The Garden of Lost Memories

by Ruby Hummingbird

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ELSIE

  She broke her usual routine. It had been thrown out already after so many days with Billy, the clock becoming less important, the rituals that tied her day together forgotten, her chalkboard waiting for jobs she wouldn’t do. She was visiting the wood where they had picnicked. The bluebells were gone now, everything less bright today. She didn’t stay long; she had thought the place might make her feel better, the map representing all the places her mother had loved, places they’d shared, but the house sat in the corner of the map had soured everything.

  Her mother had loved her, loved her so much, she thought as she tramped back through the fields behind the village, birds circling, the sun stubbornly hiding behind a bank of cloud. She knew that and yet that house in the corner of the map, the photo and the blanket had unravelled everything.

  She remembered the first time she had opened that tin, the red box her mother had left at the bottom of her wardrobe, the card resting on the top: For Elsie. Frowning, she had read the words, her skin breaking into goosebumps as she’d picked up the various items, as she realised the significance of what she’d found.

  The lies her mother had told her.

  I love you, my darling, my precious girl. Always peas in a pod, just the two of them. Home-schooled, lessons in the village, on the meadow under the oak tree, in their garden learning about nature, lessons bent over lined textbooks at the kitchen table. Trips to the cinema, the woods, the river, the allotment, reading on the train. Just them.

  But it hadn’t been just them. She hadn’t been her only girl. She had been the second of two daughters. She had been lied to.

  Anger that she couldn’t ask more questions, that she’d been robbed of that chance, swirled within her, made her fists clench. The woman she was mourning seemed to disappear in smoke. Who had she been? Who was her mother really? Elsie wondered as she tried to catch the wisps of her memories as they passed her. Had she loved her or had she been making up for the daughter she had loved more? Had the love and the closeness been real or was it all just smoke and mirrors?

  These thoughts swirled as she returned to the village, mud from the fields still stuck to her boots, past the door of her own house, a quick glance at her neighbour’s door, a flush of shame as she thought about the little boy who lived there. He was better off without her, she convinced herself as she passed.

  The graveyard was empty and she hadn’t brought along any flowers. Today she didn’t feel like placing anything in front of the gravestone. She wished the woman buried beneath was alive, in their house, not just a presence that she spoke to in the walls. She needed to talk to her, needed to hear her explain, reassure.

  She didn’t want to kneel, so she stood staring down at the flattened ground, her arms folded across her chest. ‘I don’t want to feel like this,’ she admitted, the years stripped back as if she was a teenager seeking comfort. ‘I don’t want to keep wondering why you kept your secret for so long. I thought…’ She felt the tears build in her throat, her chest start to heave. ‘I thought we trusted each other with everything.’

  She cupped a hand to her neck, aware her voice was rising in the empty place, echoing off the gravestones, the church looming in front of her. ‘You let me believe it was always best, just you and me, and that you liked it that way. But it was your guilt that made our world so…’ – she dropped the hand – ‘so small.’

  A tear trickled slowly down her cheek and she brushed it away, her voice catching on the next few words. ‘I know you would say I could have left. I nearly did and do you remember, remember what you said to me?’

  It was hopeless. There was no one there to fight with and she knew too that she had allowed her life to take on this shape. She had avoided facing the other things she had learnt, still cowering from them even now.

  She sunk to her knees, her trousers instantly damp as she stared at the gravestone, at the letters of her mother’s name: Rosa Maple. A beautiful name. Her mother had been beautiful. She had been her mother. Her only friend. She didn’t want to feel these things towards her. She didn’t want to blame her in this way.

  She left the graveyard, bereft and alone, intending to head straight home, to play her mother’s favourite Ella Fitzgerald records and sit in the front room surrounded by the prints and figurines that had comforted her over the years, the things her mother had loved. She so desperately wanted to drink peppermint tea from the polka-dot teapot and try to feel close to her.

