The Child Garden

by Catriona McPherson

  “Pretty things,” I said, smiling at the way they were sitting there, paws pursed in front of them, still licking their lips with that little flag of pink tongue so startling against the black of their fur. They waited as I tipped the carton, just a puddle of milk in each side—enough for a treat but not enough to upset them—and I smiled again at the way they stretched up, arching their backs, and settled dow—

  Nicky!

  My arm jolted and a spout of milk doused the freezer top. The cats scattered, streaking away, leaving the dish rattling. I caught it and held it still. Had I imagined that noise or had someone just knocked on the front door?

  At the pictures, every single person in the audience, every single time, asks why that idiot woman is going to see what the noise was, why that moron is going to answer the door. And every one of them, if the same thing happened for real, would do it too. I barely paused to think, certainly didn’t pick up my phone or a poker on the way. I crept back through the kitchen and into the passageway, edged opened the glass door, and sidled out into the porch, listening.

  There was no mistaking it the second time; that was a quiet but definite knock. I flicked the switch to turn the outside light on and heard the quick sound of his feet shifting. I had startled him. Him? His feet? Was I sure?

  I opened the door anyway, on the chain, and put my face to the gap.

  “Hello?”

  He was soaked through to the skin, standing there with his shirt plastered to him and his suit trousers clinging round his legs. His face was red now, stung ruddy by the needles of rain, but it was the same face.

  “Look, I’m sorry about that up there on the road,” I said. He didn’t look angry. But if he had followed me all the way down here and splashed through the garden from wherever he’d left his car, he must be fairly bothered one way or another. “But we’re both okay, aren’t we?” I went on. “Unless you’ve got whiplash or you banged your knee. I can give you a bag of peas to put on it.”

  “It is you, isn’t it?” he said. “Knickerbocker Gloria.”

  It took my breath away to hear that name after all these years. When I got it back again I was laughing.

  “How do you know that?”

  “You don’t recognise me,” he said. So I looked closer, past the bald head and the beer belly, past the dress shirt and the suit trousers, past the glasses covered in raindrops. I looked right into his eyes.

  “Stig of the Dump!” I said and closed the door to undo the chain, let him in out of the rain.

  Two

  Stig of the Dump, Stephen Tarrant, came from Castle Douglas like me, but his family went to Saudi Arabia when he was six and so when they came home again, five years later, rich and different, he was a new boy. He joined Mrs. Hill’s primary seven class and thanks to her theories, he sat next to me. Mrs. Hill reckoned the boys would fling fewer spit balls and the girls would giggle a bit less and in a lower key. Of course, what actually happened was that the girls giggled even more, flirting, and the boys threw monster spit balls, showing off, but Mrs. Hill hated admitting she was wrong and so I had spent a year close enough to Stig Tarrant to know that he sneezed in sunlight and that he washed his hair on a Sunday night and a Wednesday. It felt like yesterday.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him once we were in the kitchen. I meant why was he driving the back roads on a night like this, but a bit of me sort of meant How can you be here, in this room, where no one ever comes? And another bit of me sort of meant How can Stig of the Dump be a man with stubbly jowls and a bad crown that’s getting black along the gumline? How can Stig Tarrant be rubbing his bald head dry on that warm tea towel from the Rayburn rail, the tea towel I ironed on Sunday, because I like ironing and I ran out of clothes before the end of the good stuff on the radio?

  “Aw, that feels good,” he said. “What am I doing here? I’m having the worst night of my life.”

  “Did you come to see me?” I said. “How did you know where I lived?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “It was like a … I mean, seeing your face through all that rain? You’ve still got the same hairstyle, Gloria. It’s thirty years later, and you look exactly the same.”

