by R. L. Holmes
One time when I was in the post office, Potts was in there sending a parcel to Philadelphia. The forever curious ol’ Moley was trying very hard to secrete information of what was in the parcel and who Mr L.M. Sebastian, the name written in vivid on it, was. She said nothing, but glared at him like she was ready to knock his block off. This unnerved Moley and sweat began seeping out of his forehead and trickling down his nose to land on his rotund belly.
After Potts left, he let out a sigh of relief and fussed around his counter panting, as if he had just come back from running a marathon. Then to his disappointment he saw it was me next in line, to which he dropped his shoulders and leaned in to Ms Anderson and said, ‘Oh dear, I don’t think I could handle another one.’
Handle another one? What was that supposed to mean? I am nothing like Potts. I always speak kindly to Moley and everyone else around here. I don’t dress like a man and glare at people like I’m waiting for them to judge me.
But then he whispered a word to Ms Anderson that I wish to never be described as again, ‘weird.’ Moley thinks I am weird. Moley the flamboyant, brace-wearing, rose growing, post office worker thinks I am weird. But this word ‘weird’ was not used in a colourful theatrical way, but in a Potts type of way. I was weird like Potts.
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I noticed when I was much younger, children my own age had nothing in common with me, and I had no interest in whatever they spoke about on the playground. I sometimes tried to pretend to be interested in their games with pink Barbie dolls and Strawberry Shortcakes, but I tired of them quickly, and I only did it to try to fit in.
I dress differently. I wear colourful patterned clothes that Gran handmade. I read different books, and listen to music Gran likes to play. Most of the time I didn’t mind the differences until my twelfth birthday arrived.
This dreaded day was only four days ago and it’s a day I would like to forget forever. Gran said that it was a special birthday for me astrologically, and we should celebrate with a celestial party. So I invited my whole class and told them the theme is to come as your star sign.
On the day of my party, a sunny Saturday, I helped Gran cook chocolate fudge, an old recipe that’s been passed down, that has a tablespoon of vinegar in it. We baked plain biscuits and smothered them with dark blue icing to represent the night sky, and sprinkled tiny, silver edible balls to represent the stars. Gran baked a chocolate cake and shaped it cleverly into the planet Saturn with a ring around it. Then she iced it a brown-grey colour that I didn’t think looked very nice, but Gran said that is the actual colour of it, and I should be grateful to get a cake at all.
We covered the ceiling with glowing stars that you only see when it’s dark and the lights are off, so you couldn’t see them on my birthday. We slung silver tinsel across the walls and pinned pictures up of planets and the solar system. I was so excited on this day I could hardly breathe. Due to my sensitive stomach, I had a couple of bouts of diarrhoea, but Gran said it was just because I was nervous and I needed to learn to calm myself down.
Now my birthday was on the wake of Daniel’s death, so perhaps it wasn’t appropriate. Perhaps I could’ve waited another week or two and then maybe it would’ve worked out better. But gran insisted saying that we kids needed some cheering up and we shouldn’t be bogged down with adult situations such as Daniel’s death. She also said that my solar return lands on this particular day making it an important event to be celebrated the moment it actually occurs.
According to her astrological charts many things will be revealed and clarified to me over the next 12 months, starting on my birthday. She said friendships will be gained and lost but a male friend will be invaluable, health will be up and down and the returning of someone special will change the course of my life. Well, she was certainly right about the first prediction.
At 2pm the party officially began. Alanis Morissette was playing on the radio and I waited by the front door for my classmates to arrive with presents in hand.
By 2.15pm, Brambles wanted to go outside.
2.30pm, I checked the mail box to find a parcel from Mum and Dad. It was wrapped in gold paper and glistened in the afternoon sun. When I ripped open the paper, lying beneath was some acrylic paints and paint brushes. If my memory serves me right it is the same present she got me last year.
2.45pm, nobody showed up.