  One of the shops on the high street made her pause, beckoned to her as she passed on the other side of the road, a chance perhaps to be comforted by a person, perhaps, not an object. She found herself crossing over.

  Pushing open the heavy glass door to the butcher she glanced behind the counter, the young Darren in attendance. She waited, ready to see Mr Porter’s endlessly perky face appear from the room behind.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said, approaching the counter, ‘a lamb and rosemary pie.’

  It was normally at this moment he would appear. ‘Elsie,’ he’d say, and follow it up with some comment about the weather, the village gossip, something her mother had once told him, asking her, for the millionth time, to call him Stanley.

  Her pie was wrapped in paper and Darren gave her a frightened glance: ‘£3.85, please.’

  She handed over the money.

  ‘Stan’s ill,’ he said in a sudden burst. ‘If you were wondering…’

  She hadn’t been expecting the announcement. ‘I wasn’t,’ she replied, not wanting to be thought of as a nosy gossip.

  Darren’s expression changed, a hardness in his eyes. ‘I thought you might care. We’re all a bit worried.’

  She felt the sting of his words, pictured Mr Porter’s friendly face, his endless attempts to engage her, his easy manner. She backed away. She had come to see Stanley, she realised, to see someone who had cared about her mother too. Now what did this young man want from her? She couldn’t have known. Why did she always get things wrong?

  She was still thinking about the exchange as she walked past the chemist, not hearing the tinkle of the bell, the sound of footsteps behind her before she felt the grip on her arm.

  ‘Elsie,’ June said, her hair spiked down onto her forehead today like strange angry ‘W’s. ‘The form, Elsie, I’ve still had nothing back.’

  Elsie shrugged her off, thrown by the contact, the fresh reminder of the things she’d lost. ‘I—’

  ‘That’s children these days, Elsie. They can’t set their minds to anything. If it isn’t a mobile, it’s a—’

  ‘Billy is perfectly able to set his mind to something,’ Elsie snapped, her voice loud in the quiet street.

  June’s mouth puckered.

  ‘If you could stop hassling me about it,’ Elsie huffed, her anger spilling out onto this woman.

  June put one hand on her chest. ‘Hassling? I’m just doing my job. You were the one so keen for the form, others have to wait months for an allotment. But as a special favour to you, Elsie. Well, there’s no need for rudeness,’ she bristled, smoothing at the hair on her forehead.

  Elsie didn’t have the words, just continued to glare at June, her chest rising and falling.

  ‘I’ll get back to work then. It’s just some of us don’t like to have our time wasted.’

  She left Elsie standing on the street, feeling more fed up. ‘Pious, irritating…’ she muttered for the next few steps, drawing up short as she saw Samantha leaving work, releasing her bun with one hand, hair falling down, her shoulders back as she untucked her shirt. She caught Elsie’s eye as she stood at the pedestrian crossing, pausing as a car stopped and beeped her before she stepped into the road. No smile, no greeting.

  Elsie gripped the handle of her bag, feeling the hole inside her widen. The few things that had helped her seemed to have disappeared, leaving her even more alone.

  What was wrong with Mr Porter? She should have asked more. Was he at home? Was he in hospital? He hadn’t seemed il
l the last time she had been in there but he was the kind of person to downplay his problems. She should have noticed more. A flush of shame took over as she recalled Darren’s words. What did people in the village think of her? When had she become this woman? Twenty-eight years ago she knew, or maybe even before then, after the other thing happened, so painful it took her breath away.

  Elsie moved slowly home, the sky now tinged with grey, the sun losing its battle with the cloud. She could see children up ahead leaving the school, imagined Billy as one of them, dressed in his grey trousers, white Aertex. Would he be in one of the larger groups of children or would he be walking on his own? For a second, she stood stock-still in the street, wanting to weep at the thought.

  She knew what loneliness felt like, remembered how she had craved friends her age, had created endless games with people in her head: tea parties, birthday parties, dances, classes. She had watched other children in the summer on the meadow playing games, older teenagers sat round benches, some lying in the laps of others. She had been sat with her mother, just them. Two peas in a pod.

