by R. L. Holmes
The day after the cannabis confiscation, Constable Lewis arrives with the senior officer to ask Gran some more questions. They didn’t arrest her for growing the stuff, but they are trying really hard to extract as much information as they possibly can, about who she was growing the dope for. As far as I can tell, she didn’t smoke it herself. She’d be more incline to drink a herbal tea or a strong black coffee, than relax into a joint. So the whole situation is rather confusing for me, my mum and everyone else who found out about it.
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Early December 1998: Stranger
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Oh boy! Things are heating up. This little yellow house is full of drama this year. Poor Mary, I bet you didn’t think your perfect world of blue cornflowers and purple pansies would come crashing down like this.
It was my duty as a decent citizen to inform the police of your dealings with illegal substances. Of course I have known about this for some time, from the mouth of the deceased. He told me everything. So, how well can you keep a secret Mary? Will you tell them?
Saracen, my dear child, my potential apprentice, I saw those kids. I saw how they were treating you. But I dealt to them. It was me who changed your teacher. That chubby Windermere is totally incompetent with those awful brats. How dare they? How dare they try to wear you down, and insult someone as talented as you? But no need to worry, Sara, I have it all sorted. Ms Seymour owed me a favour, and Windy, as they call her, was struck down mysteriously with something contagious.
Once again I pull the strings and the puppet moves. I drop the strings and the puppet falls flat, like Windy. Food poisoning it was. She will get better in time. It was a simple procedure, spike her sandwich. She noticed it tasted funny from the first bite. But the greedy creature that she is, just kept on eating.
Did you see me that day, Saracen? Did you see me? I was standing by the jungle gym, I’m sure you saw me. I was just checking that you were okay and I see you are doing well.
It’s tough at times, I know. I know your heart hurts when people do careless, selfish things. Your gran, Mary; what a disaster! You’ll be glad to see the back of them.
Did you like Ms Seymour? She’s a good friend of mine. We go way back, before you were born, Sara. There were times when she was my only friend, the only one that truly understood what it’s like to be one of us, Sara. And now I have you, almost.
‘Getaway Pope! I have no interest in your opinions. Stop pestering me!’
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Mid December 1998: Saracen
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To avoid any hassles from classmates and school staff, Mum decides to keep me at home for a few days, which I’m very pleased about. We’re almost at the end of the school year, so I’m not going to miss out on much. And I’m really keen to see the back of 1998 with all its bloody, murderousness and funny temperature.
We instead clean up the devastating mess those policemen made in the shed and the greenhouse. Everything is gone or destroyed. All the hanging, drying herbs are either confiscated or shoved outside on the damp grass. All the brown glass jars and bottles of liquid herbs have been opened and sampled or smashed. Everything is in ruins.
Seth disappeared too. I carefully peer under the shed, avoiding the Garden Witch to find him, but he’s gone.
After a while, cleaning and sweeping broken glass, mum and I wander inside to have a bite to eat. Gran is standing, staring at The Hypocrite painting, her mind a million miles away.
‘Did you tell them anything?’ mum asks.
‘There is nothing to tell them. I was growing it for my own use, that’s all.’
Mum places her hands on her bony hips and snarls. ‘Growing it for your own use?’ The tone in her voice higher pitched as she got to the last word.
‘Yes! My own use,’ Gran snaps back.
‘You did not! That’s not all for you. I doubt that any of it is for you.’ Mum pauses, her eyes staring deeply into Gran, as if she is trying to read her mind. ‘Who are you trying to protect? Why don’t you tell them the truth?’
‘That is the truth,’ Gran bellows, stamping her foot on the ground.
At this point, I feel it’s probably a good idea to leave. So I mosey out into the back garden to have another look for Seth.
‘Is everything alright over there?’ Potts calls out. A waft of cigarette smoke sails over the fence and into our sweet smelling garden.
‘Yep,’ I say, disbelieving my own words.
‘It looks like your Gran was running a fine business there.’
