Lesson #6

The Hanging Garden (Excerpt)
Sally Breen

In the Twenty First Century I learned my own way that paradise was just one of our oldest lies.

The interior decorator had a penchant for poetry – not mine – but the metaphysical poets, the masters of the seventeenth century. He liked to read to me. The purveyor of grand narratives. I could have told him that shacking up with an interior decorator in a high rise was as close as I would get to God on the Gold Coast but a comment like that wouldn’t suit me. I listened instead, to Milton talking of great falls and of a great paradise long lost. I pressed my hands up against the plate glass windows of the tower six inches of it between me and the rest of the world and wondered why it was always so cool. Either the sun burnt down on the water or the moon did and nothing changed. The touch of invisibility was always the same. The interior decorator read on. Speaking in tongues. Sometimes I looked out at the perfect blue or endless black of the sea, and wished for a tsunami. By the time we got through Milton’s Book 2 I surmised that Eve had probably felt a similar longing for catastrophe.

I would have thought it more instructive to know what Eve was thinking. If only she had left a note. She never had a voice. We all have a looking glass for seeing.

‘We’re all just creatures of the sky up here.’ He said, gesturing around.

I shivered because it was true. The next morning I coaxed Missy with titbits and what I thought was a shared affinity for exile. I gathered him out of the kitchen cupboard and into my arms, crossed the threshold with my back to the sea and started the descent to the outside. I could feel Missy’s heart begin to throttle hard against my skin as the elevator plunged lower and lower. We hit ground. The doors slid open. He squirmed furiously away from all the bright cut surfaces. There was no one in sight. I held on – sure in the sanctity of my pilgrimage. But Missy did not calm. Once outside his reaction grew worse. He went completely limp – his heart still beating very fast. He was playing dead. We needed dirt. I headed for the pool area in search of grass. As soon as my hands left Missy’s body he went rigid with fear. His back arched as if he was trying to pull all his weight away from his paws, his white fur erect and electrified but what disturbed me most was his eyes: all that horror. I realised, Missy, like his owner, was convinced he was divine.

I picked Missy up and ascended the Tower for the last time. It did not take me long to collect my things. I had always been a gypsy. I recalled a small stanza not from Milton but from someone alive. ‘Eve wasn’t kicked out of Eden. She walked out’. It made me happy. I hit the button to exit, stronger now, and willing to concede that perhaps paradise wasn’t a lie. Maybe it was just a damn good story.