The China Garden Read online

  This morning, though, she was almost grateful for it, without knowing why. She glanced over at the curtains: their slight movement, and the sun behind them, nudged images towards her that sleep had dulled. Faces. Angela’s as a young woman, hopeful, open. Kieran’s last night, blank. Her own in the mirror at bedtime, after Kieran finally came home. It had looked no different to the one she rubbed with almond oil the night before that and every night, its creases and age spots unchanged by the news.

  She lifted a hand to her cheek, watched the curtains lift an inch and sag. Lift and sag. Breathed deeply and let her hand drop to the empty space on the bed beside her. I didn’t get to ask how it all went with her. The thought was etched on her mind more than Iris’s words, more than Kieran’s terrible quiet. It had been with her all night and informed her dreams: of bright gifts given and taken, of a church nave in soft shadow, where her own cries died soundless in her throat. Too late, too late. Her fingers on the sheet traced circles, around, around. And now another thought entered the uneasy mix she might have been stirring there, like soup: even if her husband was beside her now, she would not have been able to tell him all this.

  In the kitchen, minutes later, she pursed her lips, deciding to be businesslike: tea and toast, and a cheese and pickle sandwich for Kieran. She cut the sandwich in four, wrapped it and left it on the usual shelf in the refrigerator. Filled his water bottle, pulled out breakfast things. Then she stood for a moment in the doorway to the lounge room, finishing her tea, listening for any signs he was stirring. Sometimes, on still mornings like this, she could just hear the crush of waves on sand, a kilometre away down the hill. Or perhaps it was dozens of tyres on bitumen, she was never sure. At any rate there was no sign her grandson was awake. Outside she closed the door softly and automatically pulled her car keys from her handbag. Looked down at them splayed in her palm and stopped. Stowed them once more and, taking her gardening hat from its hook nearby, set off down the hill on foot.

  Laura felt the light before she saw it, the voices before she heard them. Coming up through waves of fitful sleep her body registered sensation at a kind of slant. She opened her eyes to the queasy yellow of the light and wondered if that was what a stroke felt like, the senses knocked sideways, eyes hearing and ears seeing. She pulled off her headphones and looked around, blinking away heaviness. The plane was stale with the sighs and yawns of people long deprived of true sleep. Some were shuffling up the aisles, pulling at clothing, colourless. Look, said the man next to her, nodding towards the window. A fine stubble shadowed his chin. Laura turned. In the blackness below, a string of lights, then a cluster. Australia, she heard him say. She stared, trying to feel what he felt. What his voice held. Gladness.

  Cress liked to arrive early for her shifts at St Barnabas. She liked to walk among the shelves for a while alone, and breathe in the smells, the still air, the fragrance of old things. Cedar and silky oak, musty fabric and books. And sometimes, something else. Sometimes, lifting a fine china tea cup from its saucer, or tracing the curve of a hairbrush first used before she was born, she thought she could smell the slight perfume of skin, of hair or fingertips imprinted there eighty or ninety or a hundred years ago. She had caught herself raising a cup to her own lips, a brush to her own hair, as if the very gesture might erase time.

  This morning, she allowed herself a few moments to stand at the front of the cluttered aisles, to be as still as the air. The sun was already pouring pink and apricot through the higher stained-glass windows, softening edges and bringing one word to Cress’s lips. Benediction.

  May the Lord bless you and keep you. May He let His light shine down upon you, and give you peace. Out of the long years of services and Sunday school she had brought those two lovely sentences. The kindness of them, the rhythm. Cress began to move up the first aisle, bending with her dusting cloth to wipe and dab at wood, china and glass. There was peace in the rhythm of her hands, a blessing given and received.

  When Cress had reached the end of the first aisle, Iris Ferguson appeared with the till keys and unlocked the arched front doors of the shop. Bright yellow light fell through onto the broad planks of the floor. Muffled sounds from the street trickled in on its tail. Cress paused to listen: on the light wind came the snap of laughter, the press of tyres on the road. And the sea. She kept listening for some moments, as if to make sure. The same way she sometimes stood late at night, in her own darkened house, listening to Kieran breathe.

