They worked silently together. It didn’t seem like a long time. Surely it was only two minutes later when Abby said, I’m bored, come on, and wandered off in the direction of the shops. He scrambled up, brushing grass from his jeans. Lucky lucky lucky, he said, following her.
They walked halfway up the block, stopping to look into shop windows. The newsagent’s was full of exercise books and pencil cases and there were school uniforms on little mannequins outside the draper’s. Abby paused at the big glass window. There were ladies’ dresses on display, ordinary dresses like Cress wore, some blouses. Abby stood pulling at her over-size T-shirt, twisting her hands in the excess fabric. It’s expensive here, she said. There’s better stuff at the op-shop. Cheaper.
Then her eyes fell on a choker of cheap glass beads on a shelf inside the window. There were bracelets and earrings too, silver with blue stones, others with green and yellow, necklaces of translucent, liquid chips. They look like rain drops, Kieran said, his hands on the plate glass. Or treasure, she breathed next to him. When I’m rich I’m going to have boxes and boxes of beads. I’ll wear a different colour every day.
Kieran looked from the window to Abby and back to the jewellery again. Beads and treasure. Come on, she said, tugging at his sleeve. But Kieran was slow, hoarding time. Thinking.
Do you want to come to my place tomorrow? he asked as she walked away.
The teapot was drained. So was the old woman’s energy, Laura thought, listening as Cress’s voice dropped, trailed away to monosyllables. She watched Cress twist her empty cup round and round with the tips of her fingers. So that’s what I’ve got, she thought. A dotty old girl with a Calvinist bent and an odd boy who walks at night. Still, the odd boy had known her mother. And in an apparently second-hand, unspoken kind of way, so had Cress.
Did you ever speak to Kieran about Angela? She was speaking to the top of Cress’s head, still bent over the china cup. The fine strands of hair, the silver hair clip. Laura felt a sudden bolt of tenderness for her, and for the old, old woman Angela would never be. There are so many things I’d like to find out. Things I’d liked to have asked her – But just then the waitress arrived with the bill. Laura felt the bubble of air around them deflate.
Out on the footpath they both hesitated. As the sea breeze flicked at their skirts, and lifted Laura’s hair and dropped it, she said: I’ve just discovered my mother had another child, before I was born. A boy. He was adopted out. She paused again and glanced at Cress. It was all kept secret, buried.
She looked out towards the ocean, and didn’t see Cress’s face, the movement of her eyes, the way her mouth opened and then closed again, words dying on her tongue. I don’t know why he was adopted or how and I don’t know why she didn’t tell me. Why she couldn’t. There was only the two of us.
She turned back; Cress’s face was wooden. She looked straight ahead and said, Well, we have to get on with our lives, Laura. Put things behind us. Your mother knew that, she must have.
The sea was pale in the heat, shimmering; small waves slumped to shore. They stood silently. Cars rolled past, and people; Laura brushed strands of dark hair from her face. She thought, how do you put a child’s whole existence behind you? But said instead, I’d like to meet your grandson, and fished paper and pen from her bag and scribbled out the number of her mobile. As she offered it, Cress took Laura’s hand in both of her own. The old woman’s palms felt velvety, like flower petals.
Laura drove slowly along the esplanade, watching clouds gather over the darkening sea. She wanted to think about Kieran, about the story Cress had told her, but it was the old woman’s face she kept seeing, on the windscreen, on the bitumen in front of her. The way she looked as she talked about ‘putting it all behind us’. As she shrugged off a lifetime of religion, spoke of life as just a series of coincidental events, good and bad. As if, these days, she believed nothing had meaning. Just as Angela had.
There was the citrus smell of approaching rain. Laura parked the car in a back street so that she could walk in the cooling air. Down past the town gardens, the library with its low verandah, the bowls club and then up the hill to the pink and green sandstone of St Mary’s Catholic Church. She stopped and leaned over the fence, admiring the stained glass and the little grotto with its blue-robed Mary. As a small girl she’d wanted badly to climb inside that grotto, to sit with Mary, to wear the white dress and veil of confirmation.
