The line slowly spun the tights away, and he found he was staring up at several bunched clouds pinned to the sky like magnets. Blank, no message in them. That’s when he heard the voice. Toast? the voice said. Vegemite toast?
He turned his head on the damp ground. The lemongrass in Cress’s vegetable garden stood mute, and there was no one, no figure, no footprints, on the stretch of lawn beside him. It was the same as it always was, the garden, the roofline of the house, the clothes above him, and the night coming down on them slowly, as it always did.
Kieran looked back at the sky. From where he lay it seemed fragile as an egg, thin-shelled, as if it could be pierced to reveal another world behind it. Was that where she was? And were the clouds a sign? Angela, he said, though his lips barely moved. There was the taste of hot toast between them.
Her music had drawn him to the shed the first time. He’d been walking the hills for months, bored with town, sticking to the high darkened roads and lanes where new houses had appeared along with the new power lines. Later, he would wonder how he’d forgotten the scatter of older places squatting at the end of their dirt tracks along the outer ridge. He would have walked past them every time on his way to the main avenue of lighted windows, where he would occasionally see figures locked together in the silvery hold of television, or each other’s embrace. In the hills, there was always something to see.
Once, he watched a child extend his arm from a high casement, and drop a woman’s dress, shocking red against the light and the dark, its skirt puffing like dough as it fell. The window closed; the dress lay like a stain on the wet grass. Some weeks later, he’d seen a man emerge from a low brick house. It was after midnight, he could hear the laboured breathing of the man as he staggered beneath a cumbersome weight. He set it carefully down on the grass behind the house. The glassy surface glittered: a television. The man had walked away, then turned, drawn a revolver from his jacket, taken aim at the centre of the screen. The explosion had cracked through Kieran’s whole body even as he watched. He’d shrunk away, feeling that he’d witnessed a crime, something outrageous. As if something alive had been shot, or an animal maimed.
The night he found Angela, he’d lost his way. Not lost exactly: he’d followed the irresistible call of an owl, just metres from the road. Later, he could only think the canopy had obscured the stars, so that he took perhaps six steps in the wrong direction before he realised the ground was sloping down. He needed to go up. But as he hesitated, all senses primed, he heard faint music. Not the sweet country melodies he played at home; even from here he could feel the drama of these new sounds, the power. Several more steps and he could make out the darkened shape of a house, and beyond it, a light. He crept closer.
The light, and the music, were coming from a shed below the wooden house. Perhaps it was the sound, but in the darkness the low building was an animal slumped in sleep. Foliage furred its walls and the roof sagged on old bones, but even from a distance, in the midnight chill, its irregular presence was benign. Different to the houses up the road. He’d wanted to walk straight up to one of the shed windows, knock on the glass.
But didn’t. Instead he’d dropped to his knees behind a straggly shrub, tried for a better line of sight. Through the windows he could make out square slabs of colour, some patterned, and smaller, spiky shapes he couldn’t identify. He squinted, angled his head. But he was too far away, and the shape he wanted to see – the human one that belonged to the music and to the light – was not in view. Someone was there, though. His instincts and the music told him, so he waited, and watched, his chest swelling and dropping with the music that was now layered with a pleading female voice climbing mountainous notes, higher, higher. Falling, climbing again. Kieran closed his eyes, there were cliffs and caves behind them, swathes of silk, castles of stone. He held his breath.
The music stopped. His eyes flew open. In the sudden silence he felt exposed, uncovered; still watching the empty windows he edged backwards, staying low, until he reached another line of shrubs. Grabbed at a branch for camouflage, and felt his own sharp breath as thorns tore at his hands and arms. Rose bushes. He pulled back, cursed silently, but he was behind the house now, so he sprang from his crouch and ran, zigzag, up the hill. Stopped when he reached the road, his heart banging, mocking him with music, that music. In thin moonlight he walked slowly back towards town, a beat in his limbs. He felt excited, happy. He lifted his stinging hands to his face, to his nose. Blood and roses. That night he slept impatient for the next night, for the thudding dark.
