He calls her in later. From his bedroom she can hear the milling of the novelties on their synthetic lawn. The race cars on his drapes are red with a trail of cartoon getaway. She watches them as she stoops, puts her face in the hip-height muzzle of his hands as instructed.
Friends don’t let friends drink their come and walk home alone after an accident: she keeps forgetting they are not friends anymore.
She takes the bus to see her father. He works in a kiosk at a mall, grinding keys into shape and sticking the soles on shoes with yellow jelly. There are spiders for sale in bubbled plaques, dark fur globes with fans of jointed leg. There is a spin-stand of padlocks and tikis. He lets her fiddle with an army knife while she waits for him to take his smoko. She likes the torque of the tiny components, the neat pull it takes to make all those miniature fatalities unfurl.
He pulls the metal grille down and takes her for a Happy Meal. He doesn’t seem to know that she’s outgrown the toys. Or maybe it’s just cheapest. She asks if she can move in with him. His mutter moves his shoulders. He’s in-between, he’s, you know, at loose ends, got stuff coming good, could be something big lined up. She cleans the burger out the bumps in her gums, rolls her mouth to rescue her lipstick, nods. They go back to the shop. He groups shoes behind the fort like Mondays are busy. He’s got a laptop behind the counter open to a page that says Local Sluts in Your Area. She gives him a waterproof smile, tells him yeah, no worries, she’s taking off.
Her lipstick is Longstaying Afterparty. In the bus home she smiles again, smooths on the next coat over the Happy Meal pith.
When they are best friends, they walk back from school across the mangroves to drink milk, do homework to cartoons in a huddle. She hitches her sundress into her gruts to wade the channel, and he pokes around to dislodge shells, flipping them into the upturned pouch of his T-shirt. But one day they come across a tub someone has capsized where the mudflats fill. It’s claw-foot, so they lever it over with bodyweight thrown into the base, legs gouging at the slop. When it rocks free there are creatures underneath it, tiny fused skeletons of kittens someone has trapped. The harbour is very wide and dark around their breathing. They scramble into the mush to drag it back.
No one hauls the tub out. It stays in the causeway, nudged adrift sometimes by a storm tide. Which is why she can walk out to sit on it after her second crash, listening under her body for the echoes, cool hoops of incoming flood.
The nurses call to say she can visit the body. She takes the camera in with her. A terrible lull has come into the room with the old woman’s closed eyes, as if the walls can’t focus. They have tucked a hibiscus into the puzzle of her hands and the lines of her face have run clear. The skin says something she wants to aim the lens at, something as definite and ghostly as chalk. The silence is airless and the cicadas that mar it seem to sing directly to the lens. She sits on the candlewick spread and stares down into the photo to see if she’s pinned it there. The thing that swims into focus is heavy, a smear gaining gravity as its outline sharpens. In the end it is the face in the frame that convinces her the old woman will not move again, that nothing is tingling under the arch of the fingers, waiting in the crumpled lips. Nothing is tapping pollen onto the sheet in tiny imperceptible quakes.
The first crash is too small, the next crash is too big, but the third one feels just right. The white lines after the third one lead out to the dump, where all the pointless heaps are roped off. She’s not wearing shoes but it doesn’t matter. Her white feet pick through the patterns of breakage. When she looks up the gulls are in reverse. It’s afterhours and no one in overalls mans the shed. Some canal has opened in her neck—there’s a pulse in her nape the size of a knuckle. The sunlight is holding still and there’s a ute on the outskirts where the fridges are hulked, someone with a shottie taking out the spray of seagulls. She freezes for a while to watch the cull. Then she sits. Aimless, she watches the stroke of her fingers through the pile of splintered things, the hull of something, a kennel, a quilt, an easel. It’s a jigsaw of rot with no one’s sadness attached: she shrugs and feels herself fit in. She doesn’t understand this made-to-measure driftwood, kicked out of lives where people must know what they need. She blinks at the stencil of wasted sunlight piercing the splits in her hand—just her own fingers seem strange today, that the end of her arm should be broken into five moving pieces, letting light through them like bone stranded inside a star.
