He was still there this morning, leaning over the coffee table with his pen, when his grandmother left for the shop. Over the top of the screen voices he heard hers: Lunch is in the fridge, Kieran. Don’t forget. Kieran? To her departing steps he called Yes, without taking his eyes from the screen. Within fifteen minutes he would forget her few words entirely. They would be replaced by six others scratched quickly onto the notebook in front of him: marionette; gothic; lithograph; effigy; mimic; daub. He rewound the tape and replayed the game host’s careful spelling. Checked the letters in front of him, saying the words out loud. Then turned the video off and stowed the tape in his room.
In the shower, he suddenly stopped humming the ‘Whiz Kids’ signature tune to think about the day. It might be a workday, he wasn’t sure. He visualised his chair on the small production line at Enterprise Packaging. The dogged faces of his mates around him. The piles of pegs, ready for bagging. No, not work. A shop day? He pictured St Barnabas, the old women dusting. The smell of the beach outside as he worked, carrying in boxes, sticking price tags on. No. He began to hum again, soaped the thick patch of hair on his chest. Half an hour later, he took some cut sandwiches from the fridge and turned left up the steep road that led from the town towards the rain-forested hills. For the next mile he could still smell the sea.
Laura bent down, close to the sandy earth, to look for the fragments of china. The new moon of a chipped saucer, a broken teapot, pieces of a bowl in eggshell blue. They were pressed into the soil as if they too might have sprouted there, like the wild herbs that splayed around them in the old garden, there at the back of the house: thyme and woody basil and chervil. She crouched close, ran a finger over the bowl’s curve. It was as old as her memory. Like the trees and the house itself. Organic, unsurprising. I’m back, she whispered over the garden. Lips slow with fatigue and the years between visits. I’m here.
She looked up and around. The old wooden house slumped against the side of the slope, its tin and timbers untended. The sun and salt winds had beaten it into something that might, she thought, become part of the forest again, its stumps joining the giant roots of figs, and vines plaiting around eaves and joists in the canopy. She smiled, enjoying the idea, knowing Angela would have enjoyed it too. Then brushed dirt from her hands. What kind of a woman, she thought suddenly, buries broken china in her garden?
Inside the house the question amplified. Now she saw what she couldn’t the night before, when she’d fallen straight into the spare bed to sleep for twelve hours. Every surface, every picture, plate, book, every breath the house breathed was a reminder, a reprimand: All the things, they said, you don’t know. Because, of course, the house was all Angela, everything. The chairs and the spaces between them, the missing louvre in the lounge room, the cracked yellow soap on the sill above the sink. The scrubbed wooden table, the sugar bowl, half-full. It was all imbued with Angela’s voice, her touch, her thinking. Each one held its knowledge of her, covetous, admonishing. You weren’t here, they said.
She went to the living room windows, needing air. Another cracked pane, the frame swollen with moisture and ill-fitting. Mould blossomed in the folds of curtains unchanged for too long. Everywhere there were signs of neglect and degeneration: paint cracked and peeling like sunburned skin, cobwebs soft and languorous with age. She turned and took in the room, the bookshelves, the view to the kitchen, trying to locate the difference that nagged at her. Her hands gripped the velvet back of an old chair and she frowned: inside the decay the house was neat. No chaos of books and brochures and dead flowers on the table and on chairs, no unopened mail on every surface, burned-down candles, newspapers, rags. Someone had tidied up.
She was surprised at her own relief. Someone had dismantled part of the unhappy past and put it back together in a way that might disguise everything, the fights, the resentments, the jealousies. But not quite. She walked towards the bathroom and her next breath brought the thin but invidious smell of turpentine; it was in the walls, the floorboards, the ceiling cracks. She knew then that even if everything had been scrubbed, and every brush, bottle and book despatched to the old women at St Barnabas, the house would still conspire with the past and all its secrets. With Angela. She peeled off her clothes and stepped into the shower, and let the water run hard, let it needle and pummel her skin.
