So he might already have been feeling the menace of that word when he dropped down to the beach and thought he saw Abby sitting in a fold of rocks clustered below the cliff path. He squinted: the holiday dress gave her away. It was such a surprise, an unanticipated joy, that he’d begun to run towards her, calling Hey, Abby! before he realised she wasn’t alone. There were two people wedged into the rocks. He glimpsed a face – it was a man, unfamiliar – and then Abby was on her feet, blocking his view, pulling at her dress and saying What are you doing here?
Kieran was struck dumb. Could only stare as she rearranged her dress, her hands moving fast but not fast enough. The bruises on her arms were bluish black, and he briefly saw one on her neck, a kind of angry red. He looked around her: the man, he saw, was not really a man, more like a tall boy; his skinny arms were folded over his bare chest and he was smirking. His face reminded Kieran of some boys he’d gone to school with, their cruel mouths. He looked at Abby again. She smiled at him and pushed her hair back and then walked away a few paces.
Kieran moved towards her and stopped, kicking his bare feet into the damp sand. She said, Hey, meet you on the headland in half an hour? Then, That tree there, it smells like potatoes, he thought she said. A sudden wind snatched at the words as she spoke, as her eyes dismissed him, and he stumbled away, up to the esplanade, past all the weekend beach-goers with their hats and umbrellas and smells of suntan oil. He tried not to think about it, about Abby and the man, and walked until he could see the post office clock. Half an hour. She said she’d meet him in half an hour. On a Sunday.
He reached the fruit shop and stood looking at the bins piled high with oranges, with cabbages and avocados, veined like testicles. He said her name, noiselessly. Abby. Abigail. It was, he thought, as beautiful and mysterious as aubergine. As almonds. That had been the colour of the bruises on her arms: aubergine. Suddenly, he felt like he had been hit. And everything about Abby, about Abby and him, was knocked sideways, confused.
Until then, he’d learned about her in puzzle pieces. He’d had no idea how to put them together or even if they would fit but, in Abby’s case, precision didn’t seem to matter. Not in the beginning. It might have been the first time in his life when the facts didn’t really count. With Abby he’d begun to enjoy the indefinite, the inexact, the things it might be better not to know. That day, though, he knew this had to change. He began again to look for certainty.
He walked up to the headland, breathing in deeply beneath each tree, sampling the scents. The ocean hissed and sighed fifty metres below. Finally he spied her bright cotton shoulder-bag under a paperbark and wandered towards it, hands in pockets, trying for nonchalance. There was the smell of cooked potatoes, slightly burned.
Abby was not there. He walked behind the tree and peered between the low shrubs, knowing it was his job to find her. But there was no girl up in the branches, no grinning girl disguised by foliage. He felt the stirrings of irritation, but when he glanced down at her bag again – it looked heavy, bulging with something, its strap in the dirt – he was reminded of a crime scene he’d seen on television, the handbag of the victim dropped in her struggles. His heart thumped like a fist. His lips moved, unbidden: Please, Abby. There was no sound. He put his hand to his mouth, to stop it making more words. When he looked up, she was there, fifty metres away, near the fence at the edge of the headland.
She stood there with the wind in her face, pushing hard against her. It made her look more like a statue than a girl, like those figures in Angela’s art books, granite, or vermiculite. Stone, but real. For one moment he wished she was stone, he would have run his fingers over her face, over her sculpted cheeks, her eyes looking out. Her lips.
But he didn’t move. He just watched her, knowing in that extraordinary moment why Angela was a painter, what artists tried to do with paint, the rewards of re-creating a beloved face in stone. Understood fully and briefly the lure of all art, the quest of all acts of creation. But could never have articulated it. Or taken it any further. It was one moment, radiant. And then gone. His next breath brought back his everyday world, his everyday deficiencies.