the names in the garden
I do the flowers. I’ve always done them. They asked me not to this time, they took me aside and they told me, but I still had the key, so I let myself in. I lay them out on the bench like I’ve always done. I go by feel, I’ve never known the names. So I lay them all out. To look at which ones can take the weight, and which will have to drape. There are some that can stand for days, and some can only trail. Some are tough, but then the limp ones could be where the beauty is. But you work that into it. That all comes in to how you see it. They’re out on the sink and you take a long look and you can see where the backbone is, and where there’s just threads. Or whispers, I don’t know. Bits that catch the light, that’s what I’m trying to get at. It just comes to me, when I take a slow look at them, spread that way. The centre stands out, the bloom that takes the eye right down into it, the place that needs to be the heart which all the rest weave round. There’s always one you don’t notice in the cutting, that rises out when you take them all in. Even if it takes me a while to find it, I stay calm and just keep watch. And then you see it lift itself out from the rest, and the others just nest in around it where they need to, or link at the base and spray.
So I’d had to let myself in. And the talk with the pastor had been hard, about how they didn’t want me to go on doing it. And so I made a mess of it. When I wanted to show them. I wanted to do something that would make them stop and hold their breath. And for that young couple, something they could join their hands by on the day and we could look up from the pews and it would be like the front wall poured with flowers and the whole church could feel white spilling all round from what I’d made. I thought I would. I had the key, and I told myself, I’ll do what I always do, and I’ll lay them in the good light out the back and if I watch them long enough they’ll fall into shape. I thought I would see, glowing there right on the sink, the core of the thing. I could pick out the soul of it. But I hadn’t been let in to the gardens. The people that usually let me come round and do the cutting had said no. The pastor had told me. He said people were uncomfortable. The families.
I said, But nothing was proven.
And he said, But as things stand, it looks bad. So I asked if I could just take the ones near the gates. I wouldn’t even go in. They wouldn’t even have to see me—though they always used to wave at me when I did the cutting, they used to send their little ones out to help me pick and to carry, and they used to chatter away. But the pastor said no, that a clean break was best now for everybody. The families entrusted him to make it clear to me. And then I said I would just kneel down by the fence, where there’s even lovely heads that poke out through the bars and I could snip them off and no one would even know I’d been. And when he got short with me I said, My husband never sets foot. He’s never even in the same street. It’s only me in the gardens. I said, Please. It’s only ever me.
But he made it clear I couldn’t go in. Not even near. It was what they all wanted. It had been decided. All those gardens, where they used to let me in to take anything I needed. All those blooms and the green and the little girls dancing out to keep me company while I moved the fronds and leant down deep to cut low through the stems.
And so when I laid them out I couldn’t see it: the one to give the centre, the shape. I did what I always do. But it wouldn’t come to me. I took down the bowls and the traps and the oasis, and I stared at them too. It was very quiet, except for the long line of humming that comes off the new light. It makes that back room very bright and, true, it’s a good light for doing the flowers in, but
it does get up under the lids of your eyes, a white line of it that feels like grit. After a while, it seems to press right round the back of them, the buzz of it. So you blink and blink. And the bowls don’t help, either. They have some beautiful vases, my church. So heavy. Like offerings. Some of them you have to pick up and hold like children, the colour of pearls. There’s one I like that’s got some finish on it, running down its sides like oil, only white, white oil with a kind of silver clearness that gives you the shivers. Or at least it does me. Like freezing silk to touch. But then it’s a chore to pick up. It’s a beauty, but a dead weight, and it slips. Or at least, I get full of the fear that it will and my heartbeat gets into my hands and makes them dizzy. And once it’s packed out then I have to get help in to do the lifting onto the altar. With all the weight of the flowers wired in, it’s too much for an old body like me. I don’t have a chance of raising it up.
