ISSN 1758-6488
|
A Passion for Gardening Fiction |
print view |
What puzzles her – and what puzzles me – is why she is still attached to a man with whom she was never happy. He hated her laugh and said so. He didn’t like the way she smiled. ‘Why do you smile like that? As if you’re scared.’ She held her knife incorrectly at table. They couldn’t even talk: ‘You interrupt me like your mother.’ Everything about her irritated him. Especially in bed. His large penis hurt her. It was a source of resentment (in him) and soreness (in her) that she never came. ‘You’re supposed to like a big cock.’ From the beginning, he found it difficult to come. ‘Look, it’s like dancing. Why can’t you dance?’ He was righteous and indefatigable. She suffered constantly from the itching, thrush, and other yeast infections.
No wonder Frank had fallen for someone else.
(Who was equally unhappy.)
And here she was, thinking about him, thinking about his eyes, thinking about the way he thought, the tell-tale compression of his lips, thinking thirty, forty years later, about their lost life together. It would have been misery, but it made no difference. She had given herself, her narrow hips that wouldn’t open wide enough at first, her mouth, her hands, the gold-beige, semiprecious hair on her vagina, the vagina itself.
And in return had been given this pendulous body in the big bathroom mirror, Gorgonzola Dolce, grotesque with gravity, concealed by condensation. In the fog, her upper torso swayed like a bloodhound, nose sampling a spoor.
Colin at the garden centre was recovering from cancer of the throat and vocal cords. A silk scarf hid the radical surgical intervention. It wasn’t a scar exactly. His neck had gathered round a raw hole, withered like a sick plant. And his voice had changed. It crackled and buzzed like a walkie-talkie.
They were discussing the ginkgo.
‘Yea, a.k.a. the Maidenhair tree. Easy to see why. Pretty. Fan-shaped. I don’t advise one, Miss Frazer. Since we’re old friends. Can grow to be bloody enormous, excuse my Spanish. And the female tree produces a fruit – well, technically, it seeds – that stinks like shit, excuse my Spanish again. So, be warned.’
‘Is there a sure way of sexing the sapling?’
‘Tricky that. Very tricky.’
She bought a sapling anyway and bedded it down near the barbed-wire fence where two humming birds of polythene blurred in the stiff wind.
