The Hanging Garden (12 page)

A rancid taste was soon mingling in Irene with the smell of gas.

Viva refused a cake, but began slurping at a glassful of the green lemonade.

Had Mrs Jenkins perhaps set out to poison you, and did Viva, the false friend, know of her mother’s intention? Together they would bury the body in the gas-saturated soil under their rotting house? You couldn’t very well spit out this rancid cake, only smile as you swallowed it by little, unhappy mouthfuls.

Mrs Jenkins said quite soon, ‘I’ll leave you to Viva, Maureen. I’m going down the road to look up a friend.’ She gave her daughter a sideways look.

Was she so confident in the effect of the cake, so callous that she was leaving her daughter to accept full responsibility? And could Viva be such a perfidious friend?

Mrs Jenkins went out as she was, in her thin dank hair, easy cotton frock and feet bare except for the pink corn plaster.

While her mother was still within earshot, Viva explained, ‘She’s after the gasfitter, Bernie Horan. A fat lot of hope she’s got of finding that one.’

‘The cake…’ Irene mumbled through her misery.

‘Yair. Spit it out.’ She offered a blue plastic bowl such as Mrs Bulpit kept her teeth in overnight. ‘Isn’t it poisonous! I couldn’t warn yer.’

To take her mind off the cake, Irene asked, ‘What were you going to show me, Viva? Something your father brought from Brazil—or was it Patagonia?’

‘Both. I’ll tell you. But you’ve
gotter
give me time. It’s a secret I never thought of sharing with anybody else.’

She went to a cupboard and after fumbling round at the back brought out a polished wooden box inlaid with ivory, ebony, and turquoise chips. The turquoise might have been due to light or inspiration or the mystic state Viva had invoked earlier on.

‘You don’t miss a trick,’ she said, still withholding the contents of the box. ‘My father got it when he was a merchant seaman—while he was on a voyage to Brazil. He made this horseback journey into the interior through the jungle, along the banks of a great river. He was in such good favour with the Indians—who recognised him for what he was—that they made him a present of a talisman which he always kept in this box.’

Again in speaking of her father her voice took on the thrumming tone of a ’cello string.

Irritated by delay, Irene urged, ‘Come on, let’s have a look at it.’ Mrs Jenkins might return too soon, or as a recurrence of unhappy nausea reminded, you might die of the grandmother’s fatty cake.

Viva opened the lid of the box. Inside was a white satin square beautifully stitched with gold thread. On removal of the sheet a black object not much larger than a fist was revealed.

‘You wouldn’t think,’ Viva said in an awful voice, ‘that this could have ever been a human head.’

Irene did not stop to think because she immediately accepted the object as an addition to her private world. A few threads of coarse hair were still adhering to the little scalp, and from the chin the bristles of a beard, less like hair than fine wire. But it was the slits where eyes and mouth had been which provoked the deepest shiver.

Not to show Viva the extent of the impression the shrunken head had made on her, she asked as casually as she could, ‘What does your mother think of it?’

‘Says it gives her the creeps. She’d have thrown it out after my father left, if I hadn’t told her it would probably come back—or revenge itself in some terrible way. So she lets it alone.’

‘You’re very lucky, to have it,’ Irene said.

Gil Horsfall’s stolen brooch was nothing to compare with Viva’s talisman from the Brazilian jungle. She herself had nothing but memories, images, and the threads of words and phrases which were constantly sprouting in her.

‘How does Patagonia come in?’

‘That’s where Carlos came from. He was a Patagonian Welshman.’ Viva immediately replaced the satin sheet and snapped the lid of the box shut. ‘They must never know at school,’ she said, ‘that I’m not like any normal Australian.’

Viva’s confession was so strange and unexpected you forgot for a moment your own abnormality. When realisation that the condition of which she was alternately ashamed and proud was one that she had in common with Viva Irene felt resentful.

She pursed her mouth. ‘I don’t know that it’s all that terrible—not like being a reffo,’ she added to show her willingness to shoulder Viva’s share of guilt.

‘I often feel all mixed up,’ Viva mumbled, quoting from a letter in a magazine Irene had found and read in Mrs Bulpit’s lounge room.

Any insecurity and confusion of your own became in consequence a distinction Viva would not have known about.

‘I think it’s time I went,’ Irene said soon after.

‘Promise not to tell,’ Viva called from the gate.

