A Place of Hiding

Deborah followed the path round the perimeter of the garden and crossed the bridge. Beneath her she saw large and colourful carp swimming while before her the interior of the teahouse lay revealed. The open door displayed a floor covered by traditional mats and a single room furnished with one low table of ebony round which six cushions lay. A deep porch ran the width of the teahouse, two steps giving access to it from the swept gravel path that continued round the garden itself. Deborah mounted these steps but made no attempt to do so surreptitiously. Better that she be another funeral guest having a stroll, she thought, than someone on the trail of a boy who probably didn’t wish to make conversation.

He was kneeling at a teak cabinet that was built into the wall at the far side of the teahouse. He had this open and was lugging a heavy bag from within it. While Deborah watched, he wrestled it out, opened it, and dug round inside. He brought forth a plastic container. Then he turned and saw Deborah watching him. He didn’t start at the sight of an unexpected stranger. He looked at her openly and without the slightest qualm. Then he got to his feet and walked past her, out onto the porch and from there to the pond.

As he passed, she saw that his plastic container held small round pellets. He took these to the edge of the water, where he sat on a smooth grey boulder and scooped up a handful, which he threw to the fish. The water was at once a swarm of rainbow activity.

Deborah said, “D’you mind if I watch?”

The boy shook his head. He was, she saw, about seventeen years old, and his face was marred by serious acne, which grew even redder as she joined him on the rock. She watched the fish for a moment, their greedy mouths pumping at the water, instinct making them snap at anything that moved on its surface. Lucky for them, she thought, to be in this safe, protected environment, where what moved on the surface was actually food and not a lure.

She said, “I don’t much like funerals. I think it’s because I started at them early. My mum died when I was seven and whenever I’m at a funeral, it all comes back to me.”

The boy said nothing, but his process of throwing the food into the water slowed marginally. Deborah took heart from this and went on.

“Funny, though, because I didn’t feel it very much when it actually happened. People would probably say that’s because I didn’t understand, but I did, you know. I knew exactly what it meant if someone died. They’d be gone and I’d never see them again. They might be with angels and God but in any case, they’d be in a place that I wouldn’t be going to for a long, long time. So I knew what it meant. I just didn’t understand what it implied. That didn’t sink in until much later, when the mother-daughter sorts of things that might have happened between us didn’t happen between me and...well, between me and anyone.”

Still he said nothing. But he paused in his feeding of the fish and watched the water as they continued to scramble for the pellets. They reminded Deborah of people in a queue when a bus arrives and what once was orderly collapses into a mass of elbows, knees, and umbrellas all shoving at once. She said, “She’s been dead almost twenty years and I still wonder what it might’ve been like. My dad never remarried and there’s no other family and there are times when it seems it would be so lovely to be part of something bigger than just the two of us. Then I wonder, as well, what it could’ve been like if they’d’ve had other children, my mum and dad. She was only thirty-two when she died, which seemed ancient to me when I was seven but which I now see meant that she had years ahead of her to have had more children. I wish she had.”

The boy looked at her then. She pushed her hair back from her face.

“Sorry. Am I going on? I do that sometimes.”

“You want to try?” He extended the plastic container to her.

She said, “Lovely. I would. Thanks.” She dipped her hand into the pellets. She moved to the edge of the rock and let the food dribble from her fingers into the water. The fish came at once, knocking one another aside in their anxiety to feed. “They make it look like the water’s boiling. There must be hundreds of them.”

“One hundred twenty-three.” The boy’s voice was low—Deborah found she had to strain to hear him—and he spoke with his gaze back upon the pond. “He keeps the stock up because the birds go after them. Big ones, the birds. Sometimes a gull but they’re generally not strong enough or fast enough. And the fish are smart. They hide. That’s why the rocks’re laid out so far over the edges of the pond: to give them a place when the birds show up.”

“One has to think of everything, I suppose,” Deborah said. “It’s brilliant, this place, though, isn’t it? I was having a wander, needing to get away from the grave site, and suddenly I saw the roof of the teahouse and the fence and it looked like it might be quiet in here. Tranquil, you know. So I came in.”

“Don’t lie.” He set the container of pellets down between them as if he were drawing a line in the sand. “I saw you.”

“Saw...?”

“You were following me. I saw you back by the stables.”