The Hanging Garden Read online

  All quiet inside your deafened room not yet dawn perhaps if you lie long enough this warm wet will disappear nothing ever does at Thebes they are drying up the swamp to wipe out malaria deserve to catch it such a big girl from lying in your own dirty swamp Essie’s pointing finger has this transparent thimble on it which needles have pricked.

  The blue light of dawn starts to flow in through the crack in the curtain clean water shadows lapping over this stagnant swamp where you are lying. The black dummy and the furniture are ticking away in league with all that is stagnant and malarial.

  Gil will know. If you can reach him.

  Bulpit snores are sighing sucking ebbing and returning.

  Gil has drawn the curtains. It is carved GIL on his naked statue lying in these pools of milky light quarried brought just recently from Paros. Disturb a dream it will dissolve into disgust or hate. Cannot risk. But grope back, your own damp black rags of misery trailing behind.

  If you could only die but you don’t only old people or soldiers in a war or Papa murdered they say.

  So it is morning. And the wet is drier. But not enough. Will become a stain of shame in any case.

  * * *

  In time you learn to do your homework. You learn to learn, or forget what you have learnt from Miss Adams Great Aunt Cleone Evthymia Mamma Papa the Greek earth.

  The Australian Democracy is not interested in politics when there’s a war to be fought and won a Japanese menace submarines did you ever in Sydney Harbour but the Yanks are here the Americans will save us.

  Life is rumours and newspapers. Viva Jenkins says Elsie Chapman laid down with a GI in the scrub above Balmoral and he give her a packet of cigarettes. She said it was immense.

  * * *

  Mrs Bulpit says, ‘You don’t know what to make of young people nowadays.’ Perhaps it is because she is missing out on experience that has made her shrink. She no longer looks made of freshly steamed suet crust. She is baked yellow, a short crust with dust in the cracks. ‘Don’t know what Gil and you get up to. How you get your homework done in no time. What the teachers think of it. It isn’t natural. Mucking around out there in the garden.’

  Gil mumbles, ‘We’re building a house.’

  ‘A house? Well, I never.’

  ‘A cubby.’

  ‘A cubby indeed. One minute you’re grown up, the next you’re kids again.’

  It is not altogether like this because you have always been grown up if they only knew. Mrs Bulpit will never understand that what he tells her is a cubby or a house is neither—or is and isn’t.

  It started not long after the first day (and night) at school. You learn what is expected after a fashion. Homework for instance. You learn to use your voice, a different language. You learn that Miss Enderby lives with her sister, that Mr Manley is expected to have a nervous breakdown, you learn all about diseases, and the bloods (never really learn about the bloods, will Mrs Bulpit find them on what she calls the ottoman?). It started on an evening when a dead bat (they call them flying foxes here) fell out of the big tree on the cliff edge where GILBERT HORSFALL has carved his name. The air is very still, neither warm nor cold, in what they still call winter, when Gil shouts in the raw school voice you have never liked, ‘Come on, for Chrissake, we gotter do something.’ And drives the knife into the bark where words end.

  He roams around fossicking, nearly stumbles on what he kicks (‘all this Wandering Jew stuff’) and brings out these old still hard boards which the weeds and time have not succeeded in rotting.

  ‘Why don’t we build something, Eirene,’ remembering Mamma perhaps, because no-one else in Australia has called you Eirene, not till now, and will probably never. ‘Why don’t we put a platform in the tree—where we can climb up to—and sit.’

  He is breathing hard as he frees the boards, rank juices making us sneeze, his long whole bony face thinking.

  Would it be wrong to love Gilbert Horsfall’s face? To love somebody. He will kill you if he knows.

  Help him drag the boards. Drag them up the tree. Arms of a silky sinewy white monkey. Gilbert Horsfall is doing it all. A hard hand helps drag me up, like some old board. Only when he has arranged the boards, says he must get a hammer and nails, and we are crouching there on our platform, you will know what to tell, say, do. Stroke your throat waiting for this moment you might have dreamt about now forming in the fork of this black tree.

  But the blood, will it trickle down on the platform, and farther, through the cracks in our house?

