The China Garden Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Sunday, two weeks earlier Umbria, Italy

  Monday Northern New South Wales, Australia

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Monday

  Friday, a week later

  Saturday

  Tuesday

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Photo: Russell Shakespeare

  Kristina Olsson is the author of the novel In One Skin (2001) and the biography Kilroy Was Here (2005). The China Garden (2009) received the 2010 Barbara Jefferis Award for its empowering depiction of women in society and was also shortlisted for the Kibble Literary Award. Kristina’s journalism and non-fiction have been published in the Australian, the Courier-Mail, the Sunday Telegraph and Griffith Review. She has worked extensively as a teacher of creative writing and journalism at tertiary level and in the community, and as an advisor to government. She lives in Brisbane.

  For bookclub notes visit www.uqp.com.au

  This is for Tony

  and the five beautiful children we share:

  Zoe, Dane, Mali, Jada & Kassi

  Cress will carry the exact memory of the news bulletin into the next few days, and a version embellished by anecdote and dream into the rest of her life. Always, though, she will be able to hear the bare bones of the words, see them as if they are laid out in hollowed earth.

  Police are questioning residents in Archer Street after a new-born baby was found abandoned in a front yard early this morning.

  Later, after the searches and the interviews, after the confessions and the stories in the paper, her memory will become visual. She will still hear the words but a moving picture will overlay them, she will see the events like a dream sequence, in odd conjunction – the mottled blues of baby skin, a girl shrinking – as she tries and fails to make sense of them, to give them a chronology, to make them narrative. This is the only way she can begin to comprehend.

  Kieran will remember too. He will remember standing at the bench in the kitchen, the cereal box raised over his bowl, feeling suddenly exposed, as if the man reading the seven o’clock news has told the world the kind of underpants he wears. He feels that everyone who looks at him will know.

  He will always have a clear picture of himself, pouring cereal, watching it fall, each flake a piece of evidence, a word, a sharp glance of accusation. As he eats he will feel certainty swell in his belly. He will know that somehow, what has happened to Abby is all his fault.

  And for Laura, as well, there will be a picture. There will be answers, finally, rather than questions, in what she sees when she opens the door of the shed that morning: a girl sitting on a stool in a long, off-white dress that is streaked and blotched with blood, an avenging angel in a painter’s smeared smock, her face open as an infant’s.

  Sunday, two weeks earlier Umbria, Italy

  The tree was old, old. Its skin mottled black and dry, scabbed with lichen. Deeply creviced, like the dirt road behind it, like the face of the farmer who had led them here, past the stand of cherry trees and through a potato field, newly dug. Below them the folds of the Valdescura, the Valley of Darkness. Alvaro nodded as he translated the name: Because of the woods, he said.

  The Fiorentina pear stood in a tangle of weeds and thorny vine, so they’d had to scythe their way in. It was afternoon late in a warm autumn; Laura watched dark circles of sweat flowering beneath Alvaro’s arms as he worked. Her own skin prickled too, but it was more than the heat. The Fiorentina was like a venerable relative of hers now. In the presence of its great age, its dignity and survival she felt humbled and grateful. And afraid: it was alive so could it feel? As they cut and moved closer she had a sense of the tree as human, hating them for being here, its limbs stiff against the intrusion. As soon as she was close enough she laid her palm flat against the rough trunk. Alvaro grinned at her. Is there a pulse? he said.

  She looked at the farmer. He was expressionless, like the tree. He shrugged, folded his arms across his chest. Quanti anni? he asked. How old?

  Laura leaned closer then and placed her cheek against the trunk. It wasn’t entirely pretence. One day, surely, one of these ancient trees would speak. Of all the days before, the people, the sun and the seasons, families, orchards. Of everything it had seen and suffered, all the triumphs and mistakes. Laura smiled at the farmer, shrugging as he had. She won’t tell, she said in her abbreviated Italian. Ninety? One hundred and ten?

