The China Garden

by Kristina Olsson

  The thought resonated, floated an image before her; it propelled her past a wide bench where an electric jug, a toaster and two mugs sat perfectly aligned, and out of the shed. She was remembering that childhood argument again, and her thoughts became moon-shaped, then circular, rounds and half-rounds pressing her to remember, pressing softly like fingers at her temple. Even when they go, they’re still mine ... They’re not separate from me. She closed the shed door and hurried back up the slope towards the china garden.

  She knelt amongst the herbs and china once more, but this time her fingers were quick, finding the half-round of a saucer buried deep, the curved mouth of a broken cup. The edges of small plates were already exposed, inverted moons waxing and waning, earth-bound. A jagged spout, the teapot bowl a perfect globe, rimed with damp. And an egg-cup, chipped twice.

  She held the egg-cup in her palm. It was off-white, crusted in dirt, a speckled yellow chicken just visible on one side. A child’s egg-cup, hers. She could hear the soft crack of a knife against egg-shell, see the scoop of yolk on a spoon. She bent to replace it, but meaning was sudden, it was a wind, bristling leaves, grass, skin. She pulled back. Part of her is buried here, she thought. She knew suddenly that everything she touched now, every roundness, every sharp edge, might be a limb, a fear, a secret.

  She stood and steadied herself. She’d said to Fergus: I’m not sure if I’m up for all this, as if knowing, or understanding, might be a choice. As if a past could be chosen, and another one ignored. Driving away from him she’d thought, I don’t have to do it. I don’t have to exhume it all, don’t have to pluck each hidden thing from its hiding place, into the pitiless air. A shadow moved over her, and a noise that made her shiver. She looked up as the black cockatoos screamed past. The hill, all this time, was a wall of fading colour. This was something she had forgotten: that the sky could make landscape bigger, thicker here, almost impenetrable. It was one thing she hadn’t missed.

  Kieran moved around his town like music. Like a hum, a repeated lyric, he slipped between bitumen and beach, fence and doorway, seen but unnoticed. Expected but not missed. Constant but unlooked for. At the bus stop, between the shelves at St Barnabas, lost in green on grass or yellow on sand, he moved like eyes move. Seeing all, seeing nothing.

  These were Kieran’s colours, green and yellow and brown. He disappeared in them. This was not what he intended – he wanted familiarity, not secrecy. But he was pleased with the effect. It allowed him to be part of the town but not exactly of it; a benign bystander. He liked the word benign; had heard it used twice now on ‘Whiz Kids’, and twice it had produced blankness in the eyes of the contestants. But he had copied the dictionary entry into his notebook the first time. Benign: gracious, gentle; mild. It was like a sigh, a soft wind in leaves.

  That was what he became, a sigh of wind, invisible, as he watched the woman in Angela’s garden, for the second time that day. He’d needed to come back, to see if she was real – and there she was, kneeling among the herbs, behind the line of old roses. Kieran watched her hands. Looking for a clue about who she was, what she was doing here. From this angle he couldn’t see her face, but hands, he knew, told stories of their own. Cress’s hands, for instance. They were full of secrets. He had watched the way she held certain things, and her fingers definitely spoke. This woman was feeling the herbs as if she was blind. Kneading the soil as if – what? He wasn’t sure. As if it was more than soil. As if it had magic in it.

  But then she’d been still, this woman, for a long time, and Kieran wanted to go. A flock of black cockatoos gave him his chance: their noise was huge, grating, and their shadow deepened the dusk for a moment; the woman slowly lifted her head. By the time she put a name to the shadow and the sound he would be gone, up through the scrub to the road, following the birds’ black cloud towards the sea.

  Cress watched the spray of water from the hose turn silver in the deepening dark, and the trees and distant houses receding, and as she did she thought about the notion of disappearing. Of becoming less and less visible. There was something comforting about it. Why? She had never entertained the idea of disappearing; she had never wanted to completely vanish. But she liked the idea of withdrawal. She liked to think of her life now as a partial retreat, a kind of fading, like curtains hung too long in the sun. So that no one noticed them much anymore; they no longer attracted the eye.