  * * *

  Viva says, ‘Elsie Chapman’s wearing the rags. That’ll curb the cow. It’s nothing, though, Lily and Eva have to take a bath. Essie Bulpit—everybody knows. It’s only the boys don’t understand. Boys are stoopid. Didn’t your auntie Mrs Lockhart tell you about it?’

  ‘If ever there’s anything you want to ask me, ask, Ireen.’ Never see Aunt Ally, or almost never, now.

  It turns out that Mrs Bulpit knows ‘… something that happens to all of us…’ from finding it on this ottoman called a bed. ‘… not to worry, Ireen. Ah, dear…’

  She would rather not be faced with things, even those she knows about.

  * * *

  Gilbert Horsfall is the one who must have either the grinning mask of the ivory monkey he puts on with other boys, or stretched out lying on the floor of our house, elbows pointing at a moon which has not yet come alive, a silver disk before it starts to palpitate with the unborn twins behind its thin skin. Or pneuma you will never talk about again with G. HORSFALL or anybody.

  He says, ‘This is nothing like. We’ve got to do something about it—make it real.’

  He says ‘we’ but means ‘he’. You are just there as a kind of shadow to his ideas.

  He gets hold of a load of old hessian through somebody, think it’s the brother-in-law of Mr Burt the bus driver everybody likes. We—or Gil makes walls for the house out of musty hessian. The hair is sprouting in his armpits. Moisture trembles down from the tips of the pinkish hairs.

  Gil says, ‘That’s okay. But not the real thing, d’you think?’ as though expecting you to give an answer.

  He thought of the biscuit tin, the upright Arnott’s Arrowroot one, washed out. He borrows the brace-and-bit from the bus driver’s brother-in-law. And tin cutters so that he can tear a hole in the bottom of the biscuit tin. He tears his hand. He bores the hole in the platform, or floor of our house, bleeding and sweating all the time.

  ‘There,’ he says, ‘we’ve got a dunny now,’ and wants me to sit on the biscuit tin and let him hear I am peeing in our dunny.

  Once Mrs Bulpit passes underneath and calls up, ‘You kids up there, what are you doing I’d like to know?’ Her head tilted back, and her mouth, her plastic teeth open, like as if she is laughing when she isn’t.

  ‘House-keeping’ Gil answers back, kind of not laughing too.

  She closes her mouth. ‘I wouldn’t expect to be cheeked by better class children.’

  ‘But it isn’t cheek—it’s true!’ Has his voice begun to break, or is it just the schoolboy’s cockerel laughter?

  You are sitting on the Arnott’s dunny where to please Gil you have learnt to pee. Now you have begun, you can’t stop on any account.

  ‘And this—raining down. I hope it’s nothing rude—I can’t stand rudery—not in my state of health.’

  ‘It’s nothing, Mrs Bulpit. Only a possum.’ You jam your thighs together.

  ‘A possum by daylight? Not likely.’

  He pulls you down beside him on the platform, and you lie side by side like the snipers in the mountains in the presence of the enemy.

  ‘I don’t believe anything anyone tells me, not since I last saw Doctor.’

  Through the knothole you can see her trying to trace a deceit. She closes her teeth. She clears her throat, and walks away. Staggering slightly, to her real house.

  He puts his hand where the pee is still wet, that he has called up, then pulls his same hand away, it could have been scalded.

/>   I would like to tell him something. I would like to write, or better, speak, the poem G. has put into me. I I I show Gilbert Horsfall that I am me me me. Not a mewing cat. He might stroke me if I were, which I would not want, or do I?

  I shall not write this poem. Memory is safer than invisible ink, that all the school knows about, playing at spies, exchanging coded messages.

  Lily Feizenbaum comes up in break, looking more than usually mysterious. She shoves a folded paper in the pocket of your cardy. Unfolded, the paper is perfectly blank.

  ‘What has she given you?’ Viva is always on the watch.

  ‘A sheet of paper.’

  ‘Betcher that’s the old invisible ink. You hold it up to heat and it brings the writing out. See? Silly nonsense. I wouldn’t want to know what Feizenbaums have to write you. So you needn’t tell me.’