‘Yep,’ I say. ‘They broke everything, so we can’t use any of the herbs anymore.’
‘Oh, right.’ I can hear her chuckles under a smoky exhale. ‘Yeah, I wasn’t actually talking about ya Gran’s herbal shit. I was talking about the other stuff.’
‘Nah, that wasn’t a business, she used it herself.’ I feel slightly intimidated by her tone and use of swear words.
‘Yeah,’ says Potts, choking on her spit. ‘I doubt all of that weed was for her, especially going by the amount harvested by those visitors after your bedtime.’
The walls suddenly come crashing down in my mind. ‘What visitors? I never heard anyone.’
‘They never came to ya door, they always went up this drive and straight into ya shed.’
‘How do you know?’ I ask, beginning to feel like she was making it all up.
‘I come out here to have a fag don’t I. I see more than your Gran realises.’
‘What do they look like, then?’
She shrugs. ‘Mostly men, I think. I don’t look that closely, besides it’s dark.’
I stand there staring at the fence, for what feels like a hundred years, with my mind racing round and round. Is Potts telling me the truth? Have there been loads of males coming up the drive for their daily dose of dope? Why have I not even heard the slightest of sounds? Even when I have to get up and go to the toilet in the middle of the night, surely I would’ve seen the shed light on. My mother’s voice suddenly echoes in my mind, when she asked me if I had seen anyone go in there in the last three months. It should be Potts they ask, not me.
My thoughts are interrupted by a familiar grunting and muttering noise coming from behind the camellia hedge. With much relief it’s Seth, back from nowhere. I race up to him and ask where he’s been. He waves me away. He’s angry. So angry, I can feel the heat, the bubbling liverish rage within him. He cannot speak, merely throwing himself into his usual duties of digging, pruning, gathering pebbles and whispering to the plants. I feel he is blaming me for the mess. I try to tell him, it wasn’t my fault. But he isn’t interested.
My mother appears behind me. She can tell I’m unhappy. ‘What’s the matter, Sara?’ her tone, calm.
Choosing once again not to mention Seth, I turn my focus back to the recent conversation with Potts. ‘She just said that lots of men come over after my bedtime.’
‘Who said that?’ my mother asks, almost panting from the shock of yet more seemingly sordid information.
‘Potts, from next door. She said that they come into the shed. But I haven’t seen anyone.’
Mum swings around and catches sight of the polluting smoke drifting up into the air. In an instant she’s at the fence. I don’t even see her walk there, she just arrives.
‘Excuse me,’ she calls over in a hasty tone.
‘Yeah, what?’ Potts calls back as she jumps up onto the rail to look over.
‘I just want to clarify something. My daughter tells me that you have seen many male visitors come over at night.’
‘Yep!’
‘Have you told the police what you have seen?’
‘Nah!’
My mother flinches a little from the reply. ‘Why not?’
‘Cos I buy my stash from her too.’
Mum sighs heavily and with much frustration. ‘Do you know who these men are?’
‘Nah! I don’t look, I don’t want to know. It’s not my business.’
‘So you just lie to the police, then?’
‘Y
ep! Pigs are pigs!’ she says, coughing up some phlegm and spitting it onto the neatly mown grass. ‘They will just make their own stories up, anyway,’ she adds. She finishes her cigarette and disappears into the house.
Mum ponders for a moment. I can tell she’s in a quandary as to what to do. Be a good person and tell the police, or protect her mother who has spent many years raising her daughter, and has dug her out of many financial difficulties.
Gran wanders out onto the back porch, hugging her arm as if she had been beaten. Mum looks over at her with much compassion in her eyes. She has had a hard life. My granddad died when mum was only 12 and Gran has never re-married. I don’t know why that is. Perhaps nobody could possibly meet the qualities embedded in her memory of her beloved husband.