  Sometimes she thought her past, all that she’d done, had been bleached, become invisible. To herself as well as to others; there were large patches now that were gone from her, gone. Who was that girl in the starched nurse’s uniform, in the Sunday hat at church, in the laundry with her mother, boiling sheets? Was she these days just the eighty-year-old version of herself, or one of the versions? She twisted the nozzle of the hose; bent to check a cabbage for grubs. Comfortable on her haunches, she fingered sinewy leaves. When a black cloud of cockatoos deepened the twilight, she looked up, watched them pass. She thought: Only the sky knows me.

  It was almost dark. She turned the nozzle again, trained the glittering spray of water out over the vines, the beans, the choko, the passionfruit. Moisture shone on fat leaves, making them droop. This made her happy; she thought she would make some tea. Recently, she had discovered chai: its aroma and faint exoticism returned her to her youth, or at least to an imagined one, careless, meditative, dreamy. The twilight garden gave her that too, that sense of ease, that dreaminess, as it settled under the rich weight of water.

  Cress turned off the hose. Kieran would be back soon; he loved chai too, with honey. Two spoons. She looked back over the fence to see the last spear of light fade over the forest, then went inside and took out the milk and honey and tea. And waited for her grandson to come home.

  Nine o’clock. Laura had kept herself awake as long as she could, and now the narrow bed looked to her like a haven. She smoothed the sheets with the flat of her hand. Tucked them in firmly again, carefully, as if there was already someone in the bed who was afraid, and needed reassurance. Washed her face, took off her clothes. Stopped briefly to listen as a chorus of frogs honked softly in the summer air.

  Then she lay and listened to the house settling around her, its old wood and wrinkled tin contracting as the heat withdrew. It’s just a house, she told herself. But knew that it was more than a house – it had become the keeper of a certain period of her life. It was an archive of all the best and worst things that had happened here. She had known this, she realised, since the day she left, thirty or so years before. But there hadn’t been a keeper in her life, no one to really answer to, since she left this place. She’d been determined to make it so; the house, she decided, would not spoil that now.

  I am no longer that sooky girl. The thought revived her energy briefly, made her brave. In the dull yellow light of the naked bulb, she willed all the ghosts of the house to come. Come now, I’m ready. She said it aloud, knowing they would not be hurried. They would stretch their infinite limbs and crack their lively knuckles and wait, until the invitation was stale and her mouth dry from anticipation. They would wait for her while she waited for them. They wouldn’t come tonight. She picked up one of the books she’d brought up from a pile in the parlour. Silas Marner. She lasted two pages, then reached for the light.

  Thursday

  Laura heard the phone ring in her sleep, through a dream more real than daylight. It was a swimming dream and hard to wake from. At an unknown beach, where she kicked and stroked towards a headland that kept receding, towards a crowd on the sand, a colourful knot of them, who didn’t hear her shouts. Even as she called to them, though, asking where she was, she realised she had no voice, she could not make a sound, not even a rasp; even her heavy breath was silent.

  She opened her eyes and the dream snapped off. Her body in the narrow bed felt heavy after the weightlessness of the dream swim, and she was shocked by the light, which was the exact yellow of the beach. Her eyes felt gritty, as if particles of sand h
ad lodged there. But there was no ringing sound now, nothing; all noise had stopped.

  She rubbed her face. The feel of the beach was still with her – was it Brighton, or elsewhere? She looked up: outside the window the sun was already boring its way across the Australian sky. She knew she had slept for a very long time. Nevertheless, she was tempted to roll away from the window and close her eyes again, even to risk a repeat of the mute dream, the anonymous beach. It would be worth it just to return to that weightlessness, in which she was barely conscious of her body, only the lift and dip of her arms as she swam, the effortless kick.

  But her skin was damp beneath the cotton sheet and her mouth and throat were dry. She knew she should get up. Still, it took some moments before her limbs responded, moving slowly as if they were underwater. She stood and looked outside again: leaves and foliage slumped pale and heavy in the humid air. Yes, underwater, she thought, remembering summers when moving through air was like moving through warm water.

