I read precious little fiction at the moment, let alone get the chance to write any. Here is a piece from a few years ago, that was sparked by a childhood memory, and is partly autobiographical.
Summer in the garden was always a
gaudy, ostentatious, affair. The heady musk of the roses that billowed in great trusses outside the kitchen window. Fat globules of their scent wallowed in
the thick air like barrage balloons, and burst hotly in my face. Huge
iridescent dragonflies manoeuvred like Bell 47s distorted by the haze. The Laburnum blazed
with jeweled strings of pouting, yellow, pea flowers that later on tempted me
with slender furry pods.
Rhododendrons thrived here too, with their neat, tight
posies of violet and scarlet blooms to be picked by the sticky stem and
methodically dissected for the single bead of clear, sweet nectar within. A
pile of bruised petals would accumulate like bones at my feet, tell-tale pollen
on the tip of my nose. This manna a fitting dessert to a bounty of browsed
young French, dwarf and runner beans hanging from the willow trellis at the end
of the garden.
When I close my eyes I picture my father standing
proudly amid a forest of dahlias and chrysanthemums of deepest indigo, raging
orange and shocking pink, their multi-faceted blooms pom-pomming about his
head. Father's looks were unconventional – olive-skinned with dark hair, smooth
like a pelt, framed his furrowed, rectangular forehead and below, thick black
eyebrows beetled over intense brown eyes. His ears were large and over-lobed
and his long nose sloped off to the left. Deep parenthesis around his mouth
seemed to convey all his words as asides. He wore his collar too tight and the
skin on his neck was gathered and buttoned securely in place and when I
snuggled against him he smelled of Wright's coal tar soap and dusty potting
compost. My father was a man with a wicked sense of humour and endless time for
children.
My father tinkered with old cars and
listened to Wagner at volume. At the side of our house stood his workshop, an
ancient building of dark, wet oak packed with innumerable and dangerous
delights; a roaring compressor; fat chains and pulleys; a bottomless inspection
pit; rusty boxes of graded nails, screws, bolts, nuts, clips and bits; and best
of all, a lathe from under which I would collect hot, bright, precious, metal
spirals from a quivering, intestinal pile of shavings. I loved most of all a
sudden summer downpour, I'd perch, picking splinters from my fingers and
swinging my legs, breathing the rank, dirty oil and hot fuel and listening to
the static hiss of the rain. Afterwards I'd prowl outside and investigate the
dark humps of moss sluiced from the roof, lying sodden, belly-up on the path,
and poke them with a welly toe until they oozed and screamed.
Where father operated in a world
where precision and order prevailed, Mother, by contrast, inhabited a parallel
universe of chaos and disorder. A seamstress by profession and a knitter by
habit our home was a crazed montage of fabrics, upholstery, and yarns. My
mother had a patient, oval face with a blunt chin and delicate lips pursed
around a collection of jewel-headed pins. Between her front teeth was the
smallest gap. Her nose was straight, long and perfectly sculpted, as if from
marble. She hummed constantly and listened to manouche jazz, kneeling, tacking
crinkly paper patterns onto gaudy fabrics. From this woman an industrial
quantity of gloves, scarves, and hats flowed undiminished. At Christmas she
went into overdrive filling endless shoeboxes with legions of knitted dolls for
African orphans. Not once did my father or I receive so much as a festive sock
– mother's knits were exclusively for others.
Abruptly, Summer would finish and
the trees would dump their leaves on the lawn - my father began raking in
September with good humour and finished around January without. In the house
Mother would fill crackle-glazed ceramic vases with spidery Witch Hazel and
whispering stalks of Honesty with translucent paper seed heads. Heavy, sluggish
solitary wasps bumped stupidly against the windows.
Different bounties appeared from the
garden. We would still be eating
raspberries, when the waxy pumpkins, tightly clenched artichokes, sweet figs,
bitter kale and earthy parsnips began to arrive. Outside in the low, ochre
sunlight bombastic Michaelmas daisies were attended by frenzied bees, and
shaggy Ink Caps sprouted up through the lawn like eggs. The Japanese Maple in
the middle of the lawn glowed blood-red and the air tasted of ice and wood
smoke.
