The China Garden

by Kristina Olsson

  Where was he? She shivered in her thin cotton nightie and it occurred to her he’d been walking more often lately, a couple of times a week. Did she imagine he was feverish and overexcited on those mornings, fidgety, uninterested in the garden or in coming to the shop? She found she was irritable with him, resenting whatever secret he had which didn’t include her, and occupied him more and more.

  For that reason alone she was tempted to go and look for him, to find out what he was keeping from her. But even the moonlight seemed impenetrable, she didn’t like it, and she didn’t like the shapes it made, all their possibilities. She turned from the window, hugging herself, feeling cowardly and yes, irritable, because she’d started to worry about him all over again. She decided to speak with him tomorrow, when she got home from the shop. She climbed back into her bed and slid down beneath the covers.

  Sunday

  The sign near the lifeguard’s tower said STRONG RIPS. The beach was closed and empty. Disappointed, Laura stood on the soft sand and stared out over the surface of the waves, looking for the current’s telltale signs, a subtle difference in colour where the water pulled and sucked. Perhaps it was the ambiguous light left by a shower, but she couldn’t read any danger there. It all seemed innocuous. Just the occasional thump of a heavy wave, harder and louder than the others. But the sign was unequivocal: BEACH CLOSED. Laura turned towards the rock pool below the headland, where a man with silver hair moved in a slow backstroke and a woman in a bathing cap swam sedately up and down.

  She dived without hesitation. The water felt like a second skin. Her body slipped into it and through it, the movement so fluid she might have had fins. She’d done four laps before she had to think about breathing. But her eyes soon began to sting without goggles and she flipped onto her back, kicking, floating, inching up and down the pool. She closed her eyes to the sun. The stiffness in her arms from several hours of window-cleaning ebbed slowly away.

  She’d washed the glass the way Angela always had: with vinegar and newspaper. But it wasn’t how she’d intended to spend the morning. There were shoeboxes and books and cupboards to be opened, things to be sorted. And she wanted to sort them: it was all information, potential clues, pieces of the puzzle. Get started, she’d said to herself. But then, standing with a mug of tea and looking out to the garden, she’d noticed that the windows of the parlour were almost opaque with grime. She’d begun on them immediately.

  And immediately felt awake, alive. It was the rhythm of washing, the circular process of it. Her muscles leapt to the task, their taut reflection emerging as the glass smudged and cleared. Kate would have laughed: It’s your smudgy thoughts you’re clearing, she would have said. You clean to clear your mind.

  Now, idling through the still water, Laura thought of what Kate had said a couple of days before, hearing one phrase echo back from the sandy bottom. Surely it would have broken her heart. Broken her heart. Surely. Her heart. She reached the deep end of the pool again and stopped. Leaned back into the water and pinched her nose, so her hair streamed away from her face, then pushed herself up and out. As she towelled off, she watched the woman in the bathing cap. She was still swimming, her arms arching and reaching, arching and reaching, her rhythm barely broken when she reached each end, stopped and turned, and slid once more into the stroke. Her face, when it surfaced briefly, was leathery brown and thin. Laura wondered how old she was. What shape her heart was in.

  Kieran was feeling restless. It was a beautiful Sunday, clear and golden and hot, but empty too. He lay on the floor, skipping through his tape, but nothing caught him. He was aware of Cress’s familiar movements around her room. From the time on the clock and the sounds she made – her feet padding to and from the wardrobe, little grunts as she tugged on her shoes – he knew she was getting ready for church.

  Today he didn’t want to be in the house alone. He thought, drifting through images: the park, the sand, the headland. Then he was up, ejecting the tape, tucking it carefully away in his room. He called in the direction of his grandmother: I’ll see you later, Cress, and was out the door without waiting for an answer.

