The Garden of Remembrance

by Allan Watson

  The Garden of Remembrance

  By Allan Watson

  Kindle Edition

  Published By The Candy Seance Press

  The Garden of Remembrance

  Copyright © 2012 Allan Watson

  ‘The Garden of Remembrance’ is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, electronic or mechanical without permission from the author.

  Cover Artwork By James Gorman

  Other Books Available on Kindle by Allan Watson

  ‘Dreaming in the Snakepark’

  ‘Carapace’

  ‘1-2-3-4’

  ‘….. And Other Stories’

  CHAPTER 1

  Sometimes when I wake up I can smell violets. Rita’s perfume smelled of violets. I can smell them now, like a lilac ghost from the past. Rita was the girl I had the affair with, although affair is possibly too grand a word for it. The relationship began on a drunken office night out and died a horrible, awkward death two weeks later. She was twenty four and had greenish grey eyes and flame red hair. I fucked her five times in all and never once in a bed. Like me, she claimed to be happily married. She played no part in what came later. She was only a trigger, a random and unassuming lever that sent the cosmic tumblers of destiny spinning.

  If you trace the course of a great chain of events far enough, sometimes you can find the source, like Livingstone found the wellspring of the Nile. In that context Rita was my Victoria Falls and I was the grinning fool in the barrel as it plunged into the white, foaming torrent below. I still don’t know how Teri found out about Rita. She never confronted me with any evidence, and I in turn never asked how she discovered I’d been unfaithful. It could have been anything, a dropped earring in the car, a smudge of lipstick, or maybe the faint scent of violets on my skin. But, perhaps Teri simply just knew. Women are good at that sort of leap in the dark intuition, especially after fifteen years of marriage.

  The holiday in St Andrew’s was to have saved our marriage - a parley on neutral ground. One week in which to see if Teri and I could piece together the shattered fragments of our relationship without the negative influence of her outraged family, who would be more than happy to see me cut permanently from her life like a gangrenous limb. I was desperate for the holiday to work and had the underlying impression Teri was too. If not for her love for me, then for our daughters’ sake - Denise and Alice. Since my enforced exile, I hadn’t spoken to either of them except for a few snatched moments over the telephone. Six weeks living as a lodger with my brother, James, had driven home to me exactly what I had so carelessly thrown away.

  The holiday had been booked many months before my fling with Rita, back when I still masqueraded behind the guise of loving father and husband. Usually we went abroad to Spain or Greece for a fortnight in the sun, but Teri’s father suffered a stroke just after Christmas, and although he was stable, Teri wanted to stay close to home in case he took a turn for the worse. So we opted for St Andrew’s, the location of our first weekend away together, when we were both nineteen. It was ironic we would be returning there for what could possibly be our last holiday as a couple.

  I had actually forgotten about the holiday when Teri left a message with James saying she wanted to meet with me, saying it was about something important. I had bleakly assumed it would be to discuss money, or tell me she’d seen a lawyer and wanted a divorce. Even the location of our meeting suggested despair - a Burger King perched on the shoulder of a retail park. Teri wasn’t taking any chances. A pub would have been a preferable place to talk in private, but pubs held the danger of intimacy and soft lights, the temptation to have a few drinks and let the heart rule the head.

  I arrived first and sat for ten minutes with only my untouched cheeseburger and chips for company. Around me, families laughed and chattered, reminding me they had what I no longer possessed, and I began to wonder if Teri’s choice of meeting place was chosen out of cruel spite. No matter which direction my eyes strayed, I was confronted by fathers of all shapes and sizes laughing and teasing their children. What I felt for those men wasn’t envy, it was raw, savage hatred. I was on the point of leaving when Teri arrived. It was wet outside and she wore a bulky outsized raincoat. Her blonde hair was rain darkened and plastered to her head, accentuating her pale, drawn face. I had to look twice to make sure it was her.

  She made her way over and dropped into the plastic seat across from me. I expected some sort of banal small talk before she launched whatever bombshell she had brought to the feast. How are you keeping Matt? Car running all right? How’s work? Instead, Teri had looked me straight in the eye and shocked me by proposing we go ahead with the holiday. While she talked, she picked up one of my chips and used it to trace patterns in the spilled salt on the table. I couldn’t help noticing she still wore her wedding ring. The sight nourished me more than any cheeseburger ever could. Her plan was simple and straightforward, we would travel to St Andrew’s as previously arranged. She was making no promises about taking me back. Everything to be taken one step at a time.

  And naturally there were conditions. We would sleep in separate beds, and I wasn’t to use Denise and Alice as weapons of domestic seduction against her. Until the day of the holiday arrived, I was to stay away from the house, and if by the end of the holiday she felt things weren’t working out, we would then go to our respective solicitors to thrash out money and access to the children. Her words were spoken indifferently, with no emotion, as if she didn’t care whether I agreed to her proposal or not. The message relayed, Teri got up to leave. I tried to touch her hand, but she pulled away and left without looking back. I should have been dismayed by the way she had flinched from my touch, but I felt so buoyed by the lifeline she had thrown me that I picked up the cold cheeseburger and bit off a chunk as if it were prime steak.