  Iris’s voice seemed almost foreign, when it reached her. No funeral until Monday, she trilled over her shoulder. She was flicking on lights at the dark end of the shop, twisting the knob of the overhead fans. Cress eyed the other woman, the slightly rounded back, the tidy perm. Was tempted to spoil it all by saying: Whose? But Iris was ahead of her. The daughter, she said, nodding, pushing back the sleeves of her blouse. Laura, isn’t it? Wasn’t she at school with our girls? Lives somewhere overseas.

  Cress picked up a clean cloth. Felt, as she had the night before, the clattering of wings in her head. She flapped the cloth at a shelf of electric jugs and toasters, as if they too needed to be tamed. She knew she could not trust herself to speak. Instead she moved slowly along the shelf and back again, half-listening to Iris: few friends, she heard her say as she busied herself at the counter, and lonely death. After a moment she tried to block the words out but found that Iris’s voice was only replaced by her own. I did what I thought was right, she said to herself, as if Iris had asked. As if she herself had asked. She closed her eyes, tried to blank out the other noises of the day and visualised the sea, the waves collapsing, pausing, collapsing again. Then she took her cloths and duster and began work on the next aisle.

  Everything looked the way it should: his sandwich was on the third shelf in the fridge, his cereal bowl and spoon were on the bench. That was good: it was a day like any other day, then. Kieran had slept in a bit but he still managed a bowl of corn flakes and half a piece of toast with butter and honey, and even caught the early bus. He endured the shrieks and loud laughter around him with a patient nod, even a word here and there. His workmates were always noisy on the bus; he was relieved that hadn’t changed either. All the way through town and out along the road to the workshop he managed not to think of the night before, tried to keep the good feeling he’d woken with. He had to concentrate hard.

  Kieran was proud of his powers of concentration. He often tested himself, to stay sharp. This was how he knew that O’Reilly the butcher wore different shoes on Friday to those he wore every other day; that the kitchen-hand at the chicken shop stepped outside for a smoke – a rollie – at five minutes to every hour except six. It was also how he knew that his grandmother was fond of shoplifting. This was another interesting fact in his collection.

  The first time he saw it happen – the moment he understood what he was seeing – shock overrode everything. When that subsided, he was left with something indefinite, a not-knowing that stayed with him and irritated him, like a stone in his shoe. It was the not knowing that he didn’t like more than anything else, more than the fact of the shoplifting. The gap it revealed in him. The lack of knowledge.

  If someone had asked him about Cress, he would have struggled to describe her, the way it was with her. For him it would have been like trying to describe himself, someone so thoroughly familiar that he needed to step away to see. So to answer the question, he might simply have produced the photo from his bedroom wall: Kieran, a plump baby, sitting on Cress’s lap. Both of them were laughing up at something or someone to the side, beyond the camera frame, but there was nothing polite or staged about them. These were belly laughs, their mouths stretched wide, their eyes shining with it. Kieran’s hands were clapped together, holding the moment fast.

  It wasn’t the laugh, exactly, that Kieran loved most about this photo. It was the timing: the laugh burst from them in the same split second, their faces cracking with joy. It was proof to him that he and Cress were
joined somehow, made with the same skin, as if part of him was grafted onto her at birth, and her to him.

  She was there when he was born, he knew, was the first to touch him, her hands around him as he slid from his mother. The story of his birth, of how the two women sat with him for hours before a doctor came (‘Like a treasure,’ Cress had told him, ‘we didn’t want to share’) was like a good luck charm, a bright medallion in Kieran’s mind. He’d imagined it so often he sometimes felt it was his own memory he was recalling, as well as theirs: could see them, his mother and Cress, their heads bent close over the bundle of cloth, whispering.

