As if to close the memory, Melissa shut the green purse. The snap sounded familiar and she stood there, her eyes closed, imagining her mother feeling the exact same metal on her fingertips, hearing the very same sound.
When she was ready, Melissa opened the purse again and took note of what lay inside: a wad of tissue, folded but frayed at the edges; keys; and a wallet—she could not open that with its cards bearing her mother’s name and photo, its dollar bills, each a portrait of someone not her mother yet familiar and equally dead. The worst would be knowing exactly how much money her mother was carrying, its worth somehow linked to the value of her life.
Melissa removed the wallet and placed it on the radiator. Then she delved into the folds of the purse and discovered a small silver frame with a picture of a man in his forties—not her father. It had a soft velvet backing and a tiny wedge of wood so that it could stand on its own. A lover or a friend? Melissa stood the picture upright on the table beside the radiator, allowing him—whoever he was—to be a witness to her rummaging.
There were two pill bottles—one nearly empty—of medications that Melissa didn’t recognise and hadn’t known her mother was taking. There were several pieces of paper—a grocery list; the address of a Mr and Mrs Parker-Rhodes; and a short series of words run together that Melissa could not make sense of. There was one cotton swab; two pieces of wrapped candy; a very small flashlight that did not work; and a needle pressed lightly into the lining of the purse with a short length of black thread looped through it. Underneath all this were several pennies, four nickels, a dime, and two quarters, resting like anchors at the bottom of the purse.
Melissa scooped up all the coins and held them in her hand. She glanced at the dime: It was dated 1978. Twenty-eight years of being handled, of sitting in machines and pockets and glove compartments—and of all the people who had touched this dime, her mother was the last.
Melissa put everything, except the coins and needle, back in the purse. She stitched the needle once through her sweater arm and walked slowly to the bedroom, closing and opening her hand, so the coins folded over themselves like gentle acrobats tumbling across a stage.
She slipped into the walk-in closet and took down the smallest box of purses. She began taking out each purse and opening it, half recalling the stories her mother had told, half recognising an oddly shaped paperclip or pen cap she had briefly seen years before.
After she had opened almost two-dozen purses she gave up, uncertain of what she had been looking for. She lay down on the bed and dialled her husband’s work number. As the phone rang, Melissa stared at the ceiling. This had been her mother’s nightly view. What had she thought about all those nights prior to falling asleep? Her husband answered, and with a slow, even voice, she told him the news.
He said, ‘Oh, sweetheart!’ He said he would leave work right away; he would take care of everything.
As she sat on the edge of her mother’s bed, waiting for her husband to arrive, Melissa thought again about that evening seven years ago. What had her mother wanted to give her from inside the red purse?
In the closet she dug through box after box, carefully placing each purse on the floor.
An hour passed, and she had gone through all the boxes without finding the red velvet purse. She was looking under her mother’s bed when the front door bell rang: her husband. Now she wished he hadn’t come.
In the front doorway, he seemed somehow unfamiliar, though Melissa had only seen him that morning. He brought lunch, flowers and instructions on how to open her mother’s safe—and yet to Melissa he seemed useless. She let him hold her for a respectable amount of time, console her. She asked him if he would go into the study and look for the will, which her mother had not let him keep.
‘And you?’ he said.
‘I’m sorting through boxes.’
‘So soon?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m looking for a purse, a red one.’
‘A red purse?’
‘Please don’t ask,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, though he sounded more hurt than apologetic.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ she said softly, not quite sorry either. Melissa stood motionless in the hall until her husband turned and walked into the study. In the bedroom she searched through her mother’s dresser drawers, through boxes of photos never put into albums, through her father’s clothes her mother had kept in a small closet. She could not find the red purse anywhere.
She was ruffling through shoeboxes in the walk-in closet when her husband suddenly appeared in the doorway and whispered, ‘Honey?’
Melissa turned her head, looked up.
In his left hand he held the red velvet purse, unlatched and hanging open.
‘Please, set it down now!’ she said—but she knew it was already too late. She remembered how emphatic her mother had been that night, asking if Melissa had opened the red purse while she had been sleeping. Now that the purse was open, whatever was inside, whatever had been meant for her, she was sure was no longer there. It made no sense, but she was certain all the same.
Her husband seemed to understand that something was wrong. He bent down, stroked her hair, said he was sorry—for what, of course, he could not know.
Melissa stared into the corner of the closet. She imagined that what had been in the purse was something small and wondrous—something like a tiny silver fish. Perhaps her mother had caught it years ago and was planning to show it to her that night while they were alone.
‘Honey?’ her husband said again, still stroking her hair.
Melissa stood up and walked past him into the bedroom. Her mind churned. Where could such a thing that her mother left for her in the red purse have gone? Melissa imagined that it might have slipped into one of the other purses. Maybe this was how it survived, she thought—the purses, collectively, forming a kind of ocean.
