by Carmel Bird
That did it. Mrs Calvert in a culminating climax of horror and appal, lifted the limp white velvet creature from his bed among the strawberries; she plucked the purple flowers from their nestling position at her throat, and, her gorge rising in an apoplexy of astonished disgust, she threw the little icons to the winds.
‘If I can’t have them, nobody can,’ she said, and with that they were lost forever in one of the spaces of the wind in the whirling universe.
Mrs Marsden was quite shocked by this display of temper tantrum in a grown woman and she said, ‘I think you should get that girl at once on the telephone and apologise for what you have done. Ring her OTC and QED. She ought to know. You can get her before she goes out to walk the dogs beside the river, smooth as a millpond at this time of night, this time of year, and in this day and age.’
I was quite surprised when Mrs Calvert rang to say she had mislaid the violets and the rabbit in the sea of troubles, and to forgive her. I said it didn’t matter, really, and it was nice of her to ring.
Maytime Fair
My wife has died. Six months ago it was, and I still say it like that—my wife has died. As if it happened a few minutes ago or yesterday. It seems to make the loneliness easier to bear. And letters still come for her. I wonder sometimes how long it takes for death and absence to filter through to distant friends and the bank and the Reader’s Digest. I went to the bank the other day and said to the little girl behind the glass in a loud and desperate voice, ‘My wife has died and you must stop sending letters to her about anything whatsoever. Please understand,’ I said, ‘my wife will not borrow money from you. She will not be requiring a Visa card.’ The girl was very nice and got the manager and he apologised and all the other customers in the queues looked sorry but they looked away. Then, of course, the next day the bank sent Marjory a letter about interest rates. I tore it up.
I tore up the letter and threw it in the fire and it curled and went brown and wouldn’t seem to burn. Not like the things from Reader’s Digest that flare up and spurt out sudden flames of green and blue and purple. I burned a lot of Marjory’s things in the garden incinerator. Things I couldn’t bring myself to sort or think about. Like Christmas cards and letters and the half-finished tapestry of the Laughing Cavalier. How could you, Dad? the girls asked when I told them. The Laughing Cavalier, they said, very shocked. I never liked the cavalier myself, and half of him seemed to me to be of no use to anyone. But Anne said she would have finished it and turned it into a shopping bag. Then Elizabeth started arguing and said it should have been framed and hung in the hall just as it was. I must say I was glad I’d already burnt the thing. Susan had the sense not to say anything. So nobody knew which side she was on. She’s like that.
No nonsense about Susan. Never has been. It’s lucky she lives the closest so that it was natural for her to help me with Marjory’s things, her clothes. Susan came round every day for a week or so and folded things up into boxes and then she got St Vincent de Paul to come. ‘I’ll put the shoes in the garbage,’ she said, and I was scarcely listening. But suddenly I had a memory of Marjory years ago at a party in her red-satin dress and the red shoes we bought in Venice. I went rushing into the bedroom where Susan had what looked like dozens of pairs of old shoes on the bed. They were all sad and brown and grey and black. One white pair and a few pairs of coloured slippers, pastel. ‘The red ones?’ I said, ‘what have you done with your mother’s red shoes.’ They were already in the rubbish tin mixed up with some celery. I fished them out and Susan looked at me strangely but said nothing. I told her the shoes reminded me of very happy times—Venice and the party, and so on, I said. Susan wanted to know where I would put them and she looked down at my feet while she asked. I had a clear understanding that she wondered in that moment if I was going to dress up in her mother’s things. Nothing further from my mind, and my feet are size eleven.
I keep the shoes on the floor of the wardrobe alongside my own shoes. I fancy the ghost of Marjory dances in and out of the wardrobe. I’m sorry I didn’t keep a dress or two hanging there. I even looked in the doorway of St Vincent de Paul one day, half-thinking I’d go in and buy one of Marjory’s dresses, but I couldn’t stand the smell of the place.
I came away from there knowing that the only thing I really wanted was the shoes. She loved them so. For some reason I cannot explain, I could not bear to keep Marjory’s holy medals. I believed they should have been buried with her, but the sister at the hospital put them in a little box and gave them to Susan. ‘Your mother’s medals, Susan,’ she said, and pressed the box into Susan’s hand. ‘She was wearing them when she died.’ So Susan took them home and in her very sensible and literal way she wrote in pencil on the lid of the box, ‘The medals Mother was wearing when she died.’ It was the Johnson & Johnson box that had contained six thin oval bunion plasters. And all Marjory’s dear medals—Perpetual Succour, Philomena, Miraculous, Scapular, Mater Dolorosa, Little Flower—plus two Pius Xs, one attached to a crucifix. All her medals in the thin black drawer that slid in and out. Susan wrote on the lid and came round and gave the box to me. But I said, ‘You have them, Susan. Or share them up with your sisters.’ Susan said nothing and she took the box away. I can’t say how much that box offended me. And Susan’s label—‘The medals Mother was wearing when she died.’ And the date.
