by Jan Carson
‘Do you think they’ll stop being married?’ I’d ask my brother, and he always replied, ‘Maybe someday, when we’re older.’
He was seven then and wise enough to know when to tell the whole truth and when a smaller part of that same truth might suffice.
‘Do you think they’ll get rid of the garden centre?’
‘No way.’
I believed him when he said this because he said it quickly, without elaboration, and it was the thing I most wanted to hear.
My parents had never intended to run a garden centre. My mother was trained to teach children in a primary school. She had not yet been able to do this for money, only for free, as a student. My father was a man who sold things at Nutts Corner market, and before that, a man who sold things round the doors, and once, briefly, a bartender, which was how he’d met my mother.
My mother often said to me, ‘Life would’ve been much easier if I’d stayed in that night and never met your father.’
My father often said to me, ‘It just so happened to be your mother. It could have been any wee lassie in a skirt.’
They should not have said these things to me. I checked with my brother, and they’d said similar things to him, and worse. He was older than me, and a boy, which went some way towards explaining why.
‘Why do they hate each other so much?’ I asked my brother, and he assured me that our parents did not hate each other, that this was just how adults got on when they were stuck running a garden centre they did not want.
Before the garden centre became a garden centre it had been a farm. The farm belonged to my grandfather who died. The day before my grandfather died, he’d asked to speak to my mother alone, in his hospital room. My mother was his only child. There had been a son. The son had also died. Something to do with a tractor, or perhaps a bull; the details were never discussed with us. It was assumed that my brother and I would know all these family stories, without being told.
In the room, alone with my mother, my grandfather said, ‘I’m dying Susan, and I don’t want this farm going out of the family. Promise me you’ll keep it after I’m dead.’
My mother had loved her father. He was a good man, if somewhat quiet, and given to strong religion.
‘Yes,’ she’d said. ‘Yes Daddy, I’ll keep the farm on after you die. I promise.’
At the time she’d been crossing her fingers behind her back so my grandfather wouldn’t see. Later, this would seem silly to her. She was twenty-three years old that summer and more than capable of breaking a promise, even with uncrossed fingers.
My mother did not want to have a farm. She could not stand the smell of sheep feed or the way it could not be washed out of clothes. She wanted to be a teacher of children in a primary school, possibly in Belfast. My father, who was by then already her husband, did not know what he really wanted. He was reasonably certain it wasn’t a farm.
‘Could we sell it and emigrate to Australia?’ he’d asked. This was on the morning after Granda’s funeral. The hearse had not been paid for yet, nor the dear, white flowers which covered the coffin’s lid during the service.
‘No,’ said my mother, her lips frosting around the edges. ‘We are not selling the farm. We are not emigrating to Australia.’ (Though she might have been persuaded if he’d waited a week or so before asking.)
‘You don’t have to keep your promise to your dad. It was unfair of him to ask.’
‘We’re keeping the farm,’ said my mother. Once this was said, she meant it. Even so, she could not picture the two of them together, with livestock and potatoes.
The garden centre had grown from the gap between my parents. It was not quite a farm. Neither was it a promise entirely broken. The barns came down and the greenhouses glassed up in their place. All the livestock went off to market in a neighbour’s truck and did not come back. Where the potato drills had been there were soon polytunnels, sweating out strawberries and tomatoes like tight, red pool balls bunching on the vine. My mother had plans for a coffee shop. The coffee shop never materialised but she often mentioned it to her schoolteacher friends when they called in for bedding plants or shrubs.
My brother and I were most easy amongst the plants.
We set our seasons against their seasons and grew accordingly. In spring we shot forwards like bloom-faced sprouts, pencilling our progress against the coal-shed door. In winter we were underground creatures, dozing in front of the television, all our green potential propagating beneath fleeced blankets and duvets. Seeds we were, my brother and I, or small bulbs, always angling towards the sunlight.
We could not bear the feel of closed curtains or summertime spent indoors.
