Gilliflowers (3 page)

The atmosphere disappeared with Penny and then returned with her, persisting through dinner. She was unusually cool with Dick and Shane. I was blatantly cold— shouldered. She’s hardly warmly effusive at the best of times where I’m concerned, but there was no doubt I was getting some sort of treatment. I was treated to several icy looks. She also picked at her food with a look on her face suggestive of being force fed live slugs. It annoyed me, but I kept stum. I had a suspicion she would welcome an opportunity to spat with me. I usually come off worst in such encounters because she keeps her temper better than I do, and she swears less. Once dinner was done I washed up and then announced I was having an early night. I was tired. I had a lot to do the next day and I wanted to be fresh.

I slept heavily and awoke later than I intended next morning feeling anything but fresh. Sunday is generally a sleep in day and I don’t set the alarm. I’d been relying on my inner alarm clock to wake me up and it hadn’t. It was gone half past eight and I had a ton of stuff to do for the party alongside my usual chores.

My mood didn’t lighten any when I discovered Penny was up ahead of me. I couldn’t believe it. She usually doesn’t surface until ten or thereabouts. She was in the kitchen sitting at the table sipping tea. She glanced up as I walked in, a look of disdain on her face. I felt my hackles rise as she took first strike and dug her claws into me.

“Don’t you think you should get dressed instead of wandering around half naked when you have guests in the house. It’s uncouth.”

I was wearing pyjama shorts and a top so I was hardly indecent. It wasn’t like my pole pal was poking through my fly leering at her from its one eye. “I didn’t know you’d be up, Pen,” I abbreviated her name in the way she detested, “and anyway it’s my house I’m entitled to wander around wearing whatever I want.”

“It is not your house. You have no claim on it whatsoever, though I’m sure you’d like to. It belongs to my brother and his legally recognised partner.”

Her words hit me like a slap to the face. I felt a surge of anger. “I’m well aware of who the house belongs to, but it’s still my home.” I then rashly imparted a nugget of information that should have remained private. In the aftermath of the CP I’d been made a promise. I would in my turn have legal status. In the event of either Dick or Shane dying I would marry the surviving partner. Penny’s reaction was cold and calmly vicious. She didn’t even raise her voice.

“Let’s hope you die first then.” She stood up. “Besides,” she looked me up and down as if measuring a pile of shit, “it’s a ridiculous notion. They probably only said it to keep you quiet. Thanks to you my brother and Dick had to have a shabby secret hole in the wall ceremony with no family members present. They’ll come to their senses one of these days and see you for what you are, a leech. Your novelty value will wear off and you’ll end up grating on them as much as you grate on me and then they’ll kick you out of this house. I hope I’m around to see it.” She swept out of the room.

I sat down at the table, shaken by the encounter. I regretted telling her what I’d told her with all my heart. They were words shared between the three of us and they should have remained private among the three of us. Not only had I dispelled their magic by speaking them, I’d offered my belly and a sharp knife to an enemy. She had gutted me.

Going upstairs I flopped back into bed and indulged in a bout of what I’m often accused of, childishness. Giving way to tears I announced everyone hated me so I was staying in bed all day. Shane naturally demanded to know why I was ruining his Sunday lie in with a deluge of saline, snot and self-pity. I gave a brief account, basically along the lines of Penny being mean to me. I discovered why.

When she and Shane had gone to Leo’s house she had spotted the photo he had taken of them on the day of their Civil Partnership. He’d had one framed. It stood on the mantel in his lounge along with other favourite photos of friends, family and his cat and of course she had a nose at them. She asked about it, wanting to know where it had been taken, the large floral arrangement suggesting it was a wedding.

Leo, the blabbermouth, had told her. Discovering it was Dick and Shane’s CP

ceremony had shocked her. She was furious and demanded to know why she hadn’t been told about it or invited to attend.

Shane explained there had been no slight intended. They had not wanted a public declaration. It was legal paperwork and no big deal.

Leo, in what Shane described as a cack-handed attempt at pouring oil on troubled waters told her they’d also done it on the quick and quiet so as not to upset me. It was like pouring petrol on an open fire. She was even more furious.