But he hadn’t returned to the hills for several nights, delayed by chores at home and by the semi-finals of the ‘Einstein Game’. When he did, slipping between shadows, shape-shifting as he moved, he came to the bottom of the track and found the rose bushes first. Dared to touch petals in velvety moonlight. This gave him courage. Around the right-hand side of the house, he dipped his body to the damp grass and tried to move like smoke, insinuating himself. When he came to the lighted window he crouched, one grey mountain rock among the others in the tangle of fronds and leaves.
I know you. The voice was steady, its owner unmoved. You don’t need to hide.
The words might have come from the tree-ferns; that would have been easier. His body had truly become one of the rocks, surely he too had been standing there forever. But he was a rock with eyes, and now he forced them to see, looking at last – the seconds stretched out, treasonous – at the window. Nothing. The other window was dark; he bent sideways, then boldly took a small step towards it.
You can see better in the light. The shrubs, not the window. He swung round.
She was standing behind them, at the corner of the shed. He was looking at a pale face, featureless in the once familiar dark. There was some kind of woollen cap, and dark hair. He knew at once that he was safe with her, but his limbs were granite once more, unwilling to move. His heart slowed. He breathed.
Come on then. Come in. There’s tea. She turned. Stopped, looked back at him. Regarded his still face. You don’t have to talk, she said, and was gone.
But Angela did need to talk. It began there, that night.
Do you like to paint? There was no answer so she turned from the canvas to look at him. Blankness. He shook his head. No? Have you tried it? Again the blankness, silence. Then: I can do other things, he said. I can spell Kosciusko. And eucalyptus. I can make toast, all kinds.
She stood regarding him. All kinds? Her voice waiving the need for an answer. Waiving any obligation to be, or say, anything. She smiled a small smile. What about cleaning brushes? she said, and handed him a posy of them, multi-hued.
He’d looked at them. Magic wands, he thought later. As they passed from her hand to his, something was sealed between them. From that moment the words would thicken and layer, until talk became glue. Her voice would keep him there when he knew he should go, knew he would sleep long into the next morning and endure Cress’s hard eyes when he woke. But he also knew, after a while, that Angela needed him to hear her. He would become essential, like her painting. She was making shapes in her life, figuring it out. She needed him. He loved that.
A soft growl. Kieran could feel the vibration of the car engine through the ground, and turned his head to watch his grandmother climb out of the car and close the door. Watched her hurry around to the other side, sort of skipping, and take something from the passenger seat. Then hurry away, holding a parcel in two outstretched arms, looking straight ahead. He was about to call out to her, but there was something in her face that stopped him, he knew instantly it would be like waking a sleepwalker from a dream. So he just lay there on the grass, quietly, and watched her disappear behind the kitchen garden.
Cress carried the parcel straight through the house and into her bedroom. On the way she listened for sounds: there was no murmur of television, no rustling in the kitchen. Kieran? she called softly, almost to herself. The house made no
reply. In the bedroom she looked quickly around. There were several options: behind the old, carved dresser, beneath the pile of scarves and hats on the wooden chair. She stood still for a few moments, holding the dress in her arms. There was the faint smell of dust, and of tea. Then, deciding, she knelt beside the bed and slid the dress beneath it. Her hands hovered momentarily. Then she patted the parcel softly, a blessing to keep it safe, to keep it quiet. When she walked back into the kitchen, Kieran was there, making toast.
Kate had answered the phone after two rings. At last, she said. I was about to call you.
I’ve got news, Laura said, and stopped. It felt like something she should have rehearsed.
In the pause she heard Kate laugh. You’ve inherited a secret fortune, she said. Good. A few more years for the orchard.
