The China Garden

by Kristina Olsson

  She drove up to the wooden house almost hidden by garden at the top of the hill, thinking of Kieran in the darkness outside her kitchen, the utter stillness, her conviction, as she’d crept towards him, that his presence was benign. Now she swung open a wooden gate and as she walked down a path flanked by a yard and clothes hoist on one side and a flourishing garden on the other, she saw she was in his garden. Vines rioted over the back fence – pumpkin, choko – and she passed spinach, tomatoes, lettuces, capsicum all in rows, and trellises for peas and beans, neatly tied. Despite the profusion there was order, even precision. Three clumps of parsley, three of spiky rosemary, a spreading oregano. They seemed to make one big variegated pattern. She thought: He must like that.

  Cress greeted her at the door. They smiled, each in their skirts – presenting, Laura thought, polite versions of themselves. Though Cress always looked proper, neat, her hair combed and fastened behind her ears and everything carefully ironed. Laura glanced down at her own skirt. She hadn’t ironed anything in years.

  I’m afraid, Cress said, motioning her into a sitting room with a couch and an armchair on old-fashioned, patterned brown carpet and a television in the corner, that Kieran isn’t here. I’m sure I told him you were coming. But that’s Kieran. Tea?

  She disappeared through a doorway and Laura heard the sounds of water running and the chink of crockery. Then Cress’s head appeared around the door: Orange Pekoe, Darjeeling, China? I think I’ve got Ceylon. Laura shrugged. China, she said, and Cress flashed an approving smile. Laura sat on the couch, taking in the room, the television prominent but bookshelves too, ornaments. Cress’s voice floated out to her. He could just turn up, though. That’s what he does.

  Kieran stood behind the bus shelter across from Abby’s house. He was trying to remember how long it had been since he’d seen her. It seemed like weeks. He knew it wasn’t, but he hadn’t been able to shake off the notion that she was ill, and that made it seem longer. He wished he could just march in there and make her some sweet milky tea and some toast. He wished he could sit with her, tell her jokes, make sure she was feeling all right.

  The house looked all closed up and secretive today. More so than usual, he thought, though he didn’t know why. It made him fidgety; he wanted more than anything to get up close to it, to put his ear to one of the walls or windows and listen. Once, crouched under a tree in her neighbour’s dark yard, he’d heard her father shouting, calling Abby names. He hadn’t recognised the words, but he didn’t have to. It was his voice. Hard and ugly like the sound of metal scraping. He’d itched to run in there, to tell him to stop, but knew, even then, that he might just make it worse. The look of the man, his tensed body: it could hurt something or someone badly.

  Now he moved quickly across the road, his head down. Listened hard for any noise, any sign at all. Nothing. Just the whirr of a vacuum-cleaner from the house next door and a dog barking. Kieran breathed out. Perhaps, today, he could just relax.

  I used to be a Sunday School teacher. Cress poured more tea into the bone china cups. Precious cups, her mother’s, all looping roses and gilt that was still unworn. She hadn’t felt moved to use them in years. But today, even as she’d waited for Laura, secretly happy that Kieran wasn’t there, she knew they were just right for the occasion.

  When she’d come back with tea and buttered slices of date loaf, she’d found Laura looking at the big family Bible that still sat alongside Dickens, Austen and Joyce on the recently dusted bookshelves, the postcard of the angel and the children tucked inside it. All those little faces, turned up to you. She offered Laura milk. I can’t tell you how good I felt. She paused, was tempted, oddly, to spoon sugar into her tea, as her mother would have done. Her mother stirring, stirring, eyes on the ceiling, the wall. Then it was all gone, all of it. It was no one thing. But after my mother died I realised I felt no comfort from above. I couldn’t feel her, she was just gone. You don’t realise, she said, how much of your life is held up, scaffolded by your faith. It’s not just a matter of losing the word ‘God’ from your vocabulary. You lose yourself. That person – she raised her cup to her lips – just turns to salt. She sipped tea and leaned back in the chair, feeling lightness in her limbs, her fingers.