  She bent to pull her tools from her pack and the two men wandered off. This suited her. She believed the work of grafting was an intimate exchange, not surgical so much as psychological. It was not a performance, it was not for spectators. She spoke softly to the pear as she moved around, preparing it. Sometimes, as she touched and talked and cut, she felt in the air some old sadness, something alive and stoic but not human. She would fight back tears then or, like today, just let them come.

  A cool wind came up the valley as she worked. It gathered with it the noise of a thousand leaves rubbing, bristling, and she didn’t hear Alvaro approaching, not even the sound of his boots; she jumped when she felt his hand on her arm. A frown had begun to form on her face; she liked to work alone. After ten years as her assistant, he knew that. But then she looked at him and saw that his eyes were uncertain. He thrust the mobile phone in her direction. It’s Kate, he said, raising his brows.

  Later, she will keep seeing herself at just this moment. It will be involuntary – the scene will simply keep forming itself in her head, as if repetition and reinvention will force her brain or her heart or her eyes to understand it properly. She will see the pear tree, its stoic bark, its leaves, and hear her daughter’s voice. It is too mature, she thinks, too grown-up; as calm and final as death.

  But on that warm afternoon – unseasonably warm, even for Umbria – she registered only Kate’s words and, oddly, the translucency of a leaf, sea green, lifting and falling in that light wind, lifting, turning, falling. Green as a wave, she thought, as she folded up the phone and dropped it into her shirt pocket. She looked down at what she had done, at the vertical cut in the tree’s flesh. Felt the handle of the knife gripped hard, hard in her hand. She loosened her hold and stared for a moment at the blade. Hesitated, then bent to her work again, concentrating. This part of the graft was crucial, it had to be precise. She squinted, feeling her way, telling the tree: It’s all right, it’s all right.

  Alvaro appeared again at her shoulder as she was finishing. He watched as she packed the precious piece of tree flesh for its journey, then he took her tools and wiped and dried them. The farmer was gone and the sun was tipping over; Laura was aware of the world glittering, soft light on leaves and grass, the fine hairs on her arms. She picked up her pack, put her hand to the tree once more.

  There was no noise now, nothing, only a bird calling, and the quiet orchestra of wind and small creatures breathing. Into that soft half-sound, Kate’s voice returned to her, the words stroke and lawyer. They made the sound of something collapsing.

  They turned from the Fiorentina, and stepped back onto the narrow trail through the potato plants. Laura looked ahead to the thin shadows thrown by the cherry trees and the stone walls of the farmhou
se. Beside her, Alvaro walked with his head bowed slightly, saying nothing. When they were through the field she turned her face towards him and said: My mother died.

  There were a thousand things that might be done but only one that couldn’t wait. Back at the orchard they unpacked the truck and in the last of the light carried the cutting to the rows of pear and almond trees, where together they completed the graft. Laura knelt and concentrated. These minutes were crucial, she felt it in the nerves in her arms and hands and fingertips. She spoke as she worked: Precious Fiorentina. Perhaps to fight off a flush of irritation she felt and didn’t understand, something that had nothing to do with the tree.

  She grimaced, her hands firm on the binding cloth. Alvaro had turned to check the other plants around them but his eyes, she knew, were watching her face as well as the movement of her hands. When she finished she leaned back on her haunches. Beside her Alvaro stooped to examine the leaves on a healthy almond tree. Go, he said, his face to the leaves. Go to her. I know what to do here.

  Monday Northern New South Wales, Australia

  The sharp scent of newly watered tomato plants: this is what Cress took into the house with her every evening when she’d finished in the garden and it was time to cook. Clean and peppery, the smell of efficiency. Yes, she thought, slipping off her gardening shoes at the back door and wiping dampness from her hands. She nodded to herself as she shuffled into the kitchen and pulled an apron from a hook on the pantry door. She reached into the fridge: carrots, pumpkin, peas. Then found her favourite knife. The efficient smell of tomatoes. The notion pleased her; she would tell Kieran. But not now: the ‘Millennium Quiz’ was on now. He would be too busy with words of his own.

