Midnight Garden

by Jeannie Wycherley

  Until she spoiled it all at the beginning of our final year by meeting someone else.

  We’d been mucking around on the tennis courts—laughing and playing what we jokingly considered to be tennis against each other. Two male engineering students—both surprisingly non-geeky and wholly presentable—had asked us if we’d join them for doubles. For Emily and Joe it was love. As simple as that. A spark that became a flame.

  All too soon I’d become surplus to requirements. Joe came around to our flat all the time and pushed me out. He and Emily cosied up on the sofa, canoodling and schmoozing and I was little more than a spare part. A gooseberry. An unwanted spectator.

  I resented it. I begrudged him. And I was angry at her.

  So I did the only thing I knew that would destroy them.

  I inveigled my way into his affections. By hook or by crook. And without much fanfare. Sadly for Emily, it didn’t take much. He loved the attention. The flattery. Then I slept with him.

  And twelve months after we graduated, I married him.

  It was the most disastrous of unions. We were two people who never really knew each other, or took the time to learn. And no, I never really cared for him either. I’d cheated to win his affection—and he had cheated on Emily. How is that any way to begin a relationship?

  As I stared into the fountain bowl, Emily’s face blinked back at me from the water.

  “It was your fault,” I told her. “You shouldn’t have gotten involved with him. You and I could have gone on the way we always had. You spoiled it for both of us. I didn’t want to be with him. It was a waste of my life.”

  I smacked my hand down hard on the surface of the water. Emily’s face exploded. The sound of the tennis session emanating from the park somewhere in the distance dissipated just as quickly.

  “Fuck you,” I spat. “I’d never have felt so alone if I hadn’t known what it was like not to be lonely anymore.”

  I slithered from my perch and faced the fountain, then leaned over and immersed my head in the water.

  Later, channelling the abrasive teenager I’d once been, full of angst and bile, I strolled back through the labyrinth swatting at bushes with my secateurs, playing a game of one-sided tennis with a variety of blooms. My anger broiling away on the surface for once, instead of being buried deeply within.

  “Love. Love. LOVE!” I lopped off a particularly luscious blooming rose in bright purpley-red and it flew through the air to land right in my path.

  Love? I seriously doubted such an emotion actually existed. Surely the notion of it led only to manipulation and strategy. Game playing and ambition. I’ll have sex with you if you’ll become this person. I’ll provide you with a child if you provide me with that house. I’ll do this, if you do that. Negotiation. Manoeuvring. Tit-for-tat.

  I examined the trail of destruction I’d left in my wake. What would Isobel think when she came upon this mess?

  The large rose on the path ahead stared at me accusingly.

  I almost decided to tread on the head and crush it into the ground, but with my anger sated for the time being, it seemed a waste to leave it there.

  “Such beautiful flowers!” my mother exclaimed when I brought a large vase into her room the following morning.

  “They are, aren’t they?” I’d picked roses in all different colours and arranged them along with some fern I’d plucked from the undergrowth of the garden in Oakview Villa. Nobody would know. The bouquet looked pretty and fresh, and the smell was heavenly, particularly in my mother’s sickroom.

  I made to place them on my mother’s dressing table, but she waved me over. “Can you put them here, next to me?”

  “I’m not sure what Cathy will say,” I said, but I created a space for them.

  My mother watched me arrange the vase and titivate the flowers. “They are pretty.” Her glance fell on my hand. “You’ve cut yourself?”

  I scanned the palm of my right hand. The scar on my wrist had disappeared completely now, but I’d woken this morning, and bizarrely, the place where the rose had punctured my hand several nights ago had suddenly started to weep.

  “Oh it’s a nuisance,” I grumbled, snatching up a wet-wipe from the stash that Cathy kept by my mother’s bed and dabbing the wound.

  “There are some plasters in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom,” my mother said.