  Laura sat holding a plate with a half-eaten piece of date loaf. She seemed, Cress thought, unsure how to answer. Then Laura put the plate down. I was never allowed to go to Sunday School, she said. I hated Angela for that, when I was small. I wanted to do what everyone else did. She picked up the plate again. I wanted a mother like everyone else’s.

  Cress gazed at the younger woman looking back at her, wondering if there was a challenge in her voice. But then Laura spoke again. She held the plate up like an offering and said: Now I’d do anything to be able to talk to her, to tell her I understand.

  Kieran wandered towards St Barnabas, wondering if Cress might be there. He tried to remember what she’d asked him to do today. There was something niggling at him; he fished around in his head but it was stubborn and wouldn’t come. Still, if she’d wanted him to do something it was likely to be at St Barnabas.

  It was Saturday, and the shop was busy. There were people in each aisle and several at the counter. He looked over and waved at Iris and she gave him a grimacing smile as she answered a question from one customer and wrapped the other’s goods. He went to the back of the shop to look for Cress. On the way down aisle four, he paused to look at the shelves of tools – pliers, hammers, small saws, boxes of nails. The usual stuff, except for a pair of binoculars, put here, perhaps, because they didn’t belong anywhere else. Kieran picked them up and turned them over. They were in good condition, the lenses clear and unscratched. Forgetting Cress and her errand, he took them to the plate-glass front window to try them out.

  He was about to lift them to his eyes to scan the esplanade when something in the near distance caught his eye: long wispy blonde hair, baggy pants, a certain walk. Abby. Had to be. He glued the binoculars to his face and tried to find her again – there she was, moving slowly along the esplanade, her hair lifting and dropping. She was coming this way.

  Do you know young Abby? Kieran dropped the binoculars to his side. Iris was standing so close to him he nearly hit her with them. He looked at her blankly.

  Poor wee thing. I’m glad to see she’s put some weight on. She a friend of yours?

  Kieran was mute. He felt exposed, with the binoculars in his hands. He nodded, hoping that would help. They both watched as Abby reached the corner then turned and walked towards the beach.

  I suppose everyone’s a friend of yours, Kieran, Iris said, and then her smile evaporated. But don’t let her father know. Doesn’t like her having friends. Not even at church.

  Kieran kept his eyes on Abby. His heart beat hard in his chest. But, he thought, Abby does have friends. He was her friend, and there was that boy at the beach. And she’d told him, at least once, that she had a friend she visited, someone he didn’t know. Was that why her father shouted at her? He watched as her slight figure became smaller and smaller in the distance. Why? he said, turning to Iris. Why doesn’t he like it?

  But Iris was bending to move a box of old bottles away from the window. He stared down at her perfect, blue-white curls. Don’t know, love, she said, hefting the box to one hip and turning away. Perhaps, she said over her shoulder, he thinks she’ll run away, like her mother did.

  Kieran followed Iris back up the glass aisle, wanting to know more, to ask more: When did her mother run away? Where to? Why did he bruise Abby’s arms? But a customer got to Iris first, so he went back to the tools, replaced the binoculars and hurried from the shop. He ran across the busy road, barely checking for cars, and down onto the sand of Convent Beach. He looked up and down, and over to the headland path. He clenched his fists. Why hadn’t he brought the binoculars with him? Abby was nowhere to be seen.

  When I was young I thou
ght motherhood came with a badge, Laura said. A badge of unhappiness. They had drained the teapot and their cups. Kieran’s absence and their waiting had created a vacuum they both felt compelled to fill. As if, Laura thought, all the absences in their lives had been enough. I used to wonder if there was a secret about motherhood that I’d also know one day. If I’d get that look, that badge, when I was a mother.

  Cress leaned forward. All mothers suffer, she said. Laura looked at her. Gauging. That’s what my mother said. Another piece of Cress’s puzzle fell into place.

  Suddenly the old woman looked up, bird-like, at a grandmother clock on the sideboard near the door. She shrugged. Kieran is – she paused – unpredictable. You might wait an hour or you might wait all day.

