The house was quiet when he opened the door. The smell of sausages, recently cooked, was so rich he could almost see it; everything had a glow. It was his favourite dinner. He went in through the lounge room, his spirits lifting. There was the hiss of the shower; the lamps were on. In his bedroom he plucked Lucinda Williams from his CD stand; as her voice drifted up and out around the room he threw himself onto his bed, landing on his back. He tucked his hands behind his head. Within seconds the balls of his feet, the bare toes spread wide, were tapping air.
Three words. She was sad. Laura poured the last of the wine and sat down in the armchair in the parlour, where papers from the shoe boxes and the school case still lay fanned out on the floor. From the moment she’d seen Kieran in the shadows outside the house, she’d sensed the walls of an invisible triangle closing. She was sad. The words, simple, devastating, brought them together, Angela, Kieran, Laura. In that moment she saw past the anger, past the distance Angela had put between them and that she, Laura, had then made physical by leaving this town, leaving the country. Laura had seen one Angela: angry and tough and controlling. Kieran had probably seen the inner one.
She put the glass on the floor beside the drifts of papers and documents. She stared down at them. They were, she saw now, bookends of her family’s life. Here was her own birth certificate: Laura Elisabeth Lindquist. Born to Angela Mary and August Arne, September 10, 1953, at 8.14 pm at Ballina, New South Wales. Seven pounds fourteen ounces. Here were the early records of her growth from the local Maternal and Child Welfare Centre: baby Lindquist took her first solid food – mashed banana – at three months, cut her first tooth and sat up at eight months, crawled at seven months, was weaned at eight months, walked at one year. And there, put to one side, her father’s funeral notice, Angela’s tickets and receipts, The Rose.
She sat and regarded the papers. They would not, she knew, tell her about her childhood loneliness, her rebellion at school, her own anger. But there was something else. Something she hadn’t been consciously looking for: proof that she had been born into love, that she had been wanted, cared for. It had been recorded, that love, written down: mashed banana at three months. When she finally fell into bed, leaving the evidence scattered over the parlour floor, it was this phrase that came back to her. She hugged it to herself, and slept.
Wednesday
It had taken Laura just a week to remember the particular rhythms of living alone. Without the expectation of another’s footfall or voice, the way a day is bracketed by another’s leaving and returning home. After her first lonely few years in London, there had always been someone coming home. Friends she’d shared flats with, Kate’s student father, briefly, and later, Kate herself. The movements of other people had shaped her days, given them purpose – artificial, sometimes – and a timetable. Along with work, they had sliced each day into tolerable pieces.
But being alone here, and away from work, this was what she re-learned: that you had to try to make meaning of the day, to structure it so there were things to do to fill in time. Time might be the enemy. Or it might just be a blankness, the terror of seconds ticking slowly away while you stared at the sky and it became slightly duller, until it was dark and nothing was different, except that at least now you could eat, or prepare to go out, ritualising the time left before you could decently slide into sleep.
She had always been too busy to see it this way before. But here, she had caught herself waiting for the phone to ring, for someone to come home. She was unused to all the silences, the absence of scrutiny. Which had its terrors, as well as its benefits. Who was she, without someone else’s eyes to see her? To bring some particular version of herself into being every day? Without another’s approval or disapproval, expectations, needs – someone else’s notion of her? This, she saw as she tried, half-hearted, to sort and stack old magazines and books, was what she had left her mother to, when she fled. This aloneness. This endless invention of a self.
So she was genuinely startled to hear the grumble of Fergus’s van outside again, the knock on the door. Since Kieran’s visit she hadn’t given him or the repairs another thought. I won’t come in, he said. He’d stopped halfway up the stairs, grinning at her, his voice bright like the red and white Hawaiian shirt he was wearing. Left my saw here yesterday. But I’m going to cut those last bits of timber before I take it. He backed down the stairs again. That okay? I’ve gotta keep moving – have to get home and change for a meeting. He waved and she nodded but before she could speak he was on his way around the side of the house where, a minute later, the sound of the saw screamed into the clear clean air.