  He had no real plans; that was half the joy. On an empty Sunday the world was full of shapes and possibilities. He drifted slowly along the quiet streets of town, past the c l o s e d signs on the doors of smaller shops, and before the plan had formed in his head he was heading towards the rocky end of Broken Beach, below the reserve where the lighthouse peered over the bay. He loved the rocky platforms here, the way the tide left small grottos of water, lined with shells and seaweed. He loved the shapes of the rocks themselves, some like block chocolate, some lined like a crossword. But what he loved most was the lighthouse. It was old and small compared to pictures he had seen, but to Kieran it was perfectly shaped, and by night the regular sweep and flash of its beam was perfect too, as sustaining as a heartbeat.

  He climbed the steep foot track, through stands of coastal banksias, then followed the fence around the cliff to the reserve. There was no one else there. Happy, he sat down with his back to the cool white concrete of the lighthouse and looked out over the endless miles of ocean. He imagined his eyes as the light, sweeping over the far reaches of water. If the light had eyes, what would it see? It would, he realised suddenly, see the whales before he did, when they journeyed up the coast for warmer water, and again on their return.

  The walk back from the beach took less time, or seemed to. Laura could feel the sun beneath her skin, the tightness of salt. But it was also a clean, scrubbed feeling, and back at the house she decided not to shower it off. Outside, the south-easterly had picked up; it brought with it the slap of lemon gum and mulch, like a wave. She thought about tea, decided against it, and poured cold water into a glass instead. Then turned from the sink and looked around: the rest of the kitchen cupboards, the parlour and bookshelves, the upstairs rooms. There was a whole life to dismantle. She swallowed most of the water and considered where to continue the day’s chores, then changed her mind. She looked around for Silas Marner, something to remove her for a while.

  Over bench tops, the table, the backs of chairs. Nothing. Immediately she felt the familiar growl of impatience in her belly. She’d felt it over the past couple of days: small disappointments or irritations became inflamed like infections in her. Missing keys, a blunt knife – two such events in proximity could induce fury.

  She put her glass down. For Christ’s sake. Lifted things from the scored and stained lino bench top. The sight of it, its age and damage, deepened her distress. She stalked into the parlour, reefed a towel from a chair, but her eye caught something to the left and she looked up sharply. There was a figure in the open doorway. Fergus.

  I tried to call, he said. No answer. Wiping his feet on the mat and stepping inside. There was a question in the way he looked at her but he just said: You’ve been to the beach.

  She dropped the towel and pushed her hair behind her ears, breathing deeply to disguise her fright. Then shrugged and gave a half-smile. I keep losing things, she said, struggling with her voice. I’ve probably lost the phone. She threw a glance around the parlour as if that might help. When she looked back he was still standing just inside the door, his hands in the pockets of his long boardshorts. He looked, she thought, like the real Fergus, hair wild and uncombed, barefoot.

  You’ve got some work to do around here, he said.

  Kieran was usually the one who saw the whales first. Without binoculars – unlike the others who came, their eyes intent on the sea. He wasn’t even aware of watching for them, or of the timing, of the arrival of October. But Kieran knew this bowl of sea as if it was a street he’d lived in. He knew its shapes and rhythms, the sounds it made under various skies, the way it moved beneath the winds. Its moody greens and greys. The way it smelled of bodies, not human.

  That was what he loved most about it, its un-humanness. Its failure to respond or belong or bend to people. The way it kept
its own counsel. Perhaps that was why, so often, he was the first to spot them: his eyes saw the sea differently in the first place. Their presence didn’t come as a surprise. It was as if he knew and saw the shape of them moving, well before the first plume of spray appeared above the waterline, a magician flourishing his scarf. But when he saw them his chest banged with gladness all the same, and he would watch for a tail or a breach, laughing, his cells alive with the connection, animal or human or other-worldly.

  He sat there, feeling the bulk of the lighthouse at his back, remembering October and the day the whales came this time. It was only a few weeks back, but to Kieran it seemed much longer. It was a Monday, he remembered that. He’d been alone up here, all the weekenders had gone and everyone else was at work or at home. At any rate they were not at the beach. Except for one solitary pair, a young mother and her small child down near the rocks on Broken Beach, where, he guessed later, they were too preoccupied with rock pools to see what he saw out to sea.