Not now that the secret had become more yours than Viva’s.

Irene waved back. A scattering of bats had begun weaving their evening flight. On the sky line the image of the shrunken head hung more purposefully, it seemed. Aunt Cleonaki must surely have accepted the mystic head as she would have approved some miracle-working black Panayia made respectable by the rigid vestments of Orthodoxy.

The image of the head only dissolved as Mrs Jenkins was seen advancing up the road.

‘I couldn’t contact my friend,’ she said with the composure of a lady returning from a visit to another. ‘Any messages will have to keep.’

It seemed in no way unusual that she should be hatless, gloveless, and barefooted, except that stones had drawn blood and the plaster was missing from her corn.

‘I wonder what nonsense that girl of mine’s been telling you,’ she said and laughed. ‘About her father, I bet. That lousy bastard—she can’t get over his disappearance. I could tell you—but won’t…’

Her denture wobbled, and cracks were reappearing in her composure.

‘Run along, dear,’ she advised, ‘It isn’t safe for a young girl, so many undesirables around in wartime—in peace too, you’ve got to face it.’

Irene continued on her way to Cameron Street. She felt strangely protected by the image of the head which she had appropriated as her talisman, and for the moment at least, indifferent to people and events.

*   *   *

Not long after, it seemed, though in fact they were strung out on the thread of months, perhaps even years, three important events occurred to shatter Irene’s sense of inviolability.

Event No 1

It was a steamy morning. You had gone down early, before the others were up, through the dark garden, to the sea wall. Everything dusty, or dank, or patent-leathery about the foliage had been exorcised by an influx of slow light. In the lower garden the hibiscus trumpets were expanding, and reaching upwards into what was not their native province, their pistils bejewelled with a glittering moisture along with the wings of big velvety butterflies. Their petals flapped through territory which normally belonged to moths and bats. The harbour had subsided this morning into a sheet of wet satin. Gulls had furled their harshness for the moment and were amiably afloat above their reflections. There was no reason why the city should ever catch fire again, as it had the evening Mamma sailed on the return voyage to Egypt and Greece.

No
reason
.

But you were suddenly sucked back through the sticky web of light and colour the garden the morning had become as though for some celebration you were forced up the paths breath grown furry one big hibiscus trumpet blinding with its scarlet as the cruel phonograph voice ground out of some still blurred dream or memory.

At the top of the path, beyond the Moreton Bay fig, the walls of the cubby in its branches mildewed and exhausted, the house had never looked so huge, while at the same time it appeared preparing to fall apart.

Something was happening. Someone had arrived. As you opened the screen door at the back, it hummed like a rusty hornet. From the stove a stink of spilt milk.

Mrs Bulpit’s voice was rising. ‘Too much happens. A person can’t expect me to cope,’ she moaned, ‘not in my state of health.’

There was the undertone of a second voice.

‘…
nobody
expects you to … my responsibility…’ ending in a smoky cough which partly veiled the speaker’s sex.

Gil was standing in the scullery. He was holding his case, ready to catch the bus for school, to arrive at the point where he ceases to know you. He has grown too fat? The cloth is tight round his buttocks. The hair he has begun growing on his thighs prickles like a dog’s from whatever is happening. His face could have heard about a murder or a fire has broken out in one of these old wooden dry-rotten houses. His strong pimpling throat is again a little boy’s. The adam’s apple has been halted.

Out of sight Essie Bulpit is slopping over.

When Mrs Lockhart—you would like to see her as Aunt Alison—steps into view.

‘Irene, dear—Eirene,’ she makes this supreme concession, ‘… Mrs Bulpit and I think you’d better … Mr Harbord agrees to let you off school today.’

It is the sign for Gil to uproot himself. His larger-sized shoes (shoes have to be bought as you grow, though garments can wait till the old become indecent) are kicking out, to shake off something holding him back, or excrement of some kind. Has he kicked that hole in the screen door, or was it already there in the old rusty mesh? Get away any way up to the bus. There is no reason why he should stay to contract a disease from someone who has to be quarantined.

His leather is stamping on the cracked concrete path. Escaping. The bus is suddenly, all of it desirable, the pimply raucous street boys, Mr Burt’s hands twisting the wheel,
wrestling
. Viva’s fringe and smell, the smudgy faces and limp shopping bags of those who belong to a different life, in which the shortage or availability of things, together with their price, are both as important and out of date as weights and measures on the blackboard under Mr Manley’s hands.

