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The Garden of Earthly Delights
by Nic Ford
It had been barren for as long as I could remember, but on the day my mother died the little patch of land gave life for the first time. The hard and cracked soil was interrupted at last by a single bloom, a scrawny pipe-cleaner stem supporting a lone blood-red poppy.
The garden lay behind the small terraced house my parents owned, or had owned. It was nothing more than a yard really, protected from outside scrutiny by three high brick walls and the house itself. A desert in the heart of the city, it was dead and dry, bare and dusty, giving no succour to any living thing. A sad place, unadorned and unloved, and in these ways it mirrored my parents’ marriage.
My mother never ventured into the garden, never wanted to and never needed to. She inhabited the interior of the house. Hers were the two small and shadowed bedrooms, the dank bathroom, the tiny steam-ridden kitchen. She spent her silent life in that house as though it were the whole world. Her time there could not be called living, in truth; it was merely existing. Drifting from one room to another, cleaning after my father, cooking for my father, suffering at the hands of my father. Oh, he never hit her. Despite his powerful frame, my father did not express himself physically. But his deep eyes stared, penetrating my mother’s every action, and he glared and frowned at her silently. He was a man of few words, my father; he would just wait, glaring while my mother worked around him, never voicing his displeasure, but allowing her a glimpse of a deep, unknown anger he held within. My mother would say nothing, for to do so would increase his displeasure with her; she shared his silent world because her timid frame could not break free of it. She worked herself hard, living her sad life for nothing and no one, living in fear of my father’s anger, in dread of his word.
The garden was my father’s territory. Only he was allowed to enter that private and dead domain, and only he did. We were never to find out what mysteries the garden held for him. We used to try to peer through the kitchen’s grimy windows at his motionless figure, my sisters and I, but it was too high for us to reach; and my mother used to scold us for “disturbing his peace” and then push us, complaining, from the room. It was strange the way she acted, as though he had died and was no longer of this earth; maybe for her he had died, long ago. She had no humour in her voice as she scolded, but instead she looked around in fear of his displeasure, her piercing, green, almost tear-filled eyes betraying a weakness, a dependence on him that none of us understood. But to we girls it seemed somehow apt for their relationship.
Each day began with my father pushing through the tiny kitchen, his great back bowed like he was a beast of burden carrying a load. He would walk as if he was being held back by some mighty force, but his face would show no emotion. No flicker of recognition for his wife, his daughters, would appear as he pushed his way into the garden; the only glimmer of life was in his eyes, and they were dark and malevolent. He went each day sullen and silent, breaking my mother’s heart. And for all that we wished he would talk to us, know us, he never did; my father was a stranger.
-oOo-
On the morning of my mother’s death, my sisters and I were taken away to stay with our Aunt Miriam. She told us that we were too young to understand what had happened, that we shouldn’t ask any difficult questions. But we knew that we would never see our mother again.
She was my father’s sister, Aunt Miriam, and there had never been any real love lost between herself and my mother. But the two women had always been civil in each others presence, and she treated us well now, in our time of need. She owned a large house, much larger than we had known before, left her by a rich and erstwhile sickly husband; and we now had the run of this. We were left strangely unaffected by the loss of our mother, and were more eager to explore our new home and its gardens than mourn her parting. Perhaps we were still in shock. Perhaps we simply did not understand the enormity of what had happened; certainly it was to this that Aunt Miriam ascribed our behaviour. We were happy to let the adults think that of us, but my sisters and I knew the real reason for our unconcern. Our mother had died, passed on, gone beyond. She was in a happier place now, out of the clutches of my father, and we celebrated with her.
And so our days with Aunt Miriam passed slowly and happily, a long and hot summer of the kind that makes childhood memories fast. We played and ran, exploring the house with its many dark nooks and hidden back rooms. We searched every corner of the vast land at its back, from the old oak tree hung with an ancient, iron swing and carved with initials of mysterious and long forgotten lovers, to the deep, tumbledown well that still echoed with a magical, watery voice from the all-but-dried stream in its depths. We invented medieval countries in that garden, entire nations with the house as their castle and capital. My sisters and I played long, joyously, with imaginations that knew no bounds, and as we played our Aunt and her friends watched and clucked over us, never reminding us our mother’s recent departure, thinking that our youth had let the event slip by, and thankfully. But we knew, we knew all the while, that out mother watched us from some other place, and played and joined our games with us. She had not left us, as Aunt Miriam seemed to think, and now we would not leave her.
