The China Garden

by Kristina Olsson

  This was Cress’s habit: the seven o’clock news, a cup of tea, a load of washing. The tiny laundry was off the kitchen so she would take her cup and sort washing while she listened. Often she tolerated the news bulletin just so that she could hear the weather report. It was important to know what the day held. She had two good heaps now, one of Kieran’s jeans and dark T-shirts, one of towels and skirts, blouses and smalls. A news item about an abandoned baby was repeating itself in her head. She knew Archer Street; it was on the outskirts of town, a strange mix of old public housing and new.

  She bent to scoop the first load from the floor. Stopped, looked up, listening. Something – nothing, some absence she recognised – told her Kieran had gone. It was hours too early for the bus. When he was up at this hour it was, she knew, only to watch his re-runs. But there was no muffled sound of television, nor any music, nor any sense that he was in the house. She dropped the blouse she had bunched in her hand and walked through to the kitchen. Kieran, she called, knowing there would be no reply. Kieran. Her answer was there on the bench, the unfinished bowl of cereal, the spoon abandoned in a pool of milk. She stood looking down. But, she thought, addressing the bowl, he always says goodbye.

  In the puffy flakes of wet cereal, in the curve of the spoon, a picture shimmered. It was, she thought, like watching a figure walk out of the distance. The features becoming clearer, recognisable, as they approached. As they walked out of Archer Street. A slight tremor ran through her, she slapped her hand to her chest. Her skin prickled. Now she saw a girl. Very young. Her hand crept to her mouth.

  Abby’s room. He knew it was hers because he’d seen the light on every night that her father was out. The rest of the house was usually in darkness, those nights. Except for a single bulb at the end of the side path, shining a dull cone of yellow near the bottom of the steps. Kieran had watched Abby’s father sway in and out of this light, his skin glazing to copper, at least once a week. For months.

  On these same nights he had imagined her here, inside this room. Had pictured a girl at play: with beads and bangles and pictures in books. Dolls even. Now those two pictures clashed shockingly in front of him. It was nothing like his own bedroom, with its posters and music and clothes and notebooks. As he stared the word that had eluded him arrived. The word for the house and for this room: austere. Like all the others the room was so tidy it made his stomach tighten, as if his body was being compressed. And then there was the colour: it might be a faded blue but amid all the order it seemed grey, the walls, the small desk and the carpet, even the blind that had been pulled down over the window. It occurred to him that blind was a good word for it because the whole room was in twilight. Even though, outside that window, it was a bright, hot day.

  But something here didn’t fit. Something jarred. His eyes moved over the desk, bare but for a small vase with fake carnations, to the few neatly shelved books. A small glass object he didn’t recognise until he picked it up and saw white particles inside it falling on a miniature castle. A snow dome. He tipped it again and watched the snow fall. Then he looked up: on the wall above, a crucifix. He moved forward to touch the figure of Jesus collapsed on the cross, and as he touched his fingers to the tiny feet and the head he realised what the strangeness was.

  It was a smell. Human, sort of thick. He snatched his fingers back as if they had touched live flesh. The crucifix fell to the floor. He crouched to retrieve it but felt confused now in the dimness; felt for a moment that he was in the forest, after rain, the floor was damp and down here the smell was mulchy like the rich wet recesses of trees and rocks, leaves and animal fur and droppings. The soil making itself from dead things. It was neither a good smell nor a bad one. But it didn’t belong here.

  He stood and swivelled and pawed the wall for a switch. The room filled with a sickly pale light and he turned into it. Knew immediately that he was seeing the smell now. His body was frozen for long seconds, as if the blood, watery, sticky, might be a trick, an illusion. It wasn’t. His nose his eyes his hands the pads of his fingers like small animals knew it, it was blood, blood. He had seen blood before, was not afraid of it, but the sight of it here, like the long-ago sight of his scraped knees and stubbed toes, made his throat constrict, his breath catch. He stumbled from the room. By the time he reached the back door he was sobbing.