Anyway school is out for this morning, and you are looking at Aunt Ally’s throat or cleavage in her bosom, the blackhead in it throbbing.

‘Come into the lounge, Irene,’ she said, ‘there’s something we must have a talk about.’

Do you smell? Or has somebody been reading your thoughts?

Essie Bulpit has prudently retreated to her bedroom. She has heard what Aunt Ally has to tell and wouldn’t want to hear again, unless it was really interesting—or bad. Ally is looking so nervous, her glassy blue eyes avoiding her burnt skin hanging in more than usually pronounced rags, the thing she has to tell must be real bad. After she had hardly settled herself in a groaning of the Bulpit springs, and forced a fresh pack of cigarettes out of the carton corseting it, she can’t postpone any longer.

So she started off. ‘You can’t expect only happiness, dear, out of life,’ as if you didn’t know, ‘the blows will come as well. And what I have to tell you will probably be the greatest blow.’

Go on tell, tell, I can take it, because you have as good as told me.

‘Wouldn’t you like to come and sit beside me, dear?’

She holds out a hand, with its crummy rings, and the cigarette trembling between stained fingers. While you continue standing where you are. She will think you cold, but it’s okay by Ally if you don’t accept her invitation, her imitation of kindness, she doesn’t go in for touching, or not more than can be helped.

‘It’s about your mum, darling.’

‘I know.’

She looks put out, if not frightened. ‘How did you know? Did somebody tell you?’

‘No.’

How to tell Ally, who likes to live in her own car, driving round the bright Harbour bays, with her cigarettes and tissues, the boys’ sports gear, and the wilting vegetables she has bought cheap, keeping all else at arm’s length, unless the God she doesn’t believe in gives her a motor accident, how to tell this aunt you are half moth that knows by downy instincts, half Attic rock that can withstand the Turk’s scimitar.

‘Well, if you claim to know,’ she says rather angrily, aligning her big feet in their scuffed shoes in front of her on the Wilton carpet, ‘it makes it easier for both of us. Though it doesn’t seem natural. You
aren’t natural
, Ireen.’ The glassy eyes are back in true glaring form. ‘To know that your mother is dead—and to feel nothing, it appears—you’re just not an ordinary girl.’

‘Where did she die? Greece?’ It might after all become unbearable, you can feel your wiry legs bending, possibly giving.

‘No, in Egypt—in Alexandria.’

‘How?’

Facts are more in Ally’s line. She lets out a raw, relieved cough, and a funnel of smoke.

‘In a bombing raid. She and her friend—I forget his name—and a number of others must have died instantly, when the house they were visiting,’ she coughed again, ‘suffered a direct hit.’

She makes it sound as though it’s in the newspapers. Only unknown people die. It suits both of you this way.

Oh no no it doesn’t. You know about the other. Not from Mamma lying under Alexandrian rubble. But father murdered in his cell. Now Mamma has ended something. Greece—my heart—is dead.

Ally is extracting herself from a horrible situation and the groaning Bulpit sofa. ‘I like to think you feel more than you let me see. And now to be practical—not to brood over what’s happened and can’t be undone—why don’t we drive somewhere for the day. Do a little shopping in the city en route. I’ll buy you anything you have a fancy for—provided it’s not too extravagant—in war time.’

Keep it light, bright, and inexpensive for poor old Ally.

‘No.’ It seems your voice will never learn to play along. ‘I’d rather stay here.’

‘What—with Mrs Bulpit? She’s—in no fit state…’

‘With nobody.’

Ally hunches her shoulders. Unnaturalness in others makes her look deformed.

When she has gone, after you hear her driving away, the room, this recent torture chamber, settles back into its normal dull shape. You go outside into the garden to regain your normal balance. But nothing will ever be the same.

‘Eirene’ is dead. I am Irene Ireen Reenie anything this Australian landscape dictates their voices expect. Not altogether. Little bits of ‘Eirene’ are still flapping torn and bloody where they have been ground into the broken concrete strewn along the sea wall amongst the gulls’ scribble little spurts of knowledge will always intrude on what others are babbling about and on what I have learned to learn from blackboard and textbook, memory will always be bloodier than pinpricks the cruel tango we can’t resist in any of its movements in the bilious Alexandrian
patisserie
in Attic dust in mountain snow my mouth is watery with what I must live and already know.