But as the summer went on, eventually cooling its ardour to allow the dying oaks and beeches to drop autumn on the grass, we did begin to forget our mother. Not in a bad way; we did not forget that she had existed, and she was no less part of our lives than before. But my sisters and I began to think of her less during our games. While we still knew she watched us, her voice was heard less and less often, until she was no more than a whisper in our latest childhood conversation of princes and dragons. She left us as the summer left us, as if she was inextricably tied to that long, dry season. The rains of autumn pushed her away, just as they discouraged the sun from showing, and while we never forgot her, so too we remembered less often.
It was not until our father came to collect us, a full seven months after our mother, thankfully, had left him forever, that our old life came real to me again.
-oOo-
“You can’t take them, James. They’re too young. For heaven’s sake, they’ve forgotten their life with you, and they’ve never known how she died. Don’t make them go through all that.”
“They’s my kids, Miriam, and I want ’em back. They’s mine. They should be with me, by rights.”
Our aunt, tired by an argument that had gone on too long, turned from my father and sat with her back to him. “You don’t know what you’re asking, James. They have a good life here, in a beautiful house. What would they have with you?”
“I’s their father. They should be with me.”
“In that hovel?” My aunt stood again, her body now shaking with anger, fire and a deep, deep sadness in her eyes. “In that hovel, James? With the damp pulling plaster from the walls by the day, and nowhere to go except streets I wouldn’t send a dog to?” She came around the kitchen table to him, taking his jaw in a vice-like grip that surprised even he. In other circumstances it would have been comical, a strangely saddened giant of a man so threatened by a woman half his size. But there was an ice in the air, that evening, and I knew, watching from my forgotten position by the door, that both were deadly serious.
“Do you really think I’m going to give them up, James?” My aunt spoke with a voice shaking but deadly cool, and she tightened her grip on her brother’s jaw so that his face whitened around her bruising fingers. My father, too, shook, but his rage was not at my aunt; somehow it was instead directed inwards. “Do you really think I’m going to let them return with you to that sty? Do you really know me so badly? Who will they have for a mother, James, if I let them go back with you? One of the floozies you’ve taken to replace her?”
At that my father exploded. He took hold of my aunt’s arm, her frail wrist enclosed in just one mighty hand, and cried a meaningless shout of rage. He pulled her hand from his face so viciously that blood was drawn from both his cheek and her fingers, and tossed her to the ground as if no more than a doll. Turning to her so that her entire, prostrate body was in his shadow, he raised his hand to strike her down; but at the last moment that passive but deeply sad look of old returned to his face, and he turned to the door, all but running to be free of his sister’s house.
I, too, had to run to follow him, leaving my sisters to calm our aunt from her sobs.
-oOo-
I had not seen my father for what seemed like a lifetime; and the man I saw now was not the man I had known that lifetime ago. I followed my father not back to our house, the home in which our mother had suffered so long, but instead to a bar, a place that, to my knowledge he had never visited before. I thought that I was in for a long wait for him, that he would be drowning his sorrows at the to his sister of his whole family, but I was wrong; he was not long inside. Indeed, I had to be quick as he came out, bottle in one hand and some woman on the other, to avoid being seen by him and attracting his displeasure. But I needn’t have worried, as the man who came out from the pub was not my father. Oh, he wore my father’s body, but he laughed and drank, caroused and shouted and kissed and fondled the girl at his side. He was not my father, who had known no emotion except a sad, sad anger; he was not the man who had killed my mother so slowly over the years.
I followed them for what seemed like hours, through streets that I never knew existed in a town I had known all my life but which now seemed like a stranger. The pair in front became drunker, louder, more lecherous, while I jumped from shadow to darkened corner and back so as not to be seen. We eventually arrived at my former home, and my father fumbled at the lock with his key, having to make several attempts before the door yielded to him and let them inside. They, drunken and uncaring, lurched through to the tiny, dark living room, leaving the door to swing idly in the wind. I moved to follow them, to watch their desecration of my mother’s house, her home; but, as if to foil me, a gust took the door so hard that it swung shut in my face, the lock clicking closed. I was alone.
-oOo-
The darkened lane behind my mother’s house was forbidding at the best of times, but now, approaching midnight at the end of a wind-swept autumn day, it instilled in me a fear I had not known before. Was it the shadows dancing against the broken, red brick walls, as the wind whistled chill? Was it the broken windows, sharp like teeth, in those houses in the terrace now left derelict? Or was there something else in the lane that night? I couldn’t tell, but there was something left me cold, left me so afraid that the pity and anger I had held for my father was nearly forgotten; but not quite, not quite.
I turned to face the garden, my father’s garden, hidden behind its walls at the back of the house they had just entered. At first I could make out nothing different from those dead and decrepit yards at the back of the other sad houses in the street, but then I saw; faint, and only just visible, but I saw the source of my fear. A glow came from behind those walls, a sickly, death-yellow glow barely perceptible against the darkened windows to its back. But it was there, it was there, and it came from the garden. Oh, what had my father done? What terrible secret did he keep there?