  “It’s fine,” I told her, but as the blood oozed I knew I’d give in. I left my mother to her own devices while I hunted down a plaster. The cardboard box in the cabinet was ancient, crushed between a variety of pills and ointments. I eased the sticking plaster from its plastic envelope, only to find it had lost all its stickiness a long time ago. Rolling my eyes, I resorted to a larger one and clamped it down on my skin, hoping it would stay in place. Maybe Cathy would have something a little more effective. I’d ask her when I saw her later.

  Returning to the master bedroom I was taken aback to find my mother had wriggled onto her side, all by herself. She was reaching out a finger to gently stroke the velvety petals of the large purple-red rose. Her eyes glistened.

  “Mum?” I asked and she started at my voice, blinking back the offending tears.

  “Your father gave me roses like this when he found out I was expecting you,” she said, her voice soft with longing. “He was so happy.”

  “Was he?” I asked. I edged my chair closer to the bed and sat down, then plucked the purple-red rose from the vase and handed it to her. She cradled it gently next to her chin, the way a child might hold a teddy bear.

  “We hadn’t thought we’d be able to have children. We’d been trying for such a long time.”

  My breath hitched in my chest to hear her talking about something so personal. I’d often wondered at the delay between my parent’s marriage and my appearance. My mother and father had been married thirteen years before I came along. Now it made sense.

  “Did he want a boy?” I asked, certain she would say yes, but she laughed gently.

  “Heavens no. He said he’d be happy whatever you turned out to be. And he was. He doted on you.”

  A familiar ache flooded through me, a long-held heartbreak. “I wish I could remember that.”

  I met my mother’s eyes and she nodded, understanding. For once we were united in our grief. It was a rare and precious moment.

  “I wish you could, too. He was a good man.” She stroked the rose.

  How different things would have been had he lived. A freak accident had taken him just weeks before my brother had been born. A coach had slid on a patch of untreated ice outside the building where my father worked, and he’d been killed instantly when it mounted the pavement.

  “If only—” I sighed, but I knew what my mother’s response would be. If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.

  My mother looked at me, her face bleak, her eyes full again. “There’s always a trade-off, Lisa.”

  Taken aback by her response I asked, “What do you mean? A trade-off?”

  But she only sighed, the hiss escaping from somewhere troubled, hiding deep inside. “Read to me,” she said. “I don’t want to remember.”

  “Cathy?” I perched on a stool in the kitchen finishing up a late supper of marmite on toast. The radio played some evening jazz—low, light and melancholic—perfectly suited to my mood. Cathy had returned from her final check on my mother and was pulling on her jacket, getting ready to head for home. “Can you do me a favour?”

  She looked at me in surprise. “Sure! If I can.”

  “Just take a look at my hand?” She was a nurse, she would be able to suggest what I should do. “I was stabbed by a rose and it’s been bleeding all day, and the itch is driving me to distraction.”

  Cathy winced in empathy. “Oooh. Not nice. Let me see.”

  I stood and moved into the light, peeling away the triple layer of ancient band-aids. One wouldn’t stick, and two wasn’t enough. Cathy tutted at the sight of the bloody wadding. “Ouch.”

  “Do you think it�
�s infected?” I asked her as she twisted my hand this way and that, carefully scrutinising the puncture mark.

  She squeezed the edges and more blood oozed from the wound, dark and purple-red—just like the rose that had caused it. “Hmm. You say it hasn’t stopped bleeding? There’s no other fluid here… besides the blood… nothing to suggest an infection.”

  “It’s the itch that’s doing my head in,” I repeated.

  Cathy nodded and grabbed a wad of kitchen roll to wipe the area clean again. Then she dropped my hand and had a quick look in the case she always carried around with her. She located a few sterile wipes, some fresh wound dressings and a bandage, then quickly and efficiently cleaned the wound thoroughly before binding it up.

  “What I would suggest is that you pop over to your mother’s GP surgery in the morning and have a nurse practitioner there check it out. She’ll be able to take things further if she needs to.”