It had started again, that noise in her head, when Cress had finally plucked the booties from beneath her clothes and the dolls from her bag, and laid them on the table next to Kieran’s notebook. He hadn’t moved the notebook for a couple of days; there was the list of words, but beautiful still stared up at her like an epigraph. She stood there considering the book and the word, noting briefly its difference from the other words on the page, words like vermicilli that seemed exotic, foreign. Together with the booties and dolls, beautiful seemed to create some kind of code, some kind of language. She sat down slowly on the couch with her hands in her lap. The fingers of one hand rubbing the fingers of the other. When she looked down her fingertips had, of their own volition, all come together in an upside down V: here is the church, here is the steeple. The blessed birds began to flip around in her head again, just as they had the day before.
It was enough. She picked up the booties and dolls and took them to her bedroom, stowing them quickly, unceremoniously, in her top drawer, beneath knickers and spencers. Then she went to the laundry for the vacuum cleaner and dusting cloths. She would start with the sitting room. The whole house felt gritty, neglected. One room at a time, and everything would soon feel clean. And the birds would calm their wings.
Kieran worked until midday in Labelling. Today it was barley sugar. Little orange twists in a cellophane wrapper. Lift, place, press. He was glad, gladder than usual, that he had Labelling instead of Counting this morning. At least twice Jillian, who sat opposite him on the belt, had shouted his name, asking him why he was staring into space. She’d given him a look that was clearly impatience, even through her thick glasses. He’d said, Okay, okay, and glared at her, even though he knew she was right. He was distracted.
Since the night before there’d been a feeling in the pit of him he didn’t understand. He’d only been with Laura a short time – half an hour? – but he knew that something had changed. There was this new thing between them. He didn’t know what, because he didn’t know her. But he was afraid, all the same, because this new thing might shatter, like glass. Something might happen to her; it did to Angela. He didn’t want anything to happen to Laura.
He sat there at the belt as the barley sugar bumped by, feeling a bit stupid, because the day before, he’d wanted to run away from her. Had no wish to know her at all. Then he remembered it had been like this with Angela too. At first, he had to fight an occasional impulse to run. Away from the shed, away from her. It felt strange, being on the inside, rather than outside looking in. Like the day he was pulled from the audience by actors in a school play. Up on the wide stage he’d frozen; could not look out at his friends or at the empty seat he should have been in.
It had been months before he realised he no longer felt uncomfortable with Angela. It wasn’t like being at home, or at work, or anywhere else exactly. Being with her was almost like being on his own. Nothing was demanded of him, nothing expected. He felt that he had chosen her, as well as the things he did there, could decide whether or not to clean her brushes or make toast. Or sweep. Or just watch. They were the same sorts of things he’d always done, anonymous things. He could come and go as he pleased.
This thought got him through the rest of the morning to lunchtime, when he wandered off, not thinking about the fact that the day was half-done or about the afterno
on ahead. He wanted to be inside this new air, this new thing. He wanted to think about it. As the rest of his workmates washed their hands and headed back to their stations, he took his backpack and slipped out the door. He considered all the best places to think, and decided to catch the bus back to town, to the park.
I think I’d rather be blind than deaf, Angela said one night, just after his first visit. He opened his eyes at the sound of her voice. He’d been standing with his head tilted back, barely aware that he’d closed them. It was the first time he’d heard her music properly, inside the shed – the first time he’d really listened to it. The first time he’d heard Puccini.
Music makes me another person. My better self, she smiled. He wasn’t sure what she meant, only that he’d somehow heard the music in every bit of him, and that each part responded, legs, stomach, hands, head. As if he was being held by another warm body. It made his breathing change. Maybe that was what she meant.
But her words jarred, dislodged the feeling. If you were blind, he said carefully, you wouldn’t be able to paint.
But if I was deaf, she replied without pausing, I wouldn’t be able to feel. She turned to him. That’s what music gives me. Feelings. And courage. It makes me brave.