The wind had picked up now, as if to deter me from pursuing my discovery, to push me into running from that terrible place, back to the arms of my aunt. It had the opposite effect. I moved closer to the back wall of the garden, and leant against it to try to find a little shelter from the now strong wind and increasing drops of hard, oily rain. It was warm, warm to the touch, and with a gasp I pulled back. As I did so, I heard a noise; a low, quiet moan, that while holding in it sorrow and pain, was also a sound that only increased my fear of the place. It was a terrible, rasping noise, telling of loss and dreadful hurt, and promising untold revenge on those that crossed it further.
I would not let it win, I decided, and pushed myself against the wall once more. I grasped at the bricks, forcing my fingers into the cracks where years-old cement now crumbled to dust at my touch. Whatever had made that noise, I would not let it make my decisions for me. Bravado took control of me, and the anger against my father that had welled up so greatly earlier came upon me again. The wind was fuller now, and bitterly cold, and it pushed me and pulled me as I held the wall; I didn’t care. Instead of allowing myself to be bent at the wind’s will, I defied it. I pushed myself closer to the wall, pulling myself into it, and I shouted to the wind. I shouted an incoherent tirade of abuse, rage at its torment, rage at my father and the woman he had so easily found in the bar, rage at the abuse he had for so long poured upon my mother, until the end of her life was a blessing. Rage. Rage. Rage.
With each shout I hit at the wall. My fists beat into it, knocking at brick, cement and moss alike, my anger trying to break that symbol of my father’s world. I cried and shouted till my fingers bled and my voice was hoarse; but still it was not enough for me. Again I hit, and again, and again, until in a last fury I allowed the wind to take me and throw me against my father’s wall, his defence and abuse of the world. With a final cry, I hit the wall, and arm was brick, and brick was skull, and skull was mortar and all were one.
And I was through. I had thought I would die, that that was the end. But no. No. I turned to look, and behind me I saw a wall; just a common, red-brick wall that housed a common yard. But somehow, I had been thrown through that wall, into a garden. Not much more than a yard, but still a garden, where the wind didn’t blow, where summer still warmed the cracked ground, and where somehow, somehow, daylight still flooded in. A small, dusty and dead yard, with a single, blood-red poppy on a pipe-cleaner stem in its centre.
At last, I was in my father’s domain. I had entered his garden.
-oOo-
What I had first taken to be some unearthly daylight, streaming from a sun divorced from the world beyond the walls that now encased me, I soon discovered was not. Yes, I could see as well as if it was midday, but the light did not come from above, and looking up I could clearly make out stars and moon. The light was a glow, a treasure allowed only to the inhabitants of my father’s yard, and it ceased to illuminate as it broke over and above the ancient and crumbling but still-high walls.
It seemed to emanate from the centre of that dry patch of earth, yes, from around the poppy. It was the poppy that provided the source of light, the source of heat; as if the flower was itself its own life-giver. That pathetic stem, with the bloom it supported once scarlet but now more lacklustre, and holding a thin covering of the yard’s dry dust, had on first sight looked as though it had had to fight to survive, a stranger in an alien and alienating land. Now, however, it was the monarch of a stranger realm, a kingdom where it ruled absolutely, and to which it showed favour with a pale yellow glow, a light of dead flesh.
As I studied the poppy it shivered, although there was no longer any wind, not even a mild breeze, which could be said to move it. Slowly, almost imperceptibly slowly, the scrawny king seemed to turn to me, and an icy fear gripped my stomach. I knew it could not be, that it must be I, I who was moving. But I will swear that the poppy turned, that its stem, in the dark green of a bitter-fought growth, twisted towards me, the new interloper in its kingdom, an infidel to be converted to subject.
At that moment my attention was distracted. The kitchen window, which I had seen so rarely from this side before, was suddenly flooded with light. The pane was covered with the grime of years, as although my mother had been particular about the cleanliness of every aspect of her small, decrepit kitchen, my father had had no such qualms about those parts of the house that had backed onto his domain, his garden, his pride.
I moved quickly, again scared that my father would learn of my presence, and hid myself in a small alcove built into the wall, a relic of days gone by when it had housed a shabby but venerated Madonna. From here I had a good view of everything, of my father’s all but dead garden, of the poppy parading its ownership in the yard’s centre, and of the back of the house itself. Through the near-blackened kitchen window I could make out a figure moving; my father was invading my mother’s territory. I could not make out his face, but his frame was unmistakable; and yet, and yet, there was something different. He no longer held himself with the burdened stoop he had worn for my mother. Now he walked tall, somehow with purpose. Indeed, I could imagine a new look on his face, a look that my sisters and I had never seen, a vitality that had been missing in all our years as a family. But no, no, that would be too much to believe.
