Midnight Garden

by Jeannie Wycherley

“I’ll send the nurse in to redress it,” he finished, and disappeared through the curtains.

  I waited patiently for another ten minutes, trying hard not to scratch my hand, until the nurse bustled in with a tray of implements and scooted towards me on a stool on wheels.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s have a look at what we have here.” I looked away as she prodded and then irrigated the wound. She dried my hand off ready to start the dressing and then paused.

  “You’ve made it quite sore where you’ve been scratching at it, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I just can’t seem to stop.”

  “But the Doctor has prescribed some antihistamines, hasn’t he?” She consulted the notes, nodded in satisfaction and returned her attention to my hand. “This is very odd though. Did he say anything about this?”

  I glanced down at my hand and saw instantly what she meant. Dark spots—like freckles—had appeared all over my palm. They ran down my wrist and were spreading along the outer edge of my arm towards the elbow.

  “Is it a rash?” I asked and reached forward with my free hand to smooth the skin.

  The spots were ever so slightly raised.

  “It must be some kind of allergic reaction.” The nurse raised her eyebrows. “Not to worry. I’m sure you’ll be right as rain in a few days.”

  I watched her wrap my hand in a dressing. A feeling of unease lodged in the pit of my stomach, solid and unyielding.

  The number 12 bus dropped me on the main road near the bottom of Park Close. I walked home, along the sunny side, past the first two terraced rows of Georgian houses, and then onto mine. I wondered idly what the view would have looked like when the Georgian houses had been built, in the fifty or sixty years before the other side of the road had been developed. Had the park reached all the way across? Or had it been farm land or common land. The latter seemed the most likely scenario. If I’d have been someone occupying number 27 back in the 1850s, I’d have been spitting chips when the villas had been built.

  Halfway up the street I had an unusual view of Oakview Villa. From this angle I could glimpse more of the garden than when I was simply looking at it head-on from across the road. I stopped dead in my tracks. The wall around the garden pretty much obscured a proper view, but even so…

  Cheekily I climbed the steps of Number Twenty-Three Park Close and stood on tip-toe to give myself a little extra height. What I could now see confirmed what I thought I’d observed.

  The garden of Oakview Villa was dead.

  The trees were bare, the bushes were little more than bracken, there wasn’t a flower to be seen. Not a hint of colour. Not a leaf nor a petal.

  “That’s impossible,” I said, and nearly jumped out of my skin as the door behind me opened and a well-dressed middle-aged woman regarded me curiously.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, and I shook my head, slipping back down the steps. She stepped after me.

  “Sorry! Wrong house!” I called and darted up the street. I could feel her eyes boring into me, watching with suspicion as I climbed the steps of number 27. I made a great show of getting my keys out and letting myself in.

  All was calm inside the house. Cathy had obviously been and gone and left my mother alone.

  I ran up the stairs and poked my head into her room. She was sleeping, in much the same position as I’d seen her in the early hours, the rose snared under one hand, draped across her chest.

  She looked peaceful.

  I decided to let her rest.

  There was something I wanted to investigate.

  Victoria Park on a week day afternoon in early summer was relatively quiet. There were a few people walking dogs, a couple of joggers, some mums with prams and toddlers in the fenced off kiddies’ play park and a couple of older kids playing hooky from school, hanging out near the skatepark.

  Something I’d done myself many times.

  During those mid-teenage years I’d come to know this park so well. I’d hung out here with my friends for hours every week, sometimes daily. It was a fair size—approximately eleven acres in extent—with a wooded pleasure area, a recreation ground, a small boating lake, and a crazy golf course. In the 1850s the local municipality had requisitioned the ground for public use, and the villas in Park Close had been built at the same time.

  I knew exactly where the villas backed onto the park. There was an area of unkempt scrubland where some kids liked to play football or cricket. At night some less-than-salubrious goings-on occurred among the taller bushes there.

