Quicksand Tales

by Keggie Carew

  ‘I agree to this place.’

  I move seats (everyone’s seat is now empty) to get a better view. The Mother is purposefully not looking at The Father again. She glares at him, seething with hatred. Then she looks away. Then back, glaring with hatred. Real hatred. She tells the facilitator she is angry with him. Her look is frightening. The Father looks confused, and genuinely hurt (after all, he doesn’t know her).

  The facilitator leads her away. ‘Tell your husband, I got too big.’

  Long pause: ‘I got too big.’

  The facilitator asks The Father, ‘What does that feel like?’

  ‘It almost knocked me over,’ The Father says.

  Meanwhile, The Writer! is whizzing around the room, observing the scene from this angle, from that angle; he leaps on a chair, looks down on everybody, gets down, looks up. And then I see The Mother’s bottom lip trembling. Her face begins to crumple. Oh no! It is The Mother’s turn. The floodgates open. And the crying very quickly turns into a long, loud wail. She wails. And wails. And wails. Her wail becomes so loud and earth-shuddering it reminds me of the moment my mother died. My real mother. When something rose up inside me and I wailed from that deep unfathomable place something that encapsulated all the years of her life ending, her long road, her hard travail; and everything we had been through flooded back with the finality of never seeing her again.

  But no one has died here. We are in a room. Then I see a hand coming into the circle towards The Mother, and at the end of the hand is a white tissue. A tissue! A tissue, a tissue, someone is giving wailing Mother a fucking tissue. She needs a bucket.

  I cannot go on. The blue sky through the window is pulling me outside. Not even my curiosity can keep me here. Not even the spectacle of this story. We break for lunch. The tables fill quickly. I hover painfully on the edge. My friend is talking to Kenton. I tell the facilitator that I am not coming back. She smiles. She says she is sad I am not coming back, but her look tells me she knows my kind. I am the blocked person. As I nod my goodbye, my eye snags on the amber beads, looking to see if there are any trapped insects.

  I walk towards home across the Heath. The long way round, past real trees. Then I catch the tube at Kentish Town. My friend later tells me that Inuit slept the whole afternoon, curled up in a nest they made for her, in a protective bed of coats and hats, beneath the Christmas tree.

  THE CONSTANT MURDERER

  All gardeners know gardening books are full of lies, but I didn’t know the whole garden was full of deception. I’d thought of the garden as a place where one could lose oneself in contemplation, or in the physical labour of tilling the ground. To be close to nature. I felt that longing for the numinous breath, for the epiphanic moments at dusk, for the night sky. To inspect the minutiae, count the velutinous copper freckles in a foxglove’s throat, or lie beneath a great ash and let one’s eyes dilate, wander upwards, fuzz out into the spangled blue. Birds sang in gardens and built their nests, flowers bloomed and perfumed the air. Blossom after scented blossom. I longed for a garden of my own.

  I needed one. I’d become deranged. I’d go mad if I had to write one more letter to Tower Hamlets council complaining about the pimps on the corner of our London street, and the permanent bleep bleep bleep of the fork-lift reversing again and again all day outside my window for the last six months, and the extractor fan on the roof of the new catering company chugging out its warm cabbage breath at fifty decibels. Not to mention the crazed two a.m. drumming from the Celestial Church of God in the warehouse over the road, and the all-night thump thump, whirr whirr of the sweat-shop sewing machines laboured over by the poor slave-workers going full tilt next door. (Noise and guilt!) Or Bob Pyke celebrating another windfall after hiring his basement out again to another film company by having another party with the doors open into the light-well so that all the noise flooded up, adding to the sewing machines and the crazed drumming and the extractor fan. And every day said film company replaying the same moronic phrase of the new Atomic Sexpot Psycho music video they’re shooting in our road, which they’re blocking with their generators and wind machines and catering vans and skimpy models and cables everywhere as fat as your arm and hordes of people just standing around telling you you can’t walk down your own frigging street. The street that, I’m told, with the addition of a fake fire hydrant or two, is one of the few streets in London that can pass as New York. Not for me, sadly, the satisfaction of outsmarting them, like my clever neighbour Adam, opposite, who set up a row of teddies in his window to undermine the street’s credibility. That clever Adam, he blagged a whole case of Moët in exchange for taking the teddies down.

