She looked up and was surprised to find the dusk was almost complete. A tomato, a sprig of parsley and some marjoram, then: they would have omelette, and a salad. She levered herself up, bent again to gather the lettuce and to brush her knees. Limped to the back door, where she remembered the keys were still in the ignition of the car – that she had driven in and gone straight to her weeding – and that up in the wooded hills, Laura would be sifting through words and images, her own dark strangers, trying to find a way in.
Kieran left Abby at the fruit shop and wandered back through town. After everything that had happened he felt aimless, suddenly. It was a feeling he rarely had; there was always something to do, something to watch, somewhere to go. But he’d been with Abby for hours and hours – the longest they’d ever spent together – and now, without her, he felt odd, as if he wasn’t quite whole. He thought about this as he crossed the esplanade onto Convent Beach. There were some good rocks for sitting at the far end, and he wandered along the shoreline, hoping for signs of yesterday’s storm, things discarded by wind and waves.
The tide had left scatterings of jelly-like creatures, small rounds and ovals the size of a lemon, some transparent, others sea-blue. There was the occasional bluebottle too, and clumps of seaweed. He stooped to look at a long strip of kelp, ridged like leather but soft. He nudged it with his toe. He’d seen lots like that, it was nothing new. He preferred the mornings after a big tide when he could be surprised by odd things left on the hard sand like gifts. A bright blue peg, a whole coconut and, once, a thick frond of sea grass in the exact shape of a baby’s foot. Even now he watched for a corked bottle with a message, but it had never come.
Low sulky clouds bunched out over the sky again, dulling the sun. In the milky light the sea was dark green, hoarding its mysteries. Kieran found a flat rock and sat hugging his knees. He stared down at the patterns left by crabs, tiny balls of sand splaying out like Christmas decorations, at the way the foreshore turned to glass after a wave withdrew. He’d tried to see his face in it, when he was a child. The thought brought a picture: he and his mother on Saturday afternoons, with the big old bicycle on the hard sand of low tide. She would prop him on the handlebars and slowly ride the whole half-moon shoreline of Convent Beach and back. Sometimes they’d sing. Or else they’d just ride along together, with the smell of salt and their hair knotting.
The memory made him happy and sad at the same time. The word content came to him, and he knew the odd feeling was about Angela. He thought, I miss Angela. The feeling deepened as images of all those nights in the shed, years of them, cascaded through him, along with a new notion, unwelcome: he would never see Angela, never talk to her, again.
Kieran looked up at the waves tipping themselves onto the beach. Lift and tip, lift and tip. Little sighs as the sand absorbed them. Not far from him a small boy was digging in the sand. Kieran wondered what he was thinking. Was he wondering how far he could go? Kieran remembered digging holes in the sand too, while his mother watched; she would ask if he was digging to China. China. Was that what the boy was thinking too, that he might dig and dig until something or somewhere appeared beneath his scrabbling hands?
Then suddenly the boy was up and away, leaping down the beach towards a couple returning from a walk. His work was done; no China in sight today. Kieran sat for a while and listened to the sea, its roar and fizz. Finally, he pushed himself up, hesitated a moment, but could not resist: he meandered down the beach, hands in pockets, kicking softly at sand, to stand at the edge of the hole. He stared down – it was cone-shaped, widest at the top. Already an errant wave had collapsed one edge, and the wall had crumbled, leaving a small disc of shallow water in which, shockingly somehow, Kieran could see his face.
All around raised lines and lumps of sand radiated out from the pit, the slurry thrown there by the boy as he dug, so that the hole itself became the centre of a star. Kieran crouched at the edge, regarding it all, the effort, the lovely pattern in the sand. Then he lay down flat on his belly, listening. The clawing feeling left him and he felt flushed with happiness, as if Angela had been there, not the boy, as if the pit was full of music.