For a moment there was a quiet between them; the music swelled into it. I like Emmy-Lou Harris, he said.
She smiled at him and he felt shy and bold at the same time. I’ve got all her albums, he said. They make me happy.
She’d gone back to her palette then, mixing fleshy pinks, but Kieran had moved more slowly around the shed that night, stopping frequently to close his eyes, tilt his head back, and feel.
After the hard work of vacuuming, Cress went to the kitchen, filled the kettle and surveyed the tins of tea. The Orange Pekoe was nearly out, but there was Darjeeling and Russian Caravan. Perhaps it was because she was tired but the vivid blue of the Russian looked calming, so she spooned it into the teapot and took down her favourite cup, a cheap bone china that Kieran had given her one birthday when he was a child. It was splattered with violets, but that didn’t seem to spoil it. ( Violence! Kieran had announced happily when she unwrapped it. I love those flowers!)
When the tea was made she took it back to the sitting room and carefully lowered herself to the floor beside the book shelves. In this weather, wasps were likely to build nests in their spines, even in their pages or in the corners of the shelving. She’d lost a perfectly good copy of Pride and Prejudice that way: the mud from the nest had ruined most of the thin pages. She’d only just managed to save Our Mutual Friend from the same fate. So now she checked each book, particularly the old ones, every summer. Sometimes twice.
She felt calm now, dusting her books, sipping tea, pausing occasionally to read a paragraph or to look at cards and notes left between the covers. It had been her habit since she was a child to leave things – a cryptic message, a shopping list, or just a birthday card she couldn’t throw away – inside her books to surprise herself or someone else whenever the book was read again. Today she’d found a note from Shelley in a child’s hand: Mum, Veronica called, 4pm; three birthday cards from Kieran, a postcard featuring Convent Beach at low tide–
Veronica! Cress’s heart thumped. The produce stall – she’d promised to help out before lunch. She twisted around to see the clock on the sideboard. It was nearly eleven; there was just enough time. Cress struggled to her feet, inadvertently kicking Jane Eyre across the floor, and as she bent to retrieve it a newspaper clipping fell from its pages. She squinted: it was a government advertisement, with the coat of arms at the top and thick black edging. New South Wales Government Inquiry into Adoption Practices 1945–1998. The Standing Committee on Social Issues invites interested persons, but particularly women who relinquished babies for adoption in New South Wales after 1945, to contact the committee and/or give evidence at closed hearings to be held around the state...
Cress lowered the paper. The sun struck lozenges of light on the floorboards around her. She tried hard to remember when and why the advertisement had found its way into this book, tried to remember snipping it from the newspaper. Nothing came. She seemed to have no memory of it at all; no picture of herself reading the notice, of taking scissors and cutting so carefully around the edges, of selecting this particular book to store it in. Of sliding the book back beside the others on the shelf, where the notice would be forgotten, despite her yearly dusting and moving and rearranging. She shook her head. Extraordinary. Just extraordinary.
Still, this was no time to figure it out. She lifted the cutting between forefinger and thumb, chose a page, and slid the book back onto the shelf between Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch. She rubbed the small of her back and perused her unfinished work – it would have to wait until later. Then took her empty cup – there were even violets on the inside – and went to the kitchen to wash her hands.
Kieran was thinking about eyes when he reached the park. Angela’s, his own, Laura’s. After the night before, he had this new fact: they were all blue. Now his thoughts cart-wheeled beside him: What about Cress’s eyes? Brown, he thought. Were they? And his mother’s – brown too? He felt agitated, as he always did when knowledge eluded him. Clumsy, deficient. That’s when he looked towards the sky and saw salvation. It was midday, he realised. Abby might be here.
His pace turned into a run, past the duck pond and windbreak. He tried to see round corners, through tree trunks, needing to know. When he saw her sitting on a bench, swinging her feet in the sand beneath her, he slowed. Wanting to look at her, the blonde hair hanging, her face obscured. Wanting to maximise the joy that coursed through him, the relief. To think about the colour of her eyes.
