Patrick White - The Hanging Garden

‘Of course you’ll appreciate, Ireen, I’ve got to keep my own belongings somewhere —in me own home.’

Essie Bulpit’s pastry figure, and against the opposite wall the black dressmaker’s dummy make a pair of caryatids guarding these sacred objects.

She burps again, ‘Ah, dear’ and swallows ‘Mrs Haggerty down the road’s got it — well, I’m not going to dwell on it. Can’t allow black thoughts, can we? Won’t help the war effort .’ She laughs, and her teeth clack together.

At the far end of the room Essie has arranged a narrow bed, or ottoman. There is also a small chest, a table and chair.

‘… do your homework — write home to your mum…’

More important are the two windows through which the light from the water floats upward through the branches of the dark trees.

Till thankfulness is invaded by the tanks and armoured cars of fear. ‘Where is Gilbert?’

‘Expect he’s started on his homework. And you ought to get busy with yours.’

‘Don’t know what it is.’

She sighs in going out. ‘Ah dear — don’t expect it matters — all that much.’

Since this morning Mrs Bulpit’s eyes don’t seem to have the world in their sights.

* * *

This room she has got ready for you has started to become yours, not from any effort on your part, but simply by your being there. This could be something to remember, to use as a consolation for being anywhere at all. Whether in this floating half-light or later when you have undressed (a nightie makes you feel sadder) and got into bed. Bed is no more than this narrow padded box disguised as one. The brown wartime electricity will not be more comfort than darkness. Dreams must grow out of either. A black caryatid on the march is stuck with pins from which sawdust flows instead of blood. Miss Enderby expecting homework from the homeless. Mr Manley does not expect anyway not Elsie’s flower ringed with fur. You dare go down because you must to the GIRLS where there are no girls only boys Gil is tearing off your clothes he is wearing his ugly school face his voice his laughter that of the others surrounding us. They are laughing at this baby’s wrinkle to which you have shrunk from what was once a mouth down between the brown spots through the hole where you parted with Mamma long before the ship sailed down to the source of shame welling out first as a warm trickle then as the deafening cold roar of the cistern inside the wooden shed.

All quiet inside your deafened room not yet dawn perhaps if you lie long enough this warm wet will disappear nothing ever does at Thebes they are drying up the swamp to wipe out malaria deserve to catch it such a big girl from lying in your own dirty swamp Essie’s pointing finger has this transparent thimble on it which needles have pricked.

The blue light of dawn starts to flow in through the crack in the curtain clean water shadows lapping over this stagnant swamp where you are lying. The black dummy and the furniture are ticking away in league with all that is stagnant and malarial.

Gil will know. If you can reach him.

Bulpit snores are sighing sucking ebbing and returning.

Gil has drawn the curtains. It is carved GIL on his naked statue lying in these pools of milky light quarried brought just recently from Paros. Disturb a dream it will dissolve into disgust or hate. Cannot risk. But grope back, your own damp black rags of misery trailing behind.

If you could only die but you don’t only old people or soldiers in a war or Papa murdered they say.

So it is morning. And the wet is drier. But not enough. Will become a stain of shame in any case.

* * *

In time you learn to do your homework. You learn to learn, or forget what you have learnt from Miss Adams Great Aunt Cleone Evthymia Mamma Papa the Greek earth.

The Australian Democracy is not interested in politics when there’s a war to be fought and won a Japanese menace submarines did you ever in Sydney Harbour but the Yanks are here the Americans will save us.

Life is rumours and newspapers. Viva Jenkins says Elsie Chapman laid down with a GI in the scrub above Balmoral and he give her a packet of cigarettes. She said it was immense.

* * *

Mrs Bulpit says, ‘You don’t know what to make of young people nowadays.’ Perhaps it is because she is missing out on experience that has made her shrink. She no longer looks made of freshly steamed suet crust. She is baked yellow, a short crust with dust in the cracks. ‘Don’t know what Gil and you get up to. How you get your homework done in no time. What the teachers think of it. It isn’t natural. Mucking around out there in the garden.’

Gil mumbles, ‘We’re building a house.’

‘A house? Well, I never.’

‘A cubby.’

‘A cubby indeed. One minute you’re grown up, the next you’re kids again.’

It is not altogether like this because you have always been grown up if they only knew. Mrs Bulpit will never understand that what he tells her is a cubby or a house is neither — or is and isn’t.

It started not long after the first day (and night) at school. You learn what is expected after a fashion. Homework for instance. You learn to use your voice, a different language. You learn that Miss Enderby lives with her sister, that Mr Manley is expected to have a nervous breakdown, you learn all about diseases, and the bloods (never really learn about the bloods, will Mrs Bulpit find them on what she calls the ottoman ?). It started on an evening when a dead bat (they call them flying foxes here) fell out of the big tree on the cliff edge where GILBERT HORSFALL has carved his name. The air is very still, neither warm nor cold, in what they still call winter, when Gil shouts in the raw school voice you have never liked, ‘Come on, for Chrissake, we gotter do something.’ And drives the knife into the bark where words end.

He roams around fossicking, nearly stumbles on what he kicks (‘all this Wandering Jew stuff’) and brings out these old still hard boards which the weeds and time have not succeeded in rotting.

‘Why don’t we build something, Eirene,’ remembering Mamma perhaps, because no-one else in Australia has called you Eirene, not till now, and will probably never. ‘Why don’t we put a platform in the tree — where we can climb up to — and sit.’

He is breathing hard as he frees the boards, rank juices making us sneeze, his long whole bony face thinking.

Would it be wrong to love Gilbert Horsfall’s face? To love somebody. He will kill you if he knows.

Help him drag the boards. Drag them up the tree. Arms of a silky sinewy white monkey. Gilbert Horsfall is doing it all. A hard hand helps drag me up, like some old board. Only when he has arranged the boards, says he must get a hammer and nails, and we are crouching there on our platform, you will know what to tell, say, do. Stroke your throat waiting for this moment you might have dreamt about now forming in the fork of this black tree.

But the blood, will it trickle down on the platform, and farther, through the cracks in our house?

* * *

Viva says, ‘Elsie Chapman’s wearing the rags. That’ll curb the cow. It’s nothing, though, Lily and Eva have to take a bath. Essie Bulpit— everybody knows. It’s only the boys don’t understand. Boys are stoopid. Didn’t your auntie Mrs Lockhart tell you about it?’

‘If ever there’s anything you want to ask me, ask, Ireen.’ Never see Aunt Ally, or almost never, now.

It turns out that Mrs Bulpit knows ‘… something that happens to all of us…’ from finding it on this ottoman called a bed. ‘… not to worry, Ireen. Ah, dear…’

She would rather not be faced with things, even those she knows about.

* * *