of them. Salt. Not good for plants. She hoped the roses, now lying on their sides with their roots covered in sacking to protect them from the winter sun, would be OK once she replanted them.

  When, at last, the moment came that Sam had to return to the bedroom, something switched off inside her. She entered Jem’s room with mechanical steps and lifted the covers off the bed and onto the floor. In the small gap between Jem’s pyjama top and bottoms, she could see that his skin on the side of his body facing the mattress had turned livid purple, and the bits facing up were bone white. She quickly covered his face, and then swaddled his body using the sheet he’d been lying on, wet bits and all. As she pushed his stiff, heavy cadaver over to wind the sheet around it, a piece of her mind snapped off and went floating away, up towards the ceiling and then further, out above the roof. So it was only an empty automaton that pulled the heavy bundle to the floor and dragged it out of the house, sweating and panting and wincing at the thud of a head knocking against the steps that led down from the stoop to the garden.

  She pushed the wrapped body into the yawning, muddy hole with a thump that seemed to echo against the house, the barn and the hill, the sound intensifying until it filled up the whole world.