And then, to my horror, her figure joined his behind the window frame. Her shadow approached him, enveloped him in its arms, in a way that had never been demanded of my mother, had never even been allowed. No such contact between my parents, for all the years they had been together; a single glare from my father’s pain-ridden eyes would always push my mother away. She was never invited in to his burdened, embittered life.
The shadows of my father and the girl, now a single, writhing mass behind the silk screen of the window grime, stayed together, moved together, for a time obscenely long. I could only stare, only watch the window with a horrid fascination, not believing what I saw, unwilling to believe. No, no, my father would not do that; despite all his silent, long abuse of my mother, of our family, he would not do that. But he was, he was.
A sob rose in my throat, a silent, formless cry. At last I pulled myself away from that terrible scene, unable to watch the desecration of my parents’ marriage any longer. I turned from the window, not knowing where to go, where to look instead. My gaze fell upon the poppy, enthroned in the centre of the dirty yard that my father called his, now as guilt-ridden as his own life must be.
The poppy had moved. It was no longer facing me, interrogating me. Instead it had turned again - I am sure it had turned - and was now facing the window. It, too, was watching my father and his, his floozy my aunt had called her kind, and it seemed to be hungry. It was as if it needed the girl’s body, the lust of her embrace with my father, more even than my father did. As before, it now shivered, shivered in anticipation of the union that was to come, it seemed. A drop of moisture, collected no doubt from the earlier rains, hung like spittle from ravenous scarlet petal lips. Again, the bloom trembled, and now it took on a different persona. No longer was it a monarch; now it had become a dictator and an executioner, a lustful, violent voyeur. As the shadow of my father and the girl moved, so moved the poppy. While inside the pair embraced, held, kissed, so in my father’s garden the thin, straggly stem shook, as if empathising, as if the evil flower were taking part in the sordid proceedings itself.
The kitchen light switched off, dragging my attention back, away from the somehow sentient, brooding poppy. I could no longer see the figures of the girl and my father; but I did not have long to wait, for within a few seconds the light above the kitchen came on to replace that of its neighbour below.
It took me a few moments, imagining the house inside, the layout of the rooms that once I had known so well. But soon it came to me; my father had taken the girl to my parents’ bedroom. My mother’s room. My mother’s.
A few noises came from the room, for the window was a little open, and hearing them my horror mounted. A giggle from the girl, a lower, lascivious but unidentifiable murmur from my father. How could he, how could he, after showing so little care to my mother for so long? My heart beat faster, my anger and revulsion mounting, once again, to levels I had not before thought possible.
But this was replaced quickly, too quickly, by fear; in front of me the poppy moved again, as it angled itself to face the upstairs window. And now the shivers came quicker more often, and they seemed to be accompanied by a low, almost inaudible hissing, a hissing of excitement. Yes, that was it, the poppy was excited, excited by the betrayal, the naked lust that my father now displayed. My father, who had held my mother and our family in misery and fear of his wrath, of even his attention, for so many years, had come alive. Alive, and uncaring. No, not uncaring; for I remembered his face at our aunts only a few hours previously. But his guilt had led to shame, and shame to anger, and now anger had led my father to openly abuse the memory of my mother, as if the abuse during her life was not enough.
I rose to my feet, no longer caring if my father saw me or not; in any case, he was not likely to notice me now. My first reaction was to take the poppy in my hands, to tear it apart, to destroy it so that it could no longer gloat at the gift of love my father had so long denied, and now thought he gave freely. But then I saw it, and it instilled in me a fear so deep that it prevented me from ever going close to that terrible, evil plant. Yes, I saw it happening, slowly at first, but mounting in speed. The glow that emanated from the poppy was growing, pulsing, as the poppy shivered. It rose higher, higher, enveloping more of the yard with every lustful shake of the poppy’s stem, until it reached the sill of the lit window above us. And then...silence.
Silence. No sound came from the room, and no movement from the poppy. Its stem was bowed back now, so that the poppy could lean back, and bask. It basked in its own glow, as if the window or the room behind it was augmenting the deathly light, providing the flower with sustenance, strength. The poppy was a parasite, feeding off my father’s guilt and lust, my anger and pity for him.
I ran. I could no longer stay in that dreadful place, and I ran for my life. I jumped at the wall, my already bloody fingers scraping once more at the ancient mortar and brick. I missed my footing and fell back, so that once more the garden came into view, but that spurred me on. I jumped again, and this time I managed to grasp the top of the wall, to pull myself up.