  She snagged the bandage tight with a grip. “Keep this clean and dry for now and take some paracetamol if you need to.” She knelt down, to secure her case.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She looked up at me and smiled. “No problem. Happy to help.”

  The maddening itch wasn’t eased by paracetamol. Why would it have been? I found a long out-of-date packet of hay-fever tablets in the cupboard. These pills were the same as those I had once taken to combat allergies. They seemed to help with the itching a little.

  Just before midnight I was sitting on my bed in the pitch dark, scratching at the edge of the bandage and occasionally pressing against the wound in a vain attempt to relieve the itch, knowing that I was probably making the bleeding worse. I couldn’t wait for morning to come so that I could go and get the damn thing seen to.

  Bored, after a few minutes I crept to the window and pulled the nets aside, just a fraction. The light from the nearby streetlamp illuminated a circle in front of Oakview Villa. I could clearly make out Isobel, standing between the open gates.

  She tipped her head up, looking straight back at me.

  My breath caught in my throat. She couldn’t see me, could she? She couldn’t possibly know I was watching her.

  So why did she lift her hand and beckon to me? I noted her smile, so familiar now, playing on her lips. Somehow friendly and welcoming and yet now I recognised it as oddly knowing and sinister at the same time.

  I backed slowly away from the window.

  “I’m not coming tonight,” I whispered.

  Even three feet from the window I could see the luminosity of her skin, the darkness of her eyes.

  “I don’t want to visit. I don’t want the memories.” No more.

  I moved further back, standing beneath the door frame, where I couldn’t see her anymore. My heart hammered in my chest.

  I could feel her out there. I knew she was still looking for me.

  “Leave me alone. Leave me alone,” I chanted in a whisper.

  The palm of my right hand throbbed and itched and I scratched at it absently with my left thumb. Then the nails of the fingers of my left hand. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Harder and harder. Rubbing at the bandage until I realised I had moved the material aside and was ripping away at the skin. Blood was oozing between my fingers, the fingers of my left-hand slick with it.

  “Shit!” I hissed quietly, not wanting to disturb my mother. I lifted my right hand to stop the blood dripping all over the stair carpet, then moved silently on tip-toe down to the bathroom on the next floor. I pushed the door closed with my elbow, before switching on the light.

  What a mess. Blood everywhere. The sight of it made me shiver. Should I phone the out of hours GP now? Or go to straight to the hospital?

  “It was just a bloody thorn,” I hissed through clenched teeth. “From a godforsaken rose! Seriously! What is this crap?”

  I washed my hands thoroughly, watching the water run pink and then finally clean, before drying my hands on a towel. The puncture wound immediately began to ooze purpley-red blood again. I grabbed a handful of loo roll and wrapped it around my hand, over and over again, then perched on the edge of the bath, clutching my hand to my chest, fighting a wave of nausea.

  So much blood.

  The ceiling above my head creaked.

  I looked up, as though I would see the reason for the noise.

  The creak came again, followed by muffled footsteps. They walked across the floor in the room above my head. Eight or nine steps. Then stopped.

  I swallowed.

  The room above was Ian’s bedroom. Nobody went in there. Not ever.

  I cradled my poorly hand with my good hand and glared up at the ceiling, willing whomever was up there to simply disappear. If that wasn’t going to happen, my choices were stark. I’d left my mobile phone in the kitchen. I could either make a dash for downstairs to phone the police and report the intruder, or I could go upstairs and confront whomever it was.

  But what if it was my mother?

  It couldn’t be. That was ridiculous. She was bedridden. She couldn’t even sit up without help.

  Taking a deep breath I switched off the bathroom light and gently edged the door open, peering out through the crack onto the landing. My mother’s bedroom door directly across from where I stood, remained safely closed.