  Cress drove down the hill towards town. Movement made her feel better, eased the queasiness in her belly, her hands on the steering wheel and the gearstick useful, efficient. She was driving too fast. She realised this when she had to brake hard at the first intersection, the s t o p on the sign looming up like a foreign word. Stop. She breathed. Sat there for a moment. There was no other traffic; she had to think hard about what time it was. What day. She thought, I can’t remember closing the door, putting my seatbelt on. But here she was in the driver’s seat, the belt clasping her like a friend. She drove on, leaning forward, propelling herself towards the beach.

  The sand, the headlands, the rocks. Kieran’s familiars. She knew this, knew the way his body moved in those places, the things his eyes sought. She parked the car on the esplanade and walked down the path. The sun made her squint, narrowing her vision to horizontals of sea, sky, sand. She began to stride towards the beach, urgent, but then slowed as she realised what had really brought her here. The shapes formed themselves once more in front of her, she felt her skin flush the way it must have that other day, but now the little female apertures, the fleshy finger holes in the rock meant something else. Somewhere deep in her memory she had stored them, she could see that now, waiting for – expecting? – a day like today.

  Sand, suddenly. She looked down, noting her gardening clogs, clumsy, and slipped them off, held them between her fingers as she walked. The sand was already warming. She shaded her eyes: the beach was almost empty, the early swimmers gone. But the life guard was in his tower, guarding the empty water. And up ahead on the rock platform someone was fishing, connected to the sea by a flimsy line. It was the only human shape against the grey pitted rock, the veil of sea spray, the headland. She hurried on.

  The woman fishing nodded at her as she picked her way past. She had to be careful. The little grottos and their dishes of water were everywhere, and old oyster shells, and stones. She wanted not to look at the shapes in the rock now but of course she did, had to. This morning, at low tide, they were shallow, more exposed. The sun was sucking out their scent. She tried not to think of the scent as womanly. As secret. As slightly shameful.

  Finally she stopped on a smooth curve of stone and looked up and around. In all directions, even to the sea, although she knew he didn’t swim. A wave cracked against rocks. Gulls creaked above her head. She breathed. He was not here.

  Kieran didn’t realise he was crying until he saw the man’s face, and stopped. Shock numbed him for a moment, a hunter surprised by his prey. The man was at the bottom of the steps, his familiar face turned up, his eyes locked, his hand on the rail.

  His hand.

  Kieran stared at it, and in the two beats of silence that followed, reason left him. His hand.

  There was no decision, no plan. From the top of the steps he launched himself, forgetting he was made of human skin and bones that break, he was in that instant a vessel of pure rage. He was all shining sharpness flying, every line and molecule. As his body collided with the man’s he released the cry he had caught and held. His own hands were raised, and he was unsurprised to see and to feel the snow dome still clasped there, unsurprised too as it crashed into the man’s head. Rose and crashed again.

  Cress stood facing the ocean, her shoes dangling from the fingers of one hand, her car keys in the other. Her back was straight, rigid almost, her chin set. A soft morning breeze lifted her hair, her skirt, dropped them again. The air was full of the slide and shuffle of the sea. Cress stood and stared. Acknowledged, pressing her lips over the fact, that she did not know what it was she was searching for. What she thought s
he might find. She watched as the horizon deepened, a pencil line underscoring her uncertainties. Kieran. A girl. A baby. A young girl. An abandoned baby.

  She turned her head from the sea and looked skywards. The way she once might have, hoping for answers. There was nothing there today but a burnt blue. It made her eyes hurt. She began to move in the direction of the headland, the way Kieran often went, expecting disappointment everywhere now, but needing nonetheless to go, to look.

  The climb was gentle and shaded partly by banksias, silver in the strengthening light. Still, she was breathing hard when she reached the grassy flat with its bunched shrubs and worn dirt pathways, the slope that fell dramatically away to the rocks and the sea. She moved directly towards the trees, willing her heart to slow.