  We left for St Andrew’s on a dull Saturday morning in June. James made sure I didn’t oversleep, and Norma, his wife, cooked me breakfast, the first time such a thing had occurred during my enforced stay. They were attentive to every little detail that morning, but I sensed a touch of desperation in their joviality and good wishes for the reconciliation. I didn’t blame them for wanting me out. Having a near manic depressive lodging in your spare room for six weeks couldn’t have been a picnic for them. A few times during my stay, I had walked in on them unannounced, and found myself standing in the tense vacuum of a hastily curtailed argument. From their guilty looks, I knew I had been the main subject of their heated debate. The three of us would stand there like frozen statues for a few moments before Norma disturbed the tableau by sweeping silently from the room. James blustered and pretended nothing was wrong, busying himself at the drinks cabinet while muttering under his breath about the curse of pre-menstrual tension.

  Although James was four years younger than me, he had always played the part of the older brother, protective and full of concern for my wellbeing. This had come about through the great tragedy that haunted our shared childhood. My father had died when I was seven years old, leaving our mother to bring us up along with my older sister, Brenda. Who knows what sort of strain this placed her under, but shortly after my thirteenth birthday, when James was only nine, my mother committed suicide and I was the one who discovered her corpse hanging from a rope in the hallway of our house.

  This earth shattering experience had induced a serious mental breakdown, rendering me practically catatonic, and I was hospitalised for the best part of a year. Even now I have only vague, wispy memories of that year – spending most of it in a sanatorium somewhere in the Perthshire countryside being pumped full of drugs and undergo
ing intense sessions of psychiatric therapy. When the doctors thought I was well enough to be released, I joined James and Brenda who had been taken in by my aunt and uncle.

  Adapting to my surroundings hadn’t been easy. I was still on a dosage of anti-depressants which caused erratic mood swings. I was a year behind with my schooling - and to make things worse, my new classmates discovered my past history. They began a campaign of taunts and jeers, calling me ‘Loony’ and ‘Psycho’ and worst of all ‘Murderer’, as if I had been personally responsible for tying the rope around mum’s neck before kicking the chair away. Naturally enough I got involved in playground fistfights, often being beaten bloody due to my medication slowing me down and making me confused.

  It was a bad time in my life, worse even than the institutional entrapment of the hospital. That at least had passed in a haze of narcotics. This new life was filled with fear and hate and pain. I began stealing from shops and was caught on several occasions, getting hauled before the Children’s Panel who assessed me as if I were a particularly nasty bug squirming beneath the lens of a microscope. These middle-class models of public minded virtue pretended to convey understanding and empathy, but I could tell they despised me. They too seemed to convey a suspicion that I was complicit in my mother’s suicide, despite there being no evidence to back up such a claim. I was expelled from three different schools before I was old enough to leave and get a job, and sometimes I considered taking a walk along the same dark path my mother had marked out. All it would have taken was to swallow my entire month’s medication in one go.

  It was James who saved me. James who held my hand and talked me off the ledge with kind, loving words. While my sister acted as if I didn’t exist, James had become my constant companion, fretting over my brushes with authority, a small mother hen ever attentive to whatever direction the winds of inner despair blew me. In Brenda’s mind I was tainted with the long shadow of our mother’s suicide, whether due to me discovering the body or because of my own mental collapse, or perhaps the combination of both. She never articulated her thoughts on the matter.

  My aunt and uncle did their best, but there was no real emotional connection between us. They were childless and enjoying their lives, when out of the blue they found themselves burdened with three damaged children. They did their duty, I have to give them that, but they couldn’t offer what I needed. Only James understood what I was going through. Perhaps the best therapy would have been to talk openly of the tragedy, but mum’s suicide was a closed book, it was taboo, an unmentionable act of shame that could only be hinted at, never spoken aloud.

  Even as we grew up and I left those dark depressing years behind, James still acted as if he were the elder sibling, nagging at me to enrol in night classes to get the qualifications I’d failed so miserably at school. He vetted my girlfriends for suitability, and in general kept me on the straight and narrow. And here I was again, once more foisted upon him, wreathed in melancholia and emotional distress. I was well aware his wife Norma had never taken to me. Most likely James had told her something of my previous slide into depression and this had coloured her perceptions of me. She was never openly rude but it was obvious my company was only tolerated for James’s sake. Sometimes I would catch her staring at me when she thought I wasn’t looking, her expression a mixture of distaste and pity. She made me feel as if I had committed some sort of heinous crime. I don’t remember ever having offended the woman, and if I tried to broach the subject - James would laugh it off as a fancy of my imagination.

  With James and Norma’s good-byes ringing in my ears, I had driven away that morning feeling both excited and nervous. It was a half hour journey from their house to what I still thought of as my own home, and it gave me plenty of time to think of what I would say to Teri when I arrived. I even thought of stopping somewhere to buy flowers, but that would have been a bad decision. By accepting them Teri may have felt I was pressurising her into conceding a small but vital point. It would have seemed like I was pre-empting her forgiveness.

