Patrick White - The Hanging Garden

What she had been spared inspired Eirene to leap, missing out the short flight of ricketty rotting wooden steps. Her sense of power and release made her feel she was flying. She landed lightly at Viva Jenkins’ heels, and at once let out a cry filled with disgust, pain and giggles.

‘What’s up, Ireen?’ Viva had turned, frowning under her dark fringe.

‘I squashed a — long — black— slug !’

As proof the slug lay mashed and quivering on its deathbed of disintegrating concrete, while Eirene sounded as though she might die of all that was churning out of her.

‘Only a slug! You’re the real loop, Ireen.’

If they had not drifted deeper into the garden and come across something of greater interest, Viva Jenkins might have reconsidered her friendship with this loopy Greek reffo.

‘What’s that up there?’

‘That’s a house — a cubby.’

‘Who built it?’

‘We did — Gil and I.’

‘And you go up there together?’

‘We used to — sometimes…’

Eirene Sklavos feels the power fainting inside her.

‘Can we go up?’

‘It isn’t safe. The boards are rotten.’ Fainter and fainter Eirene Sklavos hears herself. ‘Mrs Bulpit forbids it.’ The school language she has learnt to speak is ebbing out of her.

Worst of all, Gil could be up there listening.

As Viva suspects, ‘Could be up there all the while.’

The evening is drawing in. Bats have begun flying.

‘Ooh, it’s grooby! Land in yer hair. Can’t stay all night waiting for old Essie to show up.’

The light has intensified her fringe and her mole.

‘When you come to my place, Reenie, I’ll show you what my father brought from Brazil,’ she stands threatening an instant at the gate.

* * *

Viva was standing at the gate, waiting. ‘Thought you wasn’t coming.’ She might have preferred it that way. ‘Mumma said you wouldn’t. Said from what she’d heard you’d be too grand.’

The kind of remark you had learnt to ignore.

Jenkins’ place was an ‘old’ house. The gate might have fallen down if Viva hadn’t been persuading it to stand. The weatherboard house had once been painted, but by now the paint had almost flaked away. It had the look of some old Arab house outside Alexandria which had soaked up a lifetime of sunlight, and this absorption was perhaps what helped it hold together. A one-eyed house, with a lace curtain veiling that. There were several additional windows, but all of them bare, which gave them a blind glassy look. A pretty fretwork balcony above the porch had a couple of floorboards hanging from it.

‘I like your balcony,’ you told her for something to say. ‘I’d spend half my time up there, looking out across the water.’

‘It isn’t safe,’ she warned as though getting her own back.

She was leading you up the front steps. The wooden uprights were each decorated with a pyramid, the point of the one you put your hand on so metal-sharp it made you squeal.

‘Ooooh! That’s dangerous!’

‘That’s what my father said when he fell off the balcony and landed on it.’

‘He could have been killed. Was he badly hurt?’

‘We don’t know. He disappeared.’

Viva’s mum had been waiting for them somewhere in the dark interior behind the lace. When she showed up, she was wearing an easy cotton dress in no particular style. Standing side by side with her daughter, she was not much taller.

‘Hello Ireen,’ Mrs Jenkins said, ‘I’m glad to meet Viva’s friend at last.’ She had a smile which came and went, like thin sunlight, and several teeth were missing in one side of a pink denture. The dark room made her skin look whiter. She was one of those women who had been steamed rather than baked by the Sydney climate.

She said, ‘I expect you’ll have a lot to tell me,’ and planted herself on the edge of a sofa.

Did she really expect? It could have been expectation which caused her white calves to bulge when she wrapped her arms around her knees. Her feet were bare except for a pink corn plaster.

Viva was scowling with embarrassment. ‘Aren’t you gunner give ’er something to eat?’

‘You’re just like your father! Think of nothing but feeding your face. Nice people when they come to see you expect a bit of intercourse. Viva,’ she confided in Irene, ‘can never hope to become a lady.’

Viva could have been suppressing a whimper somewhere inside her muttering.

‘Do they live in houses like this in Greece?’ Mrs Jenkins asked her visitor. ‘Are they Christians?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Mr Jenkins was a pagan.’

‘He was not !’

‘You can’t expect anything of most men.’ Mrs Jenkins was becoming vehement. A wind swept through her listless hair. ‘There’s the gas — he promised me to come last Thursday and it’s now this Tuesday. We could die of it for all he cares.’ She opened her small white ringless hands and glanced not so much at the hands as a nothingness she was holding in them.

There was certainly a smell of gas in the room. It became the stronger for your noticing it. The coloured plastic flowers seemed to exude the smell of gas.

Mrs Jenkins must have noticed you noticing. ‘I love plastic flowers, don’t you? I think they’re more artistic than the real, which die on a person anyway.’

The gaseous colours of the plastics glowed.

Suddenly Mrs Jenkins jumped up so quickly she had to steady herself on the end of the sofa. ‘Suppose I’d better bring you something to eat or this girl of mine will go crook on me. You’ll have to entertain Maureen, dear, while I’m out of the room.’

‘She’s mad,’ Viva said, ‘Mr Horan — that’s the gas feller — came on Thursday, but she wouldn’t let him alone. He left without finishing the job.’

‘Why don’t we open the window — let the gas escape?’

Viva became more agitated. ‘Wouldn’t be worth it. She doesn’t want anything to escape. That’s why Carlos disappeared.’

‘Carlos?’

‘My father — Charlie to his mates — but Carlos was his name. I’ll tell you all about that. No pagan,’ she glanced at the doorway through which her mother had just gone ‘my father was a mystic.’

Irene Sklavos felt her eyelids snap as though she were awakening to a state she had sensed but never been able to put a name to. From Aunt Cleonaki she had learnt about the Saints, all of them far too Orthodox and rigid for the word to apply. She suspected Cleonaki would have disapproved of anything so fluid. If you knew about mystics yourself it was from associating with the state in certain dreams and an imagination you had to keep hidden.

She could feel her heart palpitating like a rubber bulb. ‘You must tell me about your father, Viva, because I think I understand — sort of,’ she added to appease the part of herself which had learnt to be Australian.

Viva brushed back her fringe. ‘I’ll tell you and show you — when she’s out of the way. But you must promise never to tell. It will always be our secret.’

In speaking of her father Viva’s speech seemed to improve, her voice vibrated like some stringed instrument — a ’cello?

Irene saw that Viva might be acquiring power over her, but could not resist promising. A moment of complete physical repugnance occurred as she visualised herself sharing a warm bath with Viva Jenkins. As the water lapped against the sides of the bath it revealed a greasy highwater mark.

‘Ssh!’ Viva warned. ‘She’s coming.’

Mrs Jenkins had restored her face with smiles and a forced tranquillity. She was carrying a dish, on it a clutch of little cakes, and a jug of what looked like lemonade, but as remote from the lemon as her plastic flowers were from soil, sunlight, and natural grace. The jug of pseudo lemonade shared their gaseous glow.