It may have been because of the murder, but I doubt it. Not one classmate contacted me or Gran to say couldn’t make it. Every one of them was enthusiastic when I gave out the invitations, but now I realise they were lying. Yet I chose to overlook the sniggers and whispers behind me. I let myself walk straight into a trap. I had been tricked, they had won. It was all a little game to make me hate myself even more.
I was devastated. Moley is right. I am weird. I have not learnt yet how to make my weirdness into something cool or hip like Johnny Depp or Marilyn Munroe.
At this point I was just strange and kids my age didn’t like being around me because of it. So on my twelfth birthday I succumbed to being a misfit, a vagabond and a weirdo, and decided I would create my own friends from my imagination. Friends that do and say whatever I like, read what I like to read, sing the songs that I wrote, and it was on my twelfth birthday that I met Seth.
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Seth is a hairy old gnome-like man that suddenly appeared in our back garden on the day of my failed birthday party. He dwells in a pit under the shed and comes out during the day to fuss over the plants, insects and birds. He introduced himself to me by throwing a slug in my hair, when in a silent, blubbering rage; I kicked the old apricot tree. He was slightly taken aback when he realised that I could see him as the culprit, and I was shocked to see a grumpy little old man throwing slugs at me at my already awful party.
When we collided, I flung myself inside screaming and bawling to my gran and he shoved dead leaves into his ears to block out my high-pitched screeches, and then slid under the shed into his pit.
To calm me down, Gran made a pot of chamomile and peppermint tea while peering out the window to see what I was hysterical over. Potts yelled over the fence, telling me to shut up as I’m disturbing her peaceful fag time, while Mrs Rennie shushed Potts for being so obstinately rude. The German shepherd two doors down began barking, provoking the old black Labrador across the road which then sent the miniature poodle cross into a yapping frenzy. All the while, thoughts were circling in my mind about the failed party, the embarrassment of having to see them all on Monday, wondering who this funny little man was, and how come I hadn’t seen him before.
By about 4pm every dog and human had calmed down and I made my way out onto the porch to see if the funny little man would make another appearance.
I put my gumboots on and carefully trod through the luscious garden, listening out for twigs snapping and branches rustling. I was out there for a good hour, crawling under shrubs, looking up trees and under the wheelbarrow. But to my disappointment he had vanished into thin air, like a ghost or a lost memory.
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Some have described Gran’s garden as the most beautiful in the entire area. Mrs Rennie our neighbour is always impressed and so was Daniel Parker. I love this place. I can get lost in here for hours creating a world filled with African animals and the royalty that ride them.
Along the back of the garden is a line of pittosporum that Gran planted to make the property feel more private and secure. She said they are fast growers and the birds love them. Every winter she hires tree cutters to chop a good metre off the top, but they quickly sprout back again in spring and summer. And when they do grow, the birds make nests in the forks of the branches created by the pruning. These trees attract every common, and sometimes not so common bird there is.
To the left of the yard, lining the fence are purple hydrangeas mixed with magenta rose bushes. These are fairly old as some of them are rotting away. Mary, my gran, doesn’t like to pull plants unless they are completely dead. I remember she was upset when the old apricot tree got s
eriously damaged in the spring winds and half of it broke away. But Gran didn’t give up; she spoke to it, fed it and pruned the dead stuff. Like anything that’s loved, it produced blossoms and new foliage and then in summer, as it always does, it formed the juiciest, sweetest apricots in all the land. But only from the branches on the left side, as the right side of it is dead, rotting from the spring winds.
The old apricot tree sits at the back of our orchard amongst Black Doris plums, apples, nectarines, peaches, feijoas, tamarillo’s, citrus and several berry vines. In September the orchard suddenly comes alive - a magnificent display of white or pink sweet scented blossoms. And when they are done the petals gently drop like snow completely covering the ground. By summer the trees are laden with the most delicious juicy fruits and when I bite into them the juice would dribble down my face and stain my clothes forever.