  By the time I pulled into the driveway all the clever things I had thought to say had dissolved into grey ash the wind took and blew away. I actually felt my legs tremble as I got out the car and walked to the front door where I stood for a moment composing myself and getting my head together. That was when I noticed something strange about the house itself. In the space of six weeks, some subtle change had taken place. It was as if the bricks and mortar had been taken apart and then rebuilt almost the exact way they had been before. There were small differences however. The pitch of the roof seemed a few degrees steeper, the window frames an inch or two askew, and the paint on the front door more faded than I remembered. It was like one of those trick photographs where you view a familiar object from a strange perspective. The house could pretend it didn’t know me, but I saw through its tricks.

  I pushed on the bell and the door opened immediately. Teri must have seen me through the window and been waiting. The woman who answered the door no longer resembled the bedraggled woman I had last seen in Burger King. Her blonde hair was cut short and hung in a heavy fringe across her brow. She wore a loose fitting T-shirt and jogging bottoms, but I could see she had lost weight. The effect was startling, she looked ten years younger.

  We stared each other out for a few moments before she broke the silence. ‘You’re early, Matt. I wasn’t expecting you for another twenty minutes.’

  While I hadn’t been anticipating a ticker tape welcome, I had at least hoped for a smile or some small indication that she was glad to see me. I hid my disappointment. If this was the way Teri intended playing the game then I would go along with it. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘If you like I’ll wait in the car.’

  She seemed to seriously consider my offer for a few seconds before standing aside. ‘There’s no need for that. Come in.’

  I walked past her into the living room and stood awkwardly like a novice insurance salesman, unsure of what his sales pitch should be. There is no lonelier emotion than feeling like a stranger in your own home. Teri followed me in and once again we stood face to face with an invisible wall between us.

  ‘You’re looking good,’ I said.

  She merely shrugged as if I was stating something obvious and leaned over to brush some non-existent dust from the arm of the couch. I was suddenly glad that I hadn’t bought the flowers. I heard running footsteps and excited giggles above my head. Despite wanting to keep a serious expression on my face, as if this would prove how earnest my intentions were, I couldn’t help smiling, and asked if I could go up to see the girls.

  Teri shook her head. ‘They’re not ready yet. Why don’t you start loading the car. Everything’s in the back hall.’

  Then she was gone, leaving me to wonder if the holiday was going to be nothing more than a vengeful exercise in how to best punish an errant husband before discarding him. A folded sheet of paper on the fireplace caught my eye and I couldn’t resist the temptation to peek. It was a schedule for a health club. This was where Teri’s new trim look came from. I wondered if her workouts and the new hair style were for my benefit, before it dawned on me that she might be preparing herself for re-entry into the singles world. The thought depressed me more than I expected.

  I wandered morosely through the kitchen into the back hall and spent a few minutes looking at the colourful collage of drawings and paintings pinned to the wall. Alice’s work was typical of any five year old. Ragged looking cats and drunken flowers in bright primary colours nest to pieces of card decorated with dead leaves and tin foil. Denise however was already showing real talent. She had recently turned nine, but her work held eye catching detail and hints of perspective that belied her age.

  There were some recent drawings I hadn’t seen before, and it looked as though Teri had arranged them where I couldn’t fail to spot them. If it was a ploy to make me feel even more of a failed father than I already was, it was succeeding. Alice had three new drawings on show. One was a lopsided tree with real p
ieces of bark stuck to it, while another was meant to be a zoo or a menagerie of animals from hell. It was the third that drew my attention the most. Alice had drawn a crude scrawl of a man that I gathered was a rude caricature of myself. Her black crayon had given me a downward slash of a mouth I took to represent unhappiness. I wondered just how much the separation had affected her, and I promised myself I would do my best to make amends no matter what emotional obstacles Teri put in the way.

  Denise had only one new drawing on the wall. A garden scene of some kind that I almost passed my eye over, before realising it looked familiar. A worm of dread in the base of my skull stirred and uncoiled, disturbing long buried memories like sediment in a bottle of vinegar wine. I tried to think why the scene seemed so eerily familiar, but nothing came to mind.

  Denise’s garden was a rectangle viewed from an overhead perspective with long, narrow flower beds arranged in a symmetrical pattern around its perimeter and centre. There were two small smudges on the paper as if it had been carelessly handled by someone with charcoal on their fingers. Later on the smudges would resolve and define themselves into something else, but for now they were nothing more than simple smears on the paper, ashen whorls made by clumsy little fingers. Looking back, I should have torn the drawing from the wall and flushed it down the toilet. Perhaps it would have made no difference to the events that followed, but whenever I think of that day, I see that point as a key moment where I could have prevented the sickness and horror that lay smirking around the corner.

  By the time I finished loading the car it looked as morose and resigned as any over-laden beast of burden. I didn’t blame it. The boot space was taken up with hold-all’s and plastic bags containing everything from tins of soup to washing up liquid. Barbie’s blonde coiffure poked out from a River Island carrier bag, the expression on her arrogant face seeming to snootily enquire if her summer wardrobe had been included. I squeezed her plastic face with my thumb and hoped it hurt like hell. In the foot wells behind the front seats more plastic carrier bags loitered, each bulging with an assortment of holiday bric-a-brac.