But Angela had been cynical about all religions, about denominations of every kind. Even Sunday School. Laura was jealous of the children who went – jealous even that they were never allowed to play on Sundays, when they seemed to turn into different people, people with brushed hair and patent leather shoes and hats and family lunches to go to. Had she actually seen them then, or just imagined seeing them? Shuffling into St Barnabas near the esplanade, or into St Mary’s, or the modest Methodist church just behind Broken Beach. They’d be all dressed up, and some of them – not the Catholics apparently – also went to Sunday School where there was singing, and stories. And at Christmas, a picnic, with sweets and three-legged races and a present for everyone. Even with the dressing up it sounded exotic to her, a club she was barred from and therefore wanted badly to join.
But Angela had tossed off her pleas with one word: hypocrites. Laura hadn’t even known what the word meant, not for the years she was placed with the tiny group called Others during religious instruction at school, all the years she wondered what a ‘confirmation’ was, the years she struggled to learn the words to the Christmas carols they sang at school in December, words everyone else already had by heart. Of course, Laura had loved the carols, had coveted the rituals and the robes and the belonging. Standing here now, her hands on the sandstone fence, she could smile. Angela never knew how lovingly her agnostic daughter had coloured in the nativity scenes in end-of-year art classes, or how often she and her friends played ‘communion’ with red cordial and arrowroot biscuits, or what it cost her to pretend that she and Angela, like all the other families she knew, didn’t ever eat meat on Fridays and always ate hard-boiled eggs on Easter Sundays. She turned from the church and wandered back down the hill to her car.
By the time she got back to the house Laura knew a storm was brewing. She took a glass of wine onto the front verandah, the word brewing in her head, teasing her. A storm brewing, she thought, suggested mischievous hands, at work for dark purposes. She remembered Cress blushing slightly, mocking herself and her own words: As if there was a grander plan. As if it was more than just bad luck.
Clouds were purpling the eastern sky, and wind gusted up the valley, snatching at leaves and hair. Laura leaned into it, breathing brine and eucalypt. She rubbed her arms, anticipating. Looked down from the verandah over the roof of the shed and the grass and the jumble of rocks and ferns. Tried to remember the name of the spiky green fronds that splayed against the dull tin of the shed. It occurred to her that Kieran, Angela’s odd friend, might know the name, might know this place better than she did.
A few fat drops of rain slapped onto the railing and onto the deck behind her. The light dimmed, and Laura tensed with excitement, as if the storm was a piece of theatre for which she’d paid admission. She looked around the sky. It was marbled in purple and grey, lit from behind by occasional lightning. To the east the sea and sky had washed together, obliterating the horizon. The world was a confusion of senses, upside down: the sky without stars, without sun or moon, and overhead thunder booming like the sea.
Laura hurried inside to close windows, the impulse automatic. Once again she felt some atavistic pull, her feet following old footsteps, her hands moving in old patterns, pulling down the sashes, locking them shut. It occurred to her that in London – in her part of London – the windows were always closed. She switched on lights and pushed back curtains, and settled down to enjoy the storm.
Cress washed her hands at the tap and slipped off her gardening shoes,
paused to look at the sky as distant thunder thumped and rolled. She breathed in the scent of storm air, then turned inside. A piece of silverside was slow-cooking on the stovetop; she cleaned off the carrots she’d picked and added them to the pot. The words Kieran and Angela were unusual friends bubbled away with them. She stood with her hands in her apron pockets, her lips pursed, as if she could re-live the morning and stop herself saying things. The Requiem Canticles, I thought I’d left my body myself. She winced. Stupid, stupid.
She went into the lounge room and looked around for her book. It wasn’t on the arm of the chair where she’d left it. Hadn’t she? A tremor of irritation rippled through her. So much time was wasted in forgetfulness – minutes, hours she would never get back. These days she knew it was best, when something was lost, to stand still, to be calm, to let her mind and her eyes settle. Deep breath. She let her vision wander without urgency over the sofa, the floor, the top of the television. The coffee table. Kieran’s notebook was open there, words from a recent quiz scrawled across a page: remedy, daffodils, symphonic, repent.