  Laura brushed crumbs from her lap and stood. Aware she was being dismissed. Angela was working towards an exhibition at Noosa next month, she said. She watched as Cress put plates beneath saucers and brushed at crumbs. I was just thinking. It would be good if Kieran’s painting was there. She began to move towards the door.

  Cress followed her. Yes, she said. We’ll ask him, shall we?

  Sunday

  The pain builds slowly in her all afternoon. A sick, dragging feeling that comes and goes, maybe it’s gastric. She is comforted by that, by the familiarity of it, though her stomach feels heavy and tight. She cooks potatoes and lamb chops for her father and leaves them in the oven. Thinks, maybe if I can sleep. Folds herself onto the pink chenille of her single bed, closes her eyes.

  Is woken by the pain grown sharper, harder, less knowable. She feels marooned by it, anchored to the mattress. She is frightened now. Wishes for someone to ask, someone who might know. It is hard not to cry.

  The house is in darkness. She stands to pull back the bedspread and feels the pain bulge in her. A sound builds in her throat. She grips the windowsill, parts her lips and the sound leaks out. Ooooaaaa, oooaaa, oooaaahhh. Outside the night is ordinary in every other way, the thin summer darkness, the occasional squeal of a flying fox, and the sea, shushing them all to sleep. The pain comes and goes, comes and goes.

  She is lying curled around her stomach. Here it is: sharper, harder, she hears her own voice again, Oooooohhhhh. And following it, within moments, her father’s. Abby? and his footsteps across bare boards. She jerks the covers up, turns to face the wall, makes a fist and shoves it into her mouth. The door swings open and she feels his eyes. Her name again, softer, but only just. Abby. An eternity, surely, and then the click of the door closing, and silence.

  She is losing all sense of herself. She is not Abby, she is a thing, she is the pain, it obliterates her. There is only the pain, and the darkness, beating time. The urgent need to cry out. Her hand – some time, she doesn’t know when, or how – has found a thick pencil near the bed; she clamps it between her teeth.

  There is no respite now, it is one long crush of muscle and bone and blood. She tastes lead as her teeth jam together. Finds she is grunting, her legs apart as if pushed by rough hands. Fear bubbles in her throat. She pants to keep herself quiet.

  But she is bursting, surely her body is bursting open. She shoves her hands down to stop herself splitting, feels the utter foreignness of her own flesh, swollen and damp and open. Nausea, revulsion: she remembers the boy’s hand the first time he touched her there. Knows instantly that whatever is wrong now – if she is dying now – it is all to do with him. What he did.

  Then she is squatting on the bed – it is what her body does, without instruction – and holding the bed-head for support. There is a gush of fluid, but the pressure is still there and she tries to cover herself because her insides are pushing out. Her hand feels the roundness of an orange, the softness of a peach, something hard and soft at the same time. Her lungs fill with air and now she is pushing, grunting silently and there is almost pleasure in it. And then it is over. She falls to her knees over the moving shape between them.

  She is afraid to look down. For some moments she kneels there, breathing hard, her whole body shaking. Then leans back, finally, and looks. In the dull light from the window, on the bloodied sheet: the face of a doll. She knows it at once, traces her forefinger across its cheek. Its mouth and eyes are open and there is a mewling noise, like a kitten. Sshh, dolly, she whispers. Sshhh. And it does, the noise stops, though its legs jerk up and down like a puppet, up and down.

  She leans against the wall and closes her eyes. Sleeps, perhaps – she doesn’t know. Knows only, when her heavy lids lift, that there, outside the window, the dark horizon is smeared apricot and pink. But it is she herself she is terrified by; what her body has done. The blood, the smell. The doll-like creature she expelled, the lumps and ropes of flesh it is attached to. A wave of nausea ripples through her.

  The horizon is yellowing. The morning, her father. She moves, forcing her legs, they gush blood. But she is, once more and suddenly, no longer Abby; is a stranger to herself. But Not-Abby knows what to do.