  Two peas in a pod and then a moment that changed everything, a moment where she glimpsed a different life for herself. She had almost escaped. She had got so close. And then the shutters came down, the dream dissolved and she stopped craving that other life, the one that, for a second, she’d been promised.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  BILLY

  She couldn’t watch me all the time. The house was frosty with our silence. And maybe I should have told her where I’d planned to go but I knew she wouldn’t have liked the idea and she’d have said no and then what?

  Dick called that morning when I was sat pretending to work at the kitchen table, Mum stirring a cold coffee and staring out of the window. Her eyes became frantic as she listened to the voice on the other end. ‘But I’ve got Billy and… No, of course I want to… no, I need the job. Please, Rich, don’t… OK, OK, I’ll be there in half an hour…’

  She lowered the phone on the table and sat dumbly, coffee forgotten. ‘Rich needs me to work,’ she said.

  Dick was a jerk but I was too tired from our last argument: she wouldn’t let me work in my room, what did she think, I was going to leap from the second-floor window? So, I didn’t say anything, just grunted and went back to pretending to do long division.

  Mum phoned Polly and I could hear the whole conversation. Polly couldn’t come, Polly had ‘broken up’ (been dumped) with her boyfriend and was inconsolable and just ‘needed to be alone right now’. The call hadn’t lasted long.

  ‘What am I meant to do?’ Mum glanced at me. She sat in the kitchen chair, her nail bleeding where she had picked at the side. She left the room, headed upstairs. I could hear her sweeping round her bedroom, imagined her scooping up her work clothes from wherever she’d abandoned them the day before.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, suddenly standing at the kitchen door, dressed a few moments later, her hair tied back in a high bun.

  ‘Where are we g—’

  ‘Don’t argue, Billy,’ she interrupted, sighing and picking up her handbag, ‘just come.’

  I dragged my feet following her, fed up with another row, sick and tired of them. Mum and I hadn’t really argued back in London and these days I felt like I was angry with her all the time.

  I knew exactly where we were going when we walked out of our gate and took an immediate left.

  ‘No way!’ I said, stopping in the middle of Mrs Maple’s path. ‘No way!’

  ‘Billy, we don’t have another choice…’

  ‘We do. I’ll stay at home, I promise. You can go and I’ll just read, or do my homework, or—’

  ‘I can’t trust you,’ Mum replied quietly. ‘Look, I don’t want to but—’

  ‘You can,’ I pleaded, ‘I really promise. I’m sorry I lied, but I really won’t again.’

  Mum paused for a fraction of a second and I thought I might have stopped her. ‘It will be fine.’

  ‘It won’t be,’ I snapped, a surge of anger, so close to the surface these days.

  Then, taking a breath, she reached a hand out. ‘I’m sorry, Billy,’ she said, pressing the doorbell. ‘I just want you to be safe,’ she added in a soft voice, twisting back to face the door.

  My fists were already clenched and I wanted to turn and run straight back up the path. I had my mobile in my pocket but no money or anything else. And it was about to rain and before I had even made a decision Mrs Maple appeared in the porch, her face set in a confused frown, a glance at her wristwatch.

  No doubt we were interrupting the weird goose daisy dusting or the oven cleaning or the making stinky mint tea or whatever other time it was.

  She opened the door a fraction, as if she was frightened we were about to mug her. ‘Yes?’ she said, her eyes down, not looking at Mum or me.

  ‘I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t desperate,’ Mum replied, her voice embarrassed. I hadn’t heard their argument but Mum told me she’d been really rude to her.

  ‘He can stay,’ Mrs Maple said, cutting her off, ‘you need the help.’

  Mum’s shoulders dropped and she nodded once, not adding any more words.

  ‘Come on then, Billy,’ Mrs Maple said, beckoning me inside.

  ‘Go on then,’ Mum whispered, turning to me, a sorry look in her eyes.

