The Garden
Ingrid
Barnes
The unbrushed
hair made a fuzzy golden halo round the head which poked
out of the blankets which were lying in a pile on the dusty
floorboards of the apartment. The eyes, large and dark and
liquid, were always watching. The apartment was gloomy, the
sun not daring to probe the heavy, moth-eaten curtains to
touch the cool still silent air within.
The door banged open. There were sounds, sounds of objects
kicked and thrown, of unshed tears furiously held back. A
skinny, dishevelled woman stood in the doorway. “I
was sacked,” she said coldly. The girl in the
blankets did not move, did not blink, did not flinch.
“At least pretend you care that there is no money . .
. no . . . nothing. Nothing at all to call my own . .
.” The girls still did not move, and the woman turned
her head to the ceiling and talked to that instead.
“No house, no car, no husband, no clothes, no money,
just a useless kid. A useless good-for-nothing kid. If I
wasn’t saddled with you, I could be out there having
a life, meeting guys, making friends. These years were
meant to be mine, I was meant to party and travel and have
fun. But they were stolen, they were stolen from me.”
She was spitting and crying now, hot tears dribbling down
her cheeks, which were red. The girl said nothing, did
nothing. Anything she did would be the wrong thing, she
knew.
The woman’s face was red and tight, her eyes popping
from her face, the veins in her head and neck sticking out
from her skin. She closed her eyes, squeezing the hot salty
water down her face. She howled, “I hate you. I hate
you. This is all your fault. It’s your fault that I
am trapped here forever, and I can never escape. If it
wasn’t for you . . . if you had never happened . . .
it would be okay. Everything would be okay. I would be okay
. . .” She let out a thin painful wail as she slumped
to her knees, her head falling into her lap, her arms flung
around herself. Her body condensed down into a small pile
of bones on the floor. The sobs that rose from her shook
her skeletal body. The whole apartment shook with her. The
walls, the floor, the ceiling shuddered and heaved with the
intensity of her sorrow and despair.
The
girl rose, shedding the shell of blankets like a butterfly
leaving its cocoon. She was skinny too, too skinny, but
still graceful, like a young bird. She opened the rickety
back door and ran down a narrow flight of stone steps into
a garden. The flowers had gone wild, their ragged pink
heads swaying on long spindly stalks. The sun burned down,
making the air thick with heat. The only sounds were the
clicks and whirrs of the huge flying insects that inhabited
this forgotten place. She threw her arms out and spun
around and around. The world blurred into a wild haze of
colour. Like a spinning top, she began to teeter and
overbalance, then she toppled gently into the flowers. Her
shoulders hit the hot baked earth and it smelt good. She
looked up. She could see the flowers towering above her.
Then the sun came across and the whole world disappeared,
everything melting together into whiteness. For a moment,
she was no longer a girl, but just a small part of
something else, something big, bigger than herself.
Her eyelids flickered, then closed. The whiteness was
replaced with soft, gently pulsing red. She was warm. A
half formed wraith of memory flitted crazily through her
mind. It whispered of feeling safe and loved and not alone.
She tried, but she couldn’t catch it. It broke into
tiny pieces and dissolved into the air.
She
let her eyes adjust as she stepped into the house. The
coolness twined itself around her ankles, like a cat. As
her vision returned, she saw her mother curled on the
floor. The girl knew what to do now. She had been here many
times before. She would lay her mother out and cover her
with a blanket. Then she would try and find some food or
something for dinner. The jar of sad pills was on the floor
too, the pills her mother took when she cried. But the sad
pills weren’t in the jar any more, it was empty. She
pulled her mother’s arm to uncurl her. It was hard.
And cold. That wasn’t right. Her mother was not meant
to be cold. No, it wasn’t right.