Monsters in the Garden by David Larsen

Author:David Larsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Victoria University Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Bernard Beckett

Bernard Beckett is a father, high-school teacher and occasional writer. His twelve books to date have ranged from coming-of-age novels to speculative sci-fi, a piece of non-fiction and a clumsy attempt at literature.

The Armillary

On nights like this, when the mountain air was clean and sharp to the touch, and the skies sparkled clear, her father would not be seen. She knew better than to call him down to share their evening meal, or to make her way up the ancient stone stairway and knock gently on the wooden trapdoor. He would be statue-still – she could picture it – hunched over the eyepiece of his telescope, lost in the comfort of distance. Or he would be leaning back in the old armchair they had together dragged to its final resting place, stopping every three steps to invent ever-more-colourful curses. His head would be snapped back and his mouth would be open, galaxies reflected in the sheen of his unblinking eyes. The last strands of his hair would have slipped unselfconsciously from his scaled scalp, a dirty white river cascading from temple to jaw. More than once a visitor had thought him dead. Not departed, she would explain – just drunk. Drunk on all the potions she had learned of on his knee; drunk on infinity, order, mathematics and speculation. There would be an old blanket wrapped around his diminished frame, for there was no roof above him, only the distant sky, calling his name.

‘But isn’t it just the same, night after night?’ a younger self had asked him. ‘Don’t you get tired of that?’

‘Yes,’ he had replied, nodding in agreement not with her, but with the universe itself. ‘It is the same. Isn’t that the most beautiful thing you can imagine?’

She’d smiled then, the beginning of a truce that would last for decades. He did not understand her poetry, and she did not understand his. But poetry it was, they each understood that much, and until that night, it was enough.

He screamed. The sound was so strange and unexpected that she stepped back without thinking, hands out and open, ready. The small chisel she was holding clattered to the floor. Her heart knew first – it was always the way – and stopped for a moment, leaving gaps in her warm swirling blood, pockets of iciness. It came again, a muffled ululation from above, cycling to quietness and then rising in anguish, settling finally into a protracted moan. She moved quickly once she understood. Not the detail, but the pain. Somewhere, high above her, her father was in pain.

She arrived breathless. She had long anticipated this moment, when her rudimentary first-aid skills would prove inadequate. Her father was aged and this grim meeting had the weight of the inevitable. She would have to call on a friend in the valley to help her bring the body down. It would be an awkward task, bruising and undignified, but she would do it. She was that type of daughter. But it would not be today.

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