  But I wasn’t letting her off the hook, glaring at her as she stepped round me. ‘I don’t…’

  ‘I’ll be inside,’ Mrs Maple said, turning from the door.

  I didn’t exactly have a choice. I pushed into the house, refusing to say goodbye to Mum, slamming Mrs Maple’s front door behind me, the noise reverberating in the small space.

  Pulling my mobile out, I tapped quickly, just inside her porch, knowing one person who might be able to get me out of this rubbish life where I had to go round to nasty old ladies, and a mum who couldn’t afford a TV, who made me do stuff I didn’t want to do.

  He’d asked again, three times in fact, in amongst other chat: his five-a-side football team had won their last game, work was dull, Liverpool should get a new manager, was I watching the game? Where were we now? I hadn’t replied to his last message at all.

  We live in Pangbourne, I typed to Dad. The last message from him had been days ago. Pressed send before I could think again. That would show Mum. I could do stuff she didn’t like too.

  I stomped into the house, not feeling any better, a dark worry tugging at my insides. I pushed it down.

  Anyway, I was thinking too much of that other dad, not the one I liked to hang out with who bought me a football shirt with my name on the back from a special website he’d found online, and took me to McDonald’s, and pretended to be a walrus when he stuck straws up his nose. That dad was the one I messaged, I thought, as I tried to shake my mood.

  Mrs Maple was stood, shoulders rigid, at the counter. ‘I was about to start work in the garden,’ she said. ‘Your pear squash is on the table.’

  She pointed at the single glass sat waiting for me, the single custard cream on a plate. No teapot next to it. I felt a flush as I remembered its broken pieces scattered over the tiles the last time I was in the room. She had loved that ugly old teapot.

  I looked at her, still too cross and hurt to say thank you. I left the stupid squash on the table and threw myself into a chair.

  ‘There’s no need to be silly,’ Mrs Maple said when I didn’t look at her.

  That just made me more angry. She had been so mean to me, and I had done nothing. Not really. So, I had been to the house on her map. So what?

  ‘Billy, I…’ She took a step forward. ‘I’m about to sow some biennials in amongst the tulips.’

  ‘Great,’ I said, knowing I was being sullen but not able to stop my pout, the feeling that I was there with no choice. Mum had just left me. I was old enough to look after myself. I didn’t want to be passed around like a thing people had to watch.

  ‘Well, are you coming?’ she asked, moving to the back door.

&n
bsp; ‘Got no choice,’ I replied, scraping the chair back and making her cringe.

  She moved quickly through to the garden. I disguised my surprise at the place. The grass desperately needed cutting, there were a hundred weeds peeking through the cracks of the patio again. But the flower beds were filled with different flowers now blooming, bursts of cheery colour all along the fence, the total opposite of my mood.

  She snapped on her gardening gloves and stood looking at me. ‘Where do you want to start?’

  Great. Slave labour, basically.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Are you going to punish me all day?’ she asked, hands on her hips.

  God, it was so unfair! She hadn’t even said sorry, it was her who had made it all awkward between us. We’d been getting on. I’d done one stupid thing wrong, and I don’t even know why it was wrong, and she’d completely lost it on me. I suppose I should have told her but she was so weird about the stupid map and tin and I wanted to see what it was all about. Maybe I should have said something.

  For a second a few memories nudged at me: the first time I’d heard Mrs Maple belly laugh in the cinema, her surprise jump into the water from the boat, the patient way she had taught me about the garden, the endless smiles as she handed me a custard cream. In a panic I felt like I might start crying. Those days had saved me from being really sad. In this new, grim village with zero friends she’d been like a mate.

  Was it so much to ask for just an apology?

  She was busying herself with a tray of seedlings, the trowel lying next door. I stood on the patio, silently fuming. She didn’t seem any different. Had she even missed me? Did she really not care?

  I saw the ladder abandoned on its side and moved across, wanting to do something where I wouldn’t have to talk, wouldn’t have to work next to her.