Page 57 of This Vicious Hunger
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived in a tower in the middle of a poison garden. Every day she waited for the good doctor who had rescued her from her cruel and unusual fate to visit—and every day the sun rose without her. It had not always been this way. When the girl was a baby, she knew the doctor had mothered her as well as she could, feeding her cow’s milk from a spoon and teaching her to damp her lips with tart apple paste. Always at arm’s length, with gloves or a shawl, but the doctor did her best.
The child who was once a baby nobody could love grew to become a girl who did not even love herself. She doesn’t remember the comfort of the sun, a warmth without prickly rashes all over her tender skin or boils and blisters erupting in the places her clothes didn’t reach, though the doctor says she did once feel its heat on her face and rejoice. She doesn’t remember what it felt like not to be hungry, the worm—she likes to think of it as a worm, not her own feral self—in her belly never satisfied. These days she eats out of necessity, not because it fills her but because if she doesn’t she will eventually go mad.
The girl in the garden doesn’t have friends; she has flowers and trees and poisonous blooms. She can’t remember a life before the garden and its savage beauty, and most days she doesn’t want to. The plants are hers; they are her friends, her confidants. Unlike the doctor, they never leave her. From the first light of the moon the girl tends her garden, chosen—no,blessed—by its trust, and giving faith in return. It delivers fruits to her on the days the doctor does not come, the soil damp with the water she has carried in calloused hands making the plants grow big and strong.
The garden is her slice of paradise, an Eden untouched by the rest of the world, and she likes it that way. Until, that is, the day the first stranger comes. The first of three friends beyond the gate, each of them a fox in disguise. The first, Pietro, is a student of law. His father was a botanist, and the garden, its locked gate a deterrent to most, is of great interest. Of course, the girl inside becomes his next-best interest when he finds the gates locked. He lavishes her with gifts, sweet treats from the bakery, bulbs and seeds of the non-poison variety, which she sows, and which subsequently fail to grow.
Pietro tells her stories of his travels around the country, and wider—to the mountains of the northeast and the world across the ocean; he laughs when she doesn’t know what horses or dogs are but is sombre when she tells him of the rabbits that sometimes stray into the garden; she often cooks them. She leaves out the part where they die, twisted and foaming at the mouth or with eyes glassy and black as coal, but Pietro senses there is more to these tales.
He is a beautiful man, big and broad with rippling muscles he likes to display under overly tight white shirts. His legs are great boulders, stacked in khaki and navy slacks. The girl, barelyseventeen, has never met a man before and she assumes that this is what all men are like: big and loud, charming and coy. When she looks at him she feels nothing but curiosity—but her books have taught her only that curiosity is like a window that will always remain open until it is firmly closed up tight.
The doctor warns her that people will take advantage of her beauty, that they will want to take the garden—and her gifts, or her curse—for themselves. The girl doesn’t understand why anybody would want to steal what she would willingly give away, but fear keeps her in the doctor’s pocket. She does not like to hurt, or maim, or kill, but it is all she knows.
Pietro asks her every day about the garden and its locked gate. At first she tells wild tales hoping to scare him away, and later she tells an approximation of the truth, which is wilder than any story she could concoct, and only seems to make him want her more. In his eyes she is tragic, untouched, and vulnerable, her curse a romantic challenge to overcome.Is this what it feels like?she wonders.To be desired?She, who has never had friends, who has never known anything but these greying walls and her books inside the tower, likes the way it makes her feel.
When Pietro asks her if he can enter her garden, the girl always says no, but his promises get grander with the passing days. He will break her free of her tower prison and carry her to Romeras himself so she can be seen by the finest physicians in the land; he will burn the garden for her, if only she would take his hand. In the end he wears her down, day after day, gift after gift, question after question. Perhaps, she reasons, the doctor has no real reason to be cautious, and her curse extends only to the rabbits and bees and occasional small bird. She has never harmed her plants, after all.
Pietro is in the garden barely an hour before he becomes worthless to her than even a single one of his gifts. In the meadow beyond the trees he shows his true nature, not a strong, brave hero, a fighter of curses, but a brute.Just a kiss, he sneers.A repayment for all of my gifts.He chases the girl into the safety of her angel’s trumpet and its giant white bell-shaped flowers, bruises already forming on her arms from the strength of his hands. It takes less than a minute for him to collapse, and it turns out it isn’t just the rabbits, the bees, or the occasional small bird; whether the garden or her curse, something has saved her.
She buries him beneath the oleander.
It is two years before she meets her next friend, a quiet scholar by the name of Michele. He has no family history of botany or science. He is a poet, gentle and dreamy. He finds her garden in the hour before dawn after crying over the death of his late grandmother—late, because she died five years before Michele was born.
The girl does not like Michele. He is too soft and too gentle. Everything makes him sad. At first she tolerates his company because it is better than the silent moonlight, the endless lonely nights tending to her flowers. She teaches him the poetry of the ancients, which she knows a little by heart, and in return he reads sections of his latest works to her aloud as they wander along the walls.
Soon the girl grows tired of the poet. Unfortunately, the poet does not grow tired of her. He is weak and frail with the scents of the garden, and he, like Pietro, begs to come inside. This time she does not tell tales, either wild or truthful, but it’s clear that Michele wouldn’t listen if she did. He likes to tell his own stories, the act of committing them to speech the same in his mind as the creation of truth. He believes, in turn, that the garden will balancehis humours; its poison leaves will cure his melancholia; if it were to kill him, he would become a martyr after death and his poems would be published far and wide.