Neither could we imagine a house without a garden or, worse still, a paved backyard. The idea of an apartment was a sort of disability to us, perhaps as bad as blindness. We quietly pitied those children who did not have their own garden centres.
‘What do children do if they don’t have a garden?’ we once asked my mother.
‘They go to the park,’ she replied.
We laughed at the ludicrousness of this, using the same made-up laughter we’d invented for Christmas-cracker jokes.
There were hundreds of places to hide on a garden centre, for example the polytunnels (which smelt of money, sweating) and the outhouses (which smelt of meat and leaves or, put simpler, compost in plastic sacks), the larger trees and the shed, where my father kept his tools and sometimes went to smoke when my mother was after him to do something around the house. The greenhouse was the only place on the garden centre no good for hiding. Even in summer, when the tomato plants were heaviest, you could be seen clearly through the glass, like a person lying beneath untroubled water.
My mother understood this. She was always sending my father to the greenhouse for tomatoes or watering or pricking the fledgling plants into individual pots. She liked to keep him behind glass as if he were one of the animals, stuffed and mounted at the Ulster Museum. Sometimes the glass was for holding him in and sometimes for keeping him out.
It was easy enough to tell which side of the glass my mother was standing on.
On the worst days, she did not get changed out of her bedroom clothes. She stood at the sink window, turning the same wet plate like a steering wheel, round and round, as she watched my father pace the greenhouse aisles with a can of bug spray. You could tell there were sore things she wished to say, but the language for this was stuck inside her and only her hands could move.
At other times, she’d take a mug of coffee out to him, on a tray with biscuits. She’d set it carefully on the potting bench, making room amidst his gloves and trowels. If she was wearing shoes instead of slippers, we’d know the coffee was only an excuse. She planned to stay and fight for an hour, or fifteen minutes, however long it took to empty her out. Afterwards she would cry, but never in front of us. Afterwards there would not be proper dinner, only toast or jam sandwiches, with yogurts for pudding. We did not particularly mind this. It felt like eating breakfast at the wrong time. This was a feeling not dissimilar to birthdays or when someone from the family was sick in hospital and anything was permissible.
‘Why do they always fight in the greenhouse?’ I asked my brother.
He did not know exactly, and tried to guess from all the television programmes we’d seen of adults fighting in England and America.
‘I think it’s so she doesn’t shoot him,’ he said.
‘Because it’s too dangerous to fire guns in a room made of glass?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he replied, ‘because everyone will see what she’s doing.’
My father cheated. Not just with women, also in business and sports, and once on the transfer test between primary school and secondary. He was one of those men who could not content himself with happiness. He went at it like a raised scab. He smoked and did the lottery and stuck his fingers in the trifle for a lick before it set. If you asked him straight up about any of this he would say, ‘Your head’s cut,’ or, ‘You’ve th
e wrong end of the stick there, my friend,’ or, quite simply, ‘It wasn’t me.’
It always was, yet my father had come to believe his own alibis. He would look genuinely confused by the lottery ticket gone through the wash in his trouser pocket, or the track marks in the trifle cream, or the girl from the next farm over with her six-month belly rounding up and her father on our doorstep, shouting, shouting, shouting through the letter box, ‘I’ll be back with my gun, you wee bollocks. You can’t hide in there forever.’
‘Cheating’s easy,’ he said to us, one evening, after drinking beer. ‘Getting away with it’s the difficult part.’
My mother was out at a church thing for ladies and could not hear him.
My father laughed when he said this – ha, ha, ha – as if he actually thought he was home and dry. This was the summer after the paddling pool. The grass had not yet grown back. On the front lawn a dead, yellow circle marked the place where our pool had been. The grass was swirled around on top of itself like the way a baby’s hair will be on a hot day, after a nap. I was sitting on the arm of the sofa and could see the mark of it through the living room window, even as my father was saying, ‘Cheating is easy.’ Everything leaves marks, even water.