She turned. Tasting the wind, knowing he was there. He watched as the stone fragmented, melted into Abby’s ordinary, crooked, weary smile. Sauntered towards her, shy as an acolyte. She stood waiting, unreadable as stone. They both looked back towards the ocean, speech or the need for it absorbed by waves pawing the shore beneath them. Kieran strained to see it all, the ocean, her face – and then he remembered. The marks on her arm. He opened his mouth, but there were no words there, none of the right ones. The wind obscured them, and then the reason for them. But the bruises were in his head now, behind his eyes, a carbon-copy. For him to consider afterwards.
They walked back down towards the park, but she didn’t want to stop there. He began to walk towards the fruit shop, where she always left him, but she didn’t want to go there, either. I’m not going home, she said. Kieran looked at her. I’m going to visit a friend. She kicked at a tuft of grass, once, twice, her eyes on something over his right shoulder, although he knew it was just an ordinary footpath, with its straggly shrubs and odd bits of paper nudged along by the wind.
He stood with his arms hanging limply at his side, and then he became aware of his fists. They were clenching and unclenching. His heart felt like it was bruising his chest. Does your father know? he asked the same tuft of grass. All she had was her shoulder-bag. She wasn’t even wearing shoes.
Not his business, she said. Anyway, she said, looking at him suddenly as if it wasn’t him, staring hard, he’s an arse. I hate him.
Kieran stared back. As if it wasn’t really her. He’d never heard her swear, never heard her use hard words, like hate. She turned then and began to walk away. Kieran hurried to catch up. I’ll walk you there, he said to her back, I’ll walk you to your friend’s.
She stopped. Looked at him calmly and said, No, you can’t, it’s too far, and then, as she moved away, she tilted her head backwards and called something out to the sky. He didn’t hear it, couldn’t make out the words, although later he would visualise them as long unbroken ribbons, unspooling upwards, across the reach of blue. On each was the message meant only for him. He turned back towards the beach, looking upwards, expecting skywriting. Trailing words like clouds, for all the world to see.
Fergus produced ginger beer in stubbies from the van parked outside and they walked from room to room. Laura stood back as Fergus peered at the details of doors and windows and wood and plaster. He took his time, prodding, leaning into corners, looking beneath things and around them. Upstairs he ran the flat of his hand across panels of wood, scratched at peeling paint. Solid, he said. Back downstairs he went outside, looking up and down, once more tapping, pulling, pushing.
The balustrade on your deck’s rotten. In several places. He drained his stubby and turned to her. She was standing in the shadow of the sliding back doors, watching. Inspectors would fail it. Too dangerous. He looked down and then up again. And some of these planks are almost gone.
She nodded, sipping her drink.
Kitchen cupboard doors need replacing, and the benchtop. Mouldy tiles in the bathroom. Window frames should be sanded and oiled.
Jesus, Fergus. She blew out a long breath. What will that all cost? She walked to the edge of the deck and pushed the balustrade. It moved alarmingly beneath her hand.
Fergus grinned. For the first time Laura wondered how old he was. We could just paint over the rotten bits if you like, he shrugged. They probably wouldn’t notice.
Laura rubbed her arms, although she wasn’t cold. I probably would though, she smiled back, when I plummeted through it.
He opened two more stubbies and handed her one. The other jobs are fiddly. He sat down on the deck and leaned against the wall. But I could do the balustrade and decking over a day or two.
Fergus – she sa
t cross-legged a few feet from him.
I’m free next week, he said.
Cress didn’t wait until the end of the Benediction. The lovely, mesmerising words and all those closed eyes provided just enough cover, and she crept from her pew as fast as her stiff limbs would take her. Outside, instead of turning towards home, she found herself walking down the esplanade and across the road towards the sea. Her head was still deep in the thoughts that had found her while the rest of the small congregation had listened to a reading from Luke. She walked without any real intention, but looked around long enough to acknowledge that it was rare for her, these days or any days, to find her feet in sand.
When she was a girl she had lived in a house right above the ocean. A house on low stilts, with deep verandahs and a tin roof, squatting behind a line of coastal banksias on the ridge above Convent Beach. It seemed to Cress it had rained a lot. More than now, at least. In her memory she’d been surrounded by green; the sea, the hills behind her, the deep grass on the paths down the cliff to the beach.
