by Ian McDonald
“I know why you make them. Because it’s real there. The things in your head are real there. You can see.”
A finger and a smile, both slightly crooked, called Enye to the window. In the gathering shadows beneath the screening trees stood two figures, almost shadows themselves: one short, square, one tall, stretched. They stood like scarecrows on a wooden cross and Enye knew that theirs were the watching eyes, the safeguard kept on her enactment of the story of Stone Gardania. Grandmother and granddaughter stood behind the latticed window watching until the shadows rose up out of the ground and covered the two figures and drew them into themselves. A tremendous sense of having touched the very edge of something mystical and enormous stole out of the garden over the house.
“Who are they?”
She saw tear tracks on her grandmother’s cheeks.
The Stone Gardanian Empire, that might have endured a thousand years, moving from glory to glory, was swept aside in less than a week by the tidal wave of puberty.
Saul is tall, but you cannot tell that because he is sitting down. Saul is strong, but you would only know that if you had seen him naked, Saul has a face like a geomorphological feature. Saul has long black hair with just the least tinge of grey. He wears it gelled back from his face and, when he is not on official business, ties it into a pigtail. Saul is a solicitor—that branch of the legal profession that does all the work and garners none of the glory. That is reserved for the other branch of the profession—the gowned and periwigged barristers. As they wait in the ludicrously overpriced, underportioned restaurant for the doppios to come, he tells Enye about a ward of court case that hinges upon the mother’s conviction that she is not Mrs. Marion Hoey of Kincora Road, Clontarf, but Mrs. Elvis Presley, seduced, impregnated, and secretly married in a Wesleyan chapel at which the rhinestone legend, on bended knee, sang “Love Me Tender.” All this allegedly happened during a clandestine shopping trip by The King to the Clontarf branch of PriceRite stores two years after his (putative) death. The justice calls for Mrs. Marion Hoey of Kincora Road, Clontarf. Mrs. Marion Hoey of Kincora Road, Clontarf, is conspicuous by her absence. Again he calls, and a third time, whereupon an usher is dispatched to return red-faced, and stage-whispers into His Honour’s ear: “She says she isn’t going to come unless she is called Mrs. Elvis Presley.”
Case closed.
She watches Saul’s hands as he recounts the story. They are not the hands of a lawyer. They are the hands of a mountaineer, a geologist, or, she thinks, an assassin. She watches him, animated and smiling, and he notices her watching him and sees that behind her smile she is far, far away.
“You don’t seem quite yourself tonight,” he says. “Are you having your period?”
She wants, suddenly, to throw her tiny cup of espresso in his animated, smiling face, and she is afraid of herself. Is this how it ends, she asks, the trivial irritations becoming minor annoyances becoming simmering resentments? Do we fall out of tolerance with each other? Do we collapse into a vague nebula of angers and rages? She has been wondering whether to end it for some time now. She is not certain if she loves him. She never was. She is not certain he loves her, would love her, if she told him all the secret things about herself she has never spoken aloud.
She cannot conceive speaking aloud the truths about herself. Who would believe her? And, believing her, who could love her? Strange, the one she has come closest to telling those truths is Mr. Antrobus, downstairs.
At the next table in the overpriced, underportioned restaurant, two men are wrapped in a very serious discussion about Batman. They are saying that he is an archetype of the modern mass psyche, a classically twentieth-century urban existentialist antihero. Saul is doubled up with laughter, softly ramming his serviette into his mouth to stop the loud laughter from spilling out.
“This is a middle-aged man who dresses up in black tights and his mother’s old curtains, with an unhealthy relationship with a prepubescent boy in scaley knickers, who swans around dark alleyways at dead of night, and these guys are talking about him like he was Marcel Proust.”
“They’re looking at us,” she hisses.
As she follows him in her car through the neon and diesel to his apartment in a tree-lined avenue of neo-Georgian town houses, she can feel the distance between them. It is as if all the many separate points that came between them have been gathered up and laid end to end.
