The Insistent Garden Read online

  The Insistent Garden

  The

  INSISTENT

  GARDEN

  a

  novel

  ROSIE CHARD

  COPYRIGHT © ROSIE CHARD 2013

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Chard, Rosie, 1959–

  The insistent garden / Rosie Chard.

  Issued also in an electronic format. isbn 978-1-927063-38-5

  I. Title.

  PS8605.H3667i67 2013 C813’.6 C2013-901541-8

  Editor for the Board: Douglas Barbour

  Cover and interior design: Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design

  Cover photo: wallpaper © suze / photocase.com

  Author photo: Nat Chard

  NeWest Press acknowledges the financial support of the Alberta Multimedia Development Fund and the Edmonton Arts Council for our publishing program. We further acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $24.3 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  #201, 8540–109 Street

  Edmonton, Alberta T6G 1E6

  780.432.9427

  www.newestpress.com

  No bison were harmed in the making of this book.

  printed and bound in Canada 1 2 3 4 5 14 13

  For Phoebe

  And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,

  That I scarce was sure I heard you

  EDGAR ALLAN POE,

  “THE RAVEN”

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Two

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Part Three

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Part One

  1

  I was sweeping the porch with the wide broom when I found the fly. A live fly, it was sealed inside the bottle of milk waiting on the doorstep. I knew it was still alive even before I picked up the cold glass and peered inside. Its legs waved frantically and its body drifted in a wave of milk that slapped against the sides with every movement of my hand.

  I glanced up the street, and then looked towards my neighbour’s hedge; just leaves, just twigs.

  “What’s wrong with the milk?” my father said, as I entered the kitchen.

  “There’s a fly inside the bottle,” I replied.

  “Who put it there?” my father said, frowning.

  “No-one.” I placed the bottle on the draining board. “It. . . it just happened.”

  “He did it!” My father shoved back his chair, his neck tall with anger. I drew in a breath. Of course he had done it; there was no doubt in my father’s mind. He had sneaked into our garden while it was still dark and stolen the milk from the doorstep. He had removed the lid with a knife, captured the fly and dropped it into the bottle. The bottle was now sealed. The milk was now tainted; I could almost see the limp feeding tube dipping into the liquid like a straw, not sucking up, but leaching downwards.

  “I can throw it away,” I said.

  “No, I’ll do it.” My father stepped towards me and closed his fingers round the glass neck. A whiff of mothballs wafted out from beneath his armpit as he lifted the bottle up, opened the back door and disappeared into the garden, leaving a rectangle of early morning sunshine lying on my feet. A shadow fell onto my toes and I looked up just in time to see my father’s raised arm silhouetted against the sky.

  I rushed out of the back door. “No, please!” But it was too late. The trapped fly was airborne again; it soared over the garden wall like a white bird. As the sound of breaking glass raced back into our garden I clamped my hands over my ears and looked up at the wall that divided us from our neighbour. He had the fly now.

  He deserved it.

  2

  I knew the back of my father’s ankles intimately — especially that segment of skin between the top of his socks and the bottom of his trousers. A small forest of leg hair was exposed every time he stretched up the ladder to press mortar into a high part of the garden wall and I often felt the desire to tuck the stray tufts back into his sock. His shoes were scuffed too, down the back seam, and I sometimes wondered what mythical creature rubbed that precise spot.

  “Pass me up that cloth,” he said, glancing down at the bucket beside my feet.

  “Yes.” I replied, too quickly.

  The slime impregnating the cloth conjured up memories of frogspawn, but I managed to wring it out without changing expression and held it up to my father’s waiting hand. This was what I did. Bend down; wring out; pass up.

  For as long as I could remember my father and I had been working on the garden wall. Not an ordinary wall. Not a low boundary just high enough for neighbours to rest their elbows on and discuss the weather. Not even a lovingly crafted brick divider, marking the back of a flower bed. Our wall was a barricade, designed to keep out the enemy. It began at the corner of our house and ran down one side of the garden before coming to a halt at the back fence, over a hundred feet away. It used to be like other people’s walls, low, straight, often warm — the perfect place against which to lean — but my father had built it up over the years, adding extra layers with new bricks and off-cuts and materials he’d found in the street and now it reached eight feet if the chalk mark scratched halfway up
could be trusted. I couldn’t remember life without the wall. I’d tried. I’d often walked its length from house to back fence, running my hand along the bricks as I attempted to recall a time when our garden looked the same as every other in the street.

