The Child Garden

by Catriona McPherson

  “Nicky,” Scott had said, “would be as upset as this bloody rock.” And my sister, Marilyn, actually smirked. She had the decency to turn away, but she was smiling. So I never met my niece, or the nephew that followed, and Nicky hadn’t seen his auntie and uncle since he was six.

  “Hardly any of them still move,” I told Stig. “They get choked up with leaf litter or tufts of grass or people try to clear them and go too far and they roll off. Miss Drumm’s been looking after this one since she was twelve and her dad trained her. Then when she got too frail, she trained me.”

  “And how exactly could this thing scupper me hiding?”

  “Because the only time in ten years anyone has ever turned up here unannounced is once when some archeology or history buffs—not sure who they were—came to ask about a stone. But you can’t see it over the wall and they came to the back door, so I said I didn’t know what they were talking about.”

  I hadn’t told Miss Drumm in case she burst a blood vessel. The Stone of Milharay wasn’t on Wikipedia and it wasn’t on Historic Scotland and that was purely because—as she explained to me, gripping my arm hard with her callused old hand until her yellow nails nearly dug into my flesh—that was purely because the estate had been in her family for four hundred years and even though they lost more and more of it until she, the last of the Drumms, was forced to live in a shepherd’s hovel, the fact that Rough House and its grounds had never passed through the office of an estate agent kept the secret safe.

  “Why does she care so much?” said Stig, when I’d explained to him.

  “Well, standing stones and circles and menhirs, you know,” I said. I didn’t want to tell him, because Miss Drumm is my friend and there’s no way to say it without making her sound like a lunatic.

  “I really don’t, Glo.”

  “Druids, Wiccans, Pagans, all that lot. A standing stone—I’m quoting Miss Drumm now—‘is like catnip, and a rocking stone that still rocks would be like catnip rolled in cocaine.’ The place would be overrun with them, she reckons.”

  “And she likes her peace and quiet, eh?” said Stig.

  “That’s it,” I lied. And changed the subject. “So I’m here guarding the stone and feeding Walter Scott. Miss Drumm would shut the place up if it weren’t for Walter, but as long as he’s here, I’m here, and as long as someone’s here they can … guard the stone.” Rock the stone, I had almost said, but I stopped myself before he got the chance to laugh at me. “And because I don’t pay any rent I can afford to keep Nicky in the home, which I couldn’t otherwise, because being a registrar doesn’t pull in much of a wage really. But as long as Miss Drumm lasts long enough, everything will be okay. So I spend just about as much time making sure they take good care of her as I do making sure they take good care of Nicky, and that does her no harm either.”

  “Lasts long enough for what?” said Stig. I tried to answer him. I opened my mouth and closed it enough times to feel like a fish, and God knows what I looked like, but I’ve never said the worst even to myself and certainly not out loud. I wouldn’t know where to begin.

  “Poor wee guy,” said Stig, showing that I didn’t need to.

  “And speaking of my job, I need to go and do it,” I said. I only cried a little bit while the bath taps were going and, anyway, even if you’re doing a wedding, I always think people will just assume that a registrar with red eyes has just recorded a death.

  Nine

  “‘Nothing in the world is single,’” I said at the end of the ceremony. “‘All things by a law divine, in another’s being mingle—Why not I with thine?’” There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

  It would get me struck off if the Humanist Society could hear me. I could just imagine Bryan—the sergeant-at-arms, Miss Drumm called him; actually the HS regional coordinator—choking on the word when he tried to accuse me: A law divine, Gloria? Divine? If they wanted divinity they’d cough up for a church.

  “That was absolutely lovely,” said one of the mothers. She was neck to knee in lavender chiffon, like a mother should be, a fascinator like a giant insect landed on her head. “Are you coming to the reception?”

  “Oh, how kind you are!” I said. “If only I could. But I’ve got to get back to the office and enter all this to make it legal.” I patted the folder where the signed register extract was waiting. That usually did the trick. The thought of the registrar kicking up her heels at the party and the precious documents getting shoved under a banquet table and lost was enough to stop nearly everyone.