  I picked my way through the dried-out bracken, the plastic bottles and faded crisp packets, sad looking condoms and even the odd syringe, glad to be wearing jeans and boots rather than shorts and flip-flops. The day had started cool—when I’d set out for the hospital—but it was rapidly turning warm.

  The walls at the rear of the villa properties were tall but given their relative age some of them were crumbling. I suppose many of the owners had no idea what sort of state their back walls were in, because tucked away at the end of their substantial gardens—usually behind potting sheds or greenhouses or a variety of mature trees—they had probably not been seen for decades.

  I counted my way along the properties by taking note of the roofs. By my reckoning Oakview Villa would be fifth from the end of the row, and I knew it had three distinctive double red-bricked chimneys. I spotted the villa quickly enough, but the rest of my luck appeared to be out. The wall here was sturdy and looked for all the world as though it had been built yesterday. There was no way I could climb it.

  I shuffled around the undergrowth, disentangling myself from a variety of spiky bushes and walked further along to where a couple of flimsy young trees were trying to make themselves felt. With some difficulty, by jamming one foot against the wall and the other against one of the trees, fearing it would snap completely in half, and using my own good hand to hoist myself higher, I was able to get my head above the height of the wall.

  The garden of Oakview Villa was a desolate ruin.

  How could that be? I’d been over there. Several nights in a row.

  Had I been dreaming? Sleep walking?

  Yet, once it must have been the glorious landscaped garden I recalled. The plants and trees—their remains at any rate—were exactly where I remembered them, but the trees around the perimeter of the garden were now skeletal and devoid of leaf even now at the cusp of the summer. The ornamental bushes and raised flower beds had been taken over completely by weeds. Closer to me, I could vaguely make out the dull colour of the mosaic path, now mostly covered by dirt and detritus. Further away I could see scarring on the ground where the labyrinth had once been—the hedges had all but disappeared.

  In the distance the house stared back at me, sullen and silent. I could imagine a face at the window, all too easily—be that Isobel or the old woman’s—and I shuddered.

  Pulling my gaze back, I noted that there in the centre of the garden, maybe eighty metres from where I clung precariously to the wall, I could see the fountain. Or the wreckage of what had once been the magnificent and sizeable fountain. Ivy had insinuated itself all around the ruins of it. The God with the vase had toppled to the ground where he now lay, missing his head and an arm. The bowl of the fountain had a sizeable chunk out of the side of it, too. It would never hold water again.

  And no little boy would ever sail his boat there again, either.

  As the tree supporting my weight threatened to bend a little too far and splinter, I jumped back to the ground. The colours of the world swam out of focus, and I fought a sudden bout of faintness, my rapid heartbeat drumming between my ears.

  Nothing made sense. This was the same garden and yet not the same.

  It seemed some magic occurred in the hours between midnight and dawn.

  I stood at the gate staring up at the shuttered windows of Oakview Villa, my head thumping in consternation.

  Smoke issued out of the central chimney pot, darker than normal, curling into the pristin
e blue sky, smudging the beauty of the day.

  What did it all mean? Fear and confusion coursed through my blood. I could hardly keep my limbs still, and my breath whistled in and out of my throat in panic. I pushed at the railings with my left hand, still cradling my right—which throbbed in time to the pulse in my forehead—and the chain and padlock clinked but held firm.

  “Hey? Hey! I know you’re in there!” I shouted, fury pouring out of me in waves. “Let me in!”

  I kicked at the gates as hard as I could. “Let me in! You mad fucking bitch!”

  “Lisa?”

  I spun around, startled. Cathy stood behind me, her jacket under the arm that clutched her case, keys in her other hand. She’d just parked up. “Is everything alright?”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. I didn’t know what to say to her. My eyes felt huge in my face, the horror of the previous night—the previous few nights—coming home to roost in my mind.

  “You’re not alright, are you my love?” Cathy’s voice soothed me. “Come on. Let’s go home. I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.”

  “I… I… I need to get in there,” I stuttered, pointing desperately behind me at Oakview Villa.