  Since he was a child he’d spent so much time with Cress that the word grandmother had lost its true meaning in their relationship. It wasn’t actually a word he’d ever used. Like his mother, and most other people, he called her Cress. Or Cressida, singing it down the scale when he felt particularly happy, the syllables falling among the herbs in the garden or echoing off the crowded shelves at St Barnabas. Cress-ida. At any rate, over thirty years – and particularly in the past ten that he had lived here full-time – Cressida and grandmother had fused together in his head, becoming more than the sum of their parts. To Kieran she was elemental, like his hands and feet, daily, precious, unregarded.

  His own hands prickled the first time he saw her take something. Take, remove, and finally steal, he conceded later, but that wasn’t the word that came, at first: he simply watched through a window of the shop as Cress, an unlikely magician, slid a small object – a silver spoon – beneath the sleeve of her cardigan, rendering it invisible. It took his head several seconds to catch up to his eyes: perhaps she was scratching her elbow, perhaps she had just folded her arms, the spoon disappearing beneath her fingers.

  No. The spoon was in her sleeve. That knowledge and the picture in his head – his grandmother bending to dust the shelf, her eyes as the spoon slipped beneath her sleeve – kept replaying in his head for the next hour and would appear at odd intervals in the days that followed. At home he tried to match them up with Cress in the kitchen, Cress in the garden. He found himself watching her hand movements, examining the exact shape of her forearm. Whatever was missing, the crucial knowledge he didn’t have, might reveal itself there.

  The first few hours of the day were spent smoothing labels onto small plastic bags. ‘Bulls Eyes’, the labels said. ‘Packed by Enterprise Packaging.’ Every now and then Kieran looked up and around at the faces of his workmates, intently bent to the task. Lift, place, press. Labelling was not one of the jobs Kieran enjoyed here, but it wasn’t the worst. That had to be Counting Six: sitting at a small conveyor belt and slipping one, two, three, four, five, six sticks of wrapped barley sugar into the pre-labelled plastic bags. Only a small number of people were chosen for this job, and Kieran was one of them, but the praise he received for his counting skills did not make up for the strict concentration it required. At least in Labelling he got to think his own thoughts, letting them range over people and places far removed from Enterprise Packaging.

  For the past hour or so – lift, place, press – his thoughts about Abby had pushed time away. Made him feel – he reached for the word – content. In the beginning, he’d felt ill on the days when there was no choice, when he had to come to work. On these days he was certain she would be at the park. Nausea would burrow at him. He would imagine her: floating along as if she was wind-driven, sailing the air on the swing. Slowing, looking for him. Then forgetting, after a while, that he’d ever been there, or that they had ever been friends. Forgetting him.

  This thought would make him fumble, growing impatient with the clock. Once or twice he thought of standing up, retrieving his bag and simply leaving. His workmates would barely register he’d gone. But then he would think of Cress, and the small pension he received only if he turned up at Enterprise Packaging ten whole days out of every month. Few things made him happier – or feel more like a man – than slipping the new notes and coins into her purse on payday. Being with Abby, though, came close.

  Today he watched the bags of sweets fill up and bob along the belt, watched his own hands at their regular tasks, the hands of the others, and again felt reassured. Not even Counting Six took that away. It was, he thought, the way he felt some mornings after he’d been to Angela’s, when he woke late to hear Cress humming in the garden. Kind of warm and settled. Content, he thought again, and smiled as his hands did their work, one, two, three, four, five, six.

  At knock-off time this feeling was still with him as he ignored the homeward bus and his friends in their orderly queue and walked off in the direction of the hills. At four o’clock the sun was still warm, and Enterprise Packaging was a long way from anything, so by the time he got to Angela’s his water was gone and he was thinking about a cup of tea. As he walked down the track he was thinking he’d like it milky. Sometimes he drank it black, as Angela did, with sugar, both of them holding their mugs with two hands, blowing over the surface of the tea, taking small sips. There would be companionable little grunts of pleasure. But right now he was sweating from the long walk, and thirsty; milky tea would be good. Not too hot.