I threw myself over the wall, first one leg and then the other, and let go, not caring where I fell, so that I could run, run back to the safety of Aunt Miriam and her warm house. But as I escaped that dreadful place, I caught a last glimpse of the once empty yard. My father’s garden was growing, growing with every pulse of the poppy’s glow, it seemed. For there, in the yard’s centre, the poppy stood, tall, proud and evil, uncaring any longer of my presence or absence. And, to my increasing horror, around its base were shoots. Small, as yet hardly breaking the surface, but shoots. And they were growing visibly, stretching slowly upwards and bowed as if in homage to the poppy at their centre, courtiers to a triumphant king.
-oOo-
There had been an argument, I don’t remember about what. My sister, the middle child, flew into a tantrum which she ended by biting our aunt on the arm, and running from the house. I being the eldest, it fell to me to follow her, and so once again I left my aunt’s house for a rain-soaked evening in a miserable autumn chill, in search of my family.
I could see my sister in front of me, just disappearing from view as she rounded a corner at the end of the street. It didn’t matter; I knew where she was headed. I set off after her, in the direction of our old home, and once again that strange, cold fear pulled at my gut. But I could not bow to my own weakness; my sister was too young to be out alone, she needed me to bring her back. And then, and then, if she ever found our father, if she saw the house, the garden’s abomination... God forbid, God forbid.
And once again, somehow, the streets of that town I had thought I knew so well, seemed strange and alien to me that night. More than once I lost my way, and ended up at the wrong end of a road, at the back rather than the front of a familiar church or other landmark. Small, trivial mistakes, and ones which would not usually cause me anything other than annoyance; but tonight, as I was chasing my sister, they fought against me. The town itself, as if caught under my father’s self-centred spell, conspired to stop me finding her before she reached him, the reassuring coldness and unlove that was all she had known from him for so long.
When at last I caught her, the rain had started again. The dank soiling rain which always seemed to accompany my father’s garden, his life.
She was standing at the door of the house. Just standing, staring at the door as if it would open magically for her and bring back her mother, her old life or a better one. From inside, I could here the vague sounds of a party; the giggles of the girl my father had met earlier mingled with those of others, strangers I did not know. And music, music that had never before, to my knowledge, been allowed in that house. My father had denied us most simple pleasures.
“Come on,” I said, and held out my hand for her to take. “Come back. There’s nothing for us here. He doesn’t want us. Come back.”
She turned and looked at me. No emotion showed on her young face. She just looked, studied me, and I could not hold her gaze for long.
Suddenly, she pulled away from me. “No! No, I won’t come!” she shouted, and ran from me back to the door, knocking on it hard.
I grabbed her shoulder, pulled her roughly back to me. “You little idiot! Do you really want him out here with us? Do you? Do you?”
She started to whimper, then, and held me close. I hugged her back, trying to replace some of the love that my father had made missing from her life for so long; but my mind was not in it, still fearful as I was that he had heard her knocking. I looked up, expecting to see the door open, to be replaced by my father’s frame and expressionless but condemning face. But he did not come, and the noises from the party inside continued; he was obviously otherwise engaged.
The rain was getting harder yet. Drops of water, black and oily, the hard and already stagnant rain of the town’s industry, soaked our clothes and chilled our skins.
“I’m all wet,” my sister said, broken by sobs. “I want to go inside.”
I replied, “No. Not in there. But I know a place where we can shelter, for a little while.”
-oOo-
Inside the Madonna’s alcove, lit again by the poppy’s glow, we were a little drier, a little safer from the rain’s constant assault. Somehow, with a dependant to protect, the poppy scared me a little less, and I had time to study the garden better while my sister’s sobs turned into gentle, exhausted snores on my shoulder.
It was still barren to look at, still lifeless and sad. But the poppy in its centre was thriving, sending out its sickly glow, which still lit the dusty ground and crumbling walls, and still reached to the lower sill of the upstairs window of the house, just as I had seen it last. The poppy had noticed us, turned to us to study us; but now it was moving back, in that eerie way it had, ready to bask once more in its own reflected glow. And somehow, somehow, the fact that we were now ignored, accepted, was strangely reassuring.
Around its base the shoots that I had glimpsed as I had escaped had now grown somewhat. They, too, were poppies; but none as scarlet, as tall and wiry, as imposing as their leader. And none turned to face us, thankfully. Instead, their gazes were firmly centred on the petals of the individual in the centre, high above them and dripping rain as if some kind of dark manna for its subjects.
And as I watched, waited for the poppy to resume its reign, the rain stopped. And as it did silence of that place fell over me, until I fell to the poppy’s strange peace. Waiting, waiting, for it to make its next move. Waiting.
“Pussy!” My sister’s voice pulled me from my waking dream, dragged me back to reality. “There’s a pussy! Look, there!”