  But the memory contained a question. She let it hang there in the fugginess where jetlag and dreams and foreboding had met. As she began to sort through her clothes she addressed it: Who was the person who knew these things? Was it the young girl she was in this house? From the evening before, she remembered an obscure fear of going to sleep here and waking up in that girl’s skin. Just before sleep, a sudden horror of following her own footsteps through the house, of being caught in the groove of old movements and breaths.

  That vulnerable, teary girl. She threw clothes onto the day bed. T-shirts and skirts, socks, pants, they all fanned out, crumpled, musty from the suitcase. Could the geography of childhood be so firmly stencilled on your soul that you returned, not just to a place you once moved in, but to the habits and attitudes and emotions that once made you? Could the grown, self-made woman revert to the young, skittish child in the house where that child had lived?

  The whole notion seemed hallucinatory to her. But possible. She tied a sarong around her hips and wondered if she was actually fully awake or in some odd time delay, her brain caught somewhere in the thin air of long-distance flight. She was five minutes out of bed but already her skin felt clammy. Sweat beaded her top lip. She sat down suddenly on the bed and knew that what she wanted most was to go straight back to sleep.

  No. She said the word aloud. Something in the cotton-wool of her head reminded her this was a bad idea, that she needed to wait to sleep again until night. She breathed deeply, visualising the hours stretching out through the day, the long minutes of consciousness. It seemed unendurable. But would be endured. She knew this in the part of her that had met impossible deadlines, done hard things. She picked up her mobile: one missed call. Fergus. She took a breath and pressed in the number, waited for his voice.

  Later, still strangely tired, she would think back to the light-water dream and the heavy-water air of the morning, and to the sound of his voice. Stories, she’d heard him say, that I want to tell you. I’ll buy you dinner. Or thought she’d heard. What? she’d said or shouted at the phone, and he’d apologised for the noise of water, of the surf, and carefully pronounced the name of a beachside bar. Seven o’clock, he yelled.

  The first time Kieran saw Abby, she was wearing a shapeless summer dress printed with big red and orange hibiscus flowers that made him think of islands. It was the way she walked too, as if she was moving without a purpose, without any need, a holiday kind of walk.

  It was a weekday morning, and he was at the park. He liked to go there after nine o’clock, when everyone was at work or at school, and everything he touched had the delicious feel of something borrowed, something he really shouldn’t have. That morning Abby was drifting, or maybe being blown by the wind, and although he was standing still, behind the monkey bars, he felt that he was being drawn towards her, instead of the reverse. He turned to the side, trying to be invisible, or very still, or both.

  So it jolted him when she sat down on the swing and began to talk. She pushed off into the air, the flowery dress billowing softly, her straggly fringe flicking back from her eyes. Gentle Jesus meek and mild, look upon a little child. Gentle Jesus, meek and – d’ you know the rest of the words to that? Her voice tangling with her long hair, so he saw strands of words, blonde.

  Kieran looked quickly behind him. Was someone else there? He hadn’t seen anyone on the path. Gentle Jesus ... The swing slowed and she tried to propel it with her legs. Skinny legs, long. Hey, give us a push? Please?

  She turned her head then, and looked directly at him for about three seconds. There was no surprise in her face. She looked at him as if they already knew each other. Then the wind whipped her fringe across her eyes again and she leaned far back, so the curtain of hair hung straight down, the ends in the dirt beneath the swing. He moved out from behind the monkey bars. She lay back on the seat of the swing, her face upside down, grinning at him. C’mon then, she said, swinging away and back again. Push! He smiled, and pushed.

  At first they just met in the park. Sometimes Abby would get there before him, and he would see her soaring on the swing from way up on the hill path. Her head would be flung back and her hair trailing, like the first time.

  On these days he learned to sit quietly nearby and wait for the swing to slow. It was no use trying to talk. Abby was somewhere else, her thoughts pushed up and propelled away beyond the solid ground where Kieran sat, pulling at grass, glancing up occasionally at the shape her body made, arcing through air.