  She washed the vegetables and listened as the noise of the television rose and fell in the next room. Without a glance she knew her grandson would be sitting still and silent in front of the screen, legs crossed on the floor. On his lap his notebook, his pen, and the dictionary beside him. Nothing else would register until the ‘Quiz’ was over, not the slow dip of the sun and the insistent cicadas, not the first hiss of onions and meat in the pan.

  Cress stood by the stove with a spoon, and by habit rubbed a spot in the small of her back, just where the apron strings tied. She was thinking that the true colour of onions was the colour of new butter, creamy, pale. She pushed them around, chasing a memory of her girlhood in the blackened pan, something about milk. Skin on custard. The backs of her mother’s hands. Behind her, at that moment, the phone on the wall rang with a bursting sound. Cress touched her chest briefly, quelling an echo; moved the pan from the heat, wiped her hands.

  She was anticipating her daughter’s voice, and readied her own for warmth. But it was Iris, not Shelley, Iris Ferguson from the shop. She was breathy with news. Cress listened and stared at the spiralling telephone cord, the palm of her left hand stilled against the fabric of the apron. After some time, perhaps a minute, she managed some monosyllables in reply, a phrase. When she placed the phone back in its cradle, her hand lingered there the way it might on a shoulder, a forehead.

  She stood by the phone. Two thoughts arrived in quick succession. The first was about Kieran. She needed to give him this news, this information. She peered around the door at him, or rather at the back of his head. She stared at his bare neck and bit her lip. He still had the neck of a young boy, smooth, heartbreaking. She tried out words, mouthing them noiselessly to his back, his neck, his hair: Angela is dead. Angela has passed away. Angela is gone. Angela.

  As she did, Kieran took his pen and wrote something in his notebook. She felt a momentary panic that he had heard her thoughts and written them down. His movements were quick, his face dipping and lifting again to the screen. Cress followed his eyes. Not a question had been missed; the quiz master, avuncular, grinned approvingly. She wished for a script just like his.

  The second thought took longer to form properly in her head. She turned back to the stove and to her chopping, her mind noisy, full of wings flapping, the wings of birds that couldn’t escape. Carrots fell in discs from the knife. She pushed them to one side. Scooped up mushrooms. Stopped, stared ahead out of the window onto her evening garden. As she watched it darken slightly she let the words come, let the wings quieten. I didn’t get to say anything to her, she thought. I didn’t get to ask.

  Undulant. A beautiful word. Kieran said it aloud, and his tongue played over the sound like a wave. That’s what the dictionary said too. Moving with a sinuous or wavelike motion. He grinned and said the word again, watched the sea echo it back at him. That was just the word he wanted. The one no one else had known tonight on the ‘Quiz’. The idea buoyed him up, even now, and he wanted to hold onto it. It almost cancelled out the other ones that Cress had used afterwards, even as he sat there with his notebook and his dictionary.

  Dead. At first that word had bounced off him, as if it was soft rubber and he a hard surface. He could almost watch it dribble away from him, across the carpet of the lounge room, slowly. For weeks afterwards when he thought of that, it was the brown-flecked patterns in the carpet he would see, they leapt up at him bearing the words they had absorbed and he had not: Angela is dead.

  He was aware of the ‘Quiz’ ending and the contestants laughing, of Cress trying to talk to him. The word Angela. His own name: Kieran. But it made no sense to listen; the words were without meaning, so he got up and left the room and walked outside. The jacaranda in the corner of the yard glittered in the silvery early darkness. Everything seemed to be watching him, the trees, the tired birds, his grandmother pretending not to as she fussed in the kitchen. He turned from it all and went to the back gate, down the hill towards town.