  Cathy frowned. “What on earth for, Lisa? It’s all locked up.”

  “I have to!”

  Cathy reached for me. “I doubt anybody even lives there anymore.”

  “They do,” I protested, pulling my arm away. “They definitely do.”

  “Well why don’t you try again later?” She probably hoped I’d calm down and become more rational. “Maybe… whomever it is you’re trying to get hold of will be back in a while.” She glanced around, taking in the For-Sale sign.

  She reached for me again. Her hand on my arm was firm but gentle. “You’re shaking, Lisa. Come on. I want to get you home.”

  I allowed her to lead me across the road, and when I seemed incapable of unlocking the door, took the house keys from my hand and let us in.

  “Go down to the kitchen,” she said. “I just want to check on your mother.”

  Jittery.

  I sat on my bed, my knees jumping up and down like pistons, absently scratching at my right arm. The little dots had spread all the way to my elbow, and all around the lower half of my arm. You’d have thought scratching at the heads would have picked them off, but they were tough, and I didn’t break the skin.

  Noradrenaline flooded my system and I realised I was on the point of a panic attack. I jammed my hands over my knees and began to sing.

  “Alouette, gentille alouette.

  Alouette, je te plumerai.”

  * * *

  I tried to ignore the quiver in my voice, concentrating instead on the words and how they sounded. It was a trick a child psychologist had taught me many years ago. When I finished the song, I started again, over and over, driving thoughts of the past out of my mind.

  “Your turn, Ian. Hurry up!” I gave him my best glower and twisted my hands in the air. He knew what that meant. I’d administer a Chinese Burn if he wasn’t careful.

  The day was beautifully bright and sunny, but we were steaming in my attic bedroom, creating our own entertainment in order to stem off our boredom. Ian, recovering from an unseasonal bout of flu, which he’d naturally followed up with bronchitis, had been confined to the house. There was no real need for me to stay indoors with him, but my mother had ‘suggested’ it in a tone that brooked no argument.

  And he was my brother and my playmate, so why wouldn’t I choose to play with him?

  The problem was, I was all grown up—so I liked to think—at eight years of age, and he was still a baby at five. I’d tried to play with his cars but quickly lost interest. Then we played schools, where I was the teacher and Ian and Pongo, and the rest of our soft toys were my pupils. But Ian had become tired and fractious.

  After an energy boost of orange juice from the fridge in the kitchen, my mother had bid us play quietly while she took a nap. She always seemed to be tired these days. There was something in the pills she took. We’d hung out in the kitchen colouring for a while—she didn’t like us to be in our bedrooms when she was taking her nap—and then, when that quickly became tedious, we began daring each other to do increasingly stupid things.

  I dared Ian to drink a teaspoon of vinegar—all of it! —and he dared to me to eat a teaspoon of mustard.

  Disgusting.

  I dared him to climb the kitchen bookcase—completely unaware it wasn’t attached to the wall and could have tipped over—but he managed it with ease. Such a monkey. In return he dared me to balance a dozen books on my head. I managed eight before they toppled off and two of them broke their spines. I gathered them up guiltily, shuffling their pages and soothing them back into place, before returning them to the bookshelves.

  “I win,” Ian crowed, and I shushed him and pointed at the ceiling above our heads where my mother slept.

  “Well I do,” he whispered back at me.

  “That was a stupid challenge,” I said, with all the authority of the older sister. He pouted and I feared he would cry, after all he really wasn’t well yet. Quickly I jumped in. “I dare you to enter the front room and sit in Dad’s chair.”

  His flushed face blanched a little at this. In our house it was an unforgivable sin to enter the front room. My mother would sit there alone in the evening, often with a bottle of wine, sometimes weeping. Ian and I were not permitted to play there.

  But my tiny brother was nothing if not dogged, and so we climbed quietly up the back stairs to the entrance hall and Ian quietly turned the handle and walked in. I hovered at the door and watched as he stared with reverence at the tall wing-backed chair with maroon brocade that had been my father’s.