The girl does not intend to let Michele inside. In fact, she stops going to the gate altogether, worried for his sanity—and his life. Michele, however, does not take this rejection well. One day, while the girl is sleeping, he scales the garden wall, finding a precious gap in the broken spikes atop it and dropping to his knees beneath a canopy of trees. By the time she finds his body beneath the arching flowers of the golden rain laburnum, his skin dusted with fine yellow powder, it is too late.
She buries him with his book of poems, all twee or bawdy or downright embarrassing; they are his alone in death. She is not sad, or at least only for herself. He never belonged here anyway.
The girl doesn’t tell the doctor about the poet—she does not tell her much of anything these days—but she suspects that somehow she knows about his death. The girl does not argue when, two weeks later, the gap in the wall’s spikes disappears overnight, fresh grey metal glinting like a warning.
The third time the girl makes a friend, everything is different—and, somehow, nothing is. This time it is not a weedy man at the gate, or a brute, but another girl like her. She comes to the gate in the early hours of night, smoking cigarillos and pacing a rut in the grass out front. She talks aloud to herself, mostly nonsense, but the girl likes the sweet cadence of her voice.
For many nights, our garden girl does nothing but watch. This other woman is everything she dreams of being: chic in narrow, ankle-length skirts and shirts that ruffle at the sleeves and collars, and she wears her hair in a bob, cut severely at the chin. The nights go by and this new stranger visits the garden most eveningsafter dusk, talking and smoking and staring at the sky, as if this is her own private chapel. It isn’t long before the girl cannot resist making herself known, not least because she worries if she doesn’t, then more strangers will eventually come.
The other woman’s name is Clara. She is married to one of the scholars, but she speaks of him little. When she was alone, she was always wound as tightly as a spring, but when the two of them talk she is soft and gentle, asking questions but not minding if the girl doesn’t, or cannot, answer. She knows a little of flowers and loves to learn. She tells stories of her childhood, in a town not so far away, where the homes all have front gardens overflowing with colourful blooms and children run in the grassy meadows after school. She misses the town and hates the university—that much is clear.
At first, the girl doesn’t notice the feeling. It grows beneath her breastbone like a seed, and without realising she feeds it a steady diet of sunlight and water. As the seed sprouts its tiny leaves, she begins to see what is happening, though she doesn’t understand it. Clara doesn’t ask to come inside the garden, not like the others, but she is always there at the gate when the night falls, and soon the girl is counting the hours until she arrives. This time it isshewho invites the stranger inside, revelling in the warmth of Clara’s sun, taking every offered moment, every gift, and basking in them all.
It hurts, a knife right to the belly, that she cannot trust her body, her skin; she is cautious not to touch Clara in case she might share the fate of the rabbits and birds, and of Pietro buried under the oleander. She hides behind trees, whispering to her plants.Just make her like me, she begs.Please. If you trust her as you do me, make her as baneful as I am.
If Clara notices the girl’s reluctance to touch, the way sheappears like a ghost and is untouchable in the same way, always out of reach, she doesn’t say. She thrives on the giddy, stolen romance, the casual brushes with danger a drug, and the girl… she laps it up like cream.
Until, one day, the fairy tale ends. Clara—stupid, greedy,hungryClara—wants more than her husband, the university, and the girl can give. This ghostly romance—is it even that?—is not enough; she wants riches and freedom too. One or two carefully chosen specimens could set her up for a lifetime, but she makes plans to takefiveof the precious seedlings the girl has cross-cultivated. The girl notices the change, the withdrawal a kick to her already fragile heart. She is suspicious but not sure why.
Clara is not as careful as she thinks she is. She might keep her plans from the girl, withdrawing from the garden’s poison influence, but the garden can read her intentions like a book. The girl doesn’t want to believe it, the way the plants seem to turn on her beautiful friend. At first she thinks Clara’s new sickness is natural, born of disease or overworking. She coughs and splutters her way through her cigarillos, many nights arriving with the stench of vomit on her breath. The girl tries to tell herself that these things, romances and the like, take time, that perhaps the garden is only a little jealous, but itwillsee: Clara is good for her, and that will be good for it.
The longer the sickness progresses, the harder it is to deny: Clara is plotting, and the garden is withdrawing its trust. The girl’s feelings sputter and die like a candle flame drowned in wax. Did Clara never care for her at all?
The next night, when Clara visits the garden, the girl is ready to administer an experiment. Although she is a daughter, and an orphan, of science, this is the first thesis of her own suggestion.She will settle for truth but prays for honesty. If the girl feels any guilt at the prospect of this test, she buries it deep, deeper than the empty hole beneath her breastbone where the seed of hope once grew. It is simple: if Clara’s intentions are pure, then she will endure no ill effects from their touch, and the girl can proceed with their romance with caution. If not… Well. It wouldn’t be an experiment if she could guarantee the outcome.
In the end, the garden is right. Clara lies, denying her plans without a blink of guilt. But the girl, and the garden, have prepared for this, and neither will let Clara leave without repayment in kind for her dishonesty. All it takes is a single kiss on the mouth. And oh, the kiss iseverythingthe girl hoped such a thing might be. And then Clara’s throat closes as the guilty confession pours from her poisoned lips.
The garden, and the doctor, were right all along. And now the girl is alone once more.