Melissa stood at the edge of her mother’s bed and stared down at it. It was covered with purses and clothes. She asked her husband to leave her, to let her have time alone. After he closed the door, panic overtook her. She could think only about what her mother had meant to give her, how it was gone and would likely never be found again. She pulled the needle from her sweater and pricked herself in the palm of her hand, hoping it might calm her. A single drop of blood formed on her skin. Melissa drove the pin further in, though there was no pain.
She could not stay married, would not. Instead, she would move into this house. She would live alone, travel, go on adventures, have relationships with men, but only as it suited her. She would live her life as her mother had. Maybe, in time, the thing her mother had intended to give her would appear, a silver flash behind the curtains, around the corner, under the bed.
LOOK FOR THE PLACE WHERE THE IVY RISES
Tom Johnstone
I can hear them calling my name, but I don’t answer. There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’, but I’ve never really felt part of Garfield and Sons, not the way I’m beginning to feel a part of this warm, wet place, where black rain-drops trickle off glossy, dark-green leaves.
Someone else is calling to me by the new name she’s given me, and her call is stronger. I know she might punish me with sharp thorns for the damage I’ve done to the grove. But then again, if I hadn’t done it, I might never have found her.
Garfield knows something about what goes on here. He must do. I’m sure of it, from the way he’s been so tentative from the beginning about cutting back the shrubs here. Unusual for him. Hacking plants to the ground is his default setting. It’s become an ingrained habit for me too now, after some time working for his grounds maintenance firm. Perhaps I should explain this before she decides my punishment, as some kind of mitigation. Not that this is anything like a magistrate’s court, this place of welcoming dampness and tickling spiders’ webs, where an ocean of strangling ivy tries to trip me into its soft embrace, where unseen beasts scurry into the shadows at my tread, where the sweet aroma of leaf-mould fills my nostrils.
/>
***
It’s amazing the amount of wild space that can co-exist with an urban housing complex, even a relatively well-maintained, well-to-do one like Monmouth Park. When I heard that Garfield had won the contract, I thought we’d be doing a lot more hard cutting back, instead of tinkering around the edges.
I knew he’d probably given Steve and Bob a detailed briefing at home, so they knew exactly what to cut and what not to cut. That’s always the trouble with working as part of a family firm, and often feeling like a spare part in any case. I suppose I knew what I was getting into when I took the job with the close-knit trio. But I never quite got used to the unsaid things that sometimes passed in sullen glances between the Garfields, the unspoken echoes of conversations and agreements at the breakfast or dinner table. I often used to think that I’d love to be a fly on the wall during such discussions. It might have answered a few questions. But now their petty bickering and back-biting has ceased to interest me, or bother me.
Of course I knew from the start that Jim Garfield had taken me on as a favour. There weren’t many firms that would employ me. But I always wondered why he felt the need to keep such a close eye on me all the time. It wasn’t that I was forbidden to use the mechanical hedge cutter, more that circumstances conspired to make sure that he, Steve or Bob would be the ones to pick it up and start trimming, leaving me to do the picking up and loading of cuttings into the van. I think this might have been something they arranged privately between themselves, or maybe it was just the way things happened. If it was planned, I couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t as if I was dangerous. I suppose I can’t blame them for their assumptions.
Still, they let me use the bow saw and the loppers, figuring I couldn’t do much damage with those! That was how I came to be standing in front of a particularly overgrown elder tree, sawing off a few branches. Jim was hedge-trimming a straggly euonymous nearby and noticed me hacking away.
‘Not that one, Tillman. We’re leaving that one.’
I suppressed a sigh. An unsightly weed-tree that had sprung up as a sucker, crowding out the ornamental shrubs: surely there was no question about this. It should be cut down to ground level. That was what he would have done in any other circumstances.
There were many occasions like this. Whenever I tried to make even the most insignificant operational decision, Garfield was breathing down my neck, checking on me, monitoring me, looking for any excuse to over-rule me. Or maybe I was just being paranoid.
Garfield sauntered off, leaving me to wonder exactly what it was he wanted me to do? After all, I couldn’t be expected to think for myself, could I? As I stood there, open-mouthed, I became aware of a presence. Somewhere near the elder something moved, a flicker on the edge of my vision, leaves rustling in the mess of overgrown, tangled roots.
‘Rats.’
The voice came from above me. I turned to see a spry old head peering down at me from one of the first-floor flats that overlooked the jungle. An old man, I at first thought, due to the scanty hair. But the faded rose-pink blouse and purple brooch, as well as something about the face and tone of voice, suggested that it was a woman.
‘I’m sorry?’ I asked.
‘It’s full of rats,’ continued the shrewd-looking old woman, propped up on bony elbows over the window-sill. ‘All that overgrown mess attracts vermin. Someone ought to cut that damned elder down to the ground. Is that what you’re here to do, dear?’
I hesitated, listening to the whine of the hedge-cutter further down the driveway that led up through the grounds to the housing complex.
‘Well . . .’
‘If not, why not? And why are you standing down there with a bow saw?’
‘I started cutting it down,’ I offered. ‘But the boss said to leave it untouched.’
‘Really? Why?’
