ilspeth and irda | written 23 February 2002

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This I wrote to dispel some of the very negative feelings I had towards my mother, and to deal with my own habit of picturing my father as my unflagging hero. I rather like this story...hope you enjoy it ;)

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Candles burned into stumps under glass in the Garden. Thick ash sizzled on the undersides. Heavy rain poured, and plump drops toddled on the sloped domes of the flames’ crystal houses, then slid over the edges, like swimmers into a pool.

Thunder shook the air, a lion’s roar erupting. Each leaf trembled as though footsteps shook their stalks. Mud-puddles quivered. The rain was warm. Trellises of wax-yellow roses were afire.

Into the house. Wailing rain pattered on the windows. The night was noticeably unsettled. The demons were already moving in. She sensed their tongues, lashing around corners, voices trying to find her. She huddled in a corner, soaked, nose dripping leftover rain, wrapped in a wool shawl that Irda had spun. In the next room to the next room was a bed, deep and velvet, posts of cedar. Canopy strewn with rose-petals and sheafs of pink silk. White linens, pink silk trimmings. The smell of lavender. Silk pillows. All that silk, shimmering under the violent light of moon disturbed by storm, and of fire caught up in wind. Blood soaked into the sheets, through down-mattress like copper going back to its source in the earth, dripped onto the wood floor under the bed. It dripped. It dripped. The sound of dripping snaked through two rooms and caught her ears, under the wool.

She wept soundly. She felt sorry for herself. Two rooms over her mother lay, throat cut, silver hair knifed from her scalp and stuffed into her mouth, one hand at her ear, the other at her husband’s bloated hand. He lay, eyes yellow and bulging, skin purple, blood frozen. Poisoned drool still seeped from beneath a swollen tongue. Her sorrow cocooned her, fluttered close to her heat. The room two over was cold in its absence.

Out in the garden the fire had spread to the plants without flowers. Silver-and-green bushes, crawling ivy, aloe, rosemary. Things that looked like spiders and serpents. Huge tufts of fern, billowing into smoke. Mint-scented inferno. All that lovely craftmanship. Plants that had hearts the size of humans’. Thick veins, throbbing with love and blood and sweet sunlight. Stalks that taunted her with pointing. Rustling fingers that talked like harmonicas when the wind blew through them, claiming her mother in their leafy sibilance. Herbs too precious to harvest for cooking; but human children could walk miles for the impersonal plants of another farmer. Hissing Jealousy simmered on top of her cooking brain. She did not altogether dismiss it.

And the ones with the flowers! Oh, she, they, Ilspeth and Irda, forty-nine months apart to the day, the pink babies, toddling in white cotton! Never could they resemble the sanctity of a flower. Eyes batting, twilight-coloured pools with coal at their banks. Pulsing arteries, the push and pull of blood and oxygen. Tiny feet, hands reaching up. Lush smiles, pink laughter. There was a nanny, seven days a week, employed to, among other things, meticulously photograph all of this, this passing-childhood growing-up nonsense. Each picture had dirt on the back, stains in the shape of ovals and whirligigs. The eternal grip of their mother, coming in from the garden, smelling of earth, grabbing a new shovel, lingering briefly on her babbling phonies caught in the sunlight of an afternoon, before bustling off into the outdoors, where her real children waited.

And the man who slept beside her in the nights when she cried out for all the things she had planted, well, his sperm had shot into many a toilet bowl and raw quivering hand, but never into the eggs from which those two tremorous girls had formed. Whose sperm had had been forgotten since, for he was no gardener. He lived on as a legend in the lore of the two girls, though; they snuck off to see him on weekends, taking long tandem bicycle rides through the rain-drenched fertile country, to his shack at the edge of the earth. The three would pile furtively into his loud car, and the girls would keep their heads down and whisper games back and forth until they reached the edge of town, where their father would buy them bagged popped corn sprinkled with sugar, and fat red strawberries swollen to the limit of ripeness. They would get themselves all three into a mess of popped corn and fruit flesh, and then spend all day climbing the statues at the out-of-doors Musée de l’Église in town-center. Many a memory they had of tandeming home at dusk, sneaking in under the guidance of nanny Michele, coming up the back staircase which did not creak so as to not wake Maman, who was perpetually asleep.