He sat down next to her, and in the instant before she lifted her face he remembered: greeny-brown. Like rock pools after the tide left. Sometimes he would squat by the pools and stare for a long time, waiting for small creatures to emerge like actors on a stage. He loved the mystery of them, the hidden recesses. That’s what he thought now about Abby’s eyes.
Today they were glassy, unreadable. With a start he realised they had been last time, and the time before. And that it had been ages since she’d played on the swing, or hung by her knees from the monkey-bars. Come on, he said, wanting to cheer her up. Feeling responsible. She was silent, and still, her palms spread either side of her on the bench. I’ll push you really high.
No. The answer swift and firm. She shook her head. No. He looked about him. Biting his bottom lip, as if he’d been stung. Then the metal slide caught the sun. He jumped up, ran to it, climbed. Hey! he called from the top, then dropped and slid down slowly, backwards, grinning at her. Crawled back up, stood, flapping his arms calling, Abby – Abby – Abby – before he jumped, wings stiff, into the dirt below. Dust leapt up in applause. He waited for hers.
She looked at him silently as he sauntered back, slapping his hands on his jeans. I can’t do that any more, Kieran, she said flatly. I can’t jump and I can’t swing. She picked up her bottle of water and sipped it. She looked at his questioning face. I just can’t, okay. Can’t do jack all. They sat in silence. Kieran examined the sand beneath his shoe. After a while Abby said, I’ve gotta go home, and stood. She pulled the open sides of her windcheater over her chest. Then she walked slowly away. He watched her hair move as she moved, rising and falling, very gently. She didn’t pause, or look back. It was the first time he didn’t feel like following.
There was something about her face, that look she had, not sad, not angry. What did she want? What was she missing? He dug his hands in his pockets and thought hard, the tips of his shoes making crescent shapes in the sand. That look reminded him of Cress sometimes, and all at once he was back at St Barnabas – how long ago? Ages – on the day of the Virgin Mary.
He’d been helping Cress unpack a box at the back of the shop: odds and ends from a house sale. There was a lot of old Tupperware, books with torn
jackets, cups without saucers. At the very bottom, a small wooden crucifix, and an unusual picture of the Virgin Mary, her eyes downcast, her heart ablaze.
Cress had been dusting and wiping each item as it emerged, but he watched her pause at the Virgin. Over the top of a nest of plastic bowls he saw her run a forefinger across the familiar face, her own eyes mirroring Mary’s, as she stood gazing down. Kieren kept moving his own cloth in slow circles over the plastic lids, seeing Cress without looking at her. She seemed to stand still, staring, for a long time. Kieren’s cloth had moved around the lids several dozen times when Cress finally put the picture down. She looked at him behind his bowls. Let’s get all this priced, she’d said.
It would be an hour or so later when they were sorting the pieces for shelving that Kieren would remember the Virgin and the look on Cress’s face. What he’d thought was sadness in her eyes would become something else then, he would see it instead as a particular kind of longing. For, of course, the Virgin wasn’t there any more. Did not appear on any shelf. Kieran knew where she would be, and realised in the same moment that this knowledge, the fact that it was his alone, didn’t matter. He felt an instant sense of relief. On the way home that afternoon, he glanced several times at Cress’s handbag, propped on the back seat of the car. From the outside it looked the same as it did every other day. So did Cress, leaning slightly forward over the steering wheel with the sun in her eyes. He looked ahead too, and began to think about dinner.
Today, watching Abby’s small shape become smaller in the distance, something nudged at him, and he found himself following, after all. He stayed well back – she was in no mood for surprises, he knew. But he could also see there was something wrong; the certainty of it lodged in him like a stone. From behind bus shelters and hibiscus bushes he tailed her as she walked, head down, arms crossed against the windcheater, all the way down Archer Street. A windcheater! On a summer’s day. As she crossed the road and slowly pushed open the gate, as if it took all her strength, it occurred to him: Abby might be sick.
The China Garden Page 20