Afterward, when he is lying like a great slab of stone across the bed, she finds a place to wait for morning inside the curve of his shoulder and gazes at the slats of shadow and yellow streetlight cast across the plaster mouldings of the ceiling. Early morning jets scream in low over the city. She is tired, tired, but she cannot sleep. Not yet. She has battles to fight, endless battles.
Tired, tired, so tired. But they never tire.
Saul stirs in his monolithic dreams, cries out, an incoherent child’s voice, Saul-that-was, tumbling back through the years. Enye listens to the traffic, the shriek of distant police sirens, and waits for morning in the hollow of his shoulder.
How much confidence can one be reasonably expected to have in a solicitor called Swindell?
Not expecting to have been remembered in her grandmother’s will, she had not attended the formal reading. It came as a surprise to be interrupted in the middle of the DairyCrest Creameries account by Mr. Swindell’s Dickensian lisp inviting her to call upon him in his chambers at her earliest convenience to take possession of an item that had been bequeathed to her.
Said item being a bulky brown paper parcel tied with string, like a fat woman in a too-small bikini. Corners of paper peeped tantalisingly from tears in the wrapping; the package rustled and smelled faintly of must and flowers. The bindings cut with a faint, elastic twang—the brown paper had been folded, not taped. Within was an untidy heap of notes written in black ballpoint, pencilled sketches, jottings, photocopies of press snippets, and eighty-four watercolour studies of flowers. There was no explanatory note. At the very bottom was a hand-lettered frontispiece bearing the words: The Secret Language of Flowers.
It had grown dark without Enye’s realising. She took the piled papers to the table in her pine kitchenette, switched on the overhead pull-down lamp, and addressed herself to the task of ordering the jumbled pages. Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique played from the midi-system in her living room.
It seemed to be a book, or a notion of a book—a book of the kind that is wholly conceived as a labour of love and thus can never be satisfactorily completed. Grandmother Jessica had made veiled references to a project she regarded as “her life’s chief work,” but as proof of it was never forthcoming, the magnum opus had been dismissed as an old woman’s bargaining with mortality. What Enye had spread in heaps across her pine table was clearly the work of years, if not decades, of stolen moments—midnight jottings, notings after tea or before breakfast, afternoon sketchings and scribblings; entire winter nights in her studio. The work was fragmentary, disorganised: next to a series of studies of bog-irises might be some hurriedly pencilled note on the symbolic meanings of jonquil (“I desire a return of affection.”), canterbury bell (acknowledgment), dock (patience), valerian (an accommodating disposition), and turnip (charity). Paper-clipped to these might be photocopied snippings from obscure herbalist magazines of a cure for diseases of sheep prepared in the Caucasus from agrimony, feverfew, and beech bark. Enye divided the work under two major headings. Sketches and Drawings, and Jottings and Scribblings. These groups she later subdivided into Botany; Herbal and Remedial Effects (Medicinal); Herbal and Remedial Effects (Environmental) (the effect of the presence of differing species of flowers in a room); Symbolic Meanings (Tokens); and Symbolic Meanings (Floromancy).
The many and diverse flower beds at the house in Ballybrack (sold, she had learned from Mr. Swindell, to a property developer with outline planning permission to convert into a development of six luxury apartments to be known as Ironbridge Mews) were a result of her grandmother’s fascination with fl
oromancy. She had developed the art from the Victorian lovers’ language of tokens given and tokens received into a method of divination and oracle.
An early memory, so early she could not be certain that it was not imaginary, fleshed out from things she had been told, was of being sent into the garden to pick a posy of ten flowers (no more, no less). Any flower she wanted, as long as there were no more than ten. Her grandmother laid the gathered posy on the table, studied each flower diligently, and noted her conclusions in a pocket-sized loose-leaf notebook, the first such Enye had ever seen.
“Lupin for imagination, acanthus for fine art, chamomile for energy in adversity, magnolia for persistence, night convolvulus for deeds done in darkness; monkshood: knight-errantry, bravery, valiant-for-truth. White oak for independence, walnut leaves for strategy. Rhododendron: Danger, beware. Not close, danger far off, too far to be seen. That’s only nine. One more. What have you got in your hand, Enye? May I see it?”