Laura smiled. Wondered briefly and for the first time what the house might be worth. Then: No, she said. Not quite–
She had to imagine words then, imagine the sound of them as they were spoken, as Kate might hear them. She realised she had to tell herself this story, as well as her daughter. All this time, she said, I haven’t been an only child at all. I’ve got a brother out there I’ve never known. She stopped, waiting for something from Kate, but there was nothing. Born two years before me and adopted out. Then never spoken of. She said: A little surprise in the will.
It took a few seconds. When it came Kate’s voice was changed, tentative. She said, Adopted. Trying it out, perhaps, for meaning, for some kind of sense. You mean, given up.
She was seventeen. Laura heard herself speaking. There was no emotion in the words. It’s what they did, in those days.
Who?
Single girls. They went away, had the baby in secret. There was that documentary...
But didn’t anyone try to help her?
Laura took a deep breath. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Realising as she said it. And there’s no one to ask.
At the other end Kate was quiet. Then, Shit, she said. So – did she ever find him again? And who was the father?
August was. My father.
Laura heard Kate say What? as she began to explain that no, Angela hadn’t tried to find the child and that she had no other information to go on. She felt suddenly overtaken by the dreamlike quality of the previous few days, of everything Fergus had said. And by all the knowledge she’d lived her life without. Right now I feel I could have hallucinated the whole thing.
Kate waited. Are you all right? she asked finally. I knew I should have come.
Cress stood in her high garden, watching twilight disguise the town. She was thinking how kind it was, this hour of the day, how forgiving. It was difficult, faced with an indigo sky behind a fretwork of trees, to regret too much, resent too much. Beauty buffed away at all your calluses, she thought, at old hard hearts. Softened them up to live another day, reminded you it was useless to regret. The sun would come up and go down again tomorrow regardless, splaying beauty around, immune to her. To everyone.
Lights began to glow in stepped yellow rectangles down the hill to the sea. Gone were the days when she could watch each window flare in the darkness and name its owner, visualising the face, the hands at their Sunday night tasks. For a long time after Ed died she had done that compulsively. Jealousy strangled reason, her throat would burn with it, but still she would stand here, watching the windows. Each house smug with companionship, each window alight with joy.
Back then, when she could no longer bear the blitheness of it all – the faces, the occasional voice carried up on air flavoured with ignorance and roast meat – she would go inside. It was before Kieran came to stay, long before. In the dark house, she would lie on her back and close her eyes, trying to hear. Not listening so much as trying to hear, to summon sounds – his voice, his whistle, the noises he made going out or coming home. Terrified she would forget.
She didn’t spend time staring at lighted windows anymore. That kind of longing had thinned out her body and her days, and she’d soon found she didn’t need the consolation of envy. Besides, it was hard to be jealous of complete strangers, and when her view filled up with the windows of new houses, modern, anonymous, she stopped looking. The newcomers held no interest for her, their transplanted lives too narrow, their ambitions too raw.
She wandered over and turned on the hose and breathed deeply in the cooling air. Listened for the bleep of cicadas. She didn’t resent the newcomers or the changes, she conceded now, aiming the spray carefully among tender lettuce leaves and cherry tomatoes. Among the town’s hills and fibro beach houses, its five churches, its new cafés and delis and gift stores, it was still possible to withdraw a little. But not completely: a whole life lived in the bowl of a small town meant it was impossible to disappear. She knew that, and so, of course, had Angela. There was always someone who remembered, someone who asked where you were.
The shed that was Angela’s studio was a dozen steps down a path trodden into the kikuyu. The valley and the town lay below it, and the silver disc of the sea. The last of the afternoon sun blazed on the corrugated-tin walls; Laura squinted, telescoping vision, and was surprised to find everything, the overgrown shrubs, the wild passionfruit vine – the air – thickened with memory. One in particular: she was a child, arguing with her mother about her painting, about her bloody art. That’s what she’d called it, hoping to shock, but Angela’s voice was even: You’ll see one day, she said. In the end you cling to what makes you feel you’re alive. Her own childish outrage then, because even in the face of her mother’s indifference, she’d still believed she was the most important thing.