  Almost immediately he felt better. The words didn’t reach to here; he could look around and see no evidence of them. They were just the same streets, his streets, the air salty and normal. Unmarked by catastrophe. He dug his hands in his pockets and perused it all with a quiet smile. By the time he reached the esplanade he felt himself again, at least the person he was half an hour before. The person he was before the phone rang. He filled his lungs with air. Undulant, he said.

  The sea pushed itself up Convent Beach with little grunts and sighs. The surface of the water was dark now, unknowable as always. He scratched the side of his chin, his nails on the light stubble, and listened. He loved the sound of the sea, its range of notes and noises, though the look of it, the idea of it, sometimes unsettled him. Tonight, he felt it sounded tired.

  He turned towards the shops, and thought about the word content. From the ‘Quiz’ he knew it meant more than one thing; but it was mostly about interiors, or something contained, as well as accepting and calm. A word that goes with inside, he’d said to Angela, when he was visiting a couple of nights before. She’d just finished a painting, huge, bigger than all the others put together. It leaned against the wall of the shed as if it was resting, he thought. It had a title scrawled across the bottom: I Go Looking for Signs of Contentment #3.

  Now he couldn’t help wondering about its message. Because surely there was one. Surely there had to be messages or warnings about strange things, sudden things, like the signs on dangerous roads: falling rocks ahead, sharp curve. He wanted to think their discussion that night had contained one. He mouthed the word again into the still, warm air: content. But what had she really meant? He was her friend so he should know. And he didn’t.

  The shops on the sea-front were all fluorescent comfort. He stood across the road and watched people drifting past them, stopping occasionally to peer inside, to consult each other. There was a loose knot of boys in board shorts outside the takeaway, lounging in plastic chairs. Kieran looked at them, heard the drift of their lazy vowels, and found that he was hungry. There was the smell of hot chips and ocean and batter. He turned towards it.

  At the mid-point of the high curve of air that would take her south to Australia, Laura woke to the smell of roses. The cabin of the aircraft had
been dimmed for sleep. She knew she had been dreaming of her mother’s garden, the pinks and yellows of overblown roses, a velvety smell. It was still there in the half-dark, that smell, soft and calming. She looked down the row of sleeping passengers and imagined a plane-load of dreams exhaled into the false night.

  She shifted in her seat. The fragrance of roses abruptly vanished, leaving a dry, empty feeling that might have been the air of the plane and might have been dread. The night before, the lawyer had said: Wills are always emotional. You can’t talk back to them, you can’t have the last say. His Irish lilt and the phone line had been clean and clear; he might have been calling from Dublin rather than a beachside office on the north coast of New South Wales. It was the moment it had all gelled in her head: her mother was gone, they were all gone, all her links with the place she was born in. She’d felt this dryness then, this emptiness.

  She looked out at the endless dark and the pulsing points of light on the plane’s wing. You can’t talk back to them. She rested her forehead for a moment on the cold glass, watched her own face lean in towards her like a friend. Wished for a moment she had encouraged Kate to come with her. I’ll be better on my own, she’d said and had thought it was the truth. Wanting the freedom, even from her daughter, to sit with this new version of herself. To look into the emptiness. To see where it led.

  But long distance flight, inexorable, impossible, stripped everything down, removed even that feeble volition, leaving her unconvinced of anything. Concentrated all the aloneness in a long, long moment, one that churned on and on with the great grinding engines. She shifted again in her seat, pulled on headphones to block the sound, switched to the music channel. Closed her eyes again and fell asleep to the sound of Puccini.

  Tuesday

  Cress woke with the sun and with the weight of the previous night still on her, so that the new day already felt old. She lay still for a while in the high silky-oak bed that had been her husband’s wedding gift to her, the bed they’d shared for thirty years. There was barely a day she didn’t say to herself: not long enough. It still felt like a nuptial bed rather than a widow’s, and even now she sometimes woke half surprised to find herself alone.