So I don’t know what I was thinking, letting myself in, trying to change what they thought of me. It’s just that I’d always done the flowers. So it didn’t seem like it could be the end. I hadn’t thought it through, but then I never need to think the flowers through. They just come to me, where they should be, and whether they should push up into crooked knots or they should hang down like a net, and whether they want to drift out and touch lightly as froth or they want to shoot and be twisted. They’ve always joined for me, in my eye, before I even started to touch them. And I thought for a moment that a flash did come, of how to work it, like the ripples of a star if you were too close to it, like its glory would make you weep but also had a sting to it. But then it went out. Just out, like the dark in its place in my head had always been there. A cold black I couldn’t shift was just waiting in my head behind all the beautiful things I used to see. Then I found that I couldn’t keep myself steady. There wasn’t any calm left.
And I made a mess when I stopped looking and I started to handle them. Because I don’t know the names in the garden where I’ve always gone, but I know them all by feel. And it was hard to find anything, when they said I couldn’t come. I had no sense of where to go. I had to go creeping all over town, and it didn’t seem like anything good was growing. Not where I could get to it, not without asking. And the way the pastor had made it sound to me, everyone felt the same, and I wouldn’t be wanted even outside the gardens, even strangers would know when they looked at me, they would have heard the stories. Only he said the news, not the stories. As if it had turned into truth already. When it hadn’t. I saw that news too. I stood by our letterbox on the day it came and opened the page and it was like the sun went out, and the words had shadows that rushed right through our front yard and I knew when I turned around they’d be all over our house and they’d be there too when I looked down our street. The thick ugly words they use in their headlines, moving down the street like weeds. I think I said that to the pastor, even. I said, I knew those stories were spreading like weeds. But I didn’t think they would get into the church. But he said he had a duty, he said the feelings of the decent community would be with the poor little girl. So I walked around after that looking for blooms and I couldn’t bring myself to ask, even when I saw what I needed, not if it meant I had to look at doors opening and decent people staring down into my face and thinking ugly things of me. So I wasn’t left with much. And when I found something that gave me some hope it was down in the gully on the river-end of our street, where I’ve always shrunk from going. I’ve never had to go there because the gardens were open to me. But now, being shut out, it seemed like the only thing I could do was go down into that gulf. So I made myself cross over. And the fence into it had been broken. And the trees were thick and cramped me, and the smell soaked into my clothes. And the cold feel got deeper. And the dirt plugged up my shoes and they weren’t even dry when I let myself into church later, so I walked it in with me, the smell of that swamp. It was steep down, so everything felt tipped on a slant. I wasn’t dressed for it and I tore something I’d kept nice for years. And I had a hard time not slumping right into the muck. But I did find flowers there. I’d always known that I would. I’d just never looked.
So I let myself in. And I still had hope, that I’d see something shine up into my eyes when I looked at them. They hadn’t looked in such a poor state on their bank. They’d looked hardy enough, quite stubby, and they had a rich leaf and a sprinkle of gold in the head. But I could see from the start when I let myself in, that something had happened to them. I don’t know when. They were lovely, but you could see that the light had leaked out. There were breaks all through them, and juice came out the crushes in their stalks. The damage was done. It must have been moving them. I didn’t notice. I wasn’t ready to give up, though. And I thought I could anchor them, and make them prop each other up, I thought I could stake them so they didn’t give way. So I started to wire them. But the wire seemed to mash right through the stems, and all I had were tangles of wet. I kept sweeping through them and trying to find one more I could brace. Then the next one turned to waste. And all I had made was a pile of shreds. And my hands were stained with the white sap that leached out of them.
I knew then that this was the end. It was that slimy milk that came off the plants. You couldn’t scour it off. It stained. I just wanted all the foul things gone. I started to push the whole mob of flowers down the bin. They were useless. But I couldn’t take the sickly feel of them sliding down my fingers. It showed up in the creases of my hands like it did on the stems, the glint of it sticking in the bruises. And then somehow I started thinking of the day when I married my husband and of how we’d been standing in a halo of stiff white flowers and it was lovely but then he couldn’t get the ring to fit. And everyone was looking and he was annoyed and had to get hold of my wrist and push and push and I watched the skin of my finger lift up in red bands, and it stung and I bit down under my veil until it slid.