What about me? she’d squeaked. Angela had looked at her briefly and turned back to her canvas. That’s different, she said. Children leave you. They go.
So it’s true, Laura had thought. Art comes first. Stupid, ugly art people put on their walls and forgot. She said: People buy paintings! They go too.
Angela passed a mottled brush from one hand to the other. No, she said calmly. Even when they go, they’re still mine. They’re me. Or I’m them. They’re not separate from me. Her mother staring out of the window, away from her. She remembered the wild pink of a crepe myrtle, a brazen, startling pink. Laura had turned from it, from Angela, and walked out of the shed, up the hill to the house.
She was thinking of this, and of her mother’s face, stolid, indifferent, as she approached the side door of the shed. She reached out, and her fingers on the door handle felt bold, transgressive. You are not a child, she told herself, twisting the knob and finding the door unlocked. Still, she had to breathe in to slow her heartbeat as the door soundlessly opened and she stepped into the shed for the first time in more than thirty years.
Her bare feet met cold concrete. She stopped two paces in. Cold feet. She felt again the reaction she’d had with Fergus, the urge to laugh, and then to run. She made herself stop and be still in the big, open space that bulked around her, to breathe in the air that was not just turpentine now but thick with the smell of oil paint and linseed and cleaning fluids. She closed her eyes briefly and opened them. Made herself see, to acknowledge what was there.
Easels, canvases stacked against walls, shelves of tins and bottles, paper, paint. At one end, a small couch with a green rug. These things her eyes took in and were comfortable with, the green of the rug a cheerful flag of colour in the dimming light. She felt braver then, approached the layers of work against one wall and thumbed through them. No surprises there – specimen after specimen, labelled in Angela’s hand: ‘Grevillea banksii’, ‘Callistemon Rocky Ck’, ‘Melaleuca wilsonii’. This last a blazing pink like the crepe myrtle of her memory.
She was turning towards the easels when her eye was caught by two large shapes propped side-on against the end wall. She made her way across the floor, cool, colour-battered, to stand in front of the big canvases. Felt unsure then whether their size or h
er own shock made her feel suddenly small, suddenly a child again, naïve, without any measure of understanding.
Both pictures were chaos: of colour and detail and ungoverned form. Or so it seemed at first. Stepping back, she thought she could make out in one the ravenous shapes of a strangler vine, its extraordinary energy and reach outrageous even in a rainforest. As she stared, other forms became clearer: fronds and succulent leaves and tree roots rioting, and strange and exotic flowers, and a hundred shades of green beneath a benevolent sweep of sky. Across the bottom a scrawled title in tall sloping letters: I Go Looking for Signs of Contentment #3.
The other canvas was unreadable. It was painted with the same exuberant brush and slap of palette knife, but its shapes, she finally decided, were unknowable. She tilted her head, seeing finally that some kind of order, rather than chaos, informed this one, that in the swirls and flights of colour and stroke there was something like rhythm. That was all. The scrawl at the bottom again, this time: I Go Looking for Signs of Contentment #2.
She looked up. Might have allowed the notion that these were from the hand of a different artist but there, on the easel, was a third, smaller picture in the same form and pattern, unfinished. Up close its nature was also unrecognisable, but it was this one that Laura stood longest before, her eye trying to trace the movements of brush, of fingers, of intention. After minutes, shape and meaning eluded her. Then a suspicion, faint at first, not to be trusted, took hold behind her eyes. It was something that was missing whenever she found herself in a gallery, that had been missing for her always, she realised now, when she thought of ‘art’. In the layers of paint, in the sweeping, almost careless tracks and paths it made, she could see the tentative traces of joy. It was a word she had never before attached to a painting; and rarely to her mother.
The China Garden Page 5