  Not me. I was just losing it. Fuming and festering and writing long potty letters of complaint to the Environmental Services. They knew me. But the day their telephone number came up as Friends and Family on our BT account I knew it was time to go. Time to stop fighting. The plane trees (annually threatened by the council because their roots might be interfering with underground cables, EVEN THOUGH THE ROOTS HAVE BEEN THERE FOR DECADES!) would have to take their chances without me. I was done in. Beaten. I needed a garden. I NEEDED a garden. And then we found one.

  One six-hundred-millionth of England. Half an acre. With a tiny cottage attached. So we moved. To the country.

  So, hooray! No more reversing-forklift bleeps. No more two a.m. voodoo knees-ups. No more film companies. No more thrumming sewing machines and middle-class guilt. The odd helicopter, the odd (and very annoying) microlight going round and round in the same blasted place right over my head. And one bird in the unbelievably early dawn chorus sounding remarkably similar to the single-noted reversing forklift truck. But finally, earth beneath the fingernails. Edward Thomas in 1915 said he had fought in the war ‘Literally, for this’. He rubbed it in his hands and let it sprinkle down. The soil. The medicine of it.

  I rubbed it in my hands, and then went and bought some books to read up about it. Gardening books. Gardening books! The sweet-scented promise of all that was to come. I could make plans. Plans of arbours and gazebos and shimmering mirrors of water with lilies and autumn leaves floating on them, and twining honeysuckle, and garden seats around trees, and orchards, and urns, and jasmine, and dark yew hedges with arched doorways, and unexpected vistas, and spindle spinnies, and sundials, and spires of hollyhocks and foxtail lilies, and herb knots, and weather-vanes, and nesting boxes, and scented night stocks, and more arbours, and rose bowers, and espaliered pear avenues, and camera obscuras, and moon gates, and quince loggias and sheds, and more sheds. And, oh yes, we wanted anemones in drifts.

  Except. Gardening books are full of Latin. It hadn’t occurred to me I would have to learn another language. A language of names. Unpronounceable, unrememberable, unlearnable names. Because when you look up sweet pea, it says ‘see Lathyrus odoratus’. So from S you must flick back to L, but by the time you are halfway down the L column you have forgotten what the name is – Lithriyinithiunus or Lyithrusys or Lthryayus – and have to go back to sweet pea again to find see Lathyrus odoratus, and back to L, again. So many good gardening hours wasted, prodding Latin words in the index – always in italics, which makes them harder to read, which is why you have to keep your finger on them. And I’d also like to know why the sodding index goes to all the trouble of telling you to ‘see’ something with about thirty unreadable letters in it, when it could just tell you what page it is in the first place, which would take up less ink. Lily of the valley, see Convallaria majalis. Red-hot poker, see Kniphofia. Eupatorium maculatum atropurpureum (try that!) is Purple Bush. Eupatorium purpureum – Joe Pye weed. From Latin to Cockney, it seems. Joe Pye. I prefer the vernacular. Names like bastard toadflax, lady’s bedstraw and codlins and cream. The hyphenated: touch-me-nots and forget-me-nots, Jack-go-to-bed-at-noons. And all the worts and spurges and greaters and lessers and creepings and hairys and sweets and stinkings and rues and bills and vetches. Oh, the names, they sent me into dreamy reveries.

  And if flowers were good
, I was soon to discover that the names of moths were even better. Straw belle, toadflax brocade, speckled footman, the buttoned snout (oh, oh!), the drab looper, the barberry carpet, mother shipton, the puss moth, the garden tiger, the pretty chalk carpet, the bulrush wainscot, the clouded buff, the true lover’s knot, the ghost. The male ghost moth is bright white and gathers in large groups at particular spots, in a meadow for instance, to attract a mate. They hover together and gyrate, swaying from side to side in a peculiar motion called pendeculating, their eerie shuddery whiteness shining in the moon. Pictures of moths mating look like Rorschach blots. Their union is end to end, joined at their last abdominal segment. And their wings touch, tip to tip. Two thick furry cones locked together like a docking exercise for military hardware. I like moths. And I like the word. Moth.

  ‘Did you know,’ I asked Jonathan, ‘that moths make up 97 per cent of the order Lepidoptera, with butterflies making up the remaining three?’

  It didn’t surprise him, he informed me (he likes to think he knows stuff about The Natural World).