Minutes later, as the water dripped to a stop, she waited with a towel in one hand and listened. There was nothing to listen to, really, no sound. Nothing but muted birdsong and wind, light and high up in the paperbarks. She moved the towel absently over her body. There, it was more a pitch than a sound. It was something she knew, and realised that instant she knew: it was the countless minute shiftings and shufflings and scrapings of the bush. This made her smile. It reminded her of taking up her guitar after years of neglect, and picking up the chords to ‘House of the Rising Sun’, the first song every guitar student learned. She thought: The fidelity of sound. She walked naked back to the verandah room where she had slept. There, pulling out clothes, she found a forgotten orange that had somehow survived customs. It felt like a trophy. She tossed it lightly in her hands, and walked to the front stairs to sit in the morning sun.
He knew if he stood like this, tall and straight, or at least as straight as the tree, that he wouldn’t be seen from the house. He wasn’t sure why he was so certain; it was just something he knew, like his name. And he knew there were times, like now, when he could tilt his head an inch or two and look straight into the windows of her front room. No one inside would see him. It was something to do with the shadows.
Kieran was good at being still. He learned its advantages early, when he was a very small child, and realised what an unexpected quality it was. Stillness, he saw, was much admired, especially in children: it usually meant an absence of noise and demand, which pleased adults. In the presence of stillness, many people became quiet themselves. Others allowed themselves to expand, filling up the space usually taken by noise, by movement, by the intrusions of others. And this perhaps was what Kieran liked about it most: it allowed people to forget he was there. And forgetting, they revealed themselves.
His capacity for stillness meant he didn’t usually have to conceal himself to watch people. He realised that for many in the town, his presence was no more remarkable than the shrubs on the footpath, the birds on the powerlines. Sometimes, this meant he too forgot; slipped out of the consciousness of standing or sitting in a particular place, slipped out of his own skin. He heard and saw only what he was focused on.
At this moment, though, he was firmly caught inside his own skin and quite conscious of what was happening in front of him. Angela’s house, he’d discovered, was no longer empty. Windows that had been pressed shut for months were thrown wide open. Through one of them, he could see the end of a dishevelled bed, blue sheets kicked into a ball. And even from where he stood amongst the trees a hundred metres or so from the house, he could hear water. Someone was in the shower.
At first he’d blundered down the hill, his boots loud in the dry undergrowth – then stopped, holding his breath, as if that might prevent his exposure. Shit, he’d thought. His heart thumped hard, he felt tricked. Somehow, he had absorbed the fact of Angela’s absence but not the likelihood of someone coming to take her place here. He had to reassure himself, to remember that no one would see him unless he wanted them to.
She was suddenly there now, by the bed. Briefly naked and then not. Long enough for him to see it was a woman all right, but no more. Her head was down, he couldn’t see who, or how old. Just the longish dark hair. He had to concentrate hard on his stillness, resist the urge to get a better view. She sat for a moment, then stood again and lifted her arms to tie back her wet hair. Her arms were muscled, strong, he could see that. She was a woman who worked with her arms.
Several minutes later she appeared on the front steps, startling him. He barely breathed, but couldn’t look away as she sat, forearms on knees, and bega
n to peel an orange slowly, her fingers furrowing, splitting skin and flesh. All the time her eyes were on the garden in the small yard before her, the old rose bushes, the sunburnt grass, but now, at least, he could see her face. Her face. His lips parted, he almost spoke. Angela.
It was the bones beneath her cheeks, the slope of her shoulders, the way she held her head. The face seemed so familiar he almost relaxed, almost broke cover, had a fleeting impulse to wander over and sit down and share her orange. To offer to clean her brushes, to make some toast. But of course, did not. This was not Angela, this was not anyone he knew. The likeness was strong enough though, and it made him want to know more.
