The Hanging Garden Page 9

  ‘Yair,’ he said, ‘the bus.’

  And followed her plait out of the room.

  * * *

  That night, after they had shed the bus people, he couldn’t wait to ask, ‘How did you go with your essay and the drawing?’

  ‘They didn’t seem to think much of them.’

  * * *

  Viva said, ‘I’m gunner get off at your stop, Reenie, because Mumma has a message for Mrs Bulpit, who she hasn’t seen for a long while.’

  You could not do anything about it. If you cut off one of Viva’s tentacles, she grew another. She was the Australian octopus.

  She said, ‘Remember that droring of the fuchsia—I thought it was beaut, Ireen. My old dahlia—I can’t say I don’t like a dahlia but … fuchsias are different. Nobody would ever think of a fuchsia—the way they hang…’

  Viva did not have a limp, her shoe only caught rather often in the cracked pavement as she slommacked along.

  Mrs Bulpit wasn’t home. Gil must have escaped quickly from the bus mob, put together his bread and dripping, and vanished. The aluminium dripping bowl still looked to be rocking on the kitchen table.

  Viva eyed the bowl while combating her saliva. ‘Isn’t this a spooky house?’

  ‘I haven’t noticed.’ Viva’s presence made you defend what had become once more your property, it was more yours than Mrs Bulpit’s and this afternoon, even Gil Horsfall’s.

  ‘Where’s that nasty bugger of a Horsfall boy?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ You could truthfully say.

  ‘I don’t like him,’ Viva persisted.

  ‘You don’t know him—only at school.’

  ‘I know enough. Ooh, I don’t like this house! He might jump out and interfere with us.’

  ‘He’s never tried to interfere with me.’

  ‘Must be a perv then—like they say—and I’ve always thought.’

  ‘He’s my friend.’

  ‘Wouldn’t want a perv for a friend—or any nasty boy.’

  Their conversation was leading them out of the kitchen and down those ricketty steps which led to the back yard and garden. The steps threatened to pitch Viva into it too quickly.

  The need to protect Gil increased Eirene’s feeling of power.

  ‘You didn’t show me your room,’ Viva complained as she landed in the yard flat on her feet.

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ It’s only a sort of box room. You could not bear the thought of Viva staring at the hard narrow ottoman-bed and fossicking amongst dusty objects which from time to time had furnished your dreams.

  What she had been spared inspired Eirene to leap, missing out the short flight of ricketty rotting wooden steps. Her sense of power and release made her feel she was flying. She landed lightly at Viva Jenkins’ heels, and at once let out a cry filled with disgust, pain and giggles.

  ‘What’s up, Ireen?’ Viva had turned, frowning under her dark fringe.

  ‘I squashed a—long—black—slug!’

  As proof the slug lay mashed and quivering on its deathbed of disintegrating concrete, while Eirene sounded as though she might die of all that was churning out of her.

  ‘Only a slug! You’re the real loop, Ireen.’

  If they had not drifted deeper into the garden and come across something of greater interest, Viva Jenkins might have reconsidered her friendship with this loopy Greek reffo.

  ‘What’s that up there?’

  ‘That’s a house—a cubby.’

  ‘Who built it?’

  ‘We did—Gil and I.’

  ‘And you go up there together?’

  ‘We used to—sometimes…’

  Eirene Sklavos feels the power fainting inside her.

  ‘Can we go up?’

  ‘It isn’t safe. The boards are rotten.’ Fainter and fainter Eirene Sklavos hears herself. ‘Mrs Bulpit forbids it.’ The school language she has learnt to speak is ebbing out of her.

  Worst of all, Gil could be up there listening.

  As Viva suspects, ‘Could be up there all the while.’

  The evening is drawing in. Bats have begun flying.

  ‘Ooh, it’s grooby! Land in yer hair. Can’t stay all night waiting for old Essie to show up.’

  The light has intensified her fringe and her mole.

  ‘When you come to my place, Reenie, I’ll show you what my father brought from Brazil,’ she stands threatening an instant at the gate.

  * * *

  Viva was standing at the gate, waiting. ‘Thought you wasn’t coming.’ She might have preferred it that way. ‘Mumma said you wouldn’t. Said from what she’d heard you’d be too grand.’

  The kind of remark you had learnt to ignore.

  Jenkins’ place was an ‘old’ house. The gate might have fallen down if Viva hadn’t been persuading it to stand. The weatherboard house had once been painted, but by now the paint had almost flaked away. It had the look of some old Arab house outside Alexandria which had soaked up a lifetime of sunlight, and this absorption was perhaps what helped it hold together. A one-eyed house, with a lace curtain veiling that. There were several additional windows, but all of them bare, which gave them a blind glassy look. A pretty fretwork balcony above the porch had a couple of floorboards hanging from it.

  ‘I like your balcony,’ you told her for something to say. ‘I’d spend half my time up there, looking out across the water.’