My mum is an only child. There was another, a boy called Robert, but he died as a baby. Gran raised my mum on her own, without any financial support. She worked as a nurse for a few years, before training as a herbalist. Granddad left her with a fair amount of money from the sales of his paintings. He got pretty well-known as an artist, but Robert’s terrible accident broke him. She wouldn’t tell me what this accident was all about. I wish she wouldn’t mention things if she can’t or won’t explain. It’s like a big, dark secret that everyone knows about, except me. But Gran said he would sit in that old creaky chair for hours on end. Or disappear into his artist studio, day dreaming about ‘the good ol’ days,’ when he was younger, when he had roaming adventures without responsibilities.
Gran had written all of his stories down in a diary, in case she had the urge to publish them one day. On special occasions and just when she felt like it, the diary emerges and Gran would read out one of these tales, always filled with a mystical air that made me question whether it was true or not. Studying art in Italy; drinking wine out of a fountain in France; riding wild horses bareback in Russia; catching a salmon the size of a bear in Vancouver; sketching the monster in Loch Ness.
My favourite story was when my granddad travelled to Calcutta. He and a small group ventured into the town’s square and came across a snake teaser, playing a flute. He carefully laid a piece of fabric on the ground, stood on one foot and played the eerie sounding flute. A few moments later something began to move under the fabric. It rose higher and higher, dancing to the notes coming from the instrument.
My granddad and his friends were naturally suspicious of this mysterious creature beneath the fabric. On a dare, prompted by his mates, Granddad reached out and grabbed the fabric, unveiling something they had not imagined. It was not a snake or a dancing monkey, but a piece of tatty rope. There were no strings attached, or hands grasped around it, just a piece of fraying, dirty rope. My granddad was so amazed he shook the Indian’s hand and asked him how he did it. The Indian shrugged and said, ‘Magic.’
Granddad tried to paint this memory and many others, but they often came out as abstract blurs with no real structure, just like The Hypocrite. This painting stirs and reawakens something in the depths of my gran, something I find difficult to understand. A suppressed fury of abandonment, mixed with memories of a life much sweeter than the one she has now. Why, I do not know, although I have asked many times. Her answers are never particularly satisfying to me. There is something that makes me wonder if she just wants to keep it a secret. Her private memories of the man she loved so greatly and so deeply. The man I never got to meet and my mother, his daughter only got to spend 12 years with.
After Granddad’s death, another mystery that nobody likes to discuss, Gran raised my mum on her own. She did a good job, although money was sometimes tight, but she was always good with it - making a bit on the side selling her home grown fruit and veggies and beauty products.
But after much dissatisfaction working in the orthodox medical industry, she trained up to be a Herbalist, learning the art of growing, harvesting and making herbal tinctures. It took many years to become an accomplished practitioner, many trials and some errors. But she is brilliant at it, until Raven-Face came along.
So then a few years after seeing her daughter off on her own journey into adult-hood, she returned to being a full-time mother, this time for me.
‘I have just been informed that you sold the dope at night,’ my mother says quietly to Gran.
‘Who told you that?’
‘It doesn’t matter who. I just want to know if it’s true.’
Gran gazes across the rambling garden, the flowers in bloom and smelling delicious. ‘I haven’t been out here to weed for a while,’ she says, after a long pause.
Mum drops her shoulders down in frustration. ‘Can you answer my question, mum?’
‘I didn’t sell the dope,’ she says suddenly, surprising us all. ‘I rented my space and herbal expertise out.’
‘Come on mum, be honest.’
‘I am being honest. I was approached by someone with this idea. He offered me a good price which I took, with conditions.’
‘What were the conditions?’ mum asks, doubtful of the story.
‘I grow and work on their crops, and they collect it only after 11pm. That was the condition.’
‘Who approached you?’
‘I can’t say.’
‘Why?’
Gran looks over at me. My eyes are probably the size of saucers, listening to this bizarre story about my gran, the dope grower. ‘Not in front of Sara.’
‘Sara, can you empty the rubbish bin in the kitchen?’ mum asks, annoying me senseless.
‘No!’ I snap.
‘Sara!’ My gran’s turn now, with her assertive tone. ‘Do what your mother asked, please.’