She died on the eighth of November and soon it will be May. I wish the bank and the Reader’s Digest and the girls would leave me to my thoughts. But Elizabeth and Anne have both rung me today to tell me in their differing ways that Susan has done something unforgivable. Nothing, I said, is unforgivable. This is, they said. But what has she done, I asked, what has she really done? ‘She has sent Mother’s lace tablecloths and pillow shams and handkerchief sachets to the second-hand stall at the Maytime Fair.’ I said if they had wanted those things they should have taken them. They didn’t exactly want them, they said, but they should not have gone to the second-hand stall at the convent. Actually, Elizabeth said, it’s the antique stall. Dealers come with magnifying glasses and snap things up and take them off and sell them for a fortune. I said they should be happy with the pieces of fine jewellery their mother left to them. And the china and crystal. I look around as I speak and think the house is almost empty. The china cabinet used to be so crowded with daffodil-pattern Royal Doulton.
I stop listening to the girls. I close my ears and think of Marjory’s bright red shoes waiting for her in the wardrobe. I go deaf. I go stupid. (He is so deaf, they say. So stupid. Susan gets away with anything.)
I learn to cook and weed the borders. Old-world pastel pansies that Marjory loved so much. I walk the dog and look up at the sky and think it’s going to rain. Marjory’s floral bookmark flutters from the pages of the last book she was reading. Ivanhoe. She liked to read. Six months and it seems to be a lifetime and I miss her so. And what I do not tell Anne and Elizabeth is this: I think that along with the tablecloths and pillow shams that Susan sent to the Maytime Fair, there would have been some other things. I think Susan sent the medals. Someone, I believe, will buy the bunion-plaster box of medals for a fortune or a song. And the strange thing is—it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care. I have her shoes.
Reptile Girl
On a hill above the city there stands a villa. It is surrounded by cypresses and gardens and olive trees and grape vines, and in the villa there once lived a young man and his wife.
People sometimes say that if you look at a pig at a particular time during pregnancy your child will be born with the face of that pig. Or maybe, if you are frightened by a horse, the child will develop hooves. A woman in a village just outside the city once gave birth to a litter of kittens.
Perhaps there is something in these ideas.
The young man whose name was Sam will remember always the day his wife, Sara, saw the snake.
On an afternoon in late summer Sam stands in the doorway to the garden for some minutes, watching Sara who sits on a bench in the shade of a leafy vine
. Sara has golden skin and rippling hair the colour of honey which is found in women from the north of the country. Dappled light falling through the leaves drops freckled shadows on her head and shoulders. Sam and Sara are expecting their first child, hoping for a son who will inherit his father’s robust good looks and his mother’s grace. Sara’s eyes are perfect almonds, coloured like the sea, now green, now blue.
Sara calls out in alarm and Sam rushes forward.
‘A snake,’ she whispers, pointing to the nearby garden wall. She had seen a small bright snake, a snake that slithered out from underneath the bushes and swiftly navigated its path across the toe of Sara’s sandal, disappearing between the cracks of the stone wall.
Two days later Samsara was born, a most lovely child with her mother’s golden looks and a sweet disposition. She had her father’s wit and also his musical ability. From the beginning she was known as Beautiful Samsara and as she lay in her cradle she sang in strange little languages that had hints of Hebrew and Latin and possibly Basque.
After the birth of Samsara her parents had a most opulent celebration to which they invited the archbishop and the mayor and all the other dignitaries of the city. There were the finest musicians who played lutes and violas and little xylophones to delight the baby as well as all the guests. Glamorous women in fashionable dresses walked on the terraces drinking French champagne from Italian glasses and laughing at the jokes of male companions. There was dancing and there was also a magician called Zed, who performed the most elegant and delightful forms of magic in which were contained the riddles of the mysterious east.
After the party Sara was very tired and she lay in her bath for an hour in order to recover. But as she lay there she looked down at her navel and she saw that an unusual mark had appeared, a blemish on her pearly golden skin.
The mark had a greyish colour, and when Sara scraped it with her fingernail she found that it had a smooth, smooth texture, unrelated to the smoothness of her skin. Where her skin was brushed with a dewy bloom, this patch had the shiny feel of polished stone. In appearance it resembled an area of damp showing on a wall—not surface mould developing from deposits of steam, but damp that seeps through from outside, that edges up from somewhere in the waters below the earth.
Sara wondered about the blemish, but she truly supposed that it would fade quickly. Within a few days it began to spread, and it spread rapidly.
By the time Sam discovered it, the mark had grown until it was the size of a violet petal. In astonishment at this impediment on his wife’s abdomen Sam ran his finger over it, and looked closely, only to discover that the surface was composed of what appeared to be tiny scales. The next day the patch had spread until it was the size of a rose petal. Sam insisted Sara should see a doctor.
And thus began the long and tragic sequence of treatments with creams and drugs and radiation and surgery, while all the time they prayed for a miracle. The scaly section of skin got bigger every day until the lower part of Sara’s body was covered in green and lilac scales that gleamed and shimmered in the light.
They remembered the snake that had crawled over her foot and in desperation they went to a woman who was a sort of witch and asked for her help in the form of spells or potions or incantations. She was less bewildered by the disease than the doctors were. ‘It’s scleroserpentia,’ she said, ‘commonly known as “Garden of Eden disease”.’ She said it was fatal and unusual and that there was no cure in medicine or magic. But still Sam and Sara, beside themselves with desperation and despair, continued to search for relief. They went to holy wells and sacred muddy pools. There was a special mass in the cathedral.