She pulled herself free of my arms, and ran around the poppy to a small and wet mass huddled in the corner. A black cat, half-starved and feral to look at it, trying to save itself from the recent storm. My sister fell on it, hugging it to her. “Oh, you poor thing. You’re soaked, aren’t you? What are we going to do?”
I went to join them, to examine my sister’s new friend, which was now mewing and trying to escape her clutches. My sister looked up at me, smiled. “Isn’t it lovely? It’s called Cat. Aren’t you, Cat?”
“Yes, it’s lovely,” I replied. There was something about the cat I didn’t like, something about the way it looked, although I could not put my finger on it. If nothing else, it had no right to be there, in my father’s garden. I tried to prise it from my sister’s grasp.
“Come on now, leave it. The rain’s stopped. We’d better get back to Aunt Miriam’s.”
“No. I won’t. It wants to stay with me.” My sister frowned a little-girl’s look of contempt. The cat struggled again to be free of her, but she seemed to take that as encouragement. “See? It’s nodding. It wants to stay with me.”
“Just leave it,” I shouted, and grabbed her arm. My anger surprised the both of us, and tears began to well up in my sister’s eyes again. I tried to placate her. “Look, we don’t need another cat. Aunt Miriam’s got enough for all of us already. Just come on home”
I tried to pull her away, to drag her back across the wall, but she was not satisfied. I tried again, “It’s half dead, look! It’s just a mangy, old cat.”
The cat mewed, agreeing with me, still struggling to be free. “It’s all skin and bone,” I told her, more gently now, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. “You can see its ribs through its skin. And anyway, look at its eyes...”
Its eyes.
That was it, its eyes. That was what had disturbed me so. They were not a cat’s eyes, not the usual black ellipses for pupils, or yellow iris or night-time sparkle. The cat had human eyes. Green, deep, with round, human pupils in their centres. The cat saw the world with human eyes.
Oh, my God.
With my mother’s eyes.
“No!” I screamed, and dragged the creature from my sister’s arms. She cried now for fear of me, not knowing what was happening. “No!” I screamed again. How could it? How could it? How could that animal, that cat, bring my mother’s eyes back to this place, into my father’s garden? How could it soil her memory so, how could it blaspheme?
The cat fought me now, scared for its life. Biting, spitting, clawing my arms red. I hit it, shook it, forgetting my sister’s screams. How could it? Around me the air seemed to fill, to become thick with a dark, clammy heat, and in my ears a low humming grew. I screamed once more, “No,” and threw the hissing creature from me.
A crack, a pained mew, and no more.
I looked up, wiping my eyes clear with a bloodied arm. At first I couldn’t see where the cat had landed; but then my eyes found it, a twitching mass lying beneath a red patched wall. Then, a spasm, and then it was still. I found that I was crying.
I rested for a few minutes, panting with the recent exertion, but strangely deadened to what I had done. I felt nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing; if I heard my sister’s disappearing sobs, for she left me then, I ignored them. In time, I stood, suddenly tired. I just wanted to get home, to leave that place forever. I turned to the poppy, as if to ask it for some support; It had been facing me, and I had the eerie suspicion that it had been more hungry for my outburst, that it had savoured every moment of my abuse of the cat’s life; but now it had nothing for me, and already it was slowly turning on its stem, turning to face the windows once more.
I moved to leave, slowly and lethargically, feeling at last a little of the burden my father seemed to always carry. Each step I took was heavier than the last, and with each step I stooped a little more; still I felt nothing for the cat, nothing for my sister, whose faith in me had been so betrayed. I even felt nothing for myself, there in that death-still garden, and I think the poppy must still have been exercising its influence over me. All I could feel was a weight on my shoulders, a weight from a load of which I didn’t know the name.
I reached the wall and climbed it. I had none of the urgency of my last visit to my father’s garden, I did not care if my father saw me, caught me. I moved my body over the wall, and fell to the ground on the other side.
As I hit the ground, I felt the weight lift from me, as if it was the presence of the poppy that weighted me down. I scanned the lane quickly, trying to see my sister; but she had long since gone, and I could only hope that she was safe back with our aunt.
A noise. A noise from my father’s garden. It was not the low humming that I had heard earlier, the menacing sound of the yard’s monarch as it moved; rather, it was a moan, the moan of an animal in pain. Carefully, fearful that I should see the broken body of a cat, a cat I had mutilated but not had the mercy to kill, I looked back over the wall.
There, kneeling beside the poppy, staring at the ground where my sister had stood as she sobbed for the cat, was my father. Where my sister’s tears had fallen, once a small clump of young poppy courtiers, now was only brown and dead broken stems. A perfect circle of dead poppies and browned, almost burnt grass, now shunned by the neighbouring plants which seemed to draw back in horror. But where her tears had taken the life from the poppies, my sister had also given life. A small ring of daisies was growing through the carnage.