  He’d been at Angela’s the night before. They’d talked of orchards and olive groves, of dark, secret beaches, other places. She’d been to the beach in England once, she’d told him. The water gripped me, she said. Instead of washing up and around. I suppose it was the mood I was in. He’d nodded, thinking of the sea’s own tempers, its wiles. I didn’t trust it, she said. I wanted Greece, that blue-white water, the almonds and olives. But she’d never gone there.

  Why? he’d asked her. Why hadn’t she gone? Why didn’t she go now? Angela had smiled at him, although her brush didn’t stop and her eyes didn’t move. Kieran stood his ground. You could take your easel. You could paint the beach. He might have been waving a passport, or tickets in his hand.

  She did stop then. Yes, she said. I could.

  But what she was saying, he thought, was I could have. She was speaking of possibilities in the past. He’d realised that the day after, sitting right here, and he’d looked up suddenly, towards the horizon. He was moved as always by its infinitesimal curve. That was when he’d seen them. Way out, a shadow in the water, then a shape that might be just part of the dark swell. But then it deepened, took on form. He knew immediately it was them, hadn’t moved, not even blinked, for fear it would change things or that in that second they’d be gone. He was rewarded with a bulge of grey above the water, and then a tail, slapping – a sign, he was sure, that they knew he was there. But that was all. Nothing more. He’d sat for an hour, trying to pierce the water with his gaze; all he saw – he thought – was one grey elliptical movement, a shiver over the skin of the sea.

  Now he squinted into the sun. Thought of the whales tunnelling through the deep, their calves at their sides, singing. He’d heard their songs once, on television. They reminded him of something, some noise in the night, the wind perhaps.

  Were they singing that day, weeks ago, would he have heard if he’d listened? Or were those tail-slaps a sign, a code that he should have picked up?

  Surely he should have known, somehow, about Angela, there must have been some kind of message he’d ignored, some words in the wind just for him, heard only by him, the way whale song was heard only by whales. Whatever it was he had missed it. Had forfeited his chance to say goodbye. Really, he had to listen to things more carefully, watch more carefully. There might even have been a clue on the ‘Quiz’ for him. Something vital he hadn’t written down.

  Cress looked into the mirror and smoothed the fabric of her skirt with the palm of her hand. Turned to the side, twisting her head for the back view. She’d never entirely come round to the idea of bare legs on Sundays. Stockings were like gloves and handbags to her, an integral part of dressing for church all the way through her youth and early adulthood. She had persevered with stockings and suspenders right up until Shelley was in high school and began a remorseless campaign against them, especially in summer. For a while then Cress had switched to pantyhose, but never got the hang of them, the way the legs twisted and the fork bit into flesh. Shelley could only laugh. She’d sworn never to wear stockings again after school, not even at her wedding. Not even pantyhose.

  Cress finally gave in one humid summer, but only after Shelley’s advice that the discards would not be wasted, that they’d make good ties for vines and climbers in the garden. Still, the feel of naked legs beneath skirts and dresses was a shock, and even now, these years later, the sight of them in the mirror was unsettling. She turned back and checked the buttons on her blouse, laid her hand briefly on her mother’s jade brooch. Well, she thought, you will do.

  Outside she plucked a straw hat from its hook and stood for a moment, kneading the brim into tidier shape. This perhaps was why, though she felt for her purse in her handbag, she forgot her keys, leaving them in the lock, and walked happily through the garden to the back gate. The summer morning had a sound of its own, it always reminded her of soup simmering on a stove, the heat pushing all those smells into the air. Those things were in her head, those noises and smells, when she reached the gate and swung it open, smack into the body of a young girl standing in the early shadow of the fence.