Shane told me to keep calm and carry on. Penny would get over it. He would have a quiet word with her. He spoke truth about having a quiet word, too quiet. I couldn’t hear a syllable through the closed lounge door, not even with my ear pressed up against it. I was considering getting a drinking glass to try and magnify sound when Dick appeared and used my free ear as a handy lever to detach me from the door and lead me away from it, admonishing me for being a snoopy houseboy.

After a hearty breakfast Penny commandeered the Muppet and dragged him out shopping with her when it was clear he’d rather stay in cosily tucked up by the fire. I got on with washing up, but without enthusiasm. I felt depressed and thoroughly out of kilter. Bits and pieces of the conversations I’d had with my mother and Penny flitted through my mind.

I lifted a plate from the water to put on the drainer. I’d overdone the Fairy Liquid and it was covered in soapsuds. Thin winter sunshine poked through the kitchen window making the soapy bubbles coruscate. I blinked and then froze as a silken thread trailed my cheek. Oh thank you Father Christmas! Most people got visits from the Christmas elf at this time of year while I was lumbered with a drop in by an invisible spider.

Paralysis passed and the hand holding the plate began to tremble causing the soapsuds to slide from it faster. If I lost my job as housekeeper I could hire myself out as a novel and environmentally friendly dish dryer. The tremors receded leaving waves of unfounded fear in their wake. Comfort lay close at hand. I needed only to call and Dick and Shane would come to me, but with comfort would come questions about the origins of the episode. I wasn’t in the mood for them and nor did I want to be packed off to bed to sleep the day away leaving Penny to take over my duties. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

Opening the back door I walked outside willing the cold air to chase away all vestiges of the episode and keep me alert. On some odd impulse I kept on walking, down the side path to the front of the house, across the drive and out through the gates onto the avenue. I felt locked inside my head, trapped with a whirl of jumbled thoughts and sharp emotions. The world around me moved into soft focus. From a distance I could hear footsteps, but they didn’t feel as if they belonged to me.

A flash of yellow penetrated my foggy brain, bringing me to a stop. I found myself standing outside a greengrocer, one of a small row of individual shops some distance from where I live. I sometimes go there to buy fresh eggs and vegetables instead of patronising the bigger supermarkets. The yellow was daffodils, bunches of them in a black plastic bucket standing on the chill pavement. Stooping I picked a posy from the bucket. The flowers were tiny, the stems short, thin and delicate, a hint of spring forced for the Christmas market. I had an idea they’d make a pretty decoration for the party buffet table. The jaunty yellow would be a contrast to festive greens and reds. I had enough change in my pocket to buy some.

I took them inside to pay for them, standing in the short queue. There was a radio playing behind the counter. Don McLean’s beautiful but melancholy Vincent haunted the shop interior. In my heightened state of emotion the song was as painful as salt in a wound. It made me want to cry. I felt I knew the subject personally, tapping into the sorrow and loneliness that had marred his life. There’s a theory that Vincent Van Gogh suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy and some of his strange behaviours and visions were in fact seizures, but no one really knows.

Clutching the frail flowers I resumed walking. IEM was in full ascendancy so it perhaps wasn’t surprising I ended up in a churchyard, the one where Eileen’s parents, husband and child lay buried. When Eileen’s time came she too would be interred there.

It was eerily quiet within the cemetery walls. Even the birds were hushed. I walked towards the oldest and most deserted part of the churchyard where the ancient graves were lichen stained, lopsided and barren of tributes. Those who had once mourned these dead had now joined their ranks. There was no one left to lay flowers.

We all pass out of time and memory in the end.

I crunched over the frosted grassy ground, twigs cracking and creaking underfoot like antique voices. A movement caught the corner of my eye. I turned, goosebumps pinging my skin as something snaked down from a tree like a wisp of smoke. I took a shaky breath. It was a cat, a long skinny grey creature. It stared at me for a moment standing perfectly still and then it streaked away, weaving among the graves with easy grace. Perhaps it thought I was a ghost.