  I stepped out of the bathroom and edged silently across the carpet to her room. Pausing there with my ear to her door I hardly dared to breathe. I couldn’t hear a sound, so I quietly turned the handle and poked my head in. Her night light had been left on. She lay on her back, her head against the crisp white cotton of her pillows, her face framed by soft fuzzy white hair, her eyes closed. She clasped the rose, still looking as fresh as it had the previous night, to her chest. It bloomed bright against the pale bedlinen.

  For one hollow moment, seeing her like that, laid out as she might be in her coffin, I imagined she had died.

  The idea panicked me, and my stomach dropped like a stone. For the first time in my life I realised I didn’t want to lose her. She was all I had. I took a faltering step into the bedroom and she stirred, her eyelids flickering, a weak exhalation of breath.

  Still alive.

  I quivered with relief, my knees and elbows weak, my breath caught somewhere near the top of my chest.

  A dull thump from above.

  I backed out of my mother’s room and quietly closed the door once more. Inching towards the stairs I trod carefully, knowing exactly where the cricks and creaks were, mainly in the centre of the steps. The third from the top was the worst, so I missed it out altogether. That had been easier to do at fourteen than it was at forty-four.

  A faint shadow of light greeted me on the top landing between my room and Ian’s. The street lamp outside cast a glow that illuminated the otherwise pitch black. I’d left my door open and I could see there was nothing and no-one inside.

  Not unless they were hiding beneath my bed, or in my sliver of a wardrobe.

  I cocked my head to listen. Not a breath of sound.

  Licking my dry lips nervously, I glanced at Ian’s door. Closed.

  Of course it was closed. It hadn’t been open in years.

  Hesitantly I edged towards it, reluctant to disturb the sanctity of the space within. My fingers found the circular door knob, smooth and cold, and slightly loose in its fixing. Gritting my teeth I twisted the handle, remembering as I did so, that you had to twist it round much further than you should in order for it to make purchase with the tumbler within.

  Almost a double twist.

  And then it clicked. I pushed through, into my brother’s sacred air… half-expecting to see Ian kneeling on the rug, his Matchbox cars and lorries scattered around him, his beloved teddy Pongo by his side, his bed unmade and colouring pencils and paper cluttering his desk.

  A whiff of something… the scent of my little brother… of earth and grass and Playdoh and spaghetti… then… nothing.

  The room was empty and entirely orderly.

  The curtains were open. The windowsill wa
s clear. The rug had been straightened. The pencils and paper had been collected up and replaced in the desk drawer. The cars and lorries had been stowed in a plastic box kept under the bed. The bed had been made. Pongo nestled against the pillows, still waiting for his young master to come home.

  I turned my head, sweeping my gaze around the room. Nothing untoward. Nobody here. Everything in its proper place.

  Except Ian’s little yellow sailing boat.

  It shouldn’t have been here. It had never been found.

  Someone had placed it on his desk.

  With my hands shaking, I reached out to pick it up… and faltered.

  It sat in a puddle of fresh water, as though it had only recently been plucked from the boating pond in the park.

  A single purple-red rose petal floated next to the boat.

  I backed away. Out of the room. Closing the door. Reversed across the landing to my own room, all the way to the window, my hands clamped over my mouth to stop the moan that desperately sought escape.

  When the back of my legs made contact with the window frame, I spun about.

  Isobel stood where I’d seen her earlier. She looked up at me with her moon-bright face, eyes glittering in the light.

  But she wasn’t smiling anymore.

  And then she closed the gates.

  “The x-ray isn’t showing anything untoward. There doesn’t appear to be much wrong with your hand,” the doctor told me. “So I think we’ll give you a course of antibiotics and hope that will clear everything up. I can also prescribe an antihistamine cream to help with the itching.” He smiled at me, at once reassuring, yet also oddly absent. I’d waited four hours to be seen here at the local minor injuries’ unit. The reception area was jammed. He had his work cut out today.

  “Thanks.” I nodded.