The Hanging Garden Read Online Free PDF Page A

return?
    ‘Nothing. The bed. It needs— Teasing .’
    Mamma was heaving like any Bulpit porpoise. It was too giggly to resist. You were bumping, cannoning off each other, like a couple of older girls with the giggles.
    Mamma’s sinuses were giving trouble. ‘Oh dear, aren’t we awful!’ She sniffed, bumped and giggled.
    If you had a hankie, you could have offered a hankie. If you put your arms, would this other, older girl bump you off? It was worth the try.
    But they were off again. ‘Those asbestos gloves…’ the two friends were bumping more than ever.
    When a stiffening set in. It was Mamma saying, ‘People can’t help what they look like, you must remember that, Eirene, and never laugh at physical peculiarities.’
    ‘But the gloves…’ you might have pointed out, if you had been simple, and Mamma knew you weren’t that, unless when it suited her to see you as a child.
    ‘We must sleep,’ her sinuses ordered angrily.
    And turned her back, and was soon sighing and resisting, trying to free herself, it seemed, of enormous, sticky spider webs.
    ‘Oh no…’ she moaned, opening and closing, opening and closing, like a knife, you were glad you were on the wrong side.
    Welll ssleep. She has a very bad congestion, Great Aunt Cleone said. But you can’t cup a little child’s body, there is no flesh to fill the vacuum. It is Ayia Anastasia who has spells to dissolve sickness. We must pray to the Saint, her black robe, her dark face, but remember, Eirinitsa, religion is not superstition. When you are older, the spirit will guide you—the pneuma . You will realise the difference. Though Ayios Fanourios is useful—to find things we have lost—except we must bake him a pita . It was fascinating. Great Aunt Cleone could not have boiled a potato let alone baked a pita . So religion is easier than superstition for people like Cleonaki. She has the eyes of this great Italian actress and Saints. Your spiritual aunt, people say. Papa says, ‘ ah mba ’ he accepts the Panayia only when she becomes Greece and they torture her.
    My pneumatic pneuma is a comfort floating through the seas and forests of dreams. Not Aunt Cleone, not Mamma, not even Papa will recognise this part of me if I float against them. What about him?
    Gilbert Horsfall, asleep in that narrow bed, may understand, but spits out lumps of salmon loaf through the gaps in his large, boy’s teeth. Saw I knew too much, the dried-up wishbone, the maze of string in the handkerchief drawer. Stir up the handkerchiefs and the mouse squeaks for its little black secrets.
    Or float together eye to eye seeing and knowing inside the bluish skin stretched across the moon.
    *   *   *
    The blue-grey light inside this room.
    ‘Ah no—it’s too early…’ The grey sheet rustling as you drag it closer.
    ‘But darling, I can’t sleep—on such an important day…’
    Mamma almost never calls you ‘darling’. She has put on her dress. She sits down fitting her stockings to her legs. The suspender’s pimples snap as she fastens the stockings to her belt.
    ‘What important…?’ You can hear you are a little grizzling child tossing in the bed, you can’t help it.
    Feet soft without shoes, she comes across and sits on the edge. The pale light from one window behind does not light her face. She is looking straight into your half-open eyes. You know your lids are gummy, lashes sticky with sleep. She is looking at everything ugly in her thick-skinned child.
    The hand starts trying out what she has to say. ‘You must be sensible, darling, understand why I must go back. Be of use. I don’t think Papa would have married me if he had thought I was a useless woman . Now he would want me to do this. To go back and nurse the sick. The wounded—to go back to Egypt. It’s all I can offer.’ Her hand becoming hard. ‘Do you see?’
    Yes. She had her nursing diploma.
    ‘Darling?’
    Wouldn’t want Mamma to stick a needle into my bottom when she is