The Insistent Garden Read Online Free PDF Page A

the wall.
    â€œHelp me!” he wailed, quarter-turning his head towards me.
    â€œCan I hold something?” I said, moving closer so I could see his face.
    â€œGet the end!” he yelled, “The deer are getting out of hand.”
    The deer. I suddenly saw them. They were racing across the living room wall like escapees from a drug-testing laboratory. He’d misjudged the wallpaper seams badly and body parts were everywhere: animal legs projected from heads, torsos were sliced at the waist and clipped antlers were collecting on the edges of the sheets like trophies from a stag hunt. I stepped onto the ladder and eased the paper out of his hands.
    â€œDo you think we should buy something a bit more. . . geometric next time?” I separated a pair of nostrils from the end of a roughly cut muzzle.
    â€œCheap,” was all he said.
    My father had little patience with patterns. Saturday mornings were often spent rummaging inside the sale bin at the hardware shop where he’d discovered a treasure trove of unwanted wallpaper covered with objects: vintage cars, aeroplanes, flowers in baskets and end of line flock. But he rarely stood back and looked at the scenes taking shape on our living room wall, oblivious to the rows of birds flying across painted skies or the roses pressed against the sides of purple-striped pots.
    We’d had them all. Layer after layer, which fattened the wall, shrank the room and soothed my father’s anxious heart. I’d lost track of the number of times he had wallpapered the living room wall. Not every wall, just the ‘party’ wall, as he called it. The misleading nature of this word had confused me as a child, the way it suggested that pasting layers of paper onto it would lead to some sort of celebration, dancing, music, exotic food even. It took a reader’s letter in the newspaper to enlighten me: the party wall is the boundary that separates neighbours
in semi-detached houses .
    I stepped down from the ladder and looked up at his work.
    â€œI wonder. . .” I checked his profile.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI wonder if that one might be upside down.”
    He didn’t reply at first but something flickered behind his eyes. “It’s getting it up there that matters.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI don’t want to hear,” he added quietly.
    â€œHear what?” I ventured.
    â€œWhat he has to say.”
    I squeezed the brush in my hand. “Do you hear?”
    â€œSometimes.”
    I heard too. I’d never mentioned it to my father but a voice had been coming through our living room wall for as long as I could remember. At first I thought it came from inside my head but I soon realized the only time I ever heard the voice was in that part of the house. I never caught an actual sentence, but maybe you don’t need words to know what someone is saying. No highs, no lows and no changes of pace, the bodiless voice was monotone, an even commentary that came and went and spoke to no one but itself.
    I checked my father’s profile for change. “I thought I might go and see Una for a bit this evening.”
    â€œNot for long.”
    â€œNo, not for long. An hour, maybe?”
    â€œI might need you to help me outside, we have to get that bit finished at the back end and. . .”
    I waited. He had me suspended. Every day he had me suspended, waiting for his sentences to end, waiting to find out how he would be. And when it came it was never much, few highs, few lows, no changes of pace, but every word was loaded.
    â€œ. . .alright.”
    His shirt had escaped the back of his trousers as he reached up to smooth a bubble of air out from beneath a deer’s bulging flank. It was going to be a good day.

    Una Bates lived at the end of a narrow alleyway not far from my house. A girl was attacked there once, years ago, but I always walked that way when I visited her home. Vivian would have said I courted danger if