  “It’s twenty-eight,” I said, and I hoped I wasn’t blushing. I turned to the kettle to make the tea in case I was. He was right about my hair. My mum used to do it in a centre parting and two plaits, then wind the plaits around my head and pin them. I loved it when I was a girl; it felt so clean and airy to have all my hair up away from my neck and yet it felt so secure to have it pinned there, safe and tight. It wasn’t until I had left college and started working that I realised people were laughing at me: the girls in the buying office calling me Helga and the men in packing asking me what time it was, because I looked like the wife in a cuckoo clock. I kept thinking of cutting it or leaving it hanging down, but every morning I could see the kinks of the plaits, my hair telling me what it wanted to do. And even after I washed it—especially after I washed it—I couldn’t resist the way the wet hair would really bite and the plaits would be so hard and tight and it would dry kind of crisp and tingly.

  Coming up to my wedding day, I mentioned going to a salon for an up-do and my husband (not quite my husband then, and not my husband again now) said he forbade me to mess up my hair on the very day I should look most like the girl he loved.

  “You forbid me?” I’d said, not quite sure enough to smile.

  “You’ll have to obey me as of next weekend,” he’d answered. “Why not start now?” Then I was sure he was joking, and I laughed and did my plaits as usual on my wedding day. I tucked little white silk rosebuds in around them to have something special, but he plucked them out during the first waltz and let them drop on the floor.

  “So why is it the worst night of your life?” I asked Stig, setting a mug of tea down in front of him and pushing the sugar bowl close in case he wanted any. I couldn’t stop watching him. The way his hand curled around the teaspoon was the same way it curled around a pencil when he turned it upside down to rub out a mistake. The way he plucked the wet shirt away from his back was the same way he had pulled at his school shirt when it was hot at playtime and he got sweaty running round the football pitch.

  “I can give you a dressing gown,” I said. “I haven’t got a dryer, but I can spin your things and hang them over the rail there.”

  He smiled and it was the same smile, stolen from the boy and used by this man, shining out from the middle of his plump face. “I’m going out again,” he said, “and I don’t think turning up in your nightie would be a great idea.” He took a slurp of his tea. “It’s the worst night of my life because I’ve got a stalker and I’ve agreed to meet her.”

  “Dressing gown,” I said, “not nightie.” And then: “A stalker?”

  He put his mug down, put his head in his hands, and groaned. “A girl I was at school with. Nice enough lassie, but she’s popped up again out of nowhere and kind of got her claws into me.”

  I hadn’t felt this for years, this burning in my cheeks and the heavy feeling in my middle. Not that people didn’t still tease, but these days I usually didn’t care. I tried to sound light when I answered him.

  “I think someone might have been playing a trick on both of us,” I said. He looked up sharply. “Because … this girl from school. Do you mean me?”

  “What?” he said. Then he laughed again. “No! You bampot. Her name’s April Cowan. From high school, Gloria. Well, from Eden. That’s why I’m here.”

  Eden. I had almost forgotten. The care home had been a care home for nearly twenty years and I’d been there every day for the last ten until it was like the back of my hand, like my face in the mirror. But before that, and very briefly, it was a boarding school. Eden, they called it, and they couldn’t have been more wrong.

  “I don’t think I knew you went there,” I said. In truth, when we scattered after primary I paid no a
ttention to anyone who didn’t just trot along to Castle Douglas High School like me. I knew some went to St. Joe’s in Dumfries, some with enough money went up to Ayr to Wellington’s, but I had forgotten—if I ever knew—where Stig had disappeared to. “Were you there when … what was it?”

  “We both were,” Stig said. “April Cowan and me.”

  I was trying to remember the story, but I had been twelve (and quite a dreamy twelve) and my parents hadn’t wanted to tell me. I knew they didn’t approve of Eden. Hippies, my mother had said. Running wild. And when it happened, whatever it was that I could only just remember, she had said, Well, what do you expect if you let them just—But my dad had shushed her. He was always the kind one.

  “Then Moped died,” said Stig, “and the school closed and I never saw her again.” He was gulping his tea and his face was turning a more normal colour from the warmth and the sugar, neither the white I had seen in the headlights nor the blue-pink from the freezing rain. “Never heard from her again until a couple of months ago.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I remember now. There was an accident. ‘Mo-ped’?”