On the right side of the yard, the side that Potts lives, is the driveway and at the end of the driveway is Gran’s shed. This space is never wasted on housing a car. Instead the shed is home to an array of hanged drying herbs and lines of brown glass bottles and jars, some empty and some filled with liquid. This is Gran’s manufacturing lab.
The shed is long and Gran only uses the front half as the back half is forbidden, my granddad stored his canvases and paints in there. It always has been the garden’s mystery and of course I have tried on many occasions to creep inside. But it’s impossible to enter as the only door is sealed shut with a huge wooden bookcase holding Gran’s macerating tinctures, sitting frustratingly in front.
There is a window. But it is small and for as long as I can remember a curtain has always been drawn across it, giving you absolutely no clues to what lies beyond. On the outside below the dust-filled window, the Garden Witch lies beneath, making it a rather dangerous task to get near.
But the front part of the shed is where all the action is. This is where Gran dries, bruises, chops, labels to make liquid medicine or herbal and fruit wines. Most, but not all of her herbs are from our garden. Some though like nettles, red clover flowers, fennel and cleavers she harvested wildly and other more difficult to grow herbs, she buys in.
The best place to harvest the wild herbs is by the river on Richardson’s farm. There, copious amounts of cleavers and nettles spread under the line of willows by the river, submerged in rye grasses and white clover. Further out from the river in an abundance of flowing colour is luscious green ribwort and plantain, dancing red clover flowers, white and soft pink umbrella-shaped yarrow flowers and sunny yellow fennel tops.
In spring and on the new moon my gran takes her old white Valiant down on to the farm with the back seat covered in paper bags and cane baskets. She’s a talent at spotting the most powerful of healers amongst the rye grasses and animal dung. Most people would walk on by not noticing, or tread heavily without caring. But these plants just pop back up as if waiting for someone to come along who sees them for what they really are, special.
Once these plants are carefully harvested with much respect and pleasure, they’re taken to my gran’s shed, a den of magic in the making. The entire process governed by the moon. When the sun sets, Gran wanders out and opens the curtain that blocks the sun’s harsh rays, to allow the moon’s subtle beam to engulf the space. The aerial parts of a herb are harvested on the new moon and the root or lower part of the herb on the full moon.
When making a tincture, it takes about 6 weeks for a medicine to macerate to its fullest potential. So if a tincture was made on the new moon it would be ready to separate herb from solution on the following full moon. Each herb has its own ratio of dried herb to purified water to ethanol. Gran has the list of ratios taped to the shed window, but it has gone yellow from the sun and is difficult to read. But that didn’t seem to matter, as she has all of those formulas locked into her memory from many years of practise.
Jutting out from Granddad’s old painting room is Gran’s green house. This is where she cultivates vegetables and herbs from cuttings and seeds. She never wastes anything. If she were to harvest fennel, the aniseed tasting root would be part of our tea, the seeds made into medicine for flatulence or promoting lactation, and the aerial part thrown onto the compost.
On the left side of the shed is a beastly old rose bush that I named the Garden Witch. This rose in spring, produces very large strongly fragranced blooms in a deep red that reminds me of lipstick, a murderess would wear in an old detective movie. This beastly rose terrifies me. I have been maimed, bruised and bloodied by her awful vines. She has destroyed many of my clothes, torn my skin and pulled my hair - her evil claws catching me unsuspectingly with a crocodile grip. But there is no use fighting her. I would only hurt myself even more and instead I call out to Gran to bring out her scissors, and that beastly plant is the winner again.
I suspected this funny little man, this garden sprite was hiding under the shed, the Garden Witch keeping him safe, like a lion at the gate. From a safe distance I crouched and slithered and crawled but it was no use. Her vines so thick and abundant I could not see past her limbs into his little hole. So I waited eagerly for him to return.
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That time soon came two days ago, on the Monday, when I returned home from school. Gran wasn’t home and I had forgotten my keys. The usual thing to do when I forget my keys, which I do on many occasions, is to wait around the back until she got back.