He’d sat listening one night as light rain fell among leaves outside Angela’s window. Water funnelled down the roof; there was the sound of soft voices in the gutters as it slipped along, and somewhere beneath it all, a tap-tapping as it dripped on concrete or rock. And a frog, striking low bass notes.
Kieran had felt his way along a thought that was nudging through the quiet in his head. There was the frog and the voices in the water. They might have been coming from within him. Might have been part of him, part of his head’s quietness, like the movement of his own blood. The thought flowered in front of him then, although he had no words to give it speech. But Angela, suddenly beside him, offered them up.
You were born to these sounds, she said. Water falling, water slipping, running. Pushing up a beach. They’re your lullabies.
Yes, he’d thought. The sounds I was born with, the sounds of being born. He felt extraordinarily happy then. Happiness flushed through him, from hairline to toenails, and he looked down, half expecting that he’d turned a different colour. Angela was still there, gazing at the window. Her face was reflected in the glass, calm and still, and beyond it, through it, the first wash of watery dawn in a black sky. He smiled at the window, raised his hand to the reflected Angela. Good night, she had said. He left quickly through the side door, and melted into shadow.
Laura hacked through the hard skin of a pumpkin with the sharpest knife she could find. It felt good to use the muscles in her arms and she felt rewarded, as the slice fell away, by the shocking yellow of the flesh. She decided not to peel it, to bake it quickly with oil and garlic and pine nuts, the way Kate liked it. On impulse she picked up her phone and dialled. When Kate answered she said, Do you remember what a Queensland Blue is?
A pause. Cheese? Kate laughed down the line. Is this a test?
Do you remember eating stringy mangoes?
Stringy?
The Southern Cross? We sat on the steps every night when we were here, looking for it.
Mum, I was only four. Five.
What about your grandmother?
Not much. I remember the beach, the huge waves, being scared when you went into them.
And Angela?
Just impressions. She didn’t say much. Kate paused. I have this one image in my head, of her hand. I must have been sitting beside her, because my hand is there too. She’s making lines on a piece of paper, over and over, showing me. There were bits of green paint under her nails.
Laura thought of Angela and Kate, cross-legged in the shade of a pandanus, drawing while she swam. She taught you to draw pig-face, she said. And dune flowers.
The late shower had brought into the house the smell of wet rich soil and eucalyptus. Laura breathed it in, remembering the visit, Kate’s paleness in comparison to other children, her wide-eyed wonder at the animals. After her first sight of a paddymelon, Kate had tried to make herself wake up early, to catch them nibbling grass in the rose garden. It was summer; they’d had to warn her about snakes, and meat ants, and leeches after rain. She and Laura had spent hours lying in the shallows at the beach, letting waves wash over their legs, making dribble castles. Occasionally Angela would join them, bringing her sketchbook, and an extra one for Kate.
It seemed, Laura thought now as Kate said goodbye and raced off to work, the best that Angela could do. This small sharing of herself, of the thing she loved, with her granddaughter. She was not good at conversation, not good at play. Had Angela agonised about it before they came – how to deal with a grandchild, as well as a daughter? In the end she’d paid attention to Kate in the way she knew how.
Laura squeezed garlic over the pumpkin slices and wiped her hands. Something else was at the back of that memory. It was as if it ha
d a soundtrack. She refilled her wine glass and walked outside, or was drawn outside, she thought later – because looking down at the yard rather than out at the grey line of sea, there was the shed. After the first time she hadn’t felt any compulsion to go in there. It sat in the corner of her vision – just like, she thought, the subconscious of the house, or her own, or Angela’s.
In the quiet of sunset she thought she heard music again, a lullaby. Bach. Was it? Laura didn’t know. Had made it her business to know nothing of the classics, to confine her musical tastes to her own century. But she remembered that something had changed during the visit with Kate – something between all three of them. Angela had still gone to the shed every night, still played her music, but it was different to the ugly, overblown stuff Laura had come to detest throughout her young life. The music from the shed those nights was gentle, pieces she knew would not be confronting to a child. Bach, Beethoven. Peter and the Wolf.