But all the flowers were devoured in fire, and the very last one, the very truest one, trembled under wool for what awaited her. Her limbs shook. Rain and sweat pasted her skin over. Though the night was warm she could see her breath in the room. Her sister, her dearest zombie sister, lay halfway across the world, in a cramped bed. Outside her window a brown city murmured; the clink of knife against knife in the effort of sharpening, the howl of the sirens of the lawkeepers, the ghostly prowl and wail of alley-cats in silent, unkempt formation. The air, smelling of burnt pork and dead fog, wafting heavy through the cracks in the unopenable windows. Dead pigeons lying in the streets; peasants selling tabbouleh and cold, greasy rice from striped tents which crowded like bazaars under the ever-rising plate-glass empire of skyscrapers. The sour breath of her husband, kissing her pursed lips, pinching her breasts maniacally, trying to elicit a wet, welling response from her exhausted body. Four mouths snored in varied states of slumber, two in each crib in the tiny corner room. This was all she could think of. This, and the fifth, which grew brown and boiling and, unbeknownst to its ravaged mother, mildly retarded, in her raw womb. Her husband teased stubbornly, fumbling between her legs, at her stretch-marked thighs, caressing the flab of her upper arms, his unshaven face scratching her own, his ever-protruding tongue persisting against the decided gates of her yellowing teeth. She was nineteen that year.

Ilspeth shed a few tears specially for her. Irda, older by four years, left the leafy wilderness she had grown up in, cursing her mother and saying she would rather contend with the many animals of the city than the beast which flourished in her mother’s garden. They had countered each other in the front garden, during a rainstorm no less violent than the present one; Irda had torn a rose from its bush and thrown it at her mother’s feet. "Go, you little cunt," her mother had hissed, and turned on her heel, eyes smirking and proud. From inside the house her husband echoed, Fucking go. It was always that way, a sentence and its echo. Her mother went back to bed, back to her prince. Irda was gone forever. She sent letters at first, from small towns in rural France, then from the north of Africa, then America. Letters became postcards; postcards became photographs with lines drawn down the back, addressed to Ilspeth but blank, bearing only a postmark as a message of her whereabouts. After prostituting herself for months and learning to ration a loaf of white bread so that it and water could be three weeks’ worth of meals, she married the first man who asked her name before he paid her three dollars to fuck her, a newspaper deliverer named...well, the name is not important.

Ilspeth suffered from deep depression and stopped going to see her father entirely after Irda left. In the middles of many nights he would sneak in from the edge of the earth into her wilderness, always on his lumbering bicycle because his car was too loud, and throw pebbles at her window, and beg to know what had become of Irda. She would not come down but told him the story in bits and pieces, a fantastic story about circus dancers coming through and sewing a leotard of gold for Irda, and begging her to come dance with them in Paris, and twirl ribbons and throw confetti. They taught her to walk the trapeze, and to throw her voice; each night the story became more elaborate, until Ilspeth had to begin keeping notes and reading from them. Papa sat in the front garden which her window faced, his chin in his hands, weeping softly at the good fortune of his eldest daughter. Ilspeth began to go to town alone, bypassing the vendors of popped corn and luscious fruit, instead stealing copper baubles and pickpocketing for coins, which she parceled to her father under Irda’s name, as proof of her good life.

She stopped going to school as well, hiding in the garden until her mother and her mother’s husband had climbed into their car and headed for town each morning. When they were gone she could re-enter the house; she would go up the back staircase, fry herself an breakfast in the upstairs kitchen, and lie in bed, weeping, belly full of egg and toast. When she heard them returning after their day of work, chattering, chattering like incessant birds, she would descend the back staircase, run through the garden, and spend twilight in the fields, vomiting egg and toast.

When the family ate dinners together, it was around the television, which chattered incessantly of nonsense in that same familiar way. At her mother’s right hand side was the pile of mail for the day. She sorted through perfume samples, insurance bills, the occasional magazine. Notes from Ilspeth’s teacher at school in town piled up, untouched by the silver-tongued letter opener. The dinner that evening had been especially spectacular: when Ilspeth had asked to be excused having barely touched her carefully prepared food, both mother and husband crowded about her, and insisted on feeding her by hand, to the off-key music of the mocking television. The husband’s eyes leered at her, and brushed on her cheek far too long; afterwards, in a spirit of uncontrollable vengeance, she unearthed all of his pin-up-girlie magazines from under the loose floorboard in the dining room, and pitched them into the fire, but put it out before all was lost, and it was a breast here, a pussy there in the smoldering heap. Then she ran into the fields and vomited, and cleaned his fingertips from herself in a stream.