  “Well, then for God’s sake, come to the reception,” sneered the other mother. She was wearing a herringbone suit that had seen better days. Even I was more dressed up, and I try not to be. Neat and smart but no competition. Lynne at work had been kind anyway.

  “Gorgeous!” she’d said when she saw me. But no one who dressed like Lynne could think someone who dressed like me was gorgeous. “One of these days, Gloria, there’s going to be a jilting at the altar and a groom’s going to whisk you away.”

  “Not today,” I told her. “It’s two grooms.”

  Lynne narrowed her eyes. “Bloody gay weddings.” But she didn’t mean it unkindly. “I’ve only just learned the forms for civil partnerships and here we go again. Moderate pace of change, my arse. They never think about the paperwork, do they?”

  I ignored the scruffy mother and turned to the giant fascinator one.

  “How lucky Carl is to be joining your family,” I said, squeezing her hand. Some of Miss Drumm was starting to rub off on me. I would never have been so rude before I started spending so much time with her. But I put it out of my mind. It wasn’t as though the torn-faced mother was going to complain about a sour note spoiling her son’s wedding when she didn’t want her son married anyway. And besides, I had to make the most of the time I was alone in the office this afternoon. Lynne only worked mornings.

  Nathan McAllister. Born 17-3-1972. No occupation. Single. Aged 23. Found dead 8.16am 1-5-1995. Stirling University Sports Centre car park. Usual residence: Flat 4, 38 Horne Terrace, Edinburgh. Cause of Death: (amended) (i) suicide

  by carb.mon.tox. Certifying physician pppf [signed]. Registered by: Edmund McAllister (brother) Central Reg. Ed. 10-5-1995.

  I read it over and over again, then clicked back to the index screen, feeling my eyes start to swim with tears. Twenty-three years old and he’d fed a pipe from his exhaust into his car and sat there in a car park until he poisoned himself. No time of death, just when he was found. And a doctor appointed by the procurator fiscal. His brother registering his death for him. I could imagine the parents, sitting in a silent room with drawn curtains, unable to move, unable to speak. The words danced in front of my eyes, doubling and dazzling.

  Then I blinked, leaned forward, and looked again. The words weren’t doubling at all. I was reading the next entry down.

  Edmund McAllister. Born 17-3-1972.

  Ned and Nod, Stig had called them, and they were both dead. They were twins, otherwise they wouldn’t never have been beside each other in the record—plenty of McAllisters in Scotland, after all. They were twins and they had died within a year of each other. I clicked through and kept reading.

  Found dead 7.15pm, 8-11-1995. Hermitage, Dunkeld.

  Cause of Death: (amended) (i) suicide by drowning. Certifying physician, pppf [signed] Registered by:

  Phillip McAllister (father) Central Reg. Ed. 20-11-1995.

  The Hermitage at Dunkeld. I knew the place. It was a beautiful spot—a high waterfall with a little stone folly. If someone wanted to blend the Eden crypt and the place where Moped Best fell into the river, then the Hermitage at Dunkeld was about as good as it could get. And this time his poor father had to go and register the death himself. Presumably because there was no one else to do it for them. I thought about my colleagues up there in the central office in Edinburgh, in that gloomy looming building, and hoped that Mr. McAlli
ster had got someone kind, someone still able to share a little in the pain, even if they saw it every day.

  I printed the two entries then wiped the history and switched the computer off. Sat there looking at the wall of fame, all the babies and couples in their wedding clothes. We never got funeral photographs, not of the flowers or the coffin or even the mourners. And I always wondered if it was worth trying to start the tradition. You heard it over and over again at the funeral teas afterwards: how the family only ever saw each other at funerals these days, how the last time they’d seen the departed was at so-and-so’s funeral. Well, stand up and smile and take some pictures, I always wanted to say. Chances are there’s someone here today you’ll never see again in this life.

  But what, I asked myself as I sat there staring, was bothering me? Some thought had flitted over my brain and now it was gone somewhere I couldn’t follow.

