Helen Brown - After Cleo

Oblivious to the fact most of the women in the waiting room were staring death in the eye sockets, a bloke shouted into his mobile. ‘What’re you doin’ tonight?’ Hot with rage, I wanted to throttle him.

A tall blonde with stooped shoulders strode in and sat down next to the hedgehog haircut woman. Like a couple who’d been married too long, they didn’t talk or look at each other, though they were unquestionably together. Maybe they’d had a row.

I’d assumed it was the grumpy one in for a check-up but when the nurse appeared the blonde sprang to her feet and disappeared down the corridor. Her partner seemed self-absorbed for a while, then her mouth turned down and she rubbed a tear away with her knuckle.

A husband buried himself in the sports section of a newspaper. Philip offered to make another peppermint tea. I said yes. Good to keep men busy.

A nurse approached me after a while. ‘Come through please,’ she said.

I scurried down the corridor in her wake, grateful for the change of atmosphere.

Stepping into the examination area, I knew the drill. Remove everything from the waist up and put on the white towelling robe that transformed me into a patient. God I hate it here , I thought, as I took off my red coat and dangly earrings.

Running away was an option but it wasn’t this place or this particular Tuesday that was to blame. Today was merely a milestone, to record the progress of the past two years. Or not. Greg had said it’d be five years before I was ‘out of the woods’.

Like a dog at the vet’s, I was wary of the Chinese mammogram technician, reminding her my right breast was fake so only the left one needed squashing in her machine. Ouch.

Leaving me to ferry the images to the radiographer, the technician said she’d be back in a tick. Five, fifteen, twenty minutes passed. I wondered why she was taking so long. Fear ran a chill through me. Had they found something?

‘Oh, you’re still there,’ she said brightly from the doorway. ‘We found a shadow deep in your chest cavity but it’s nothing cynical.’

Thank goodness. As a journalist, I’d strived to avoid cynicism. It was a relief to know a residual cynic hadn’t set up house in my chest. I moved on to the ultrasound room and after that got dressed to meet up with Philip in the surgeon’s office. The surgeon said she liked my blouse and that the mammogram was clear.

Skipping out of the clinic, I kissed Philip goodbye and sent him back to work. Giant meringues of clouds hovered over the park. Voluptuous with moisture, they reminded me of the clouds I grew up with that went dark around the edges before unleashing themselves on dairy paddocks.

The back of my nose tingled. A cool breeze carried the damp, metallic smell of moisture. Finally it rained – and not just the miserable showers we’d made do with for months on end, but proper, wetting rain. It bounced on the street until the gutters chattered with life.

People laughed and lifted their faces to the deluge. The drought had finally broken.

Turning my key into the ignition the car radio sprang to life with Three Dog Night’s ‘Joy to the World’. I turned it up as loud as my ears could stand and drove home shouting: ‘Jeremiah was a bullfrog!’ The windscreen wipers couldn’t slap fast enough to keep up with the downpour. With rain hammering on the car’s roof and a clean bill of health, I’d fallen in love with life again.

I should have celebrated with champagne. Instead I went home, cleaned out the kitchen cupboards and thought about making a garden. A Gratitude Garden.

Ever since we’d bought Shirley, the front yard was so sparsely sprinkled with sand we could’ve raised camels. Weeds were things that’d thrived, along with ravenous fingers of sea grass scrabbling from under the fence.

With poor soil and a harsh climate, the new garden was never going to be a show-stopper. The land wasn’t much bigger than a kitten basket. That didn’t mean it couldn’t have a spiritual aspect, though. Lydia was enthusiastic when I shared the idea of a Gratitude Garden, particularly when I told her I wanted it to have a focal point for meditation.

We thumbed through a couple of gardening design books together. Most consisted of flashy barbecue areas and plunge pools. They aimed to impress rather than inspire connection to the soul.

At first I thought of creating a spiral hedge that could form a walking meditation path. But our garden was too small for an elaborate hedge system. We had to keep it simple – a circle, perhaps, with carefully chosen plants and a central focus. A ring shape would symbolise the circle of women. And we needed water to represent life, purity and forgiveness.

Lydia and I dragged the old semicircular seat from the backyard and placed it facing outwards under the apple tree. Resting on the seat, we gazed over power lines and the tiled roofs across the street. The view could easily be softened with some plants.

‘This is exciting!’ said Lydia. ‘Let’s go look at fountains.’

We drove miles out of town to a place that sold garden statues and water features, many of dubious taste. We strode past lascivious cherubs relieving themselves into ponds. Lydia paused at a selection of Buddhas and winged Asian deities. I steered her away from them.

We were about to give up and go home when a large bowl beside the checkout counter caught our attention. Filled with water, it was probably made of concrete, but had been ‘distressed’ to appear as if it had been dug out of the earth. In the middle of the bowl sat a rough-hewn stone orb, slightly bigger than a football. Water spouted through a hole in the orb, creating a restful trickle. If the bowl was lifted and set on a stand, we agreed it would be perfect.

‘Do you think there’s room for goldfish?’ Lydia asked.

‘You want goldfish?’

‘For peace,’ she said, nodding.

Two days later the water feature was delivered, plonked in pieces beside the front steps. Hoping we hadn’t been over ambitious, I called Warren, a talented landscape gardener. Tanned and muscular from years working under the sun, Warren isn’t the most talkative guy on earth. He looked at the water bowl and nodded. When I described my vision for the front garden, he cast a practised eye over the concrete paving stones on the sloping path. Finding a place for the feature would be simple compared to everything else that needed doing, he said. Earth needed shifting and flattening, and a retaining wall would have to go in close to the front fence. Three steps and a new front path would also need to go in.

Why did simplicity have to be so complicated?

The size and expense of the project began to balloon, but I trusted Warren. When he and his mates began burrowing like wombats through the front garden, I wasn’t so sure. Neighbours paused to stare over the fence. One of them complained that overnight rain had sent mud running from our place down the gutter to his property. Warren trudged down the street and patiently shovelled up the offending residue.

As with the painters, Jonah developed a crush on Warren. He waited in the front window for him every morning and pressed against the screen door, meowing seductively. When Warren and his team had their morning coffee on the back deck, Jonah bolted through the tunnel of his cat run and into his tower to admire them from one of his hammocks. Jonah had a thing for workmen’s boots. He adored weaving through a pair of muscular legs and tugging on well-worn shoelaces.

I panicked when I saw the enormous cavity Warren had dug out front, and the seriousness of the retaining wall. My simple Gratitude Garden was turning into something out of Grand Designs . Not wanting to be the client from hell, but becoming one anyway, I asked Warren if he knew what he was doing.