The Insistent Garden Read Free

tea?”
    â€œYes. Three sugars.”
    I turned towards the house and looked again at my neighbour’s attic. The window was black, and still. I looked at my own attic. Black too. I had never been inside the room at the top of my house. I had never been allowed. “ Three sugars,” barked Vivian, “And Edith, check if the post has arrived.”
    The postman’s uniform was visible at the end of the street when I looked out of the sitting room window. He traversed the horizon in a slow, lazy motion and by the time he reached the middle of my street I recognized all the idiosyncrasies of his walk, his shoulders tipped back at an angle as if invisible hands were pushing him up the hill and his feet plopped down in a soporific rhythm that only sped up as he approached my house. He lingered in the street, fiddled with the badge on his lapel and then pushed open the gate and made his way up the path. The slap of paper on the mat confirmed that something heavy had arrived.
    â€œI can get that,” said Vivian, beating me to the front door and picking up a package.
    I sidestepped her looming thighs, bent down and picked up a magazine that had skidded off the doormat and come to a halt beside the skirting board. “That’s lovely,” I said.
    â€œWhat’s lovely?”
    â€œThis picture on the cover. . . a garden. . . S-n-o-w-s-h-i-l-l Manor, it says.”
    â€œLet me see that,” said Vivian. Her nails chiseled into the cover. “It must be a mistake.” Lilies went unnoticed. “We don’t want that junk, throw it in the bin.”
    I gripped the magazine that had been shoved back into my hands. “Could I just —?”
    â€œThrow it in the bin!”

    The empty kitchen echoed with the sounds of the house after Vivian had gone upstairs; a drawer was wrenched open one floor up; someone turned on the bathroom tap. I felt a bud of sadness as I dropped the magazine into the bin and watched it sink inside a bed of teabags, white petals stained brown. Cold porridge had already smeared the spine by the time I thought to grab a corner and pull it out. I tore off the front cover, folded it into a square and slid it into my pocket.

4
    The attic. I couldn’t help thinking about the room at the top of my house. Some days I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Not down in the garden, but up here in my bedroom, late in the evening and flat on my back. This was my time, those precious minutes when light began to leak from the room and I could listen to the radio and stop being alone with other people and start to be alone with myself.
    The cracks in my ceiling had grown up with me. Years back they’d started, a faint hint of pressure of something with weight, which pressed down from above. Then they’d grown longer, those cracks, spreading out in all directions, thickening and splitting before they ran towards the window, seeking out light. Sometimes I tried to imagine the size of the room above me, that cold, edgeless, unexplainable void. Was there dust up there? Dust from skin. Dust came from skin. Vivian told me that the day she came upon me emptying the Hoover bag onto the bin. She told me — just so as I would know — that we shed our skins all day, everyday, everywhere. And hair. There was hair in that bag too, mostly black but some red and occasionally a trace of blond. What was inside the attic? I’d never dared ask, but the view, it would be good from up there.
    It was close to five o’clock by the time I’d made Vivian her fifth cup of tea, prepared supper and finished cleaning the stairs. A loose ear of wallpaper brushed against my hand as I heaved the vacuum cleaner onto the landing and switched on the light. I glanced up at the hatch in the ceiling that led to the attic, trying to remember if my father had ever climbed up there and opened it. He’d need something, a chair or a ladder. Then I noticed a spider’s web slung