It was here she realized she must kill them. She was weeping, and holding herself, kneeling by the tiny crystal thread of water, and she looked into the tops of the trees, and saw birds fluttering, and worrying the branches. And she recognized, with a stab in her deepest heart, that she would never transcend the weariness of the lower branches of life, never be more than a prostitute in the street, or a learned woman married to an unloving husband. Slowly the truth invaded her system of thought, until she was encompassed by it, wept heartily for it, and then shunned it, rising to her feet in new thought. Why should she live as a self-less plant simply because her mother tended a selfish garden? And so the world would be rid of her, she who ministered to every whisper of her pale deviant husband, but would not hear the shrieks of a rosy child.

The wind whipped up louder outside; Ilspeth hid her eyes at every flash of lightning. She would wait till morning, she thought; shiver here all night, and then through the next day, until somebody, until somebody came and found them. They could take her away. Burn the house to the same ground the garden succumbed to. Lock her where she could not kill every vague, menacing Mother she encountered. Remove her womb, so she would never pass the curse forward. Remove her ears, so she could not hear any voice of vengeance or God, so she could have the final last word.

The windows rattled against their loose locks, and one flung open somewhere in the house. She heard the moan of wind pass through the walls, felt a smack of summer humidity against her icy skin like hot breath. And something else. Something that was different, something that tasted odd, too much sugar in coffee. Her spine ached with it. Something in her head pounded. Something was prowling. Something human was in the house! Something had come in through the window. Something had snuck in up her back staircase, silent as long as you missed the second step from the bottom landing that creaked like hell opening up. Something had found her! Suppose it was police, who would see all the blood and the dead bodies and find her in the corner, gore caught in her eyebrows, skin under her fingernails, and they would all shriek that it was her and she would be doomed for sure! And all the town would shriek, especially those men and women that worked with her laudable applaudable mother-and-stepfather, and her grandmothers and her aunts, they would all shriek that it was the bad daughter of a good woman! the bad daughter of a good woman! the bad daughter of a good woman! And she would be doomed for sure! them siding with her mother even in death!

She ached to vomit; she longed for it. Peals of exclamations and accusations rung in her fragile ears. The heave of the stomach always adjusted the center of emotion in her; she could do nothing on ridding her mind of thought, but it was impossible to feel anything but emptier and purer when bile and chunk and thin streams of drool emptied from the stomach with the roar of an old train making its usual rounds. She was an addict for it, so adept that she could gag herself without lifting a single finger. The thinnest girl at school.

The bootsteps were closer, but hesitant, she could hear it. The storm crashed about and she prayed in nervous obscenities that the intruder would pass her hiding-room without the lightning illuminating her corner. She heard a gasp, another gasp, like someone losing breath. Then running. Running towards her. A door slammed, and something glass shattered. And something huge and caped descended into the room, eyes glowing, breath ragged, audible heartbeat.

Her father.

"Daddy!" she shrieked and had barely thought of rising to her feet when he had scooped her into his arms and wrapped her into his cloak. "Daddy! Daddy!" her voice pierced deep things, moving further and further from her until she could no longer control it. She must have screamed his name a hundred times; each reassuring her a fraction that it was really him. "Ilspeth," he whispered in response to each one. "Darling, Ilspeth."

By morning, when the rain had quieted into steadiness, he had bought a small boat, his hands smooth and expert on the lines and the sails from his days in the navy, and had put red henna to his daughter’s hair, and chopped it with a hunting knife as she had with her mother’s hair. He threw her hair into the sea, and coloured her eyes coal with a bit of ash from a fire in the street. On the cobbles of Marrakesh, where she would become a woman, she would paint her eyes with ash from the street-fires of peasants, and tell fabulous stories of copper baubles with magical powers, and fine strong men who rescued princesses from witches, and golden desert oases whose sands swallowed forbidden gardens.