  That was just what his tongue was anticipating, a sweet warmth was already in his mouth as he passed the rose garden, already in afternoon shadow, and turned towards the shed. As usual the house was quiet as he passed it, and everything, everything looked exactly the same as always when he pushed open the shed door. The shelves of paper and paint, the easels, the drop sheets and piles of newspaper, the cups and the water jug and the jars of tea and sugar. And it all smelled the same, the grainy whiff of oil paint, the sharpness of turps, the rich brooding smell he would always know as art. He paused there with the door flung open, his fingers gripping the handle, forgetting, or perhaps steadying. He breathed one deep breath, storing what he could in his lungs.

  It wasn’t until he stood in the middle of the big, still space that he heard the noise. He looked around, but there was nothing to indicate its source. No movement. Nothing at all. He stood there on the paint-streaked concrete for a long time, listening. When there was still nothing, when at last he could concede the noise was within him, not without, that it was a sound made from absence, he opened his mouth and said her name out loud, Angela, one sound to replace the other. Still the surfaces throbbed with it, the appallingly empty air. She was not here.

  Laura walked through clusters of people and shimmering air. Thinking: it is mirage-like. Outside Brisbane airport the heat had literally taken her breath away; sweat sprang from the pores of her hands, her face. A thin coat of dampness blurred the edges of everything, even sounds. Behind her, a small child laughing, or crying. Next to her, a woman whose face was melting, its colour disappearing beneath the tissue she dabbed at eyes and nose.

  Even so, Laura’s first impulse was to leave the hire car and walk. Anywhere. She needed the reassurance of solid earth and pavement, and to breathe. To place her body beyond the relentlessness and speed and sickly air of planes and cars. Their tight enclosure. But the pavement was sticky beneath her feet and a familiar lassitude had found her even as she walked from terminal to car park. She would settle, she decided, for the consolation of steering wheel and gear stick, that small measure of power beneath her hands. She stowed her bags in the boot, wound down the windows, and turned the car outward, then south.

  On either side, the outer suburbs of the city lolled in midday heat. Houses baked, palm fronds and thin eucalypts moved fitfully then stopped. Yards and paddocks, mustard-coloured, crisped in the savage light. Australia, Alvaro’s mother-in-law had once said to her, lovely weather, lovely house. She’d held up her fingers and rubbed them together. Big, cheap. In other words: why are you here instead of there? The old face beneath its black scarf was quizzical, and Laura could only shrug, mumbling something about trees. Now as she drove she wished she could show her, wave her arm at the defeated landscape and say: See? But perhaps the old woman wouldn’t see what she saw. The endle
ss suburbs, bleached, monotone, and beyond them, emptiness. Despite that, she thought as the highway skirted a village with the same shopfronts as the one before, despite that space, there was not room for everyone.

  She drove until the ocean appeared, a scoop of royal blue between the tiled roofs of the southern Gold Coast, and immediately felt herself soften, felt the muscles in her face become loose. The Pacific. The great unending blue that was not the colour of the English Channel or the Irish Sea, its temperament unlike the North Sea and the Mediterranean. As she drove along the coast road and beyond the Queensland border, she realised she had judged all the other seas and oceans of the world by this one, and that for her the colour blue was always relative to the blue of the Pacific.

  South of the border she stopped the car at an empty beach near Kingscliff and threw herself into the sea. The old comforts found her instantly; she felt her body take over, silencing her head, picking up the rhythm of the sea and the currents and the tide. She rode wave after wave, pushing off and stroking hard until her body was inside them, within them, renewing itself. When she finally emerged from the water she felt she was walking in new skin. She sat on the sand and watched the tide slide out. Then she found her phone in her pack and dialled the lawyer’s number. When Fergus answered she said, Can we do this now? I’m only an hour away.

  Cress had walked home bowed beneath the weight of the afternoon sun and her own uncertain heart. She’d taken small, slow steps up the hill she lived on, feeling as if she was lifting it rather than climbing it. She’d tried to distract herself with words, and decided the hill was heavy, rather than steep, and that cheered her, as precision often did, and carried her up the last incline to the top and through her back gate. But inside the house, after she’d dropped her bag and filled the kettle and even when she’d decided what to do with the next hour or so, she could feel that the heaviness was in her own body. She went into her bedroom, knowing surrender was the only option left.