She had opened her hand, shown the leaf that lay pressed within. A breath, sharply intaken. “Mandrake.”
When in need of oracular wisdom, her grandmother would select a distinctive butterfly and follow its path through the gardens, noting the plants upon which it settled in her ring-bound pocket book, until it flitted across the boundary brook into less meaningful topographies. Late in life, she claimed to have made all her investment decisions by floromancy. Enye wondered how it worked in the winter in the absence of butterflies and blooms. Birds and evergreens, perhaps? The records of meanings and conjunctions of oracles given, futures divined, gave no indication.
The deeper she delved into floromancy, the more she became aware of a concealed subgroup which she hesitantly designated “Spirits and Elementals.” A small corpus of work this, chiefly from the latter years of the old woman’s life—an apologia for the principles of floromancy argued from an arcana of elemental characters, spirits, that inhabited, visited, inspired the various flowers. Flower faeries? Hobgoblins? Enye worked back through the pile of prints and drawings and picked out a series she had on first viewing thought whimsical juvenilia: daffodil warriors, tiger-lily Jezebels, snapdragons breathing puffballs of floral fire, red-hot-poker guardsmen, erection-stiff. She placed them with the growing pile of material tagged “Spirits and Elementals.”
She looked up and saw her face reflected in the nightmirrored window. The clock on the freezer blinked 1:21 at her. Hector Berlioz had long since come to his appointed end and clicked off like an unremarkable life ending. She scrubbed at her temples with her knuckles. Somewhen in the evening she had developed a terrible headache.
“What about a green cow? Like that Swiss chocolate that’s actually Belgian that has a lilac cow: with a green cow we kill three symbolic birds with one iconic stone: you’ve got the good green grass, health and fitness, the let’s-all-get-exercise-bikes-and-pedal-our-way-into-the-coronary-care-unit lobby. You’ve got the green environmental aspect—no additives no preservatives no artificial colours no E numbers a hundred percent organic and fully biodegradable in less than three days. And you’ve got the good oul’ Wearing of the Green Twang on the Nationalistic Heartstrings aspect, all wrapped up in one chartreuse bovine: brilliant Jaypee, a genius Jaypee, Advertising Campaign of the Year Decade Millennium Jaypee, why don’t you retire and go live out your days on a tropic isle with twenty firm-breasted Filipino masseuses and live on just coconuts and fish from out the sea?”
“Mmmm?”
“Mmmm? The first idea we’ve had in weeks and all you can greet its advent with is ‘Mmmm’?”
“Sorry, Jaypee. I’ve got this mother of a headache and I can’t seem to shift it.”
“You tried aspirin codeine paracetamol morphine heroin cocaine?”
Enye nodded, careful not to send any loose plaster tumbling from the cracked basilica of her skull. Mrs. O’Verall trundled her tea trolley past their glass-walled strip-lit workstation on her rounds of what its inmates called the Glass Menagerie. Jaypee obtained a pot of her hot water and a cup and produced from the darkest recesses of his darkest drawer a tea bag which he treated with the reverential awe of half a kilo of Colombian White.
“Three Harmonies Pink Tingler,” he announced dunking the tea bag with precisely timed dunks into the hot water. “It’s from California, so it’s got to be good for something.”
It wasn’t.
In the women’s room, she tried not to throw up into the washbasin from the pain beating beating beating behind her eyes. Pastel waves of nausea washed across her vision. The Blessèd Phaedra, the Boss She Did Not Like, and Who Did Not Like Her, emerged from a cubicle, pulling at the knees of her paisley-pattern tights.
“Anything wrong, MacColl?”
“No. Nothing, I’m all right.” Though she knew that at any second high-pressure brain matter might come squeezing from the suture lines of her skull.
“You don’t look too good to me. I think maybe you should go home and look after that.”
“No, dammit, I am all right.”
“Well, it’s your life, dearie…”
She did not know how the thing with Phaedra had started. Perhaps at the party at which Oscar the Bastard had introduced the new Accounts Manager to the inmates of the Glass Menagerie. She had always suspected that her whispered comment to Jaypee that a mother must hate her kid a lot to have christened her Phaedra had been a little more public than she had intended. Overheards notwithstanding, they were enemies because they recognised each other. One Master of the Way will always recognise another, be that the Way of the Sword, or the Way of the Corporate Hierarchy. And as there can only ever be one Master, they both knew that someday, they would meet to decide who that Master was to be.