  “Mitchell Best,” said Stig. “He drowned.”

  “And this April Cowan … what?”

  “She found me on Facebook, usual story.” Walter Scott had finally got his gums around the last of his mushy dinner and he lumbered back into the kitchen. He stood in the doorway a minute, tail waving, looking at us. Maybe he was as surprised as me to have a visitor. Then he went straight to Stig, ignored his basket completely, and rested his muzzle on one of the wet trouser legs. Stig fondled his ears absently, hardly looking.

  “Divorced, of course,” he said. “Hitting forty, looking back and wondering where it all went wrong. Aren’t we all?” I didn’t say a word but he put a hand up, the one that wasn’t resting on Walter’s head.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Maybe your life’s working out fine. Anyway, April and me started messaging back and forth: ‘Ever see any of the crowd these days?’ Chitchat, chitchat. Then it changed. I remember it really clearly. I was at work on my lunch and she sent this text. ‘The worst thing, Stephen, is not knowing who knows what. Not knowing who knows.’ I remember it because who sends a text that long that just says the same thing over and over again?”

  “Bingo Little,” I said. “Except with him it was telegrams.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. It’s in a book.”

  “Still got your head stuck in a book then, eh Glo?”

  “What did she mean?” I asked, ignoring him teasing me.

  “Moped,” said Stig. “She was talking about the night Moped died.”

  I said it over to myself: The worst thing is not knowing who knows what. Then he was talking again.

  “That was when she started asking to meet. She said something like ‘if I could just talk it through once and for all, face to face’ and after that there was no stopping her. Where did I live, what sort of free time did I get, wife, girlfriend, how about a coffee then?” He laughed, a harsh sound that made Walter Scott jerk out of his standing-up doze and move off to his basket at last. Stig shivered as though the old dog leaning against his legs had been keeping him warm.

  “Starbucks at lunchtime, Glo. Like I was some kind of Internet guy. As if for fuck’s sake she hadn’t been the one pestering me.”

  I tried not to look startled. Everyone says that word now; I know that. Even the nurses at the home say it sometimes, though not in front of Miss Drumm, and the nice ones don’t say it in front of Nicky.

  “But she never showed up. I waited an hour then left. Told myself I’d delete her next one, shake her off. But it was a phone call and she caught me. Said she was sorry, said she’d chickened out. I told her she was doing my head in. That was when she started pleading. Really going for it—begging nearly. ‘I just want to talk to you. I need to talk. I need to straighten things out. Whether it’s you or not, Stephen. I’ve got to talk to someone.’”

  “That doesn’t sound like begging,” I said. “That sounds like threats.”

  He frowned and for a minute he seemed to be thinking hard. Then he nodded. “But what would she be threatening me with?” he said. “Or about? Or however you—And now tonight she sent me an ultimatum.” He dug in his back pocket and pulled out a phone, clicked, scrolled, and passed it over.

  I’m at the huttie. Come now. I’m waiting.

  “The huttie?” I said.

  “At Eden,” said Stig. He shivered again as a fierce squall of rain hit the window and the gale moaned in the chimney. “She’ll be freezing to bloody death.”

  “If she’s actually there.”

  “Yeah,” said Stig. “If.”

  “Do you think you could find it? In the dark?”

  “I could find it dead drunk and in a blindfold,” he said. Strange to think that Stig of the Dump drank. Stig who used to pour his school milk down his throat from a foot above his thrown-back head because he hated straws, cardboard cartons, and the taste of milk.

  “If it’s still there,” I said.

  “It will be,” said Stig. “It’s not really a huttie. It’s this wee stone building, pretty amazing actually, like a chapel or something.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You don’t mean the crypt? Round building with railings outside?”

  Stig stared at me. “How do you—A crypt? God, if we’d known that we wouldn’t have—”

  “I know every inch of the grounds,” I told him. “I used to ramble all over the woods with Walter Scott, before he got too frail.”