  It is half-light when she leaves the house, a shadow-figure, she watches herself from afar. Without terror now – Not-Abby will make her safe. But she needs to be fast. She hurries through the gate in the side fence and into the neighbour’s yard. There is a crepe-myrtle, just about to flower, it grows beside a high window. It is just the right tree. She makes sure the bundle is wrapped neatly; that the ground beneath it is smooth. Touches the cheek once more – it is, she thinks, like dipping a finger in water – then lifts her long skirt, her clean, clean white skirt, and runs.

  Monday

  The trees along the road were already weighed down with heat and the grass was sharp and dry but Kieran didn’t notice that. The newsreader’s voice was still in his head – newborn baby, Archer Street – as he saw but didn’t acknowledge the walkers on the esplanade, the life guards setting up on the beach, the girl wiping tables at the outdoor café. As he headed away from the beach and past the shopfronts, as the Back Fruitshop came into view, all he could really see was Abby’s face and Abby’s body in its loose oversized clothes and the monstrous shape of her father looming over her, over everything. He couldn’t see a baby. Couldn’t think the word. When he tried all he got was a bundle of cloth, the size of a fruitcake.

  Her street was empty, as it always seemed to be. So he expected to feel the same sense of heaviness he usually felt here, something that was almost dread, but today it had alchemised into anger and rage and possessiveness as he strode down the footpath, moving openly this time, unworried by his visibility. It drove him, a hot engine on a hot day, down the street, past the hibiscus bush, his customary boundary, right to her gate.

  The house loomed over the scrappy fur of burned grass in the front yard. Everything – windows, door, blinds – was pulled shut. He pushed through the gate, wondering even as his heart pumped like a piston, what the word was for this house. He kept searching for the word as he strode down the side towards the back steps. The word-wondering made it easier, made the image in his head of the man with the heavy boots and esky and bare shoulders blur for a while. It stopped Kieran wondering what he was going to do when he got to the top.

  This door was shut, as well. He raised his hand in an automatic reflex, then dropped it. He thought, Stupid to knock. He hesitated for several seconds, listening. There was no sound, nothing, and then his hand was on the door handle, which twisted easily, shockingly. The door swung open. He was over the threshold and into the house without any real sense of moving.

  It was the kind of kitchen he recognised but it was not like Cress’s. Nor was it like his mother’s modern kitchen in Brisbane, with its smooth surfaces and coffee machine. It was quite ordinary: square, lined with laminex benches and dull-coloured overhead cupboards, a small wooden table in the middle with two chairs. There was one similarity to Cress’s and that was its absolute order and tidiness. Everything was in its place, except for a cup on the table, half full of cold tea. Later he won’t be sure when he noticed these details, on his way o
ut or now, as he stood there, as still as he had ever been, listening.

  There was absolutely no sound, not even a clock ticking. Not even the fridge, off-white and squat. It did not whirr or hum or shudder, the way Cress’s did. Somewhere inside him, at that moment, he realised what a comforting sound that was. Without it the whole house seemed to be holding its breath.

  He looked towards the doorway on the other side of the kitchen. There was a kind of hallway; he could see hooks with clothes draped on them. And Abby’s shoulder bag. It was hanging there like some kind of signal, a marker of something. Immediately the anger that had driven him here and into the house returned; it speared his belly, and he launched himself towards the doorway, into the rooms beyond.

  Now he was another Kieran. He thought: This is how a hunter feels. Hard. He pushed aside air as if it was layered with invisible jungle. He wanted to call out, to use his voice like a weapon, but he didn’t. He ranged from room to room, looking into corners, lifting things from their tidy places, a cushion, a newspaper, then putting them down. Roughly. He accidentally kicked one shoe from a pair propped neatly beside a doorway, and was frightened and thrilled by the notion of leaving it there, out of place. He stared at it. A man’s shoe, leather buffed and gleaming. But lying there in the middle of the room, skewed sideways, away from its mate, it was just a useless shoe. And there was no one in the house to defend it, to rescue it.

  Cress dipped her hands into the washing hamper, sorting loads by colour. She had always been a stickler for the colour rule: dark things, white things, colours. Except for towels. As she’d got older she’d loosened up with towels, sheets too. These days they went in together or with the colours without much thought. She noticed, with some chagrin, that they did not turn grey as she’d suspected they would. She thought: All those years.