She breathed in the damp smells of early evening, of heat evaporating, remembering one morning during that visit when she’d woken early to the sounds of the same music that was in her head now. She’d walked downstairs into the eeriness of it: violins and birdsong. She’d gone to the kitchen window, frowning, as if the sounds might be visible. Kate was there, sitting on the top step with her chin in her hands. In the stillness she might have been another part of the foliage, a pretty shrub, all crumpled cotton and springy hair. Laura had begun to move towards her before she realised the little girl was listening. Really listening, as if the music was a favourite story. Her face had that look: captured, Laura had thought. She’d stood and watched her until the music ebbed away.
Laura took her glass and sat down on the step Kate had sat on twenty years before. She tried to listen. The music in her head had quietened, but she was there, within Kate’s sounds, a four-year-old hearing them for the first time. From inside the music she made herself look out: it was the opposite end of the day, the air was darkening instead of becoming light, but now she could smile like a child, one who is experiencing beauty for what it is. Included, not excluded from it. Captured, not jealous.
Something, some flash or flicker of light or movement, made her look up. Her heart thumped. There, behind an untidy gum and a frangipani, a figure. A man. She kept very still. All her senses were still with the music, and she tried to blink the figure away. But now there was no doubt – she could see his outline, the jungly colours of his clothes, and from the angle of his head he seemed to be looking straight at her.
The first spear of fright passed. She breathed. A puzzle of words and images began to come together in her head. There was something expected about this. She lowered her eyes as if she had been caught staring, not him. Busied herself brushing imaginary ants from her feet, examining her toes. Perhaps a whole minute went by. She peered up through her lashes, her head bent. He was still there.
She stood slowly, deliberately keeping her gaze low, and walked back along the deck, keeping the figure in her peripheral vision. He didn’t move. She was beginning to understand: he was more a presence than a fact. Like the aftermath of something. She leaned on the railing, looking out to the dim horizon, intensely aware of him, but feeling her body relax. Knowing in those seconds that this was not the first time he had stood there, straight as a tree, watching her. Knowing too that he would not move while she was out here. She wavered for a moment between wishing he would leave and wanting him to stay, to tempt him with small lures as she would a hungry animal.
No, not yet. She wasn’t ready. And if she wasn’t, then most likely nor was he. Still, it took a considerable effort of will to lean back from the railing and turn away. To turn her back, step away slowly as if she was lost in thought. The fearful part of her hoped her instincts were right. As she placed one foot deliberately in front of the other, the boards of the deck cooler now, she told herself her instincts were strong. Step, step. She made herself smile. I am safe with him, she thought. At the big glass doors she took one step over the threshold, tried to look back without seeming to, a flick of the head that took in the back end of the shed, the low shrubs, the frangipani. That was all. She was back inside the house, and he might still be there, watching. Or might not.
But her instincts fled with the fading light. She was a woman on her own, in a house without neighbours. The darkness was feral, it was the animal she’d lured, malevolent. How stupid she was, naïve. She pulled the vegetables from the oven. The figure could have been anyone. Pursing her lips, she took the torch and went back out through the glass doors. The beam of light was shocking against the grain of wood, making it alien, but she stalked to the steps and stood, waving the torch like a weapon. Nothing. Only the anonymous shapes of the bush at night. On the low horizontal branch of a eucalypt, a possum, indignant. And in a tree to the right, startling her voice from her throat, the wide other-worldly eyes of an owl. Oh, she heard herself say, it’s you, as her own eyes mimicked the owl’s and they stared at each other.
For a moment she felt appalled, and unsure why. She’d always felt the presence of owls as a blessing, especially when she was young. Then she smiled at herself. Of course, she thought, it’s a sign. A good omen. She ran the light quickly around the surrounding trees, leaves and branches and patterned bark flicking madly on and off in its beam. Then she turned and went inside for dinner.