  ‘It isn’t safe,’ she warned as though getting her own back.

  She was leading you up the front steps. The wooden uprights were each decorated with a pyramid, the point of the one you put your hand on so metal-sharp it made you squeal.

  ‘Ooooh! That’s dangerous!’

  ‘That’s what my father said when he fell off the balcony and landed on it.’

  ‘He could have been killed. Was he badly hurt?’

  ‘We don’t know. He disappeared.’

  Viva’s mum had been waiting for them somewhere in the dark interior behind the lace. When she showed up, she was wearing an easy cotton dress in no particular style. Standing side by side with her daughter, she was not much taller.

  ‘Hello Ireen,’ Mrs Jenkins said, ‘I’m glad to meet Viva’s friend at last.’ She had a smile which came and went, like thin sunlight, and several teeth were missing in one side of a pink denture. The dark room made her skin look whiter. She was one of those women who had been steamed rather than baked by the Sydney climate.

  She said, ‘I expect you’ll have a lot to tell me,’ and planted herself on the edge of a sofa.

  Did she really expect? It could have been expectation which caused her white calves to bulge when she wrapped her arms around her knees. Her feet were bare except for a pink corn plaster.

  Viva was scowling with embarrassment. ‘Aren’t you gunner give ’er something to eat?’

  ‘You’re just like your father! Think of nothing but feeding your face. Nice people when they come to see you expect a bit of intercourse. Viva,’ she confided in Irene, ‘can never hope to become a lady.’

  Viva could have been suppressing a whimper somewhere inside her muttering.

  ‘Do they live in houses like this in Greece?’ Mrs Jenkins asked her visitor. ‘Are they Christians?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Mr Jenkins was a pagan.’

  ‘He was not!’

  ‘You can’t expect anything of most men.’ Mrs Jenkins was becoming vehement. A wind swept through her listless hair. ‘There’s the gas—he promised me to come last Thursday and it’s now this Tuesday. We could die of it for all he cares.’ She opened her small white ringless hands and glanced not so much at the hands as a nothingness she was holding in them.

  There was certainly a smell of gas in the room. It became the stronger for your noticing it. The coloured plastic flowers seemed to exude the smell of gas.

  Mrs Jenkins must have noticed you noticing. ‘I love plastic flowers, don’t you? I think they’re more artistic than the real, which die on a person anyway.’


  The gaseous colours of the plastics glowed.

  Suddenly Mrs Jenkins jumped up so quickly she had to steady herself on the end of the sofa. ‘Suppose I’d better bring you something to eat or this girl of mine will go crook on me. You’ll have to entertain Maureen, dear, while I’m out of the room.’

  ‘She’s mad,’ Viva said, ‘Mr Horan—that’s the gas feller—came on Thursday, but she wouldn’t let him alone. He left without finishing the job.’

  ‘Why don’t we open the window—let the gas escape?’

  Viva became more agitated. ‘Wouldn’t be worth it. She doesn’t want anything to escape. That’s why Carlos disappeared.’

  ‘Carlos?’

  ‘My father—Charlie to his mates—but Carlos was his name. I’ll tell you all about that. No pagan,’ she glanced at the doorway through which her mother had just gone ‘my father was a mystic.’

  Irene Sklavos felt her eyelids snap as though she were awakening to a state she had sensed but never been able to put a name to. From Aunt Cleonaki she had learnt about the Saints, all of them far too Orthodox and rigid for the word to apply. She suspected Cleonaki would have disapproved of anything so fluid. If you knew about mystics yourself it was from associating with the state in certain dreams and an imagination you had to keep hidden.

  She could feel her heart palpitating like a rubber bulb. ‘You must tell me about your father, Viva, because I think I understand—sort of,’ she added to appease the part of herself which had learnt to be Australian.

  Viva brushed back her fringe. ‘I’ll tell you and show you—when she’s out of the way. But you must promise never to tell. It will always be our secret.’

  In speaking of her father Viva’s speech seemed to improve, her voice vibrated like some stringed instrument—a ’cello?

  Irene saw that Viva might be acquiring power over her, but could not resist promising. A moment of complete physical repugnance occurred as she visualised herself sharing a warm bath with Viva Jenkins. As the water lapped against the sides of the bath it revealed a greasy highwater mark.

  ‘Ssh!’ Viva warned. ‘She’s coming.’

  Mrs Jenkins had restored her face with smiles and a forced tranquillity. She was carrying a dish, on it a clutch of little cakes, and a jug of what looked like lemonade, but as remote from the lemon as her plastic flowers were from soil, sunlight, and natural grace. The jug of pseudo lemonade shared their gaseous glow.

  ‘These are very special cakes,’ Mrs Jenkins smiled, ‘from a recipe of my grandmother’s.’

  ‘Ah, them.’ Viva sounded disenchanted.

  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. ‘An
y 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.