From the notebook she bent slightly to look on the other side of the armchair. She half grimaced, half smiled. The corner of a hardback book was visible, lying where it had fallen from the armrest onto the floor, its bookmark beside it. She picked up Martin Chuzzlewit and sat down and began to hunt for her place.
Several minutes – was it? – went by. Cress put the book down and listened. The rain had begun, uneven at first, then drumming an even, reassuring beat on the tin roof. She pushed herself up from the chair, restless, thinking, What’s done is done, and all for the best. So, she thought, moving around the lounge room, straightening doilies, why do I feel like this? That I need, somehow, to account?
The room was in shadow now. She stood in front of the bookshelf, absently running her fingers along spines, shuffling and tidying. Noting the shape each book carved in the dust. Was prompted to clean the shelves there and then, but a crack of lightning intervened, stopping her hand, and it suddenly occurred to her: He still isn’t home. She limped into the kitchen, her legs stiff, to check the dinner and the time. The smell of meat cooking made her cheerful again, replaced any concerns about Kieran. He’d be along. He would, she told herself, come in the back door whistling, hungry, most probably wet from the downfall. Would, of course, want to eat before the ‘Quiz’. As this came to her, this image of her grandson, as she lifted the saucepan lid and leaned away from the steam, and as she caught the breath of meat and onions, in the same moment she knew what she had to do.
She walked into the lounge room where she’d left her handbag. Pulled out the creamy-coloured paper and peered at the writing. The mobile phone number and the 7 with a cross through it, the way it was written in Europe. Later, that 7-would seem stamped on her irises, she would see it everywhere, on her dinner plate, on the carpet, in the sky. Then she picked up the telephone and carefully pressed in Laura’s number.
The voice at the other end made her hesitate. This was a conversation she’d long imagined but never rehearsed. She searched for words and phrases in a momentary panic; stared at the paper that was still in her left hand, as if it was a cue. Outside thunder boomed and rolled and the phone line crackled with static.
Laura was saying: Hello, hello? I can barely hear a word.
Laura? It’s Cress. A pause. I need to speak with you. Cress could hear two lots of thunder, one at each end of the line, and rain smacking against tin. Static spat and fizzed and occasionally shrieked. She pursed her lips and swapped the phone to her other ear. Somehow the storm had made her brave, all that might and energy. It’s about your mother. I need to tell you something. Something from the past.
There was silence for a moment. Then Laura’s voice saying Cress? I don’t think I heard you properly. The crackling rose and fell on the line. This bloody phone.
But Cress was undeterred. I know about the adoption, she said, calm but loud. About the baby, the little boy.
Again, silence. Just the crashing noises of the storm running electrically between them. Cress stood with the weight of words in her hands and arms. She stared at the floor, where the number 7-appeared and disappeared over the carpet, and understood that she needed to keep speaking, while she had the strength. Already every part of her was saying: Stop. Hang up now. So she spoke loudly, and plain. She said: I was there, in the hospital, when the baby was born. I nursed there. I helped to arrange the adoption.
In the moments that followed she imagined the other woman’s reaction. She imagined Laura’s face, cradling the phone, the way her eyes might widen as meaning dawned. But she only heard: You were there? before static intervened again and clarity became impossible. So she gathered her energy and raised her voice and said firmly St Barnabas, come tomorrow down the line, not knowing if Laura heard her, or if the line was still alive. Then she lowered the telephone and placed it in its cradle.
In her bedroom she sat down on the bed and folded her hands on her lap. The room was dim with rain shadows but even so she could easily make out the face of the Virgin. The tears, the sorrowful eyes. For a long time Cress sat and looked at Mary’s face. She felt calm. Mary’s eyes helped, and so did the presence of the dress tucked away on the floor beneath her. She couldn’t see it or feel it, but it comforted her anyway, a cushion against the sharp bones of memory. She allowed herself to feel that for a little while. Then she stood, slowly, and straightened her skirt, and went out to switch on lights in the darkened house. As the kitchen blazed into life she saw the sprigs of parsley on the counter, and decided it wasn’t too late to make a white sauce.