  Your pocket could hardly wait. You heat the stove. Essie was out, Gilbert mucking around outside, on one of the days when he gets sick of you. You hold Lily’s blank paper to the flame (what if you burned it and never got to know?).

  The message grew, a yellow brown spidery.

  Momma says you are welcome any Shabbat night at our table. Lily F.

  ‘Hi there,’ Gil’s voice, ‘where’ve you got to.’

  Hold the paper quickly to the flame.

  ‘What’s that?’

  The paper melted into tinkling ash. ‘Some notes I don’t need any more.’

  ‘Not cribbing?’

  Better not to answer.

  ‘Come on out and do something!’

  Climb up behind him, into our tree, our house. He falls down grinding his neck into the heap of old hessian snippets we use as pillows. ‘Christ, it’s boring! We gotter think of something to do…’

  I stand looking out through the doorway of the house above the hanging garden. We will always mean I. He does not want me. What if I speak the invisible poem I feel inside me. Will it give me back the power I thought I had on coming here? The poem that cannot be put into words.

  * * *

  Inside these musty, suffocating walls, this lumpy heap of pricking hessian. Bruce Lockhart knew a bloke who caught the crabs. They shaved him around the cock, armpits too, and painted him blue. Anything could crawl out of a heap of filthy old hessian.

  What would they say if they saw you painted blue in the dunny at school?

  ‘I’m gunner walk around a bit.’

  Shake her off. This girl got in his hair at times.

  He swung down quickly out of the tree to show he did not need her company. He would have walked over to Lockharts’, only the old man might stare him out. ‘He mightn’t even know your name. Who are you?’ ‘I’m Gilbert Horsfall—sir,’ ‘Who?’ Hang around outside while they had their tea. Till the boys came out. They still mightn’t want him. He hunched his shoulders trying to count up the people who might know about and want him. The Colonel knew, but you couldn’t say he wanted. After that Ma Bulpit, Irene Sklavos, the teachers while you were in class, the Ballards if they hadn’t forgotten. His list petered out.

  Walking down the winding, swooping streets he said his name ‘GILBERT HORSFALL!’ He liked it, but turned round, in case somebody might have heard and thought him a nut. He liked to run his hands over his body. Nobody ever noticed it. It was there, though.

  The evening swirled around him. Lights were coming on in some of the homes. An old woman was cuddling a cat on a veranda. Old people. Running her fingers through the cat fur. She had lifted it up and was rubbing noses with the bloody cat. They say a cat has worms in its nose. This old dried up woman had it coming to her if she didn’t know enough by the time she had reached well, fifty at least. Old people got on his tits.

  From time to time he pinched his nipples, they itched rather pleasantly, then harder till it hurt.

  He didn’t like to think about the old nipples of the woman playing with her cat. The girl on the beach had covered them up as soon as she saw you were looking at what was red and rubbery, sort of flowers cut out of a wet bathing cap.

  Sandy skin. What if you sucked on a tit that had been making flowerpots in the sand …

  Bruce knew a bloke who got the clap or siph or whatever it was from going with a woman down at Mrs Macquarie’s Seat.

  Must be somebody who hasn’t got it.

  In the street he was walking down lined with big fuchsias, tree fuchsias, it was already oily dark. The deep blue sky had begun prickling slightly with stars. In a lit window a man was grinding his mouth in a woman’s open one backwards and forwards like he was swallowing her down, all the while running his hands. Some of them had brown nipples (Bruce says they don’t have to be boongs).

  Gilbert bloody Horsfall tore off a branch of the giant fuchsia and whipped the darkness. Tassels flew in all directions. The soft, fleshy, sticky stems.

  He threw the mangled remains away.

  Ohhhh he groaned, swallowing the warm damp sea air, gulping at the stars, he would have swallowed them down if he had been close enough. What was the point of anything at all? Run away, and join up and get killed. A hero on a memorial. Eirene Sklavos had seen killing, if you could believe her. Her father had been murdered. All bullsh probably. But what she had seen, done and knew stuck like splinters in his mind.

  Less murders nowadays. Ma Bulpit said it was because there’s a war on. Not without a soldier murders some girl for holding out on him. There was the boy the sailor murdered. Pervs. There was that sailor at Neutral Bay who let down his apron and waved his dick at you. Like you were a perv. You weren’t—or were you?