  Cress had time to press her hand to her chest in fright and mutter My God as the girl stumbled, grabbing at the fence for balance, and began to back away, saying Just stopped to tie my shoelace, or somesuch. Then she was gone. Over the hill, into the heat of the day, as if she was never there. But Cress’s heart thumped hard enough to keep her a moment, clutching the gate, trying to work out who the girl was, and how old, and if she had imagined the bulge beneath the loose flowery shift the girl had worn, or if the girl was in fact a vision. She frowned, looked up and down the street. Really, it was just a girl stopping to tie a shoelace. She pulled a handkerchief from her blouse and dabbed her forehead, then looked at her watch. Opened her handbag, dropped the handkerchief in and set off down the hill. The thing was, she didn’t think she’d ever seen that face before.

  That last night, Angela had talked about opera, too. He’d asked her about her favourite ones. By then, he felt he knew exactly what she would say, but he loved to ask her anyway.

  The Italians, she said without hesitating. La Traviata. Rigoletto.

  Tell me about the first time you heard them.

  Angela had smiled at him, knowing the routine. I thought I was in some kind of heaven. She looked out at the darkness. Animal heaven. Then back at him. The sounds were more than human. They made me feel better than human.

  Kieran had stared over at her, thinking of animal sounds, thinking of whales even then. For a moment he wasn’t sure what she meant. Better than human. But then she caught his gaze and held it – it seemed like ages – as if there was some understanding they had just arrived at, the two of them. Then she looked away and he’d looked down at his jeans, his shoes, half-expecting he’d grown scales, fins. But it was just ordinary denim, ordinary joggers.

  Now he blinked at the sharp chinks of light on the sea. The sun was too bright for those memories today. He caught himself scanning the horizon for a flash of fin or tail, or the languorous heave of massive bodies through the swell. There was nothing; they might be miles to the south by now, he knew that. But there were days when he needed to come up here and look out, just in case, just in case something extraordinary, or miraculous had happened. Today the sea was empty, unmomentous, a broad silver sheet that hurt his eyes. He pushed himself up and wandered off towards the beach.

  There were two Sunday services at St Barnabas Church, and Cress preferred the earlier one. There were fewer people to remark on her infrequent visits, a smaller audience for her faithlessness. But there was something else, she thought as she walked towards the timber and sandstone church building set back from the wooden hall that was now St Barnabas Thrift Shop. She felt her way along this new notion. Her thinking matched the pace of her feet along the uneven pavement. What was it? Something about the crowd at the later service, their heads bobbing up and down in tune to a psalm or a prayer, their docility.
When there were fewer she didn’t notice it so much. She wasn’t – here she stopped, looking down at a stray dandelion on the edge of the path as if she was listening to it – she wasn’t distracted.

  She looked up. Although the bells were ringing, a couple of people lingered on the front porch of the church. Cress tightened her hold on the handbag pressed to her side, pursed her lips. Go on, then. She said it aloud, pulling the handkerchief from her handbag. She was in no mood to run the gauntlet, for airy pleasantries. But even as she dabbed again at her forehead and throat and adjusted her hat, the last of them drifted through the doorway, freeing her to move up the path. She held the handrail and ascended the few steps, crossing the threshold with the last peal of bells. Took a place on an empty pew towards the back of the church, away from the others, where she could concentrate on the job at hand. A silent interrogation of – what? God? Some spirit, some remnant of something? Perhaps it was Ed, or whatever remained in the wake of everything that had ever lived. Whatever it was that held up the sky, produced the new morning, presided – finally – over everything, good things and bad.

  Sundays, Kieran had quickly discovered, were no-Abby days. He wasn’t sure why, but she’d said something once about the Sabbath which Kieran didn’t understand. He’d looked up the word immediately when he got home. In the dictionary, along with Christian Sunday, was day of obligatory abstinence from work and play and period of rest. It helped a bit, but not much. Cress went off to church some Sundays, and he knew she was Christian. But she didn’t talk about the Sabbath. And she didn’t abstain from anything that he knew of. He’d worried over abstain since the night he’d heard its meaning on ‘Whiz Kids’. It had the kind of hard sound, he thought, that left a bruise in the air.