There were marks on the greenhouse where the compost bags had rubbed against the glass, leaving behind the idea of mould. The idea of mould became moss when filtered through warm glass and August rain. By the end of the summer the moss was everywhere, creeping up the windowpanes in bearded green waves. My brother and I amused ourselves with flat stones and trowels, easing a blade edge beneath the moss, peeling it off in inch-thick strips like unbroken slivers of sunburn. Beneath the mould the glass was stained the tea-strong colour of yesterday’s piss. It would not clean off, even with spit. But it was still glass and more transparent than walls.
All summer we watched my parents in the greenhouse, taking their words out on each other. They closed the door behind them and thought themselves wise for taking this precaution. They became sepia-tinted in the dirty glass and this saddened me, because their clothes sat oddly against their antique faces, and were not stern enough by far.
My brother and I made portals in the greenhouse mould, lay belly flat on dry potato sacks and watched our parents like a cinema film. We could not tell for certain what they were arguing about. Probably the garden centre, which was still leaking, or the girl from the next farm over, who was fit to bursting now with the things my father had done to her.
‘You stay in there,’ my mother screamed at my father, ‘in the greenhouse, where I can keep an eye on everything you do.’
She closed the door behind her. It slid from side to side and settled, like the door on a fitted wardrobe. If you pulled the door too hard it came right off its runner and could easily fall on you and shatter. You could die from this, like the man my father knew, from Portglenone, who’d tripped head-first through a patio door and severed a major artery. We were particularly careful when entering and leaving the greenhouse. My mother was not careful after a fight. She was slam and bang and ‘Stay the hell out of my way, Richard!’ in a voice you could have heard two fields over.
My father stayed exactly where my mother left him, in the greenhouse, for an hour or sometimes three. He pottered around the strawberry plants and did significant things with bamboo canes. It was difficult to tell if he’d intended to stay there, gardening, or was following my mother’s instructions like a grounded child.
My mother watched him through the sink window, the lower half of him invisible and possibly dishonest, where the moss had grown over. My father’s face could easily be seen, also his hands and the part of him where his legs met his body. Every so often he lifted one of his visible hands and waved at my mother in the kitchen, as if to say, ‘I know you’re there, watching.’ My mother did not wave back.
In the autumn, when the girl from the next farm came to our front door with a letter for money which my father would not pay, my mother said, ‘Enough is enough.’
She put my father’s pyjamas in a suitcase with a Bible and a toothbrush and she said, ‘Enough is enough, Richard.’
My father did not say, ‘Your head’s cut,’ or, ‘You’ve the wrong end of the stick here, Susan,’ or even, ‘It wasn’t me.’ He looked like a parasol that would not sell.
That night he moved into the greenhouse. It was cold in there so he took a blanket and a torch for reading the Bible. He thought this might please my mother, on account of her father having been given to strong religion.
‘I’m not leaving, Susan,’ he said. ‘I’m going to live in the greenhouse where you can watch everything I do until you believe that I am a different man now, a man you can trust.’
That night my brother and I watched him change from his day clothes into his pyjamas. In the moon dark, we could not see anything particularly naked about our father, only the whiteness of him, smudging against the black. He brushed his teeth in the outside tap and settled down to sleep with a compost bag for a pillow.
‘What will the customers think?’ I asked my brother.
No one we knew had a father who lived in a greenhouse and I did not want our family to become a story which people told at funerals and christening dinners.
‘Wait and see,’ said my brother.
He was almost eight then, and already old enough to understand that people did not function in the same way as kitchen appliances.
The next morning I woke early and my mother was not in her bedroom and she was not in the bathroom and she was not in the kitchen, fixing my cereal in a plastic bowl.