At least the need to empty her stomach into the avocado-coloured porcelain seemed less urgent.
Jaypee was uncharacteristically testy when she returned to the glass and plastic work space.
“Well Words?”
“Well Pictures?”
“Green Cow?”
She squinted at the hand-drawn rough, grimaced.
“Leave it with me. I’ll stay late tonight and see if I can generate some suitable words for your pictures. Sorry, Jaypee, but the hemispheres of my brain feel like two distant tribes communicating by talking drum.”
She made sure both the Blessèd Phaedra and Oscar the Bastard saw her stay after the rest had gone back to their timber-frame Tudorette dwellings in corporate ghettos with names like Elmwood Heights and Manor Grange. The Little League of Decency and Purity came around with their vacuum cleaners and environmentally friendly spray polishes. Enye sat in a box defined by dribbling white aerosol and polishing yellow dusters, the victim of a troupe of geriatric French mime artistes.
“Make sure you switch off and lock up when you go, now.”
She waved to the Little Leaguers through her gleaming glass walls and presently hers was the only illuminated glass box in the Glass Menagerie. She scribbled things on pieces of paper. She stared at Jaypee’s Early Plastics Connoisseur calendar. She pushed the pieces of paper with things scribbled on them around her desk. She cut out the drawing of the Green Cow with scissors and blue-gunked it to the wall. She threw crumpled pieces of paper with things scribbled on them at the miniature waste bin basketball net Jaypee had bought her to welcome her to QHPSL. She found her Walkperson and listened to the stringent, ascetic counterpoints of the Brandenberg Concertos. She wrote I hate DairyCrest Creameries. I hope you all catch Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in large fat letters on a sheet of A2, taking a minute for each large, fat letter.
Nothing would come.
The Garfield wall clock informed her it was twenty past ten (ten!) and in panic she scribbled down the first five things that came into her head.
And yes, she remembered to put off the lights and lock up.
In the elevator it struck like a physical assault. She gasped, pressed her forehead against the dimpled metal walls, praying for cool, for release. The door opened. She stumbled into the stale-ex
haust atmosphere of the underground car park. Bulkhead lights in wire cages threw uneasy shadows over the oil-stained concrete and squat pillars decorated with black and yellow warning chevrons; the exit ramp curved up into darkness. She fumbled in her handbag for the pass card. Her green and white Citroen with the bamboo and wicker pattern was the only car. It seemed a tremendous distance away across the ulcerous concrete. Each footstep set nuclear fireworks exploding through her frontal lobes. Safely behind the wheel, she closed her eyes and waited for the throbbing to ebb away. She opened her eyes.
The air was boiling.
Soft motes of black light fell from infinite height to detonate on her retinas.
She reversed the Citroen 2CV around in a reckless arc, pointed its de Gaulle nose at the ramp.
The boiling air coalesced, solidified. At the foot of the ramp hovered what looked like nothing more than a transparent vagina.
Enye pressed her fingers to her temples, pressed, pressed, as if she could press them through into her brain to tear out the pain.
The vagina-mouth puckered and opened.
Out of the mouth in the air emerged something that looked like a pepper pot made of elephant flesh that crept upon thousands of red millipede feet.
It advanced into the car park. Its top, which, had it been a pepper pot and not something altogether other, would have turned to grind pepper, revolved slowly. It was studded with eyes. From each eye shone a beam of poisonous lilac light.
Behind it, within the vagina-mouth, Enye saw others struggling to push through, pushing at each other, pushing at the invisible muscles of the gateway. Others: like a spinning black-and-white-striped something that went from being like an upturned grand piano to being thinner than a razor’s edge. Others: like a dog with the head of nun, like a crimson tree with its branches covered in mouths, like leprosy that has devoured its victim and still walks erect, like something that could not be clearly seen but which sounded like oiled steel being bandsawn.