The old woman’s blackbird-like eyes darted from mine to the elder. I remembered Garfield had said something about it on the way here. He hadn’t really been talking to me; he’d been addressing one of the boys, but I’d overheard. What was it he’d said? I have trouble remembering things sometimes. Oh, yes.
‘He said the residents want to look after that area, and they don’t want it touched.’
‘Well, I’m one of the residents,’ the old woman retorted sharply, ‘and I want it taken down! Still, I suppose my opinion doesn’t count for much round here. But I know which residents you mean. And I know all about what they do to “look after” things. The Phantom Gardeners, that’s what I call them. Part of that lot that runs the place. . . .’
‘The Residents’ Association?’ I offered.
Her beady eyes stared past me for a moment, fixing on something behind me, something in the bushes where the elder grew. Then she snapped out of it and returned my gaze, smiling back at me in a preoccupied way.
‘Oh, something like that, dear. I’m not part of it anyway. It’s a little secret club. I sometimes think they’ve got something they’re hiding there. That’s why they won’t cut it back. Or maybe they’re just lazy, dear. None of them work, you know. Are you superstitious? . . .’
Before I could frame a reply to this, she went on:
‘ “Elder be ye Lady’s tree, burn it not or cursed ye’ll be.” Perhaps they think the Elder Mother will come out and take revenge on them if they cut it down!’
She laughed and went on:
‘Though what they think they’ve done to deserve such revenge, I can’t imagine. Let’s see. . . . Where shall we start? As I say, none of them work. But the rent isn’t cheap. I always wonder how they manage to pay it. Then there’s the water. . . . I would offer you a cup of tea, dear, but I really wouldn’t drink the water here, if I were you.’
She lowered her voice.
‘They put something in it, dear. . . . It changes you. . . .’
Slowly, with a theatrical gesture, she raised a bony hand to the silver tufts on her head and began to pull at them. I watched as she threw them into the air; watched them float to the ground in cottony wisps.
‘That’s what it does to you, dear,’ she stage-whispered, as if fearful of being overheard. ‘That’s what it does to you,’ she repeated with each tuft she yanked from her scalp.
She must be mentally ill, of course. Perhaps she had undergone chemotherapy recently, and the experience had brought on some kind of breakdown. Or perhaps it was the side effect of a drug she was taking as part of her treatment. That reminded me: there was something I needed to do, but I couldn’t quite remember what.
‘I don’t pay you to stand around here. . . .’
It was Garfield. He broke off from what he’d been about to say, glancing up in the direction in which I was staring, then averting his narrowed eyes from the nearly bald old woman beaming down at us.
‘Are you? . . .’ he asked.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Have you? . . .’
‘Of course.’
I had no idea what he was talking about, but it seemed easiest to say yes. Was it something to do with the object I’d just tossed into the twisting ivy under the mutilated elder?
‘Anyway, time to go now.’
Glancing back briefly at the open window, I followed him to the van.
***
I was surprised she didn’t crop up in conversation as Garfield drove us to the next job. You’d think a woman hanging out of her apartment window literally tearing her hair out and laughing maniacally, might have attracted some comment.
Then again, with Garfield and Sons I was usually a topic of, rather than a participant in, the conversation between them.
In the van, Jim and the boys sat in the front as usual, while I shared the compartment in the back with some of the tools of our trade. Over the noise of the engine I couldn’t hear what the younger Garfields were talking and joking about, though I had a good idea. I could make out a few words about how someone wasn’t ‘the sharpest tool in the box’. Their father shot them a hard look.
I knew what to expect.
Though I have problems remembering things, I’m not slow, as they seem to think I am. Maybe my problem is the opposite. My awareness of the present is a little too sharp, my senses too acute. Too acute for them to pull the cotton wool over my eyes. I knew Jim employed me because he owed my dad a favour.
***
The next day we returned to Monmouth Park, my mind bristling with questions about the elder tree, questions that had kept me awake most of the night. There were the usual glances in my direction then back at each other from Steve and Bob, and questions about whether I was all right from their father, which I deftly sidestepped. Jim’s hard blue eyes lingered on me for longer than was comfortable as he told me to load the van with clippings. Putting me on clear-up duties was a ploy to keep me in view, though if I’d challenged him about it, no doubt he would have given my obvious exhaustion as the reason for not allowing me near any of the hand-tools.
At the first opportunity I headed over to the elder tree, glancing apprehensively up at the old woman’s window. There was no sign of her, which was something of a relief, I must admit, though I had thought of asking her more about the ‘secret club’ she’d suggested ran the housing complex. But the window she’d called to me from the day before had the blind, curtainless blankness that suggests an empty property.
Had she moved out overnight? Or died suddenly? Had something more sinister happened to her? Whatever the reasons, I would not be able to ask her any more questions.
I turned my gaze towards the elder tree, its remaining fibrous branches bearing unhealthy-looking, mottled, yellowing leaves; Summer’s pale flowers, with their overpowering, acrid, sharp-sweet smell, and the purple-black berries that followed, had both long since gone. Something winked the Autumn sunlight back at me from between dark-green leaves and the tough, gnarled root of the ivy. Something silver.
Strange Tales V Page 25