My father groaned again, his horror echoing the silent revulsion that the poppy courtiers showed.
I returned to our aunt’s house, and found my sister waiting there; but she would no longer talk to me, and made very little effort to keep the fear, the hate from her eyes. My father’s garden, his world, had eaten into our family a little more.
-oOo-
I only saw the garden once more. Life at my aunt’s house had soured, since my abuse of the cat’s life and the betrayal of my sister, and I was neither happy nor truly welcome there. I started to spend more time away from the place, taking long walks, finding excuses to be apart from my sisters, eventually staying away for days on end. Each time I returned, Aunt Miriam would scold me, make me promise to never leave her home again; but in truth, she neither worried nor cared about me. The coldness of my father, a gift from the poppy, had never really left me, and now it seemed to be spreading from me to the rest of my family. In some way it broke us and split us apart, leaving fragments of a once beautiful whole which our mother, in her pain, had kept together.
And so I wandered the town, day by day, and each day the burden I carried became greater. Oh, I had thought it had fallen from me as I had climbed the garden wall that last time; but slowly, slowly, it was returning to me, until I could feel myself turning into a sad and angry automaton. My father.
And in time, the garden drew me back to it. No rain this time, and no wind to hold me there when I arrived. And I was not lost in the town; instead, it was this time clearer to me than it had ever been before, as if a mirror of myself. No, this time, as I walked the streets to my father’s garden, the town seemed to have assumed the silence, the death-yellow glow of the poppy.
The lane behind the house was as dusty, as dirty as ever; but somehow it now held an eerie quiet. There in front of me was the wall, just as I remembered it, waiting for me to pass through. No rage was needed this time, just the poppy’s peace to let me pass; and I was through.
There, waiting for me, was the poppy. It had already turned to face the wall, knowing that I would arrive, and it swayed gently now, as if waving to an old friend. But I was no friend. I did not trust the peace, the little-death, it had bestowed on me; I had seen what it had done to my father.
The poppy, surrounded by its courtiers, shivered, and it loosened a drop of dew nestling between its petals. The drop fell, a plant’s saliva, and once more I knew that the poppy was hungry, and that I was somehow its prey.
A hum, just as before, but this time deeper, more urgent, threatening. And now, for the first time, the smaller poppies themselves moved away from their adoration of the monarch in the centre. Slowly, they too turned, stems creaking in an effort to which they were unused, until their petals pointed to me. A sea of blood red and black faced me.
There was no longer any rage in me, no anger at the poppy’s arrogant hunger. Instead, I had come to just feel a cold acceptance. While I felt the poppy’s alien power over me, while I held no trusted for it, hated it, the terror I had once felt in that place was gone from me. I had turned into my father, a vessel for pain and guilt, sadness and a deep, self-destructive remorse.
The burden I carried weighed heavier on me that day, at that moment, and I wanted to rest from it. My head lowered, involuntarily, and I dropped to my knees as if exhausted. And I was. The burden, the guilt and helplessness that the breaking of my family had created in me, had become too great. My father’s acts had destroyed my mother; she had died in herself long before her body guttered and died. But instead of her escape bringing us together, we had fallen apart. I had let us drift away from each other, I had done worse than my father, and now I had to leave myself behind, to escape myself. I wanted to close my eyes, to feel the weight lift, to forget the family that I had lost, thrown from me, as I drifted into a dream. Nothing mattered to me any more, nothing except to forget.
come to me
The poppy spoke. No lips moved, no sound was made, but the poppy spoke. A quiet, reassuring voice, and it spoke to me.
come to me, again, and now it was joined by the voices of the other’s around it. yes come to us come come join us come now come
And then the calm that I had felt before in that place, the poppy’s peace began to weave its spell over me. Oh, I was still burdened, I still felt the weight of my guilt; but now I could bear it, because the poppies, my friends, were her. Here in the garden my father had built for me.
come to mecome tome cometomecometomecome
I walked to the poppy; I could do nothing else. As my father had found peace in that yard for so many years, so now the poppy of my mother’s death offered me the same peace. I no longer needed or wished for my freedom, even for my self. Just to be with the poppy, part of its peace.
As I reached the poppies I felt them part around me, caress my legs and hands with their petals as I passed. And as I presented myself before the poppy, the original, its courtiers pulled back to leave me room to address their master. I knelt.
The poppy communicated with me one last time. No words this time, but just a feeling of accomplishment, of success. Even of victory over me, but then, it was the victor and I the vanquished.