  He lurched round the bend, reeling, like on a ship in a rolling sea beneath the high swirling wastes of an ultra-marine, prickling sky, fell down at last on a bit of wasteland above a culvert, lashing out at lantana and the wiry trailers of morning glory as the stones ate into his back? Or were there others around him in the darkness?

  Big boongs with coffee coloured nipples, blousy girls with cut outs of red bathing-cap rubber. Experienced guys in business suits and moustaches grinding into unwilling mouths. Sailor on sailor.

  He was so hard he got to pulling it off, moaning for the stones, lantana smelling of cat piss and semen, the cold blue enamel of the sky. And lay wilting, not crying, it was sweat—or semen.

  He had shrunk right into himself into a kind of guilty purity he had never experienced that he could remember. Wondering what Irene Sklavos would have thought. Why, for Chrissake, this Ireen, who was nothing to do with him. But might have been standing over him looking down, prissy lips pressed together, like she had just been not explaining the bleeding pneuma. Haunting him on this wasteland above the culvert.

  He sat up presently, buttoned his fly, and started the walk towards Cameron Street. He felt drained. His legs could have been parcels of straw. As he brushed against the hedge of giant fuchsias, he was sprinkled with drops so cold and silver he shuddered for his own enormity. Were they eyes glittering amongst the foliage and fleshy tassels? What odds? She was nothing to him, another kid, a girl, a Greek reffo Lockharts said was her mother’s bastard.

  * * *

  When he got in there was no sound from the other side of her door. Must have gone to bed. He could see her lying on that ottoman like a queen on a tomb. He could hear the sounds of furniture and dry rot inside Ma Bulpit’s dunny.

  His own room, under the warrant officer’s leaning portrait, was one big yawn tonight. Neither light nor darkness let him alone. He lay remembering forever all that he most wanted to forget. And Eirene Sklavos was advancing on him her plait trailing across the carpet behind her like a long black snake, its tail still had to enter the room when she had almost reached his bedside.

  ‘… running late … miss the bus if you’re not careful…’ It was Ma Bulpit’s voice twitching him awake.

  To do him an extra favour she poured out his tea for him this morning. Her pink chenille had some egg in it.

  Sklavos had had her breakfast. Her plate with the slops of crispies in it is standing on the ta
ble opposite.

  ‘Where’s Irene?’

  ‘Finishing something for school.’ The Bulpit had not yet put in her teeth, didn’t bother at that hour and for kids, her hair still had a sleepy look, she might have been rootling round in her head for something to start complaining about.

  Finished his breakfast as quick as he could.

  Ireen—she looked like Eirene this morning—was sitting at that table at the end of her room where the stored furniture thinned out and the empty space became hers. A clear light fell around her from the window. The ottoman-bed was already made. When she looked up she might have been suggesting he should have knocked, giving him the cold look of a grown-up woman.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he heard himself bleating as he advanced.

  ‘Work,’ she answered, colder than ever, and lowered her eyes.

  ‘You must have gone to bed early,’ he tried it out cautiously.

  Had she smelled him out? The dry scales of it were rustling between his thighs.

  ‘What’s this?’

  She sat colouring in the drawing of a spray of flowers. Beside the paper lay a fuchsia branch, the sap still fresh where torn off, the leaves only just beginning to wilt, tassels drooping.

  ‘We were set an essay on our favourite flower.’ The purple and cerise glowed deeper as she worked.

  ‘But a fuchsia can’t be your favourite flower! Nobody would ever think about the fuchsia…’

  ‘There are roses of course. You’ve never seen a Greek rose.’

  He hadn’t but her voice conveyed proud blooms of a noble size.

  ‘You can like something all of a sudden,’ she said, returning to the flower she was giving life, ‘something you’ve never thought about before. Then you might forget about it.’

  She got up briskly after that, gathered her drawing and the pages of her essay, and laid them in her case.

  ‘We don’t want to miss the bus.’

  Her eyes seemed to have elongated, their whites glittered at him for an instant, as the light had through the branches of the fuchsia hedge.