My mother was invisible to me, tucked behind the greenhouse moss. When she stood up, the body of her unfolded into view and I saw, from her hair (which was all spun and muddled), and her clothes (which were yesterday’s, crumpled pyjamas), that she had been there all night, lying beside my father and the tomato plants. Afterwards she came out to us and said nothing of the greenhouse. We had jam sandwiches for breakfast and orange juice. The bread in my mouth would not chew itself down.
My father did not sleep in the greenhouse again.
My father cheated for fourteen years. There were also years before I knew him. My mother understood all this, and stayed. There were deep folds and hollows on her face where his lies had written things she could not wipe off. That summer I was not yet old enough to read by myself. Later, I would learn with books. Later still, I would look at photographs of my mother, taken during this period. It would be impossible not to see certain sentiments etched into the sad pitch of her eyebrows: ‘I have failed and I am still failing,’ ‘I am basically OK with disappointment.’
I’d like to believe that I would have been a stronger woman in her shoes, but I have not yet been given a garden centre to contend with.
3.
Still
I was not always a human statue. After college, I was briefly and unsuccessfully a postman, then a traffic warden and, finally, a bus driver. By the age of twenty-six I had begun to find movement problematic. I liked to sit on benches and indoors on the sofa, not speaking, not even reading or watching television. I was quite well suited to buses, though the pleasure of being seated could not disguise the miles I moved every day, shuttling gun-faced commuters from one side of the city to the other. After a few months the wheels began to overwhelm me.
Karen said I was lazy; that I was nothing compared to the capable husbands of her friends and sisters, that she had not agreed to marry a slob. There were arguments around the kitchen table, some coiled, others as loose and loud as glass imploding. She signed me up for a six-month trial at the gym. I went once and, terrified by all those legs and arms pumping like fleshy pistons, never returned. I couldn’t expect Karen to understand. It wasn’t laziness which kept me seated, so much as a fear of overcomplicating things. There were so many necessary processes to concern myself with: thinking and breathing, heart-beating, hair-growing and fretting over the various problems we’d accumulated like warts and other crabby itches. I had no ener
gy left for moving.
Over a period of several years, the stillness caught up with me and settled. It was a disease crawling up my legs and arms, across my ribcage, until even my heart could hold its breath, as if underwater, for a minute or more. It was a disease and I was all the better for believing in it. When the city council advertised for statues – first for the spring festival and later as semi-permanent fixtures – I was ready. This was the closest thing to a calling I’d ever had.
Karen wasn’t so easily convinced. ‘Think of the money,’ I said. I could already picture myself paying the electricity bill in small-coin shrapnel and, if the punters proved generous, taking on the mortgage too. Eventually she agreed, but only if my costume was good enough to guarantee anonymity. ‘I’d be mortified if anyone recognised you,’ she said. ‘I’d sooner they caught you having an affair.’
I have been a statue for five years now. I no longer move more than the necessary mile to work and back. I prefer public transport to the indignities of bicycles or walking, which require enormous amounts of concentration. At first I found the long stand something of a stretch and could not stomach the outside weather. However, I have, over the years grown accustomed to this, and also to the pigeons. Karen has not.
She tells her friends I work in a call centre on the edge of town. She asks me constantly, first thing in the morning and after we make love (slowly and deliberately, in a reclined position), why I couldn’t take a job in a call centre. Karen does not understand that sitting down is not the same as stillness. I can’t be angry with her. Very few people are called to be statues, and even fewer are cut out for marriage to a man who’d prefer to be made of concrete.
Most days I am Napoleon. Over the years, I have noticed that even uneducated people and teenagers will recognise Napoleon. The hand inside the jacket is a dead giveaway. Above all other possible statues, Napoleon suits me best. After a brief flirtation with Shakespeare, I settled upon him and stuck. I have the hat and the trousers, the jacket with its brass buttons running like typewriter keys across my belly, and a reasonably authentic sword Karen found at the Saturday-morning antiques market. Hand tucked like the man himself, I can hold my elbow at a forty-five degree angle for hours at a time. When the winter knuckles down, one hand, at least, remains reasonably warm.