Free The Insistent Garden by Rosie Chard

said no.”
    Archie scraped a crumb of soil out from under his thumbnail. “You know you can always help me with the vegetables, there’s a show coming up next month. We’d make a good team, you and I. Wilf would never know.” He hesitated. “It’s not the same, is it?”
    â€œNo.”
    He ran his hand over his head. “So, do you have a plan for getting out of here?”
    â€œKeep your elbows in and cover your eyes.”
    â€œAfter you, Madam.”
    It was harder getting out. The branches seemed to have woven themselves back together and Archie was repeating a word that sounded like ‘fudgit’ by the time we reached the outside.
    He steadied his body as he struggled to his feet. “So, your father knows nothing about this?”
    â€œNo, nothing.” I picked a twig off his back.
    â€œHow is he these days?”
    â€œMy father?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œHe’s alright. Why?”
    â€œJust wondered. I saw him in the surgery the other day.”
    â€œYou mean Dr. Granger’s?”
    â€œYes, I was getting my Achilles checked and he came in.”
    â€œWhat did he say?”
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œBut he never goes to the doctor.”
    â€œLucky man.”
    â€œReally, Archie, he never, ever goes.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œI just know.”
    Archie frowned. We both turned towards the high wall, as if the bricks would provide an answer.
    â€œI dream about it,” I said. “I dream that it will fall over one day and I won’t be there to stop it.”
    He looked into my eyes. “When will it stop, Edie?”
    I didn’t answer. I had never asked Archie about Edward Black. Never, during all the years that I had talked and he had listened.
    I was scared of the answer.

    I knew my father’s bedroom intimately. I knew it as the person who stretched the sheet over the corner of the mattress. I knew it as the person who emptied tissues from the bin. But I did not know it as a daughter. Never once had I been read a story between warm sheets, never sat on the chest of drawers and tucked my toes between rows of socks. Never laughed at nothing.
    I sat down on my father’s bed and succumbed to the question. Why did my father hate Edward Black? I’d wanted to ask. So many times I’d had the questions laid out in my head, but my father’s lips stretched tight into a line had always stopped me.
    I pulled open the drawer in his bedside table — a daring whim — and found a box of small, grey pills. I picked one out and held it above my tongue before slipping it back into the box. Then I opened the door of his wardrobe. The acrid perfume of mothballs soared out as I slipped my hand into the pocket of a suit jacket. The silk liner caressed my finger when I felt inside a second pocket, and another, then another, saddened by the emptiness. In his most private places, there lay nothing.

12
    Secrets. Everyone had them, I imagined. My father spent most of his evenings in his bedroom yet I never saw any sign of activity when I brought him a sandwich or tapped on the door with a cup of tea in my hand. No book open on the table, no crease on the bed. Yet a distinct sound clicked beneath his door at ten o’clock every night. Even Vivian, with her loud voice and barging ways, was secretive sometimes. She would snap her handbag shut with the ferocity of a cornered badger if anyone tried to look inside and sometimes, just sometimes, when I entered the kitchen unannounced, I would glimpse another Vivian. One that was worried.
    I was lying in bed early next morning when someone knocked on the front door. Persuading myself it was only the tail end of a dream, I turned over. But the knock came again, louder, so I forced myself out of bed and hurried downstairs. The shape of a cap rippling through the frosted glass greeted me as I entered the hall. I tightened the belt of my dressing gown and opened the