‘Adeptly crafted and beautifully observed’ Ian St James Awards
Extract from Seed
‘At the sight of Nana’s silent hall, and a patch of carpet at the foot of the stairs that looked freshly shampooed, Sarah’s mother sank down onto the stairs with her head in her hands. Sarah’s father took her into the kitchen, talking about kettles needing to be put on, then came back to fetch Sarah, who was still standing there, suitcases beside her like obedient dogs.
‘Where’s Nana?’ she asked.
Her father crouched down in front of her. He had changed out of his shorts and his knees were hidden. His eye looked as if someone had drawn a bright red curtain partway across it. ‘She’s not here, Sarah.’
‘Where is she, then?’
He put a hand on her shoulder. The bottom half of his face looked like a scrubbing brush with half its bristles missing. ‘She’s gone to sleep.’
‘But not in her own bed?’
‘Not as such. She’s, well, Christ, why can’t your mother be the one to speak to you about this? She’s in Heaven. In Heaven with the angels.’
‘You mean she’s dead.’
‘If you want to put it like that, yes.’
He led her into the back room. He sat in Nana’s chair, the green one by the fire, with the wings that Nana’s head always fell against when she watched Dixon of Dock Green. ‘You understand what death is, do you?’
Sarah, at the table, fiddled with the fringe on the chenille tablecloth. ‘Yes. Are you allowed to sit in that chair?’
‘Tell me what it is, then.’
‘It means that Nana has gone to the waters under the earth.’
Her father frowned. ‘I’m none too sure about that side of things. But what concerns us in the here and now is that wherever her soul has gone, her body is, well, still around.’
On the mantelpiece, the golden balls of the carriage clock revolved one way then the other, next to a present they’d bought Nana: an ebony mask, with a square headdress and slits for real eyes just under the carved blank ones.
‘They don’t bury a person straight away, you see,’ said her father, getting up again and going over to the window. ‘They put them in a coffin and keep them around for a day or two.’
‘It’s so that people can say their goodbyes,’ he told Nana’s shed. ‘So that they can pay their last respects.’
Sarah remembered the monkey’s death. She hadn’t realised how much the servants had loved it until she saw Richard cry over the pink, curled hands, still raised to fight the poison it had eaten.
The funeral was at night. She’d seen it: had crept down the compound and hidden behind the boy house to watch.
She saw Richard tie a cloth around the monkey’s chin, tie its toes together and plug its mouth and ears. He laid it in a Dunlop shoebox and put some twigs in on top of it. Something else went into the box, too. Sarah edged around the side of the boy house, trying to see.
That was when Michael, the cook, looked up.
‘I wasn’t spying on you!’ she said, as Richard stood up. ‘Honestly I wasn’t!’
But no one was cross. They showed her the body in the box.
‘We tie mouth so monkey na speak,’ said Richard. ‘We tie toe so him na walk.’
They had added the bent teaspoon that was the monkey’s favourite toy; that it had turned over and over in its hands as it sat on the handle of its tether and lookout post, the garden fork. Richard explained the twigs too.
‘Sesame tree him grow hundred hundred seed. Willi-willi come, him look for monkey spirit up, him look for monkey spirit down. But him na find. Sake of say, him find only seed. Seed make frovlem for barawo debil, make plenty work. Him sit all night for to count. Monkey spirit is save for Papa God.’
Sarah learnt that the Dunlop box would be buried down the far end of the compound but carried there in a roundabout way, twisting and turning so that the monkey spirit couldn’t find its way back to the boy house. It had to be done before sunrise. Otherwise the servants’ spirits might decide to follow the monkey’s spirit to the next realm.
The logic was strange but pleasing. Back in bed, she slept soundly.
Now, as she looked at her father, sitting in Nana’s chair and glancing anxiously towards the shut kitchen door, she wondered how Nana’s spirit was going to be protected and who was going to do it.’
The story, Seed, from which this extract is taken, is part of my collection-in-progress, The Habit of Loneliness.
The Therapist
‘The Therapist’ was inspired by my visits to an Alexander Technique teacher who practised from someone else’s house. She rented one room, and saw clients more or less back to back so you were meant to arrive dead on time: if you were early, you had to stand on the doorstep to wait. It was always slightly awkward encountering other clients.
Once, when she was running late, the couple who owned the house kindly let me sit in their front room for ten minutes. Naturally, it was full of their personal things. The situation seemed oddly poignant and made me wonder, more than I had before, what it was like for these people to have a steady stream of strangers going up and down their stairs every Wednesday.
I added a couple of what-ifs. What if the owner of the house was vulnerable – someone living on her own after a bereavement, say? What if the person renting the room was a male psychotherapist rather than a female Alexander teacher? What would seep down from the spare room and how would it affect her?
Find out by clicking the ‘play’ button below…
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Buy the book from the publishers, Tindal Street Press or from Amazon and read other stories by me, Polly Wright, Sidura Ludwig and Myra Connell.