The Insistent Garden Read Online Free PDF

she knew the way I strolled, quite slowly, down between the backs of the houses just as light seeped from the sky, but I liked it, the way I could see heads bob in kitchen windows as people unpacked the remains of packed lunches, and the dogs sniffed half-heartedly at the back gates. Una was my only friend. Most of my school friends had faded away during my childhood. Their loyalty — stretched taut over the years by my father’s erratic behaviour — finally snapped the day he came to the school and made a scene. It wasn’t a loud scene, no drawing back of curtains, no announcing asides to an audience, but a small act that drew attention to my family in a way that labeled me as different. He didn’t usually come to parents’ evenings. Mine was always the paper with the cross that excused the absentee parent, yet on that day he sat at the classroom table in crumbling silence, his fingers folding triangles into a corner of my essay and with his foot tapping incessantly on the floor. Then he complained. Not in a measured, reasonable way, but shouting and swearing before he bolted down the school steps like a frightened animal. As word spread in increasingly fantastical sentences, I stopped giving him letters from the school, I kept all mention of parent-teacher evenings to myself and I stopped inviting friends to my home. But my English teacher came to the house once. She’d knocked loudly on the front door and pushed her way into our hall on a wave of shrill pronouncements about my high exam results and eye for detail only to visibly wilt beneath my father’s stare. She left in a hurry, her jacket pulled tight across her chest.
    Only Una still came to the house. We’d met in my final year at school; she was a last minute new girl, thrown into the sixth form a few months before our final exams and she needed a friend. She’d traveled with her parents to India, Thailand, Fiji and places I couldn’t even pronounce. She was new to the country and new to the town; she needed a friend and I was going spare.
    Una often came to the house when my father was at work, placed her shoes neatly by the doormat, sat with me at the kitchen table and left well before his return. She’d been fascinated by our house from the first day, “Had a funny smell” she’d said, “but not in a horrible way.” Rather like the days her grandma made fish pie and left it in the oven too long. She liked to explore, flicking the tassels of the lampshades as she went through the living room and sniffing Vivian’s assortment of bath salts left behind on the bathroom shelf. But what delighted her most was the mangle. She adored the antiquated apparatus that sat in the corner of our pantry and had peeled off her socks at her first sight of it, dunked them in the sink and squeezed them through the mean lips of the roller with unconcealed delight. A bathroom sponge had followed; then in a final thrilling act she had forced through a marmite sandwich, oozing streaky black fat, which left us both weak with laughter.
    Una’s father was a kind man. He was the one who answered the door whenever I knocked. He looked genuinely pleased to see me and always sent me up the stairs on the back of the same remark, “She says she’s doing her homework” followed by a mock sigh. He never tired of that even though Una had now left school and I never tired of it either, happy to be part of an ordinary house for a small part of the day.
    Una was lying loosely on her bed when I entered her room. She read a magazine, her heels waved above her head. “Edith, I didn’t think you’d make it,” she said, shifting her weight up onto her elbow.
    â€œI haven’t got long.”
    â€œNo need to explain.” She turned a page. “Have you seen this funny thing in here? It’s called a hula-hoop.”
    I looked over her shoulder. “What do you do with it?”
    â€œTwirl it