The poppies around me slowly turned back to face their master, and it, too, turned away from me, back to bask in the reflection from the house of its deathly glow. There was no more for me to do, the ceremony of acceptance by the poppy had been so simple. I had no more need of anything than to lie, to sleep, to forget.
I curled myself into a foetal ball at the poppy’s base, my eyes closed. I laid my head to the ground, and felt beneath it a pillow. A cold, malleable pillow, fur covered and fetid.
The cat. I opened my eyes to find them staring into those of the cat. They were open, hate filled, as if the animal was still alive; but my head was on its cold body, and its neck was twisted at a grotesque angle. How the poppy had dragged it there from the wall which had taken its life, I don’t know, and don’t wish to. It had broken me from the poppy’s spell, and I was filled with hate, revulsion for the flower, for myself. I stood, and ran to the wall to escape the blaming eyes of the dead creature, crushing poppies under me as I went. They screamed, rending the poppy’s glow, as I took their feeble, sordid lives too; but they were minions of the poppy, and my loathing exceeded my care. I could still feel the touch of the cat against me, its odour in my nostrils, and I scratched at the side of my head, scraping its body from me until my skin bled. I was panicking, crying so much that I could not control my limbs, could no longer climb the wall.
The poppy had turned to face me now. It hissed again, the terrible bloom I had known at the start. It seemed to be looming closer to me, threatening me as I had never been threatened before. The yellow glow, cold as death, enveloped me. I screamed. Screamed.
-oOo-
And then, a miracle. The back door of the house, my mother’s house, opened, and I saw my father’s frame silhouetted against the kitchen light. For the first time I could remember, his sight gave me hope.
To begin, my father seemed to be a statue. He stood there, taking in the scene; crushed poppies, a mutilated cat, my screams, my panicked screams. And he saw the poppy, a malevolent god among fearful worshippers, hissing its anger at me with a dead-flesh glow. And then my father moved.
“No!” His voice was loud, louder than I had ever heard before, and he silenced me mid-scream. “No,” he screamed again, at the garden, at its walls, at the poppy. “Not my daughter. You’ll not take my daughters!”
He drew himself up, as if the burden had fallen from him, and as he did so the look of pain that had haunted his eyes for so many years left him. A rage took him, an anger I had never seen in him before, and he moved to attack the poppies. To crush them.
But he did not. As he ran to the poppy and its subjects, I saw the anger fall from him, to be replaced by an abject horror. At first I did not understand why; but then I saw, I realised at what he was staring. My father was looking at the cat. Its head had moved, turned so that it was facing him, and I knew that my father was seeing what I had seen. My mother’s eyes.
A groan escaped his lisp, and my father fell. He was silent for a few moments, but then, his head lowered, sobs broke from him and racked his body. Great, aching sobs, emotion held in too long.
And then, the last of the horror. The poppies moved again, this time quickly, easily. They bowed and bent as one, guided by the largest, their king, at their centre. The dance they danced was complex, but it seemed to pull them from the soil, to give them more life. They grew together, and their numbers somehow increased, until a mass of poppies moving as one began to take shape. A torso, from the soil, a blood red body and arms, supported by waving, pipe-cleaner stems. And at the centre, a single, large bloom as the blind, eyeless head.
The poppies came closer, still closer together, and their form was more discernible now; a woman’s torso, waist-deep in the dirt of the yard. It weaved as it grew, stretching its new limbs. And then, most terrible of all, it bent. It bent low to the ground, to the body of the dead cat, the poppy head enclosing that of the corpse. It enveloped, manipulated, pulled and tugged, until it was free of the body. And then the poppy-woman had eyes, the eyes of my mother.
The flowers stopped swaying, held stock still. The head looked this way and that, as the poppy moved it, and then straight at my father.
He, through his sobs, looked up. He did not scream, as I had thought he would, he did not fall upon the blooms in rage. My father did not see a travesty in front of him; instead, he saw my mother. He saw a woman he had once loved, a woman he had then destroyed. But most, he saw a woman who forgave him.
She opened her arms to him, my poppy mother, and he went into them gladly. He cried into her shoulder, like a child, and she hugged him to her, comforting as she always had. At last my parents were together, as one.
But the poppies were not to be denied their prey. They enveloped, enclosed him, grew around him. They receded, but did not let go, so that my father was pulled into the earth with them, until all that was left was the sound of his sobs from a blood-red byre.
And then the poppies died. Not a gradual death, as the ending of spring, but a sudden disintegration, a falling of limb from stem, brown leaves thrown on the ground. My father? He was nowhere to be seen. The poppies grown from his years of guilt and pain, each flower a woman he had hated and hurt, had at last reclaimed their own. The last I ever heard of him was the distant echo of a sob as a gust of wind threw the dead flowers into the air, the end of my father’s garden.
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