Sweet Contemplation (Part 1 of 2) (IP)

For turnips, Dad preferred to grow Sweetbell, which he called salad turnips because you could grate and use them raw. For carrots it was always Chantenay. I can’t remember the particular variety of runner beans or peas or cabbage, although I know the latter seemed always to be a basic white.

          Dad built the wall in front of the vegetable garden himself. It was about waist height for an adult, with a gap in the middle, and separated the vegetables from the lawn and the flower and shrub borders. That part was Mum’s domain. When we were old enough (about nine by Mum’s reckoning) my twin brother and I were put in charge of what was then named the terrace, but would now be called a patio. It was a solid structure, rising a good two feet above the lawn, with three steps leading down. Ben and I thought this arrangement deeply unfair, because it was hard, boring work. Mum and Dad refused to use any chemicals in the garden, and so we had to scrape and scrub the moss and mould from the top and in between the stones, which were a kind of bulky crazy paving. I don’t know if there were non-chemical ways of cleaning terraces in the 1980s, other than putting your children in a chain gang, but if there were our parents either didn’t know or kept quiet about it.

          Dad died on the 10^th March, a week before his forty-second birthday. Ben and I were fifteen. I can’t remember the actual moment I was told he was dead. I remember coming home from school and walking up the road towards the house, a cold wind scraping my ears. I was annoyed with Ben. I’d bought a quite pricey hardback book for Dad’s present, supposedly from both of us, and that afternoon Ben had said he wouldn’t be able to pay his share right away because he’d spent all his money on two double albums and a Metallica t-shirt. I remember walking up the front path and putting my key in the lock. Then nothing. Nothing until about three days later, when I heard what I thought was a cat wailing in the early hours of the morning. I went to my window and saw someone moving, beyond the wall, and I realised the noise was coming from my Mum. I watched as she marched around the vegetable garden in her dressing gown and slippers, as if she was on some sort of parade, her back and head rigid, her mouth open in that unending wail.

          Dad had taken a couple of days off work because he wasn’t feeling well. We’ll never know why he went out to the vegetable garden. Maybe to see how the cabbages were doing, or to plan the next crop. Maybe just to think. He used to say that being out among living things just quietly growing was a good exercise in contemplation. Whatever the reason he was there, he had a heart attack and fell where he always planted the turnips. Mum found him just after half past two, when she returned from work. I got home about four o’clock. It was a Wednesday so Ben was at judo. Apparently our retired neighbour, Mr Horley, took Mum to fetch him while Mrs Horley stayed with me. I don’t remember any of it.

          I do remember Dad’s funeral. It was like being at some strange function that had nothing to do with us or Dad. It wasn’t a religious service. Dad’s brother, our Uncle Simon, gave a eulogy. Mum read Funeral Blues by WH Auden – you know, ‘Stop all the clocks’ – but this was long before Four Weddings And A Funeral so people thought it was an original thing to do. She’d asked me and Ben if we wanted to read something, in a way that said she wanted us to, so between us we recited part of Prospero’s speech: ‘Our revels now are ended…our little life is rounded with a sleep.’ Uncle Simon, who was an English teacher, thought it would be very suitable.  

          Everyone came back to the house after the funeral. Mrs Horley had made sandwiches and cakes and she stood in the kitchen brewing endless cups of tea. Mr Horley poured out glasses of wine. Ben and I stood there while people circled gently round us as if we were strange, fragile objects that any sudden movement would shatter. I didn’t feel like I might shatter. I remember looking at Mum’s terrarium and thinking I felt like that, like something looking at the world through thick glass, unable to hear or feel anything. Ben had a blank expression on his face that told me he was in his own terrarium, watching everything go on around us.

          That evening, after they’d all gone – Mr and Mrs Horley put Uncle Simon and Auntie Ruth up for the night – Mum and Ben and I looked at each other and wondered what the hell we were meant to do now. For lack of any other ideas, we went to bed.

          When I lay down I realised that every inch of me ached, and my bones did, then, feel as if they might shatter. It was as though I had been given permission to stop holding on to whatever had kept me walking and talking over the last couple of weeks, and now I could just disintegrate. I felt myself drifting into sleep, and took comfort in my certainty that when I woke up, all this absurd nonsense would be over. I’d hear Dad doing the falsetto from Chicago’s If You Leave Me Now while he shaved, or his best Joe Strummer snarl while he bellowed that London was calling. (He had eclectic tastes, my Dad.) I would put my head round the bathroom door and say, ‘I had the weirdest bloody dream’ and he’d turn round with a smile and say, ‘No swearing before breakfast’.

          It was still dark when I did wake up. I lay still, wondering what had woken me. I felt sick when I thought it might be Mum marching round the vegetable garden, screeching into the night.

          I looked towards the window. A fine mist of light glimmered through the curtains, from the main road beyond the houses whose gardens backed on to ours. I didn’t want to get up and look out, too scared of seeing Mum. But there was no noise. Just an insistence, in my brain, that there was something.

          I remember doing everything quite methodically – push back the duvet, insert feet into slippers, feel my way to the door, take my dressing gown down from the hook because of the chill. Precision of thought and movement might keep chaos at bay.

          I walked across the carpet, for once confident that there were no discarded shoes, CD cases, books or pens to snag me. Mum had made us clean and tidy up the entire house before the funeral, as if she thought the guests would demand a complete inspection. Method. Precision of thought and movement. People are coming so we tidy the house. Like always.

          I drew the curtains apart.

          Dad was there in the vegetable garden, digging in the turnip patch, and the first thing I thought was, ‘why would he be digging there, it’s too early to plant the turnips’ and then ‘why is he digging in the dark?’ Then I realised it was not Dad. It was a flickering shape that was sometimes Dad and  sometimes a disjointed kaleidoscope of jagged shape and shadow, illuminated by and then disintegrating in the light from the road. A snagged piece of film twisting and jerking in an effort to escape.

          A saw-like gurgle bubbled in my throat and emerged as a scream. I jammed my palms against the window, pushing and pushing against the cold glass, unsure if I was trying to force my way out to the garden or shove this thing as far away from me as possible. It was Mum who reached me first, just as I wrenched the curtains back together, her whole body enfolding me. Then there was Ben, running, and then we all fell together on the bedroom floor, an aggregation of arms and legs, misery and pain.

          We stayed together for the rest of the night, in what was now just Mum’s room, on the bed that was now just Mum’s bed. I didn’t tell them what I’d seen.

          Next morning Ben and I sat at the kitchen table with mugs of tea, while Mum was in the shower.

          ‘Want to tell me what it was all about?’ he said.

          I shook my head.

          ‘You scared the fuck out of Mum. And me.’

          ‘I think I need to go to the vegetable garden,’ I said.

Part Two is here: Sweet Contemplation (Part 2 of 2) (IP) | ABCtales

Picture: Maule's Seed Catalogue 1895, copyright free from Wikimedia Commons https://tinyurl.com/mrxwfhfe