  My father stretched out his arm, ignoring the drips racing down his wrist and wiped the face of the wall in a rough, irritated circle. “Pass up the rest.” He lobbed the cloth back into the bucket without turning round. I loaded up the mortarboard, stabbed in a trowel and passed it up into his waiting hands.

  “Do we need some more mortar in that crack up there?” I ventured.

  “Where?” my father said, snapping his head towards me.

  “Above your left hand.”

  “I see it.”

  “And there, what about there? Just to the left of your thumb.”

  “Where?”

  “There,” I said, pointing upwards.

  “Any more cracks,” he said.

  “Yes, down there, just to the left of your knee. Yes there.”

  He stretched out his arm and pressed a dollop of mortar into a hairline crack. A blob oozed round the edges of the knife and fell soundlessly onto the grass.

  “Did I get it?” he asked.

  “Yes. But I think I see another spot.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes, there. And there’s a small hole by your elbow.”

  “Where? I can’t see it.”

  “There — no, an inch to the left, yes, there.”

  He stretched out his arm and ran the trowel across a joint, a father soothing his child.

  “Any more or shall we move the ladder?” he said.

  “One more, beside your hip. No, I meant your right hip. Sorry.”

  “For God’s sake, right or left?”

  “Right.”

  I looked up at the top of the wall and, in spite of the warmth of the morning, shivered. “Shall I make some breakfast now?”

  “Yes, I need to get to work.” He climbed down the ladder slowly — stupid, exaggerated steps.

  “Can he. . . see us here?” I said.

  “Speak up. I can’t hear what you say.”

  “Do you think he can see us when we work on the wall?”

  His eyes met mine. “Yes. He’s watching.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  I took one more look at the wall; it seemed wrinkled in the early morning light, a skin almost shed. “I’ll go and put the kettle on.”

  “Rinse the spare trowel first. I’m going back up for a second, I’ve just seen another crack — that wasn’t there yesterday.”

  I hung the cloth on a low rung, glanced up at my father’s ascending heels and made my way towards the garden tap whose drips left a permanent puddle beside the back door. The rattle of water hitting the drain was enough to drown out all other sounds in the garden but as I levered the mortar off the trowel with my knife I thought I heard something. I turned off the tap and listened but all I could hear were other sounds, the distant moan of the milk van straining to get up the hill and the deep, repetitive cry of the song thrush unable to shake off its obsession with notes grouped into three. My ear seemed to angle itself towards the high wall, trying to absorb something, anything, from the other side. But only the sound of wind sorting through leaves came back.

  My ears often deceived me. Most days I thought I heard sounds from over the high wall, strange, faintly human sounds that conjured up pictures of a life led there. They seemed tentative, those noises, coming from hands laid down gently, or from a voice kept low but the place on the other side of the wall, if I let myself just think it, occupied a room in my mind.

  “I’ll have two bits of toast today,” called my father from the top of the ladder.

  “Alright.”

  “Oh, and Edith.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t forget it’s Tuesday.”

  3

  MACHINE WASH COLD WITH LIGHT COLOURS

  DO NOT BLEACH

  COOL IRON ONLY

  Tuesday was always noisy. It was the day Vivian came to stay, and she liked to arrive rudely. She always had. I couldn’t remember a Tuesday morning free of sheet-changing and pillow-plumping and now, as the first shouts slipped beneath the front door, I looked out of the window and saw what I expected to see.

  A short, stout woman was scolding a taxi driver, her shoulders lifted up into a square and her finger jabbing into his face.

  “Aunt Vivian.” I said, opening the front door and walking towards the street.

  “That man tricked me,” she replied. Her shoulders lowered, her accusing finger disappeared into the folds of her dress and the taxi driver scrabbled to find his keys, all hope of a tip dashed. “Edith, come and get my suitcase.”

  My mouth opened, then closed. Vivian blew out her cheeks and, although she only carried a dainty handbag, looked as if it were she who had just dragged a heavy suitcase out of the car. Sweat had gathered round the unventilated parts of her body and I could see dark blotches seeping into the neckline of her dress.

  She stepped into the hall. “You’ve moved that table.”

  “Only a little bit.” I replied. I lifted her suitcase over the threshold.

  “Well, put it back where it belongs.”

  “I’ll just —”

  “I’m going to my room.” she said, “You can bring the case up after you’ve made the tea.”

