Patrick White - The Hanging Garden

At the top of the path, beyond the Moreton Bay fig, the walls of the cubby in its branches mildewed and exhausted, the house had never looked so huge, while at the same time it appeared preparing to fall apart.

Something was happening. Someone had arrived. As you opened the screen door at the back, it hummed like a rusty hornet. From the stove a stink of spilt milk.

Mrs Bulpit’s voice was rising. ‘Too much happens. A person can’t expect me to cope,’ she moaned, ‘not in my state of health.’

There was the undertone of a second voice.

‘… nobody expects you to … my responsibility…’ ending in a smoky cough which partly veiled the speaker’s sex.

Gil was standing in the scullery. He was holding his case, ready to catch the bus for school, to arrive at the point where he ceases to know you. He has grown too fat? The cloth is tight round his buttocks. The hair he has begun growing on his thighs prickles like a dog’s from whatever is happening. His face could have heard about a murder or a fire has broken out in one of these old wooden dry-rotten houses. His strong pimpling throat is again a little boy’s. The adam’s apple has been halted.

Out of sight Essie Bulpit is slopping over.

When Mrs Lockhart — you would like to see her as Aunt Alison — steps into view.

‘Irene, dear — Eirene,’ she makes this supreme concession, ‘… Mrs Bulpit and I think you’d better … Mr Harbord agrees to let you off school today.’

It is the sign for Gil to uproot himself. His larger-sized shoes (shoes have to be bought as you grow, though garments can wait till the old become indecent) are kicking out, to shake off something holding him back, or excrement of some kind. Has he kicked that hole in the screen door, or was it already there in the old rusty mesh? Get away any way up to the bus. There is no reason why he should stay to contract a disease from someone who has to be quarantined.

His leather is stamping on the cracked concrete path. Escaping. The bus is suddenly, all of it desirable, the pimply raucous street boys, Mr Burt’s hands twisting the wheel, wrestling . Viva’s fringe and smell, the smudgy faces and limp shopping bags of those who belong to a different life, in which the shortage or availability of things, together with their price, are both as important and out of date as weights and measures on the blackboard under Mr Manley’s hands.

Anyway school is out for this morning, and you are looking at Aunt Ally’s throat or cleavage in her bosom, the blackhead in it throbbing.

‘Come into the lounge, Irene,’ she said, ‘there’s something we must have a talk about.’

Do you smell? Or has somebody been reading your thoughts?

Essie Bulpit has prudently retreated to her bedroom. She has heard what Aunt Ally has to tell and wouldn’t want to hear again, unless it was really interesting — or bad. Ally is looking so nervous, her glassy blue eyes avoiding her burnt skin hanging in more than usually pronounced rags, the thing she has to tell must be real bad. After she had hardly settled herself in a groaning of the Bulpit springs, and forced a fresh pack of cigarettes out of the carton corseting it, she can’t postpone any longer.

So she started off. ‘You can’t expect only happiness, dear, out of life,’ as if you didn’t know, ‘the blows will come as well. And what I have to tell you will probably be the greatest blow.’

Go on tell, tell, I can take it, because you have as good as told me.

‘Wouldn’t you like to come and sit beside me, dear?’

She holds out a hand, with its crummy rings, and the cigarette trembling between stained fingers. While you continue standing where you are. She will think you cold, but it’s okay by Ally if you don’t accept her invitation, her imitation of kindness, she doesn’t go in for touching, or not more than can be helped.

‘It’s about your mum, darling.’

‘I know.’

She looks put out, if not frightened. ‘How did you know? Did somebody tell you?’

‘No.’

How to tell Ally, who likes to live in her own car, driving round the bright Harbour bays, with her cigarettes and tissues, the boys’ sports gear, and the wilting vegetables she has bought cheap, keeping all else at arm’s length, unless the God she doesn’t believe in gives her a motor accident, how to tell this aunt you are half moth that knows by downy instincts, half Attic rock that can withstand the Turk’s scimitar.

‘Well, if you claim to know,’ she says rather angrily, aligning her big feet in their scuffed shoes in front of her on the Wilton carpet, ‘it makes it easier for both of us. Though it doesn’t seem natural. You aren’t natural , Ireen.’ The glassy eyes are back in true glaring form. ‘To know that your mother is dead — and to feel nothing, it appears — you’re just not an ordinary girl.’

‘Where did she die? Greece?’ It might after all become unbearable, you can feel your wiry legs bending, possibly giving.

‘No, in Egypt — in Alexandria.’

‘How?’

Facts are more in Ally’s line. She lets out a raw, relieved cough, and a funnel of smoke.

‘In a bombing raid. She and her friend — I forget his name — and a number of others must have died instantly, when the house they were visiting,’ she coughed again, ‘suffered a direct hit.’

She makes it sound as though it’s in the newspapers. Only unknown people die. It suits both of you this way.

Oh no no it doesn’t. You know about the other. Not from Mamma lying under Alexandrian rubble. But father murdered in his cell. Now Mamma has ended something. Greece — my heart — is dead.

Ally is extracting herself from a horrible situation and the groaning Bulpit sofa. ‘I like to think you feel more than you let me see. And now to be practical — not to brood over what’s happened and can’t be undone — why don’t we drive somewhere for the day. Do a little shopping in the city en route. I’ll buy you anything you have a fancy for — provided it’s not too extravagant — in war time.’

Keep it light, bright, and inexpensive for poor old Ally.

‘No.’ It seems your voice will never learn to play along. ‘I’d rather stay here.’

‘What — with Mrs Bulpit? She’s — in no fit state…’

‘With nobody.’

Ally hunches her shoulders. Unnaturalness in others makes her look deformed.

When she has gone, after you hear her driving away, the room, this recent torture chamber, settles back into its normal dull shape. You go outside into the garden to regain your normal balance. But nothing will ever be the same.

‘Eirene’ is dead. I am Irene Ireen Reenie anything this Australian landscape dictates their voices expect. Not altogether. Little bits of ‘Eirene’ are still flapping torn and bloody where they have been ground into the broken concrete strewn along the sea wall amongst the gulls’ scribble little spurts of knowledge will always intrude on what others are babbling about and on what I have learned to learn from blackboard and textbook, memory will always be bloodier than pinpricks the cruel tango we can’t resist in any of its movements in the bilious Alexandrian patisserie in Attic dust in mountain snow my mouth is watery with what I must live and already know.

When will Gil come and I tell him about Mamma? Or does he already know — perhaps more than I? It will be a comfort — to watch his face — to touch his hand — if I dare.

* * *

The bus has passed. He hasn’t come. Gone with Lockharts perhaps. Is he afraid of somebody who has been touched by death?

The Bulpit calls ‘You two’ll have to get your own tonight. I feel too sick. There’s cold stuff in the flyproof.’

He comes in, throws his case in the corner.