School had been another tedious outing filled with much sitting and listening inside the classroom, and being bullied and teased outside. Word got around the playground that my party was a dismal failure, which resulted in me being the ‘chosen one’ to ridicule and torment until I came crashing down crying. Then they laughed some more.
I left school early. I couldn’t bear to stay one more minute. I walked all the way home, snivelling and wiping my seepage onto my new blue cardigan that Gran knitted last winter. My heart warmed and my eyes dried when I could see the sunny yellow walls of my home in the distance, knowing that everything from this point onwards would be okay.
It seemed like forever before I got home and was welcomed by a light cool rain. I found shelter under the back porch on the squeaky chair-swing, and rocked myself into a calm state. That was interrupted shortly when I heard angry grunts, and dirt being fired out from the hebe situated behind the flowering cherry. I knew at that moment it was him. He had returned, or at least he decided to show himself to me.
Quietly I slid my sneakers off and put my gumboots on. I did not care that I was going to get wet from the rain; I just wanted to see and hopefully talk to this funny little man. Completely avoiding the dreaded Garden Witch, I crept around the long way, taking the small gravel path that weaves through the culinary herbs of rosemary, thyme, mints and marjoram. As I brushed past, their sweet lemony fragrances sailed through the air, clearing my senses.
When I got to the camellia hedge I crouched down to get a good look at him. The camellia hedge was planted by Gran several years ago to create a separation between the flowering part of the garden and the edible part. It comes out only halfway across the yard, but it still creates a beckoning interest, a curiosity to see what’s on the other side.
But instead of carrot tops and tomatoes, I caught sight of stumpy little legs dressed in olive-coloured overalls. Realising that I was just a few feet away watching him, the funny little man raced over to his side of the camellia hedge and threw mud at me.
Immediately I stood up and ran around to his side, to find him holding up a little spade threatening to hurl it at me. After several minutes of trying to reassure him that I was harmless, he finally stopped firing dirt and insults and let me follow him.
He is an interesting creature. He has the appearance of a very short, very elderly man of about the age of eighty. Yet he’s strong, robust and quick, like that of a man a quarter his age. He can dig holes, cut back branches and sweep the path all before breakfast and without even a pearl of sweat on his forehead.
I call him Seth. Not because it’s his name,
because it isn’t. But because, I am very much aware, this is a very unusual situation. I am pretty sure that I’m the only one that can see him. And I’m not sure if he’s a figment of my imagination, or real and good at hiding from people.
Seth is a name on one of Gran’s books. Gran said it’s about an experience a woman had when an entity came through her called Seth that told her the wisest of things.
Over the past two days, Seth has spoken to me quite a bit. Well, it’s more like incessant mutterings. Sometimes I understand him, sometimes I don’t. He likes to talk about the wildlife in our backyard, like the relationships the insects have with the birds, with plants and the seasons. He mumbles and grumbles about the weather, and the part humans play in determining whether it will rain or not.
Strange.
He seems to love plants and potters for hours on end, tending to each plant in a ritualistic way. Each plant, no matter how small, is just as essential as every other living thing in that garden. As far as Seth is concerned every plant grows where it needs to be grown. That is their purpose. If a viola did not grow in the cracks of your driveway, then you and your driveway didn’t need viola at that time.
Viola, according to Seth is for a broken heart. Hence why it appears mysteriously, to fill in the space or cracks that otherwise could be a gaping wound.
I noticed a couple days after the murder, many little purple faces popping out of the footpath outside the local dairy. This I assume is Rachel’s broken heart. Of course one would have to question; is her heart broken because he died, or is it broken because he died next to another woman.
Seth has also told me a couple things about the locals of Fenton. He mentioned Mrs Rennie’s melanoma, although he called it black spot, but I knew what he meant. He said that she carries a lot of anger over her children, and another little dark spot will appear in the next two years. I didn’t know Mrs Rennie had children, so I asked Gran. She said that she gave birth to twins and they both died. I also asked Gran what was the relationship between Mrs Rennie and Potts and she said she wasn’t sure, but Potts seemed to have some sort of hold over Mrs Rennie.