  I was watching my aunt’s crease-lined backside recede up the stairs, hoping for the right words, when an unusual question came into my head. “How are you, Aunt Vivian?”

  She paused. I noticed a layer of neck squeeze up from inside her collar. “Can’t you see that with your own eyes?”

  “Yes, sorry.” I concentrated on the bit of stair carpet that meets the skirting board, the bit that holds dust.

  Why did I do it? Why did I imagine, even for a second, that my aunt would ever be different, ever be the slightest bit friendly towards me?

  Vivian was my father’s only sister. She possessed a booming voice — the sort that causes real pain to sensitive eardrums — and spoke in small, clipped sentences, pared to the bone and finished off with a tiny smacking sound as her tongue collided with the inside of her teeth. Younger in years than my father, yet older in looks, she had been visiting our house every Tuesday for as long as I could remember. It would always be the same: the disturbance at the front door and the struggle with the big case, the re-organisation of the bathroom shelves, the silent supper with my father followed by arguments over the crossword puzzle all finished off with the radio news, a cup of warm milk and an early night. The bulky suitcase always suggested a lengthy stay but by ten o’clock the next morning she’d be gone, back to her own house on the other side of town; the whiff of freshly-shaved legs in the bathroom just a memory.

  “And don’t forget, milk in first,” she called from the top of the stairs.

  I knocked on Vivian’s bedroom door a few minutes later, a cup and saucer rattling in one hand, a suitcase dragging sullenly on the other.

  “Yes?” came a voice from within.

  “I’ve brought the tea.”

  “Bring it in.”

  I went to grasp the door handle but the teacup tipped to the side, slopping a hot mouthful of liquid into the saucer.

  “I said come in.”

  “Just a second.” I put down the case and emptied the saucer back into the cup.

  “Edith. What are you doing?” The door opened and Vivian’s face lunged towards me, the smell of meat and Polo mints on her breath. I tried to smile but I could think only of her pointing finger, the one I had seen in the street. But it was safely by her side and indignation was now lodged in a new part of my aunt’s body, beneath her eyebrows, which had gathered into formidable peaks.

  “The tea spilt. . .” I began.

  “Well, don’t dither, bring it in.”

  I followed her inside, placed the teacup on the bedside table and stood back, held inside a slot of
time with no obvious beginning and no foreseeable end — the sort of slot where you re-acquaint yourself with the familiar details of your life. The spare bedroom was the only room in our house that offered any real comfort. The duvet, although worn on the edges from years of rubbing across Vivian’s chin, could still be plumped and the chair, in spite of its hard back, hosted a folded blanket that I imagined might hold heat in a cold place.

  Whenever I prepared the room for her weekly arrival, wiping dust from the dressing table and tightening the sheets across the mattress, it felt a bit like mine, but with Vivian now lining up medicine bottles on the dressing table, the atmosphere had changed. Now it was Vivian’s room, an alien territory, out of bounds and reeking of Vaseline and coal tar soap. I gazed at the wallpaper, not with any sense of exploration but as something to pass the time. The rose-flowered pattern had remained unchanged since my birth and I knew its details intimately, the yellow petals, the stems a faded green and the buds that never, ever opened. Slippage during pasting had formed a curious new species at the join between the sheets and I tried to imagine a name for these strange creatures, with their broken stems and double-headed blooms.

  “Aunt Vivian,” I said, “do you like flowers?”

  She pulled her hands out from between a layer of blouses deep inside her suitcase. “What?”

  “I mean. . . do you grow flowers in your garden?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  She returned to her case, lifted out a gigantic bra and draped it over the back of a chair. I continued to wait, my hand resting on the newly endowed furniture.

  “Should I help you unpack?” I said.

  “Yes, but don’t touch anything.”

  The auntly hands returned to the suitcase, straightening the collars of slowly decompressing cardigans and moving bottles of hand cream from one side to the other. They were wide hands, freckled with age spots and decorated with tight, silver rings, which squeezed her flesh close to the joints. I gave my own bare ring finger a squeeze and watched as each item of clothing was held up for scrutiny, categorized, then placed in a drawer. Vivian liked red. Red shirts, red shoes, red polish painted on her toenails. She dyed her hair red too, an unforgiving orangey-red that came from a mouldy-looking bottle she often left behind on our bathroom shelf. It reacted badly with her skin.