Cress had never been a swimmer. She’d discovered early that the sun was an enemy to skin as fair as hers: it would redden and sting just minutes, it seemed, after she leapt into the water with her brothers. Now she paused near a clump of dune grass, watching a woman dangle a baby in the shallows. Many summer evenings she’d spent as a child on a wide verandah, stretched out on her belly, while lumps of grated raw potato dried on her shoulders and back. Beneath her the hard cushions on the wicker couch would prickle her stomach and face. If she was very burned, her mother would repeat the procedure, layering the cold potato until the redness had disappeared. Be still, Cressida. She could hear her father even now, behind his rustle of newspaper, his pipe making his s sounds thicker. Cress would squeal and complain and her brothers would taunt; but secretly she loved the sensation and the magic of the potato, the way it absorbed the heat in her skin. The day after, the pain would be gone.
Later, though, it became harder to endure the humiliation. It was easier to stay out of the sun, to convince herself that the sand was too hot, the sea too rough, too mysterious. She avoided the beach and took refuge in the shade of big trees and in books, and was gratified by the pale complexions and constant hat-wearing of English heroines. A wide, soft brim became her trademark; beneath it her eyes could wander over other faces without seeming to stare. She could freely study the eyes of others long before they came to rest on her.
This morning, squinting beneath her panama, she slipped off her shoes and walked towards the hard sand near the shore. Small children with zinc-smeared noses dug holes and looked for yabbies. She could admit, these days, to the relief she’d felt at being unable to spend hours in the sun, and in the sea. She’d never been comfortable in the water. The pull and push of waves and tides had terrified her: they belonged to creatures that didn’t live by human rules. To Cress this seemed ridiculous; these creatures were stupid, without a brain like hers, but she had no power over them in the sea. She smiled to herself at the memory, and thought of Kieran. He preferred dry land, but even when he was very small it wasn’t out of arrogance, or even out of fear.
Like her, he wasn’t a swimmer, didn’t like immersing himself at all. Like her, he preferred the external comforts of the sea – the smell of it, the sounds, the way it looked under different skies. Cress had always thought that to Kieran the sea was like some kind of sibling; he lived alongside it, knowing its strengths and weaknesses and idiosyncrasies, feeling his links with it, the commonalities. He loved it but didn’t need to engage with it. Cress understood that. She’d always felt the same way about her brothers.
She came to the rock platform that was exposed at low tide. She was watching a family of tiny crabs skitter between sand and rock so that it took some minutes before she saw the figure lying face-down on the flat rocks, perhaps twenty feet away. Her heart thumped with fright: the clothes were familiar, faded jeans and dark singlet. She made a soft, garbled sound that died in her throat, but then the figure moved, an arm, then a shoe, and she realised he was alive and straining to see something on the rocks.
With small and painstaking steps she made her way towards him, and as she got closer she realised he was staring into the small rock pools left by the tide. They were the size of gouges made with cupped fingers, or a fist. Then, quietly, Look, he said to her without looking up – surely, she thought, without knowing she was there. Look. They’re like secrets.
She leaned down beside him but couldn’t see, so she moved to look at another one, intrigued to know what he meant. She crouched and looked closely: they were oyster-shaped, narrowing down from a wide lip, with thin curtains of sea grass or moss. Cress frowned with some vague recognition, leaned closer, then pulled back. They were woman-shaped. Like little vulvas. She reached into the water trapped there – it was warm – then touched her hand to her mouth. Everything about them was female, the salt tang, the secret recesses, the interiority. She looked quickly over at Kieran. Wondering.
He was absorbed in the theatre beneath the surface of the pools, the scurrying creatures, the barnacle-like shells. His hair was damp with sweat and sea-spray, and his eyes shone like a child’s. She watched him until her legs began to cramp beneath her, then slowly stood. Come on, she said, brushing her hand over his head. Let’s go home for lunch. She began to pick her way back across the rocks, but he lay there for a whole minute longer. When she looked back the first time he was standing, looking down, his hands at his sides. When she reached the esplanade she looked again, and he was walking slowly, whistling, hands in pockets, taking his time, but following her home.