Out of the corner of my eye, Seth emerges digging around a patch of blue verbena by the back porch. I watch him as he moves closer to mum and Gran, without them realising. How can they not see or hear him? He’s so loud. But this gives me an idea. I pretend to be in a grumpy mood and storm off in a huff, but as I pass Seth I whisper to him to listen in on their conversation. He waves me away as he often does and continues to concentrate on digging and pulling and planting.
I watch Gran and mum speaking quietly for a few minutes. Mum’s arms crossed, her expression, one of worry, those deep lines on her forehead - those expressive sad eyes. Gran’s back is to me, so I can’t lip read the answer to a most fascinating question. But her shoulders are slouched, and she’s wearing grubby track pants that she wears only when she gardens. She usually dresses beautifully, even when she is not working or going out. But since the Raven-Face attack, she has succumbed to sloppiness, having no interest in her appearance; she even forgets to brush her fair hair.
It’s a short conversation, one that sends both parties off in opposite directions. Gran comes inside, while mum wanders round the garden, pretending to gaze at the beautiful flowers, but really her mind is elsewhere. I often wonder how much we miss, when our minds are not with us. I guess that was why so many people came to see Gran, for depression and anxiety, their minds are somewhere else in another land, far, far away and they pay Gran to help them find it again.
Gran comes in to find me. I’ve taken my place in Granddad’s chair, deliberately moving it back and forwards so it creaks - something that irritates her terribly.
‘Don’t take that personally will you, Sara,’ she says, as she reaches into the cupboard for a mug.
‘I am twelve now,’ I say. ‘I have grown quite a bit, you know.’
‘Yes I know, and you have probably experienced more than many twelve year olds,’ she says in warm tone that reminds me of what she used to be like before Raven-Face.
‘So who is it?’ I ask boldly.
With one good arm, she places the mug on the kitchen bench and lifts the jug. Realising it needs filling she places the jug down on the bench, removes the lid, places the jug in the sink, turns the tap on, turns the tap off, lifts the full jug back onto the bench, puts the lid back on and switches the on button.
Watching her frustrates me so. It takes her twice as long to do anything with that arm out o
f action. Curse that awful, horrid Raven-Face.
‘I can’t say,’ she finally answers.
‘Why?’
‘The same reason I gave your mother. I just can’t say! You are going to have to leave it at that.’
‘Why can’t you say, though?’
‘Because I have sworn on your Grandfather’s grave that I will not say who approached me. And I will carry that to my own grave.’
‘How come you told mum.’
‘I didn’t!’
‘I will find out,’ I say. ‘I will ask Seth.’
Mum walks in. ‘Seth!’ her voice scolding. ‘That’s a name we shouldn’t mention any more.’
‘Why?’
‘The police have him.’
Gran and I look up slowly with expressions of pure bewilderment, waiting for the next sentence. Noticing our strange looks, mum shrugs us off. ‘They contacted me today.’
‘They rang you?’ Gran asks, purely confused.
‘Yes, rang me. They handed it over to a different unit that deals with those types of cases. They were already suspicious about an old man, the one Sara described. They also asked me if Sara needs counselling.’
‘But Tanny, he doesn’t exist,’ Gran bellows, startling me. ‘You’ve had someone arrested, who doesn’t exist.’
‘There is an old man who lives by Sara’s school in the City, who has kids over at lunch time.’
‘Is his name Seth?’ I ask.
‘No, but it starts with s. So they assumed you were getting confused, or perhaps he was using a pseudonym.’
‘Tanny, Seth is an imaginary friend of Sara’s, nothing more, nothing less.’
She beckons me to come in on the conversation and agree with her, which of course I do. ‘Tanny,’ she continues. ‘Remember all those imaginary friends she had when she was younger. There was that one she used to chat to when she had all those kidney problems, remember me telling you that.’
‘Yeah!’ I add. ‘And when I got those horrible headaches and Charlie would rub menthol oils onto my temples.’