There wasn’t much he could do, not now. He wanted to tilt his head to get a better angle, to make sure of what he thought he was seeing, but he didn’t dare. So he closed one eye and focused hard. Not-Angela kept eating, kept staring at the garden. Then, as quickly as she had appeared she was up and gone again, into the house, closing the door. He remained as still as possible for as long as he could. To help, he kept his mind on words and images: shadow, reflection, echo. He thought: Pieces of people. And wondered for the first time where Angela really was. He knew about death and the burial of bodies. He had heard people talk about spirits. When they did he assumed they meant the best parts of a person, the purest pieces. The spirit never dies, he had heard.
When he felt finally it was safe to move, this was what reverberated through him as he slipped between trees, his own body a shadow, an echo moving. At the top of Angela’s track it was still with him. All the way home along the narrow bitumen road, the eucalypts and the lilly-pillies and the exuberant lantana would sing their certainties to him: The best parts, they hummed, the spirit. If he could have replied he would have asked them one of the questions forming slowly in him as he walked. What really happened to Angela? And do spirits come out in daylight – or at night?
Laura sat on the wide steps at the front of the house, peeling an orange with her thumbnails, tearing at pieces of flesh. The whole morning, she felt, was at her shoulders, the sun climbing to midday, hauled upwards by the south-easterly and an orchestra of birds. With each segment of orange, another piece of memory lodged in her head. The blue of her school uniform. Her mother’s back.
The yard in front of her was scattered with the remnants of Angela’s rose garden: the plants had grown woody, with wayward stems and stunted blooms, but she could still see her mother’s thin body bent among them, her hands flowered and blotched with paint, gripping thorny stems. The ground around her stained with fallen petals, yellow and red on green, like her studio floor.
Secrets, Fergus had said as he walked her to her car the night before. They passed people drinking at an outdoor café; the wine was the colour of lemons. Their lives were riddled with them. She’d kept looking at the drinkers – talking, laughing, unaware of her personal catastrophe. Her fingers were looped through the handle of the school case, and she carried it the way she had as a child. She felt its weight in her whole body now, not just in her hand. It was, she thought, the precise weight of secrets.
So many things weren’t talked about, Fergus said. So many things were hidden. He’d been talking about his own father, an Irishman who’d fought with the British Army. My father was so ashamed, after the war. Shame made him angry. And silent. After a moment he said: So many silent houses.
Her head had been heavy with fatigue; she wasn’t sure it was a conversation she wanted to have. But now the words struck home. She thought of Angela’s particular kind of silence, one imposed through painting, Laura suddenly saw, chewing the last of the orange and staring at the sky. She sat still, clutching pieces of peel. She thought: Painting as a way of not speaking. As a way of processing shame. In one movement she stood and walked quickly back inside, washed her rimy hands at the kitchen sink and then hesitated, staring through the dusty louvres towards her mother’s studio. The corrugated tin glittered in the morning sun. She felt the pull and the push of answers it might hold, answers she might or might not want. She wondered if it was too early to call Kate.
In the middle of the afternoon, Cress left Iris to tend the counter and took a cup of tea – Darjeeling – into the storeroom at the back of the hall. Three cardboard boxes and a big tea chest, donations from a family on the Gold Coast, had arrived the day before. She ripped the tape from the smaller boxes and regarded the jumble of toys, toddlers’ clothes and biscuit tins with a practised eye. She knew the worth of the contents without touching them. Useful, uninteresting. She pushed the boxes aside with her foot and turned to the tea chest.
It was hip-high, without a lid. Its sides joined by metal strips and tattooed with the vestiges of old shipping stamps. This was what Cress noticed first, the washed-out crimson and blue. The fat curve of a G and a C, the loop of an L. There were other letters there, too faded to recognise, words she couldn’t make out, but that didn’t seem to matter. What mattered was authenticity, whether it was a Regency desk or a great-grandmother’s brooch or a simple wooden box. It caught at Cress every time. In a world clamouring with replicas, this was what meant something: the true. The trustworthy.
Cress bent down beside the box, and forgot that her feet were aching. She ran the flat of her hand over the letters. Someone, many years ago, had made these marks here, someone had delivered it to some wharf in some port, maybe in the Mediterranean, maybe India. How many seas had it travelled? What precious cargo had it carried, who had entrusted their possessions to it?