  I tried all the memory tricks I knew as I waited for the clock to tick round to five, then I washed out the coffeemaker, set it up for the next day, put the printouts in a plastic sleeve, and went home, like I always do. If anyone was watching from one of the cottages on the long main street all they’d see was that woman who lives up the hill going home like clockwork, or maybe fat Gloria setting off for another thrilling night at someone’s bedside, or that nice registrar who was so kind when Auntie Joyce died; that’s her off home.

  I didn’t usually wonder what anyone thought of me or even whether they did, but tonight I felt like an ant crawling across a sheet of white paper under a microscope, with the printouts in my bag and the unfamiliar groceries in a basket over my arm.

  “Been watching Jamie Oliver?” Mr. Slocombe in the shop had asked at lunchtime. “He’s the women’s Nigella, isn’t he?”

  “Been on the Internet, Mr. Slocombe,” I said, hoping I wasn’t changing colour. “It’s all about sugar now. Fat and salt are fine.”

  Only now I was worried that he would ask himself where I had been on the Internet, because the WiFi at Rough House would make you weep. And I didn’t want him to think I had been abusing the machine in the office. Especially because today, for the first time, I had. I mean, there was nothing illegal about me looking up entries, or even printing them, but I had stolen two sheets of paper and a plastic sleeve. There was no denying that.

  At first I thought he’d gone. Rough House was as still and serene as ever. The house cats and byre cats were sitting on the wall by the gate, the two camps keeping their distance. Walter Scott was nowhere to be seen. The nets blinding the windows didn’t move and no shadow passed behind them. When I opened the back door, though, everything was different, the kitchen fragrant and steaming, but empty.

  “Stig?” I called out.

  I heard the bathroom door unlocking and he appeared, still in the sweat suit but with Miss Drumm’s old crossover pinny on top. Walter was with him.

  “Had to be sure it was you,” he said, his voice sounding tremulous.

  “What’s that smell?” I asked him.

  “Meatballs Arrabiata. Or as close as I could get with what I could find. Your cupboards are pathetic.” He saw my look. “I had to do something cooped up all day. You didn’t give me your password and there’s no telly.”

  “There’s a radio,” I said, nodding at it up on the high mantelpiece above the Rayburn. “Was there anything on the news?”

  He shook his head. “An accident on the A75 and a break-in at the furniture showroom in Annan. Ask me anything. I’ve heard it seven times. I could go on Mastermind and my specialist subject would be Southwest Scotland on the eighth of October, two thou—”

  “Ssh,” I said. His voice was shaking, as though he was cycling over cobbles, and his eyes were getting shiny too. “Let’s just talk about something else for a couple of minutes. Try to slow down your breathing and you’ll feel more calm.”

  “Oh, yeah great,” he said. “Fucking yoga. That’ll solve everything.”

  “What’s this?” I said, lifting the edge of a tea cloth covering something on the warming rack. He batted my hand away.

  “Rosemary flatbread,” he said. “That wouldn’t be you subtly trying to distract me, would it?” But at last he did take a big breath in and let it out again. “Pretty good herb garden you’ve got out there, but you’ll need to wrap the bay before the frost comes.”

  “You’re a cook,” I said. “And a gardener.”

  “Not a gardener,” he told me. “But yeah, I’m a chef. Why did you have a two-pound bag of bread flour and no yeast?”

  “I bought it by accident,” I said. “A chef ?”

  I remembered cooking classes in primary seven. We studied a country, learned the dances, made the national costume out of crepe paper and then, for a finale, went over to the new bit of the school and cooked a traditional meal. Moussaka, burritos, chow mein. I remember Stig and Bezzo mixing up flour paste and bits of carrot and corn to make a puddle of sick and freak out the teacher, then thinking of Bezzo reminded me of Moped and the double entry under McAllister, and I had to sit down quickly in one of the kitchen chairs.

  Stig didn’t notice. Looking down into his pot, he just kept talking.