  It seems that moths, as opposed to their glamorous cousins the butterflies, are not appreciated as much as they could be. But they have nicer antennae, for instance. Unlike the clubhead on the end of the antennae of the butterfly, some moths have feathery affairs. Like TV aerials. For smelling. And, unlike butterflies, they rest with their wings open. So you can get a good look at their camouflage. Their woody barkiness. Their lichen mimicry. Or their resemblance to bird droppings. Or a second set of eye spots. Or toffee marbling. Or a fake mud-crack fissure of zigzags. Or simple fuzz. But the thing about moths, for a creature so good at deception, is that they completely blow it when it comes to light; spiralling inwards, they come back and back, bashing into it, singeing their papery wings, embalming themselves in the wax pools of our candles. Hardy’s envoy from Wildeve, in The Return of the Native, was a premonitory moth which perished in the candle’s flame. Mysterious pagan night creatures. And a literary device.

  It is not only the names that are Latin. Colours and shapes, and geographical origin, are Latin too. I’d begun to learn a little by now: nitidus is glossy; alba is white; virgineus, unblemished white; papyraceus, paper white; cretaceous, chalk white; melleus, honey yellow. A greyish whiteness caused by hairs overlying a green surface is canus or incanus – that is what the book says: well, which one is it? A marigold cannot be a marigold, it is a Tagetes. There’s always the exception, of course. These index editors are perverse: ‘Sweet pepper, see Peppers, sweet’. Aargh! And no Sweet Williams at all, which is a pity, for my mother grew them and their scent takes me back to our small brick-walled garden in Fareham High Street. She trained fruit trees in fans against the wall – I remember that wall; warm, old brick, with its madder reds and clay oranges, soft and rounded; and my brother Patrick climbing it, for some reason always in a Viking helmet with plastic ox horns. It’s all coming back – I remember the asparagus bed, a giant bare grave out of which those scaly, green armadillo tails poked up each spring and then disappeared. We never knew where they went. I never tasted asparagus when I was a child, and now, after our first crop, sweet nectar of the gods, I know why.

  Crop. A rather violent sounding word. According to Jonathan we were now cropping. Beetroot for instance. Beetroot, how extraordinary, when you look at it, when you think about it. I mean the alchemy of it. A tiny dry seed transmogrifying into such a bright juicy bauble. I told Jonathan it was like the Big Bang in miniature. He was digging, he was un-riveted by my Big Bang theory. Blake, of course, had his grain of sand, but I am thinking (visionary as he was) that my beetroot is better than his grain of sand. A grain of sand is too barren – I know that was the point, but rather than stretching the imagination, I think the choice of sand limits it. However hard I try, I cannot really get going with the sand metaphor. No roots, no leaves, too unconsumable. To see a World in a Grain of Sand . . . I would go as far as to say you can’t. Unless of course we’d already got to Armageddon. To See a World in a Globe of Beet. There. And I think you could see heaven in it, too. But more importantly, and more to the point, like everything else, a beetroot dies. And so the dying began. Death entered our garden (as if it hadn’t been there before) with knobs on.

  The first gruesome casualties (well, obviously not the very first) were taken by the chicken-wire over our thatched roof – which is there to stop the birds getting in and making holes in the straw. I just happened to look up. Three – no, four! – fresh baby sparrow corpses trapped under the eaves. I couldn’t work it out until I saw there was a nest in the straw where the wire had reared up, enabling an entrance into the thatch. The fledglings on their first foray must have taken a wrong turn. A doomed peregrination under the wire. We untangled the dead birds and stitched up the entrance to the nest.

  Then, oh, oh, a couple of days later, in the same place, I heard an insistent peep peep and saw another fledgling trapped. And another further up. And just beside it, its dead brother, and then another closer to the nest. I ran around beneath the thatch panicking. We had unwittingly closed up the wire on a second brood. I sent Jonathan up the ladder again; he cut the wire, and herded the birds by prodding through the chicken-wire with a broom handle. They headed off further into the thatch. One going this way. The other going that. No! No! Desperation engulfed me. I screamed advice from below. We decimated the wire until eventually all three baby sparrows teetered on the edge. Then fledged.

  The demise of the baby sparrows that didn’t make it chilled me; it sped me back once more to Fareham, to a memory I’d buried long ago, when I was in the habit of stalking fledglings around the garden with a blue tin of Saxa salt. I had been duped by the old-fashioned illustration on the tin of the long-legged boy sprinkling salt on a bird’s tail. This was what one had to do to catch one, apparently. I spent hours chasing hapless thrush and blackbird babies around the garden until I cornered a fledging sparrow one day and it hopped under a gooseberry bush. I got down with my big kid’s head and peered under the bush and met a beady eye. Oh, the hunger to stroke it, to hold it in my hand, to prove to it I wouldn’t hurt it, to prove to it I would set it free (after I had mauled it good and proper, no doubt). It needed to know this. I tipped out the whole contents of the salt tin but no bird hopped out of the bush. As I poked away with a long stick, it edged further in. For hours I tormented it, or whatever hours are for a five-year-old child, and then got bored. A week later I happened to look again. The dried-out feathery husk of a baby bird was trapped exactly in the last place I’d seen my baby sparrow. My heart plummeted and my skin went cold. I had forced it in there. I’d killed it. I had blood on my hands. I tormented myself: why hadn’t I gone back to check? Even now I can see the vicious spiked branches criss-crossing over the poor bird’s body, its beak pointing upwards, its shiny eye closed.