At the highest point of the main road through the hills, behind a splash of emerald green grass, was the entrance to the national park and its walking tracks. Kieran seldom ventured here – at least not on the tracks. Whenever he did, the rainforest crowded in on him and he felt watched, jostled; the dimness and the animal patterns of the trees were vaguely threatening. He preferred to make his own way around, marking his own paths through. But he liked the big grassy picnic area, with its gentle slope and scattered tables and paddymelon droppings. He would choose a shady place at the edge near the flowering ginger plants and watch people come and go.
Today there were two small groups, a family spread out on a blanket with plates and bottles and cups, and a couple on their backs on the grass, their socks and walking boots discarded beside them. One was using a small pack for a pillow, and they both were still, possibly asleep. The family wasn’t very lively either. A woman lay on her belly flicking the pages of a magazine. There was a baby in a floppy hat beside her, and a man with his arms on his knees.
Being here made him feel close to Angela – she’d told him once she liked it here too. She would sit and watch all the families and couples, searching, she said, for what they had and she didn’t. Contentment. After they’d left she’d walk around on the grass, looking for signs, looking at anything they left, the imprint of a blanket, a plastic cup. Anything might be a clue.
Kieran glanced around the perimeter of the park, to where the forest shuffled its feet on the gravel of the car park. Everyone always said there was no noise up here. They spoke about the quiet. But to Kieran, these days there was music everywhere. Even here, crouched low, he was close enough to the trees to hear the prickling of birds’ feet in the mulch, and behind this, the steady slide of lizards, maybe snakes.
And then there were the shushing, secretive sounds of the breeze through thousands of leaves; sometimes he felt that leaf-sound collected itself as it skipped up the hills, moving up through endless trees until it reached him. Birds joined in, and the rattle of palm fronds, and it was as if his head was inside a song. Today it could be a lullaby, Brahms, he tried to remember when Angela played it. He looked over at the woman with her baby, and knew it was something to do with them, but didn’t know exactly what. For a while he was lost in the rhythms of the song, soothed as a small child. A blue-tongue
appeared at the edge of the undergrowth, hesitated, cautious, then stalked into the sun. They both, man and lizard, cocked their heads at the other, agreeing to share the cloudy sunlight, the absence of movement.
Abby’s beads. Kieran thought about the drapery window, Abby’s words like beads themselves: When I’m rich, I’ll wear a different colour every day. A tremor of fear ran through him. He peered down between his feet, at the patch of ground that was its own world, soil, ants, grass. The enormity of what he had done seemed to stare back at him. He had invited Abby home, to come to his own house. He had never done anything like that before, had never invited anybody.
He looked up and breathed deeply, unsure how much time had passed. Now the air smelled of rain, and above the treetops the hazy clouds had turned blue-black and were advancing, it occurred to Kieran, like an army in dark tunics. A fretful wind scurried before them. Beneath the clouds the world had shrunk, compressed between trees and sky. Kieran shivered. He was still unsure about storms. Most people he knew enjoyed them, or said they did – Abby had told him once they were thrilling and he had taken that word away and examined it, turning it over and over, looking for a glint of truth.
Thunder, a tentative grumble, rolled around the eastern sky. At the far end of the green the family was packing up, the man chasing an errant hat across the grass. Kieran stood, but the lizard took fright – or perhaps it smelled the rain too – and scurried off into the bush. The woman scooped the baby onto her hip and hurried off towards the car park.
Kieran moved slowly, skirted wide around the picnic ground. The grass glowed in the storm light. As he walked down the hill his shoes scuffed loudly in the scree that edged the road, kicked thoughtlessly at split and bloated mangoes, turpentines, that had dropped from a late-blooming tree. By the time he got to Angela’s turnoff – hesitating, then walking on, resisting the lure of the house and the woman with the eyes – rain was falling, and he was back inside the lullaby and the story that went with it.
The China Garden Page 10