The surroundings were conducive to morbid thoughts. My dad didn’t get to make old bones, not living ones anyway. My mother won’t either, a bit older than dad’s, but hardly ancient. Penny’s spiteful words came back to mind.
Let’s hope you die first.

What a horrible thing to say, but what if it happened? I didn’t want to die young. I didn’t want to die old, but better later than sooner.

There was a cracked headstone in front of me, green furred with moss. The name, date and the inscription had been eaten away by time and the elements. It was physical evidence of a life long gone. The cemetery dated back to the seventeen hundreds. Whoever lay in the grave had done so for decade upon decade, the world changing around them. All that they had been had passed to dust, their laughter, their thoughts, their pain, their hopes, all gone and forgotten. It made me sad.

Removing the elastic band binding the fragile blooms together I knelt down and placed one on the grave. Closing my eyes I offered a prayer for the life that had once been. I hoped it had had its share of happy moments, love and pleasures and that death had not been painful and filled with fear. I hoped they were at peace and they didn’t mind a stranger laying a flower in their memory. I laid another one beside it, for my father, begging the pardon of the unknown grave dweller for hijacking their resting place to pay homage to my dad. I wished him peace and spoke of my regret and sadness for never having known him and for a life cut short.

Strange as it sounds I then walked around placing daffodils here and there on neglected graves that seemed to draw me. I wanted to offer the interred, these shadow people, a renewed link to the world they had once lived in via a thought and a flower.

It seemed important to remember them. Perhaps I’d be the last person to ever do so.

I discovered one grave half hidden in the shade of a Yew tree. It was the grave of a soldier from the First World War. He was an early casualty of the Somme, dying in 1916 at the age of twenty-one, the same age as my father and not so far removed from my own age. His life, his ambitions, his dreams had perished in the noise and mire of a brutal battle. What must it have felt like to be in amongst so much carnage and to know death was stalking you? His last moments must surely have been saturated with fear.

The stone detailed his regiment and rank and paid standard homage to his bravery, but what made my tears spill over and fall were the simple words at the bottom of the stone cross. ‘Our son. Home again.’ It was as if his parents were reclaiming him from that which had taken him. I couldn’t help but wonder if it might have been better to leave him with his fallen comrades and for his body to be interred alongside theirs in a dignified military cemetery, rather than for it to moulder in solitude in this forgotten corner.

Where were his parents? I checked around, but found no stone bearing the same surname as the soldiers. They might have lived for years after his death and be buried in a newer part of the churchyard. I hoped parents and son were finally reunited in whatever after world they believed in. I laid the remainder of the miniature daffodils on his grave, stood a few moments in respectful silence and then headed for home.

Leaving the timeless oasis of the churchyard I became suddenly aware of how cold I was. I’d left home without a coat. I was wearing jeans and a long sleeved top, not the warmest of attire. By the time I got home I was frozen to the marrow. I was also physically and mentally exhausted, but determined not to give into it.

I re-entered the house the way I’d left it, via the kitchen door. Penny was back; either that or the apparition poking through the fridge was a hypothermic hallucination. Unfortunately not. I forced speech through my chattering teeth. “What are you doing?”

“Making room for the whole salmon I bought.”

“I don’t want a smelly fish in my fridge. It’ll taint everything.”

“There’s no odour. It’s in a sealed bag. I need to keep it cool until I can cook it later.”

“Cook it for what?”

“For the party. I’m going to bake it whole and serve it on a bed of watercress as a centrepiece for the buffet table.”

“I’ve already got a centrepiece. I’ve made a glazed ham. We don’t need salmon.

I’ve got plenty of food.”

“I’m sure you have,” she curled her lip ever so slightly, “but sausage rolls and ham sandwiches aren’t to everyone’s taste. The salmon will bring a touch of class to your more pedestrian offerings.”

Pedestrian offerings? I shook my inner pom-poms like a fury. The cheeky bitch! I glared at her. “I might not own this house, but I’m in charge of this kitchen and I’ll be using it all day so you won’t be able to cook your stinking fish and it isn’t staying in the fridge. You’ll have to put it in the chest freezer in the garage. You can take it home with you.”