He stood listening to the wind and all the night animals scurrying, shifting. He felt his whole body relax. Sometimes, he thought, the noise of cicadas was like the night breathing. So that he held his own breath when they stopped. That’s what he found himself doing now as he lounged behind trees near her back verandah. He had to remind himself to inhale. He’d take big lungfuls of the warm, doughy air, and happily scan the house. Waiting for her to come back into the kitchen.
It was easy to watch her at night. She kept all the lights on. So whichever room she was in, he could follow her clearly. Still, he couldn’t relax too much. Every now and then she would throw a look over her shoulder unexpectedly, as if someone had called out her name. But there was no one else there. He knew that. It occurred to him out of the blue, and shockingly, that unlike Angela, unlike him, the woman was afraid of the dark. Other people were, he knew. Angela had told him.
You’re not afraid of night, are you?
He’d looked at her, gauging the question. Unsure what she meant.
Some people are scared of the dark, she went on, squeezing paint from a tube. There were smears of yellow and green on the table top beside her. Children often are. Weren’t you?
No.
Never? When you were small?
He’d tried to think. The word never made it hard. The dark made him think only of comfort. The shades of night, the different depths of places that were less dark than others, kind of lit from within, like the bark of some trees or lichen on rocks. He could tell her about that. Or he could tell her about the stories that came with night, blooming in his head like hothouse flowers that couldn’t bear the sun. He could tell her how the darkness, smudging over detail, over the hard facts of day, released him. From vigilance, from himself. And allowed his shy imagination to send out shoots, at last. Night was, he thought, when he was least frightened. Most sure. This was how it had been for as long as he could remember.
He had watched Angela dab at her canvas. There were moving points of green beneath her brush. No, he said. I’m not scared of nights. Nights give me good ideas.
Angela smiled, her eyes on her canvas. Yes, she said, ideas. She stood back, her brush still poised. That’s what scares some people about night. She handed him the brush to hold, and laughed.
Hours later, walking back along the forest road, he had thought about their conversation and wished Angela was with him. He would show her how the dark contained shadows, how the night was not uniform. It would never happen. I am too old, she had laughed when he asked her, for nightwalking. But as he slipped down into
the town, along back streets where sounds took on form – a dog snuffling, leaves shifting – he imagined her beside him. Together they would listen and see. They would show each other the shapes of things. He would tell her how he listened to the stars. With that thought he had begun to whistle softly into the dark. Was still whistling as he reached the sand, where he stretched out on his back, his arms beneath his head, eyes wide. It would take just a minute, maybe two, and then the sky would begin to tell him its stories.
Midnight, and the air in the house registered an absence. Cress sat up in bed, listening for what was missing, but at first all she could feel was the light, the stinging moonlight on her face, striping the room through the blinds. It was a moon just past full, a piece sliced from its round, and as soon as she looked at it, face to face through the sash window, she knew Kieran was gone again.
He liked to walk at night. Late, when the air was unencumbered and the world, he’d told her, was most innocent, like a man sleeping. Have you ever watched a man sleeping? he asked her once, when she’d declined an invitation to join him. He’s like a little boy! he exclaimed, his eyes wide. His whole face, it’s different. Gentle. That’s what the world is like at night.
It didn’t convince her to go. She preferred the light to the dark. She liked to see what the world was capable of.
But tonight she was worried by this gap in the air, this vacuum. Usually she had no idea he’d gone. The only sign of his night walking was in the morning: if he’d been out, he slept late, and she wouldn’t hear him until he opened his window to the garden and shouted Cre-ess! Cressida! How about a cup of tea? It worried her, suddenly, that this hole in the air existed all those nights as she slept, unaware, while her grandson explored the innocent night.
She looked out over the back paddock, the long grass silvered and icy like the sea at sunset. She suddenly realised there were sounds you might only hear because it was night, sounds the day obliterated, and that if she stared hard she could just make out the sound of small waves staggering onto the sand.
The China Garden Page 13