She stood again to survey the contents, a jumble of odd shapes wrapped in yellowed newspaper. They had been in there a long time, she could tell: all settled together, over time each parcel had found its exact place with the others, despite the irregular edges; she knew if she lifted one it would leave a very faint imprint in the wrapping of its neighbour. She leaned over to look at the newsprint, miniscule letters that teemed over the paper, and was surprised by the remnants of some fragrance. She moved closer and inhaled. It was a smell at once odd and familiar, mulchy and sharp. Tea.
She carefully removed the first item. Her fingers read its shape through the wrapping, a cup or container of some kind. She peeled the newspaper from it with her nails. It was in fact a fine china cup, Royal Albert, off-white and blue. Then its saucer. Then a sugar bowl, a cream jug. A silver salver. Cress was kneeling now, a cushion beneath her knees, placing each precious thing on the floor beside her. She was part-way through the second layer when she glimpsed something beneath it, something bigger, wrapped not in newspaper but in a thin cotton sheet. She hurried through the last few small items, not without some guilt, until she held the soft square parcel in her hands.
It was wrapped like a present without the tape, an envelope that was easily opened. There beneath the wrappings and carefully folded was what seemed to be a very old wedding dress. She stared down at the creamy satin, ran her fingers around the neckline, over the rows of tiny blossoms picked out in glass beads. Without disturbing its folds she could guess it was fifty years old or more: the handwork was exquisite but yellowing, and there was something about the pattern of the beads. She was hesitating over it, wondering how long it had lain in its folds, when she heard Iris moving around the shop, locking up. She looked towards the door, and the sound of the front door bolt sliding into place. Her next impulse surprised her. She quickly wrapped the dress and returned it to its place in the tea chest. Feeling surreptitious, not knowing why.
Back at the counter, Iris was snapping an elastic band around a wad of notes for the safe. I’m just going to finish those boxes of toys and clothes before I go, she told Iris. There’s not much left. I’ll lock up the back. Iris stowed the cash and picked up her handbag. You sure? she said, fishing about for her purse. I’ve got to get some shopping on the way home. Cress was already on her way back up through the aisles. See you tomorrow, she called.
She didn’t really think much about what happened next. Later, she would remembe
r she felt outside herself, that it was like watching someone else reach into the box once more and slowly draw the wedding dress out into the air again. She held it gently with the tips of her fingers and let it fall from the shoulders. Ivory satin and lace. The low, scooped neck and fitted bodice, beaded with tiny pearls and beads, and a dropped waist, like an Edwardian tea dress.
She spread out the thin sheet it had been wrapped in and laid the dress on the floor. Ran her fingers once more over the creamy beads, traced the shape of the scalloped hem, the fine tendrils of thread. Then she was gathering it up in her hands, in the crook of her arm, the heavy fabric folding in on itself, returning to the creases that had held it for years. How many years? Cress had no idea, she knew only that the dress moved her in some way, it beckoned to her, and holding it she felt that really it was holding her.
She wrapped it once more and, working carefully but quickly, replaced everything else in the tea chest and walked back down into the dim, empty shop and out through the back doors, locking them behind her. It wasn’t until her steps cracked and echoed shockingly on the car park gravel that she thought of what she was doing. The dress seemed huge and obvious in her arms then, and she swivelled around, looking, imagining her accusers. Nothing. Just the empty car park in the deep shadow of the church, the closed and quiet shed. She opened the car and put her handbag on the floor and the dress on the seat beside her, like a passenger. As if it was, she flicked it glances all the way home.
Kieran lay on his back under the clothes line, watching colours circle above him like birds. The afternoon sea breeze had come in late and soft. He watched it ruffle the checked tea towels, noticed how a shirt puffed out then fell in as if someone was breathing inside it. It reminded him of something uncomfortable, a thought he didn’t want to think, so he looked instead at his grandmother’s grey tights, the legs swaying, one forward, one back, a dance against the paling blue of the sky.
The China Garden Page 4