  “Wee J did business studies and hospitality so he could be the manager, and I got a chef’s apprenticeship so I could stay in the kitchen. My mum trained to run the spa and my dad was going to stand behind the bar and tell jokes. A perfect little empire with BJ at the top, like the fucking Godfather.” He lifted a spoonful of sauce out of the pan and, holding his other hand underneath it so it didn’t drip on the dog, he turned to let me taste it.

  “You swear quite a lot,” I said.

  “All chefs swear a lot,” said Stig. “If you had a telly like normal people, you’d know that.”

  “I’d rather have a cheese toastie and no effing,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, looking properly at me for the first time.

  “Are you sure you’ll be okay if I tell you?” I said.

  “I promise,” he said. “I’m sorry. Being cooped up is—”

  But still I chickened out of telling him at first. “I got April’s address.” He raised his eyebrows. “And I looked up Nathan’s record.” I took the plastic sleeve out of my bag and handed it to him.

  “Fucking hell,” he said, reading the two printouts. “That’s three, Glo. Ned, Nod, and April.”

  “Four counting Mitchell.”

  “It can’t be coincidence,” he said. “But what’s the connection?” He stared at the paper, as if he could work out the answer from those few brief notes. On the Rayburn, the pot was bubbling harder, sending out splats of sauce that sizzled on the hotplate.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t understand. I suppose it’s possible that the trauma about Moped affected Nathan so badly he killed himself, and that that might do his twin brother’s head in. And then April saw the death notice and that finished her off.” I was babbling, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “I could have stopped this,” said Stig. “If I’d listened to her. Insisted on seeing her. God, if I’d even got to the huttie a bit quicker. I don’t suppose you looked up any of the others?”

  I flushed. “I don’t know their real names. Or couldn’t remember them, anyway.”

  “Alan Best?” said Stig, and I flushed deeper. I could feel the angry blotches creeping over my chest and was glad that I still had my coat on.

  “I wasn’t thinking straight,” I said. “Look, I really need to go and see Nicky, but while I’m out you write down all their names. Full names if you can.”

  “I’ve already done it,” said Stig. “I’ve written everything I can remember, like you said.”

  “I’ll go over it when I get back. Over dinner.”

  “Can’t you take it with you?” he said. “Read it while you’re there?”

  “Read it to Nicky?”

  “No! Sorry
! Sorry.”

  I was too angry to speak. I just stood up and walked out. I’d stay longer than usual, I thought, getting in and slamming the car door, and if his Meatballs à la Profanity were dried up when I got back, then tough cheese.

  Ten

  The McAllister brothers, April Cowan, and poor Moped faded a little as I rolled up to the home to see Nicky. It was always my favourite bit of any day, rolling up to the home to see Nicky. Even Miss Drumm was like family now after ten years.

  It used to be that I’d stop in on her every few days, let her know how Walter Scott was getting on, reassure her about the stone, share news of the brambles in the hedgerows and how the potatoes were doing. I sometimes wondered if she knew that I had never made a pot of bramble jelly in my life and wouldn’t know potato blight if I caught it, but I thought maybe she liked the pretence, found it harmless, since she’d never see the garden again or find out that the vegetable patch was overrun with those sunflowers and the great-great-grandchildren of her last lettuces.

  Besides, since they were in adjoining rooms, I could hardly visit Nicky and ignore her. It was good of her to have him, really; he still cried out back then, and it wasn’t a noise you’d choose to hear if you didn’t have to. It wasn’t all that different, when I came to think of it, from the noise Walter Scott made when I tried to get him to leave her behind, the few times he visited. Miss Drumm turned her head away, her mouth trembling, and Walter dug his toenails into the polished floor of the hall and sat down hard. If the doors on that side of the corridor were open and the morning sun was shining, you could still see the scratches on the parquet where I’d dragged him.

  But Walter hadn’t been here for nine years now and Nicky had stopped making any sounds at all about six years back, so now the arrangement worked perfectly for everyone. Miss Drumm listened in on the nurses to check they weren’t teasing him, and he was the only resident who didn’t mind a connecting door with “that chopsy old B” as Mr. Ainsworth called her.