  He knew enough not to question her, even when she’d stopped. She simply wouldn’t answer. But once when she felt dizzy after she finally slumped down next to him, he asked her if, when the swing was really high, she kept her eyes open.

  Always, she said. He waited for more. It’s the stillness. I like to look at the stillness. I like being the only thing that moves.

  He’d nodded, needing no more. Needing just those few words. He felt happiness beating in him, beneath his ribs, in the soft pads of his fingertips. As if she had put the words there in his hands. That’s when he began to think about love. About the way he loved other people. If he might be in love with her. Or just in love with her sentences.

  Kieran was thinking about this today as he sat at work. Now, these months later, he didn’t worry so much about missing her during the day, knew it was not so catastrophic. There were other ways he could keep up with her, make sure she was okay. He was humming – a fragment of Beethoven? he wasn’t sure – as the bell sounded and he swung his bag over his shoulder, heading for the canteen. After lunch the end of his shift was just a few hours away. If he walked fast, he could be at the top of her street half an hour later, just before her father got home.

  Cress went from room to room with her basket, gathering up washing. Mainly it was Kieran’s. She had stopped questioning how her grandson, so fastidious in other ways, could be completely forgetful about his clothes. They were left where they dropped, piles and trails of jeans, T-shirts, socks. Beside his bed, near the television and – despite the proximity of the laundry basket – on the bathroom tiles right next to it. For a long time she tried to reform him. She’d nagged, pleaded, offered rewards. Now, after ten years or more, during which the style and the shades of Kieran’s wardrobe had barely changed, Cress had all but abandoned her efforts. Nothing seemed to penetrate. Each complaint was still met with the same bemused look, the same shrug as he scooped up the clothes in question and deposited them in the laundry.

  Often, when he reappeared, he would be wearing one of the contentious items, crumpled jeans or dirty socks or a sweat-stained singlet. This was done, she knew, completely without malice, almost completely without thought. Having picked it up again, he’d just feel like putting the thing on.

  But today she was unperturbed by the forgotten clothes or by anything much at all. She sorted washing into piles and whistled a soft tune, the way Ed always had. As she bent to pluck one good-sized load from the floor, and dropped it
item by item into the machine, her old body recognised the emotion. It was a feeling of repleteness, of some vacuum filled; she’d felt it grow in her chest at St Barnabas the moment she opened the tea-chest, and it was still with her. But there was something else too, an edge of excitement, that belonged to a much younger version of herself.

  When she and Ed had first met, the war wasn’t yet over. She was sixteen and too young, her father considered, to be consorting with a nineteen-year-old about to go off to fight. He’d forbidden her to see him. But after Ed had gone into camp, he’d sent her a letter through a friend. They’d spoken once on a hospital phone, too, even though any contact was forbidden, but a letter was visible contraband, thrilling and dangerous.

  At work in the wards she could keep it safely in her purse, or slip it into her bra, but at home she felt no such daring. Nowhere was safe. At first she’d kept it tucked into her pants, where its corners dug into her hips, sharp and reassuring, but she was terrified it would slip and fall. In the end she’d wedged it behind the Jesus picture on her bedroom wall where, even though it was just two thin airmail pages, it seemed to Cress to expand, to puff out as if it was breathing. That’s how she felt now about the dress.

  As she moved around the house, tidying, thinking about dinner, her eyes kept flicking towards the bedroom, as if the dress had a smell or a sound that might leak out. But this time it was Cress who seemed to expand. She felt swelled by its presence, and ordinary things seemed smaller: the regular twinges from her rheumatic hip didn’t irritate her today, and nor did the thought of the vegetables waiting in the kitchen to be chopped.

  So now that the house was tidy and the washing on, and she felt she’d avoided it long enough, Cress went into her bedroom, tip-toeing as if someone might hear. The air outside was still, save for the crows, and she barely noticed them. Even so, she pulled down the sash on her window, adjusted the curtains to make the room dim. Although it was midday and broad daylight, it felt safe to bring out the parcel. But her stomach tilted with pleasure at the risk.