  Nobody ever sat in it. I don’t know whether we were not permitted to or whether the power of familial memory kept us from desecrating his throne in the home, but either way, it was a shrine to our departed father.

  After taking a deep breath and shooting me a worried look, Ian clambered up on the seat with some difficulty. Then he sat back, his arms on the chair arms, his little feet dangling over the edge, a triumphant—albeit slightly worried—look on his face.

  I nodded and placed a hand to my mouth, breathing like Darth Vader. “Impressive, my dark apprentice.”

  He giggled, delighted, and then slithered off the chair.

  “It’s your turn, Ian. Hurry up! Choose me a dare.” That’s when I gave him my best glower and twisted my hands in the air, mimicking a Chinese Burn.

  He glanced around frantically, spying my mother’s best shoes in the hallway. Black shiny leather, with a hook and eye and three-inch heels

  “I dare you to wear Mum’s shoes!” Ian pointed at them.

  This was risky, but not as much as being in the living room, so I nodded and went to grab them. “Outside!” Ian shouted.

  I widened my eyes at him for being too noisy.

  “You can’t go out,” I said, slipping my right foot into a shoe. It dwarfed my foot, but once I’d buckled it into place I could just about stand in it.

  “I won’t tell if you don’t tell.”

  I shook my head, but he pressed me.

  It wouldn’t hurt, would it? Just for a few minutes.

  I pulled on the other shoe and buckled that up as tightly as I could. As we slipped through the front door, as quiet as mice, he picked up his yellow sailing boat from the porch. “We’re not going to the park,” I hissed.

  “Oh why not?” he whined back at me.

  “Because we can’t. We’re not allowed.”

  With difficulty I clumped down the steps in my high heels. They were horrendously uncomfortable and hurt the balls of my feet.

  “Now walk across the road,” commanded Ian.

  I made a face at him. “I did what you asked already. I think you’ll find it’s my turn to dare you.”

  “Go on. You’ve got to prove you can walk in them like a grown-up.”

  “I am walking in them.”

&nbs
p; “Across the road.”

  I rolled my eyes, and looking both ways, we crossed the road and paused in front of Oakview Villa. I could feel the beginning of a blister on my little toe where it was rubbing against the leather at the bottom of the shoe.

  I lifted one leg, standing like a stork, regarding the house. The quiet exterior. The dark windows.

  And remembered the day the old woman had scared me half to death. Vengeance could be mine. I turned to my baby brother.

  “I dare you to go in there,” I said. “Walk around the back and bring me something from the back garden.”

  Ian looked horrified. “I’m not going in there!”

  “Then you lose,” I replied adamantly.

  “Lisa ….” He protested, two dots of high colour staining the cheeks on his otherwise milky face.

  “I win!” I grinned with triumph and he shot me a look of absolute disgust. I folded my arms and smirked.

  “Come with me?” He looked up at me hopefully.

  I shook my head and raised my eyebrows. “No way, Jose. I’m daring you, not me.”

  Ian’s eyes, full of dread, flitted from me, to the house beyond. “She’ll shout at me, like she shouted at you.”

  “She’s probably not even in,” I suggested, although I could see the smoke from the chimney above our heads. Someone was inside.

  “Go on. Just be quick.” I pointed down at my shoes. “I’d come with you, but I can hardly walk in these.”

  He looked down at my feet and I wondered whether he regretted daring me to wear them. In my running shoes he might have persuaded me to come with him. That would be a lesson for him.

  He snuggled the yellow sailing boat closer to his chest and nodded. Once, twice. Then lifting his chin, he pushed the gate open and walked in. Without looking up at the house he followed the ornamental path to the right and disappeared around the side.

  Suddenly nervous I found myself wanting to call him back. I watched in trepidation as he vanished from my view, and then surveyed the door in apprehension. I didn’t like it that he was out of my sight. I jumped at every sound in the road behind me—some bigger lads on skateboards—and the distant sound of children playing in the park.