They finished the ginger beer and Fergus pushed himself up from the floor. Got a wave to catch, he said, taking the bottles into the kitchen. Laura walked with him to the front door. It’s all pretty tidy, he said, looking back over his shoulder. You’ve been busy.
She looked at him. It was neat when I got here, she said. I thought someone had tidied up.
Not that I know of, he said. He shrugged and waved. She watched as the van backfired once and laboured its way up the hill.
Monday
In the early morning Kieran thought about going to work. Then he thought about St Barnabas. He pictured the long aisles, the shelves of old clothes and plates, the buckets of toys in the corner. The ancient bits and pieces he knew were Cress’s favourites – the jewellery and porcelain in their glass cases, the old books. Then he thought about going to Angela’s again.
Cress had made a pot of tea before she’d gone out into the garden – to pick flowers, she said, for Angela. Kieran poured himself a cup and wandered around the house, letting his mind drift, not settling anywhere. He didn’t want to think of anything in particular. When the cup was drained he went back into the kitchen and made one piece of toast with thick white bread, spread it carefully with butter and red jam. He waved to Cress as he left, shutting the back gate.
At the park he walked from the swings to the pond and back, noticing the clumps of paspalum the council had missed when they mowed. He was distracted by that, and by a scattering of litter dropped beneath the monkey bars, a cardboard chip packet, an ice-cream wrapper, a torn Styrofoam cup. He looked at the bits of rubbish for a while as he climbed around the bars. They weren’t very interesting, but he found himself staring at them anyway, as if they might assemble themselves suddenly into something else. But they didn’t, and he kept looking, and wishing that Abby would come.
Finally he jumped down and picked them up. The packet still smelled of chips. When he’d dropped them in the bin he washed his hands under the park tap and rubbed them dry on his shorts. Did one more round of the park, watching out for her, but keeping his thoughts general. Then he began to walk towards town.
Cress parked the car and walked towards the arched iron gateway, realising as she did that she’d been hoping for a crowd. Big enough to exclude surprise at who was there and who wasn’t. She hadn’t al
lowed herself to think about why; she had not allowed herself to think about Angela at all. Nevertheless, she found she was in no mood for curiosity, no mood to be noticed. A big gathering of artists and dignitaries would be good; she could pay her respects and leave.
But after all there was just a simple memorial service at the graveside. There’d been no suggestion of a church in the notice in the daily paper, no formalities. Just an enjoinder to ‘friends and acquaintances of Angela Lindquist’ to gather at ten o’clock on the eastern side of the cemetery. Cress picked her way across the grass slowly at ten to the hour, clutching her sweet peas and daisies and gladioli. She tried, as she approached the mound of freshly dug earth near the eastern boundary, to identify the handful of people already there. Only Iris Ferguson was familiar. It had been Iris’s husband Frank who, delivering wood, had found Angela on the floor of the shed, felled by the stroke. This fact, Cress saw, gave Iris a proprietary air.
Iris looked up and smiled when she saw her, motioning her over. A few people shuffled closer, as if Cress’s arrival was a sign. Iris introduced her to several strangers: a representative from the high school and the local art society, someone from the council, the civil celebrant – a woman. Cress heard the words daughters at school together but her attention was on the plain, but beautiful, rosewood coffin resting on its pulleys over the grave. A spray of baby yellow roses lay on top. On the other side of the grave several others were speaking quietly, their heads low. She didn’t know them either.
Laura had expected all kinds of emotions except this one: nervousness. Her stomach felt hollow as she followed the pathway through the graves; for no reason she brushed the sides of her black pencil skirt as if her hands had been at work in the soil. She thought once more of her precious pear, of the graft struggling for life in the orchard in Umbria. If she was there, she would speak to it each day, would bend to it and breathe words and breath around it, urging it to live. She closed her eyes briefly to imagine it now, and was not surprised to open them again to eucalypts and poincianas that seemed newly beautiful in the morning light. She gripped her one yellow rose and followed the path to the eastern border of the cemetery.
The China Garden Page 15