The pain as the disease progressed was beyond belief, and Sara was given more and more injections of morphine. But the scaly skin continued to spread until one day it covered Sara like a body-stocking. It reached her lips and began to invade the inside of her mouth. As it advanced into her breathing channels they became paralysed as if by the administration of a coating of small crystals. Sara died of asphyxiation. All the treatments, all the experts, the travelling and praying and swallowing of pills and potions, the administration of creams and jellies and poultices of mud had been to no avail.
Sam buried her in her beloved garden, underneath her favourite pomegranate tree. He wept for her, and he was inconsolable until people pointed out to him that he had much to live for in his daughter. He turned his eyes towards beautiful Samsara, who was now three years old and who had never known a time when her mother was not ill.
In spite of the sadness and tragedy in her life, she was a radiant and graceful child. Her father loved her, and loved to watch her as she played about the garden with her dog, as she ran like sunlight through the shadows underneath the olive trees.
One afternoon she ran towards him, holding out a handful of wild flowers and grasses, and as she ran, she tripped and tore her dress and scraped her knees on the rough ground.
Sam took her in his arms, and she, sobbing, placed her head upon his shoulder. They sat down on the stone seat, and as he tried to soothe his daughter, Sam saw that just below the place where her knees were grazed, a small and shiny patch of grey appeared, developing before his very eyes.
In silent horror he realised that he was looking at the onset of scleroserpentia in his precious daughter.
The next day the grey patches were slightly larger and Sam, almost mad with grief, made a deep and terrible decision. He would close up the villa and retire with his daughter and one faithful servant to a house on a hill above another city far, far away where the opium poppy grew wild on the slopes. And there, with no doctors or witches or priests, he would watch his daughter either die or recover, but he knew her life, however short, would not be spent in hospitals and spas and hopeless anguish. He knew how to dull her pain with opiates, and he knew also how to nourish her young spirit with all that is beautiful and good. He read to her and played and sang, and together they walked in the garden of their distant villa.
The people in the nearby village knew that in the villa there lived a noble and reclusive stranger, alone save for his daughter who suffered from some mysterious and evil thing. Travellers avoided the road that led up to the house, and locals simply shook their heads and got on with their own lives.
Beautiful Samsara lived for six more years, until she was nine years old. She lived in perfect health and happiness save for her skin disease. She grew more and more to resemble her mother, but also as she grew, the scaly covering grew with her. Until it choked her. Sam eased her death with powerful opiates. He returned with her body to his old home, and he buried her with her mother, underneath the pomegranate tree. And as he heaped the grave with blossoms, he saw, from the corner of his eye, the flash of a serpentine body as a small snake slithered out from among the flowers and darted away between two smooth yellow rocks.
The Isolation of the Deciding Factor
The Work of Hermione
‘There are many poisonous aconites growing in the fields, but the monkshood variety is wholesome and medicinal, and the flowers are large, hooded, pale yellow, with a pleasant smell. The root is tuberous, sometimes consisting of one lump or knob, sometimes of more. A decoction of the root is a good lotion to wash the parts bitten by venomous creatures. The flower should be kept out of the way of children, for there is therein a farina which is dangerous if blown in the eyes.’ So wrote Hermione Uhu in her doctoral thesis, paraphrasing the words of Nicholas Culpeper. Hermione went on to say that, as a result of her research, she was confident that when combined with the juice of the common strawberry the farina of the monkshood, applied to the eye, offered positive results in the isolation of the Genetic Unconscious Deciding Factor (GUDF). It all seemed too much like simple old witchcraft, and it was a long time before anybody would listen to Hermione, but you will be pleased to learn that in the end her research was deemed valid, lives were changed, and a certain kind of wisdom prevailed.
Hermione Uhu has certainly made a name for herself. She now leads
the team of medical professionals who report to the IOSV, being the International Office for Species Variation, whose area includes the Office for Environmental Wonders (OEW). Hermione, at the age of forty, is the top surgeon and researcher in the field of Variation, but—apart from the fact that she is pale and thin and wears her black hair in a pageboy, uses no make-up, lives with her father who is a professor of something like philosophy, drinks vodka mixed with Sirop de Violette, and is, like so many members of her profession, mildly addicted to morphine—I can’t tell you very much about her that is personal. She has beautiful slender hands and feet; everybody comments on those.
Hermione’s life intersected suddenly with the lives of the Tillyards quite early in the twenty-first century.
The Birth of Norma
Imagine the shock suffered by Belinda Tillyard when her fifth child, her first daughter, was born with the paws of a kitten. When the midwife said, ‘It’s…a…girl,’ the spaces between the words gave those words an ominous weight. Belinda reached in joy for her daughter’s hands, as mothers do, to marvel at their perfection, to count the fingers, to kiss the tiny, angelic fingernails. Alas, Belinda took to her lips two sweet little front paws with pale-pink pads, covered in pure white down. The back paws were larger and stronger, but of course similar.