  There were to be a lot of tragic bird deaths and inadvertent killing in our new garden. The blackbird in the rat-trap, for instance. The trap had been set inside the garden shed, but the door had been left open and the curious bird (a bird in spring is a busy bird) had discovered the cheese and pecked it. The next time, Jonathan hid the trap behind shovels. And caught the blackbird’s wife! I know it was his wife because their newly fledged child came looking for them, beep, beep, beep. All afternoon it hopped and squawked and squawked and hopped, BEEP, BEEP! Beep, beep, beep, which we grimly understood meant: Where the hell are you? The loss of one parent is unfortunate but two is fatal. So the baby blackbird – we named him Harry – was taken in. And our worm composter came into its own. Worm after worm after worm slipped down Harry’s bright yellow throat, writhing clusters of them, miniature Gorgon’s heads. I held them up, his reflex trapdoor opened, glug, glug. The almost cartoonlike dazed eye. I imagined the worms inside, still wriggling surely. Soon Harry was busting out of his box in the kitchen at night so we began roosting him in the hedge. Before six in the morning he’d be at our window for his breakfast, beep, beep, beep, our very own reversing forklift driver, beep beep! H
e woke us up and we couldn’t ignore him for he was hungry all day long, following me around, beep, beep. Or flying at me in the garden, then landing on my head or my shoulder; if I put my arm out he would land in the palm of my hand. Little children would come from far and wide to visit Harry. And of course I began to love him. Which meant I began to worry about him. I couldn’t go out for longer than an hour at a time. Rushing back for Harry. So I began to teach him to get his own worms.

  Together we foraged in the flowerbeds, but by now it was obvious, with his speckledy chestnut breast, he was going to be a she. And then she got a cough, actually more like a sneeze. I rang the RSPB and they told me that hand-reared birds were prone to this and suggested some cough mixture, and so I administered the drops. Beep, beep, sneeze, sneeze. Oh, my baby bird.

  And then my nephew and niece came to stay and we didn’t see Harry again. I like to think Harry chose bird-dom, but I don’t think she did.

  We stopped setting traps after that. And became infested with rats. They climbed the apple tree and swung off the peanut feeder. Congregated happily on the bird table. Big ones and their babies. Country rats, fat and field-wise. Then the rats began running across the cedar shingles of the kitchen roof. Larking about, even, on the lawn. I was frightened for the birds’ eggs. And the fledglings. And us. So the rat-catcher came. The sole arsenal of the rat-catcher these days – as the law dictates – is anticoagulants. So the rats must haemorrhage from the inside. Slowly and painfully, they staggered about. Bleeding rats everywhere. Swaying in a tormented stupor until they finally keeled over. Unless Jonathan could thwack them on the head with a shovel. Oh God. No more rat poison. Which was when Jonathan said, ‘We’ll get a gun.’

  Hang on a minute. We’ll get a gun? A year in the country and we’re getting a gun? The whole idea was to live with nature. Not obliterate it. I don’t kill things. Well, I try not to kill things. I only kill things by mistake. Even insects. Do not harm the fly, he washes his hands, he washes his feet. Learnt by heart, taken to heart. Little fly, Thy Summer play, My thoughtless hand, Has brush’d away. My mother’s house was a spiderarium. She put tiny bug and beetle books in our Christmas stockings. The only thing I will flatten without a qualm is a mosquito – because that’s a him-or-me scenario. I’d been brought up in an ‘if you kill it, you have to eat it’ kind of a way. Which meant that in my zealous twenties, in Ireland, when the dog killed a rabbit I followed John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency step by step. I paunched it (removed its guts), cut off its four paws, pulled its skin and fur away from its flesh (I can still hear the tear), cut off its tail, skinned it, cut off its head, stewed it up and ate it. The body, not the head, that is. Seymour says a real countryman will paunch a rabbit with its own sharp claw.