  But they were all deaf and mute and blind, the paperbarks, the banksias, the ladylike fern that spread its skirts beneath tree trunks and underfoot. As I am, she thought, seeing nothing to help her, hearing nothing. She swept aside low branches, peered behind and into the rooms of leaves, crouched to check for disturbance. Feeling helpless now, stupid. She felt her fingers tight around the metal of the car keys. Looked down at her palm indented with their shape. Tried to think.

  She was at the edge of the thicket of trees. From behind the low branches of a eucalypt she could see the grass and the sea and sky beyond. The sun was strong now, colours plumped out, the world fleshy and real. Real. The word made her hesitate, to squint at the scene in front of her as if it was framed, as if it was, oddly, a picture. The sea glimpsed beyond foliage, the eye diverted to the veins in the leaves, a noisy green. To the scratchy detail of bark. Kieran’s voice in her ear: You can hear colour, Cress. You can. Especially at night.

  Sound returned to her then. The flat drone of grass and the ache of the sea and the fluttering paleness of her own heart. It was music, she realised, relentless, beautiful. Violin and piano in lilacs and blues. A safe kind of sound. It all, suddenly, made sense. She hurried back down the path, bare feet reckless on hot sand and unseen rocks. She winced, feeling how old her legs were. But knew, now, exactly where they were taking her.

  Laura kicked the sheet from her legs and turned in the bed. There was bright yellow light at the window and the first birds, kookaburra and magpie. She lay on her side and watched the air change, watched shapes become objects: trees, water tank. Tried to decide if they had secrets. Whether they were complicit in this suspicion that pervaded the room this morning, and those other mornings. That someone had been out there, and not Kieran. Today the feeling was stronger than ever. It coated her skin, making her uneasy in the bed. She stretched her legs and arms, searching for coolness, but the day had already found its heat. Gave up and, despite the hour, pushed herself out of bed.

  From the kitchen window she watched thin scarves of cloud drift across the valley, the greens and browns already lightened by the sun. For the hundredth time she thought: Colour is different here. But her next thought surprised her: What would Angela have done with the colours of Italy, the colours of the Umbrian hills, the sky? What might have come from days or weeks of sitting and walking in the fields there, of looking into the depths of their lines, their light and dark? Would things have been better between them? If Angela had painted in Italy, could they have had a conversation? The one they needed to have?

  The kettle began to hiss. She tipped water into the teapot and stood turning and half-turning it the way she always did, the way Angela always had. To draw it, Angela had told her the first time she’d asked, and as a very small child she could only think of a picture, the form of the teapot on paper, drawn from all sides.

  She lifted the pot, poured tea. As she hooked her finger through the handle of the cup it slipped. Hot tea splashed her fingers, and in the panic to unhook them the cup flew from her hand and fell. She ran cold water over the reddened skin, then bent to the broken cup. It was the one she’d used every day for the past weeks, and it lay now in three neat pieces on the wooden floor. She picked them up and put them on the sink and ran more cold water on her hand.

  There were two mugs among the things she hadn’t packed; she poured more tea, drank it quickly and went straight to the parlour and the mound of boxes bound for the shed. She heaved one onto her hip and used the other hand to open the back door to the deck. A breeze high up in the crowns of eucalypts rubbed leaf on leaf, like skirts on carpet. Approaching the shed she thought that this world was as it had always been, this was how things had looked and sounded every day as Angela came to the shed, ready to work. She twisted the old metal handle and pushed open the door.

  She could not stifle a scream, or whatever noise it was that rose in her throat. Later, she would not remember what sound came, only that it must have been silenced quickly, or the girl would surely have taken fright. Would surely have moved more than she did, which was a slow turn towards her, unafraid. That word, unafraid, was the one that would stay with her, make her question herself and others, because how would any of them know, how could any of them assume anything about this girl when really it was they who were afraid of her? Afraid of the image Laura encountered when the door swung open, and described later, over and over again: the girl, the dress. The unsullied face of a child.

