In spite of his inability to walk unaided, he went to Italy last year. He bleated about it so much that the House organised a tour for him and a few others. They stayed with some Franciscans in a crumbling monastery on the outskirts of Rome. Two weeks doing the sights, paying homage to our spiritual masters. They even had a private audience with the Big Boss himself. How Gecko managed I’ll never know. One rather suspects it was a swan song of epic proportions. He’s always been the emotional type, and I can just imagine him being melodramatic and tearful at silly things — the first sight of Santa Maria Maggiore or the touch of the Holy Father’s hands. When he returned he came to me bearing a small package, neatly wrapped in heavy brown paper. “A Roman relic!” I cried as I tore through the wrapping. “I adore curiosa. What could it be? A miniature sarcophagus? Perhaps a replica of Nero’s lamprey?” I opened the box and stared at a glass globe which contained within it a small man wearing brown sackcloth and holding up red hands. Gecko took it from me and shook it so that the sad little snowflakes swirled around the tiny glassed-in landscape. He clasped my hands with his and said, “We are restless until we find our home.” He said it with a smile, to let me know he was happy.
“Thank you very much for my lovely present,” I said, decidedly marcato.
I kept it on my desk for some time, however, unable to consign it to the pile for the church fete. I have no explanation for this uncharacteristic lapse. I’ve never had a problem getting rid of things. I can leave anything, anyone, at the drop of a hat, so I can’t think why I still have that paperweight. But it’s been put away now, along with the crucifixes and the sacred heart. Everything has to be neat and tidy when I fade into the ether. Nothing should be left to clutter this room when I leave. Nothing is special. Not even Padre Pio.
I did mention that I’m trying to die, didn’t I?
Don’t be alarmed, it won’t be ghastly or dramatic — I hate the thought of blood. I’ve been hoarding pills, building my little kaleidoscopic collection in an empty Pond’s cold cream jar, waiting for the right time. I have planned it carefully, and it’ll be so beautifully choreographed that everyone will applaud when they carry my body out into the courtyard and then into the waiting Bentley. I have left instructions that the hearse should be a Bentley rather than a Rolls — a small concession to modesty — and that the driver should be dressed not in black but in starched white, the stiffer the better. And if the House were able to find someone decorative to wear such a uniform, I wouldn’t complain too much.
That would be a nice touch, I think.
BUT FIRST: I must must must set this garden down on paper, as I promised Alvaro and the others, even though their sad, shrivelled minds have probably forgotten my brilliant plan to replace the Abomination with something full of grace and love and life.
What spirit shall inspire this new Eden? The answer is obvious. Not the great gardens of England, but the ancient temple gardens of the Orient. Angkor, Sigiriya, Yogyakarta. I read about them before setting out on the journey East, gorging myself on descriptions of these fantastic monuments now reduced to jungle-shrouded ruins. It was a nineteenth-century lithograph of the entrance to a Javanese water garden that first fired my imagination. I stumbled across it in my college library, in a book someone had left on his desk. The pages fell open to reveal a perfectly formed arch of volcanic rock, crowned by a carved canopy of scrolling tropical foliage, which led my eye gently to a glass-flat pool of water beyond. On either side of this archway sat mythical beasts, and in the distance, beyond the water, stood a triumvirate of temples, tall and thin, with tiered roofs the shape of shallow umbrellas. In the middle of the pond there was a small island which supported two things, a shrine and a single frangipani tree. I learnt the name of this place: Cakranegara. The very sound of it quickened my pulse and made my eyes swim with visions of hot Eastern lands I never knew existed. I looked around the library and saw no one. I tore out the page and took it back to my room, where I pinned it to the wall next to my bed.
