The Eternity Garden

The garden is peaceful, serene.

I live here. I belong here.

There are tall trees growing nearly up to the sky, and everywhere I look there are wildflowers blooming. I know they’re deceptive, choreographed in this fashion, only giving the appearance of untamed and free. High grasses surround them, and there’s the sound of running water, trickling over smooth, rounded stone. There’s gazebos and benches, so that we can sit, so that we can look up the bright blue sky, so that we can watch the birds that circle overhead, or the butterflies coming to alight on a flower, flattening their wings to offer us the full, jewelled view of their plumage.

I feel as if there used to be a time, a time when I knew who I was. I had a name, I think, and there are faces just out reach of my memory. Names; and a backdrop of conversation; hints of a fully rounded, raw-edged life. Lived… Once…

But the serenity of the garden smoothes that away; a butterfly lands on a bluebell, and I find myself sinking into the richness of its colours, reaching out to touch those delicate, rice-paper rings.

An attendant flickers in front of me.

“You have a visitor.”

“A… visitor?”

“You have a visitor. Come this way.”

#

I follow the attendant. We always do. It’d just be so strange, so disruptive, to question or defy them. Out of the garden. Along a narrow hallway. And as I walk behind the twitching image – a shape that’s broadly humanoid, except haloed, inexact – I feel the memories coming back. I brace for a torrent; but they come creeping in around the edges, just pawing me nervously like kittens, almost asking permission before they enter my head.

Charlotte. That’s my name.

Charlotte Kennedy.

I look down at a lanky, not-quite formed body, pale limbs in a loose dress. A dim recollection that I didn’t always dress this way. And the memory of a house, with yellow walls, and a porch, and cracked steps leading up to it. A big old oak tree in the back garden. Acorns, going clattering onto the green-painted corrugated roof. A dinner table. A family sitting all around it, reaching over a heap of fish-and-chips, sixty fingers grabbing for their favourites, pouring sauce, or Coke, laughing with each other.

Oh, God….!

#

I walk into the visiting room. It’s a curtained cubicle, with a bench on one side, velvety and padded; a sheet of glass at one end; a bigger, harder, more utilitarian room on the other side. And she’s standing up against the glass, waiting for me. Her lips pursed; her fingers twisted into the strap of her handbag.

Every time, this all but takes my breath away. My sister, Lula. Her hair an iron grey, and her face folded with wrinkles. Not eighteen but eighty. And yet…

She presses her hand against the glass and I swoop to press mine up against hers.

“Charlie. How are you?”

“I don’t know how to answer that. You look so…”

“Old?”

“Old.”

“That’s what time does to you.”

Does to you. What time does to me is something wholly different.

“Are you okay, Charlie?”

“I don’t know, do I?” This aggressive petulance; it always comes welling up. “I forget. I remember. I forget again. Numb, I suppose. That sums it up. How long has it been since… last time? It’s hard for me to tell, in here.”

“Two weeks.”

“Oh. Okay. Two weeks.” Time. Moving forward out there. Everything changing. “Are you okay? What did the doctor say?”

Her face looks as if it could collapse; just one almighty whipping out of a tent-peg from beneath and the whole thing comes billowing down. “I’m all right for now. I’m in respectable health, really, for my age.”

“Eighty… two?”

“Eighty-three now.”

“Oh. Crap. Happy birthday. I didn’t get you anything.”

“Charlie…”

“There’ll be nobody soon. There’ll be nobody left. Nobody to visit me once you’re gone.”

“And no-one to put flowers on my grave,” she counters.

#

Just like that. We go swinging back.

To Katy.

And my memories have trickled in through all the usual conduits, they’ve met in the middle and soaked into my brain, and so I do know what’s what again. And I do remember Katy.

She was Lula’s daughter; my niece. She was a glowing light in Lula’s rough life. She was the gift karma gave her for some of those shitty moves she’d endured in her earlier on – the Accident, with its profound orphaning; her lungs; some of the absolute prize dicks she’d fallen into troubled relationships with since then. Katy was the balance for that, the soft little baby whose wet eyes held my gaze through a thick sheet of glass. The little girl who might as well have been born a boy – all dirt and shouting and football, grazed knees and torn clothes, worn-through shoes.

She reached an age with me at one point; the same height, some similar features. Then she grew older, blossomed into an adulthood I still could only grasp at. And then. It was only in early middle age that her features softened into something more girlish – womanly really – and I might start to see her sometimes in a dress. Or her rounded figure in a blue business suit, over a floppy cream silk blouse, all complicated with scruffs and ribbons, folds flowing over her shoulders. What she’d worn the last time I saw her.

And then. Lula coming to visit on her own.

Her face made it all so plain.

“An accident…” she started to say.

I was triggered. These papered-over images wafting at me, singeing my hair, reaching in a little wire of pain, hair-thin, but radiating out. A smell. Heat.

Lula, shaking her head, “No. Not that. It was a car crash. It was the kind of thing that could happen any day,” and her voice broke, her jaw seemed to slip away; she had to hold it in place with her hand, “to anybody. They don’t believe she would even have seen it coming.”

And like that: there was no such thing as Katy. Just gone.

#

We’re looking at each other, part challenging, part grieving – for Katy, for her, for me.

I say, “It’s not fair,” and I know that I sound like a kid. I know. But what she has to remember is that I am a kid, and that time doesn’t flow the same way for me, and that the garden seeps into you, and you just can’t be the same, you can’t. I say, “It’s not fair. I’m like a prisoner in here. I want to be out there with you. I want to see what it’s like. I want to see all the changes, and go out, and do things. Like a real person.  Don’t you understand?”

“Charlie.” With her hand starfished out to catch mine, as if to keep it from peeling back away from the glass. “You know it isn’t possible. If you left the sanctuary, you wouldn’t survive, you’d burn up, you’d be dust and ashes.”

“I didn’t say it was possible. I said I wanted it!”

“Oh Charlie, are you unhappy?”

“They don’t let us get sad. They don’t let us get anything. They brush away the pain. And there’s really nothing left.”

She faces me steadily: “Do you wish we’d never done this for you? Just let you die your death and be done with it?”

“No. I don’t think so. I don’t know!”

“We thought. We all thought. All of you. The way you were taken, so senselessly, that if you could have this, a life…”

“A memory. We’re your memory. Your reminder of what happened; we’re just supposed to remind you of what happened, so you’ll be too shit-scared to ever let it happen again.”

“You were just fifteen.”

“Still fifteen.” Fifteen and Eighty.

“You never remember do you…? It happening?”

“Almost never. Almost nothing. Nothing that makes sense.”

“Stay that way, all right? Don’t go looking for it.”

You still remember. Like it was yesterday. You could have described it to me, if in all these years I’d ever worked the courage up to ask. I don’t. And would you? I don’t think you would.  Some words like: this is my burden. Don’t shoulder it. You won’t want to.

Only hints. A burning smell, a metal taste, a lick of something much worse than fire. Ashes and embers, circling up into the sky.

“I’d better go,” Lula says.

“Okay.”

“You keep safe.”

“No lions in the garden.”

“I’ll come again next week.”

I say for no reason: “Wear red.”

“Okay.”

The attendant flickers into life in front of me. She – it seems a little like a she – beckons with a curved arm. “Please return to the garden. Come this way.”

I follow. Because we always follow. And where else is there we could go?

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work