  Cress guided the wheels of the old car around the ruts and hollows of the track. The descent from the road was steep in parts, would be slippery after rain. But the distance it put between the road and the house would have made it all worthwhile to Angela, she knew. It was the first time she’d ever been here, but the track felt familiar, somehow. As if, in imagining Kieran here, she’d created a copy of it in her head.

  She was careful not to slam the car door when she got out, but found herself hurrying through a severely pruned rose garden in full view of anyone who might be watching from the house. Briefly she wondered at her own clumsy subterfuge: what did she mean by it? To surprise someone, to prevent something? She wasn’t sure, but as she careered through the garden on legs that had never felt older, she could imagine only one thing: Kieran’s face. Her hand on his cheek. The faint stubble, the patch of baby skin behind his ear.

  The image made her brave. She did not try to soften her footfall on the stairs. At the top, she raised her fist and hit the door one, two, three times. She shuddered. The noise seemed to echo in her body, waves of strain from her wrist to her elbow. But from the house there was only silence.

  Cress stood very still, listening. In those seconds she thought about Angela. The years she’d lived in this house. Cress took a step backwards, one step down. The house settled in the ground like a tired old woman, blank-faced, its wood cracked and brittle. Felt a brief stab of sadness for Angela and for herself, the long years of widowhood.

  Back down the stairs, around the corner of the house. A path led through ferns and spiky grasses, past water tanks shadowed by tall old eucalypts. There was a back verandah and an open door, but Cress was drawn past that to a shed on the downward slope, crouching among shrubs, she thought, like a confidence. The corrugated iron flashed in the sun. Cress stopped. The house and everything else might have dissolved behind her. Angela’s shed. She absently fingered the handkerchief in her pocket.

  She was a child. Despite the dress, or because of it – Laura didn’t know – the face that turned towards her seemed as calm, as unformed, as secret as a baby’s. Hair as wild as windblown grass around her head and her skin pale, but glossy somehow. Unspoiled teenage skin. Laura thought: No more than sixteen. When her shock had subsided, she took a step forward and opened her mouth to speak. Stopped. Ransacked her head for the right thing, the right voice. It came within seconds, from somewhere outside her, and she knew immediately it was right. Hello, she said, warm and normal. Unsurprised, as the girl was.

  There was no sign that the girl had heard her, though she was only metres away. No movement, no flicker or widening of the eyes, which remained locked on Laura’s, steady. Laura held her gaze – it was preternatural, as if
the girl was seeing not her but someone else – and then, braver, looked down at the bloodied skirts of the dress. Some fresh injury, but her face, her hands folded in her lap betrayed nothing, and the bodice of the dress was clean, creamy white, embroidered with pearls. A stone hit Laura’s stomach. She took another step forward, involuntary. It was a wedding dress.

  That’s a very pretty dress, she said softly. The girl looked blankly back at her. Then the ghost of a smile twisted her lips, heartbreaking. Laura felt her own fear drain away into that smile. Without moving she said carefully, Can I touch it?

  The eyes were the answer. The girl let her gaze leave Laura, dropped her chin. A fragile gesture of trust. Laura moved in a kind of glide, even the air could splinter, she thought, could produce noise, unwanted, frightening. As she got closer she held out her hand – as she would with an animal she didn’t know – to touch the dress without getting too close. Her fingers felt old lace, the girl’s thigh beneath it. Damp. They both looked down silently. It’s lovely, Laura whispered.

  She inched her way sidewards. She needed to get some idea of where the girl was hurt, how serious it was. She bent her head slightly – the back of the dress gaped open, the row of tiny covered buttons forming one side of a V, their empty loops the other. Laura’s eyes lingered on the exposed skin: it was the unmarked, unscrutinised skin of a child’s back. She found it endearing, she wanted to touch it, to put the flat of her hand against it, to reassure the girl and herself that everything was all right. What’s your name? she whispered.

  Abby, the girl whispered back.

  Three things happened then in quick succession, or that is how it would later seem. In fact weeks, even days later, it would appear to Laura that there had been a conspiracy of elements, in that moment some higher intuition had been at work, that the incidents did not occur by chance. That they were all, had always been, connected.