But then I came round. It wasn’t clean out back of church, in the good light. The flowers had bled and bled. And I just wanted all the good things kept away from them. Their wet and their stink. And that’s when it happened. Because I was in a rush. I wanted all the offerings back in their place again; the vessels, the vases with their skin like pearl. I wanted the bowls stowed away again, heavy and holy. I wanted to know that at least I’d kept sacred things safe. And the roar of the bowl blowing open seemed to pound through my ears when I never even felt the sides slip. Everything seemed to go backwards through my wet hands, and my eyes were a shatter of sharp white when I don’t know if I ever really watched its body smashing open at my feet.
But if I did, I left the mess. I don’t know how, I just left it. And I don’t know how I got home, but once I got there I knew that he was gone. I did check. I walked through all the rooms, looking for a sign of what he’d left, and what he’d taken. And nothing had changed. He hadn’t touched a single thing. But you could feel that he was gone. He’d just moved out, after all these years, and hadn’t paid anything for all the time he’d stayed here, like a bad tenant leaving in the night.
So I went outside to the shed where I knew my husband would be. To tell him God was gone. But of course, he was gone as well. Although he had left me to clean up. And they made more headlines out of him too. Perhaps he thought he’d put a stop to that. He could kill the words off along with him. But the words go on and on. The black weeds, there’s no end to them. They’re like the things they’ve been bringing up out of that gully, terrible dark arrangements that don’t have names. And now there’s no place for me, I can’t keep them back with white flowers.
I never went back to the church to clean up my mess. But then, neither did God.
.22
Her hair was wet but she hadn’t tried too hard. Green eyes, yes, but with nothing special done to them, and damp hair. Bland and lank, uncombed. You wouldn’t have called it any colour much. The pictures you see now were taken earlier: the woman I met didn’t seem like a blond, and it wasn’t a model body to me, just tired, and needed meat on
it. Collarbones, I remember those: too high under her yellow T-shirt. Her elbows were thin for the plastic table where she leaned, blue and scuffed at the tip. When she swallowed, the lines in her neck were too thick and … off-looking, now. At the time I just thought she could have taken a bit more pride.
Most women have tidied their houses, too. But there wasn’t much she could do with this place. I don’t know what the landlord was thinking, laying the carpet down where he did. It went right under the sink and the cooker, grey, raised patterns that looked like clouds. Looped horizon of fat and drainage by this stage, like you’d expect. I felt sorry for her. I knelt down to tie up my shoelace at one point and under my palm I could feel the smelt in the pile. It put me off: that gluey deep-fried scent. I drove past the place a couple of nights back, and slumps of the coated stuff were on the lawn where they’d hauled it out. There’s more than that will need stripping out of that house. But somebody bought it so they must believe that all things can be scoured.
The same clouds were sour on the table where I put down my folder, lifted the questionnaire out. Her collarbone, now I think of it, was where she rested her fingers while she answered. Only the mid-three—the thumb and the little one twitched to each side. Her nails were grime-lined. The cup that she gave me had the feel of being washed up last in sullied water. He wasn’t home yet, but I had to ask her set of questions out of his earshot anyway. So I thought we should just start.
I asked her how long she had known him. She took her hand down from the yellow shirt-band and looked at it, straightening her fingers to count. Her mouth moved for years, and she closed one fist to keep place, and turned to the uncurled hand. The tally made her blink slow. ‘Since we were kids,’ she said. ‘You don’t think of the numbers, do you? I mean, you don’t often count.’ Then she smiled—when she did you could see that picture they keep reprinting. Something was left of that face. But a split-second trace was all I could say got to me. And when she spoke, the words worked down to the base of her narrow lower teeth, and the state of them put the smile out of your mind.
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