  “I suppose you would, living here,” said Stig. “How did you end up here, Glo?” He was looking around the kitchen as if noticing it for the first time, and I tried not to care about how shabby it all was: the old, green-distempered walls with the damp showing through; lino down to the backing weave; everything plugged into a six-way board at the only socket. Maybe I made the suggestion to distract him.

  “I could come with you,” I said. “It’s better to have a witness in case she turns nasty.”

  He waited a long time before he answered. “Who’s Walter Scott?”

  I pointed at the basket. “The dog. Not the real Walter Scott, obviously. For one, I don’t believe in ghosts, and for two, I prefer Stevenson.”

  “Who?” said Stig.

  “Writers,” I told him.

  “You and your books, Knickerbocker Gloria,” he said, standing. “Okay, you’re on.”

  So it was my idea. It was never him who asked me. That’s one thing to be clear about straight away.

  Three

  We took my car because I knew the service roads through the estate and could get closer to the crypt—the huttie, I’d rather call it, going there in the dead of night this way—and Stig insisted on spreading a bin bag over the seat between his wet clothes and my precious upholstery. If he’d seen my car in daylight, he’d not have bothered. I told him that, but there was no arguing.

  “You’re doing me a massive favour, Glo,” he said. “I’m not leaving you with mildew as well.”

  “Glad to help,” I said. “I’m glad I nearly ran into you.”

  “Yeah, how about that?” We had bumped back along the track from my place and were out on the lane, just about where the near-running-into had happened. “You living here, right on Eden’s doorstep. What are the chances?”

  “Small world,” I said. I didn’t want to get started on it.

  “Isolated isn’t even the word, though, Glo,” said Stig, peering out past the windscreen wipers at the blackness. “Do you like it? Must do or you wouldn’t have bought it, eh?”

  “Well, it’s handy for me,” I said. “I work just up the road.”

  “Doing what?” he said. “Not like jobs round here are easy come by.”

  That was true. It was like a miracle when it happened. I went from being totally los
t and alone, divorced, desperate, homeless, and broke, to having this lovely house and a good job and Nicky happy and no one watching me and judging every move I made. Miss Drumm made her offer, the job was advertised, and I never looked back.

  “I’m a registrar,” I said. “Up in Dalry.”

  “Not shifts then?”

  I shook my head. “And my son lives nearby.”

  “Your son?” said Stig. “You’ve got a son?” I knew what that tone of voice was. I was used to it. Something about me made people think I wasn’t a mother. But I am. I might not have a big handbag with baby wipes and fruit snacks, or wear yoga clothes and be in a book group, but Nicky was there and the skin on my tummy was still soft and crumpled fifteen years later. No one could take that away.

  I swung off the road at one of the back ways into the estate. No sign, no gateposts, just a break in the bramble-laden fence. The trust kept the track narrow and uninviting to stop people getting nosy, but round the first bend it widened out again and cut through the pines growing close on either side.

  “This goes to the boiler house,” I told Stig, “but it passes close by the cr—the huttie. I mean, we’ll still get soaked but less than the other way.”

  “And I think we’ll get soaked for nothing,” Stig said. “I don’t think she’ll be there. I think it’s a game.”

  I was peering hard into the trees, looking for any trace of the cupola on the top of the crypt or any glint from the railings around it. Gamekeepers from the next estate sometimes drove over the top fields in spring looking for foxes, lamps on top of their Land Rovers that always made me think of lighthouses the way they swept around and then suddenly stopped, picking out the scared little fox in that harsh white light. A scrap of orange against Day-Glo green. I always turned away before I heard the crack and told myself the fox fled, hid until the gamekeeper gave up and was down in the pub, cursing it. Anyway, Miss Drumm was fully apprised of her rights and specifically withheld permission from any vehicle desiring to cross her land for the purposes of so-called vermin control. She made me learn the words and promise to say them should the occasion arise.