Selma In The City

Happy New Year, everybody!
Thank you for enriching my life so much in 2007.
Peace to you and those you hold dear in 2008……

Aunt Jo and I sat in her kitchen for two hours today drinking raspberry frappes. At one stage a bee fell into my tall tumbler, drawn by the fruity scent, buzzing with panic as the ice weighed it down and it couldn’t escape. I plunged my fingers into the red ice. ‘Don’t,’ cried Aunt Jo. ‘It’ll sting you.’ ‘I don’t care,’ I replied. ‘I am despondent.’

I gathered the ice, the pulverised fruit, and the bee, clutching them, a blood-filled trophy, crimson juice gathering at my elbow, great globules of ice staining Aunt Jo’s brand new granite benchtops. The bee climbed atop a piece of ice, an insect climbing Mount Everest, shook his wings and was gone.

Aunt Jo mopped up the spill and made me another frappe. ‘I’m despondent too,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think she’d take him back.’ It’s a rotten day, there’s no better way to describe it. My sister has taken her ex back. She kissed a frog and he didn’t turn into a prince but she’s prepared to wait for him to change. Aunt Jo and I think it’ll be a long wait. ‘I think I’ll go and smack him in the gob while I’m waiting,’ said Aunt Jo. ‘Or cut his break cables.’ Aunt Jo and I amused ourselves for over half an hour devising imaginary methods of revenge.

‘I’m fed up with Millie.’ Aunt Jo is smoking. It’s the first cigarette she’s had in five years. The smoke is exhaled in angry puffs as if she is visualising spitting in ex-man’s face. ‘Why can’t she see him for what he is? How bad will it have to get before she runs for the hills for good?’

I am worried. My sister has laid down the law but not in the direction it should be laid. Aunt Jo and I have been given our marching orders. A very firm’ thanks but no thanks.’ We are each putting on a brave face but internally we are falling to pieces. How can she take back a man she is so fearful of? What has he said to her to change her mind so definitively?

‘He just told her he loved her,’ said Aunt Jo wryly. ‘That was all he had to do. He can be quite charming for the ten minutes a day he’s sober. Millie would cling to those ten minutes as a measure of his true character, as a sign that he is capable of changing. It’s all a load of bloody bollocks.’

I have a headache from the ice or maybe from the fear that my sister could end up in the emergency room at the hands of the man who tells her he loves her. There is nothing I can do about it. She is manic depressive but not non compos mentis. In this case, it is a desire for love that is impairing her judgement, not a mental illness. Aunt Jo and I discuss harsh methods of punishment, withdrawing our support, not being there to pick up the fragments of her heart every single time it breaks at his hands. But it is hard to do. How can you send someone you love out on a tightrope without a safety net? But how can I continue to watch as the colour of hope disappears from my sister’s eyes?

Aunt Jo slices a baguette with gusto. ‘We are being forced to wait for more violence to occur and I hate it,’ she said. ‘It’s like waiting for the end of the world and being denied the chance to do anything about it.’ She waves her knife in the air, whirling it around her head like a broadsword. This is what Lara Croft would be like as a pensioner. ‘One foot wrong, that’s all he has to make, and I’ll turn him from a rooster to a hen with one slice.’

As I drive home the streets grow dark. A black cat runs across the road, edged with purple shadow. I cannot tell in which direction it runs, so swift is its flight. I put on the windscreen wipers but realise it is not raining. I am crying, my dreams for Millie’s new life screwed up like scrap paper. I try not to think about her but she appears like a ghost in the headlights. I feel like stopping the car in the middle of the road and screaming until I am skinless but all I can do is keep going and watch for signs of trouble. The realisation lodges, sharp as glass in my throat. I know it will be a while before I can swallow it down.

* Painting by John Bauer.

When I was eight and my cousin, Patrick, was nine, our families spent Christmas in Ireland. It was the winter solstice, the bleak midwinter, and the mist was spiralling in white ribbons from the North Atlantic.

The kitchen in Grandma’s cottage was warm, smelling of brandy and suet from the hundreds of Christmas puddings she had steamed for the ladies at Church. I had eaten so many raisins my tongue was stained for days afterwards and I couldn’t get the skins out from in-between my teeth. Patrick had filled his pockets with Californian walnuts which he munched under the covers after lights out.

On midwinter night as we supped our mugs of hot cocoa, Aunt Imelda told us the story of the fairy who lived in the wood at the end of what we called Gooseberry Lane because of the hundreds of gooseberry bushes that flanked it. She only came out during the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, because it was then she felt safest to unravel her wings. Her eyes were emerald green, her hair was the colour of moonlight and fell down her back like water. She was the most beautiful fairy the world had ever seen. Only a few people in the history of the village claimed to have seen her. They called themselves ‘the chosen few.’

Patrick crept into my room as I was getting ready for bed. ‘Put your pajamas on over your clothes,’ he whispered. ‘And keep your boots on. We’re going to see the fairy in the wood. I want to be one of the chosen few.’

I was excited and terrified at the same time. If the fairy only came out once a year she might not appreciate two children intruding upon her wood. Some fairies could be nasty and cast evil spells - I had learned that from Enid Blyton. I wasn’t sure how Patrick and I would explain our hair turning blue or scales growing on our faces but I was so keen on seeing the fairy I decided to take the risk.

We slipped out the back door when everyone was asleep. It was so cold the air felt like fingers touching my face. I stumbled on freshly fallen snow, it crunched as loudly as cornflakes. Patrick pulled a torch out of his dressing-gown pocket. It sent a tiny pulse of yellow light down the navy blue reaches of Gooseberry Lane.

I was so enthralled I held my breath the entire way until my head was pounding and the smell of the gooseberries freezing in the night began to sting my eyes. I was mute with expectation as we entered the wood.

The ocean rolled in the distance, so close in tone to the soft rustling of the leaves in the wood that it became hard to discern between one or the other. Patrick turned off the torch and took my hand. We gripped each other ferociously, as if about to fall off a precipice.

A wind disturbed the trees, faint as a mistral. We felt the silken brush of it on our cheeks. A light rose in the distance, turning the snow as brilliant and unblemished as porcelain. There was a sigh that sounded like the embodiment of hope. And there she was, standing before us, not more than a foot high, wings fine as gossamer, unfurled; hair beaming in the moonlight - the fairy in the wood.

She regarded us without hostility, glimmering, holding her tiny hands up to the sky as if trying to catch the moonlight. Then she sniffed the air and was gone. Just like that. We saw her for the briefest of moments but the memory of the sight of her stayed with us well into adulthood. We saw the fairy in the wood, we were convinced of it, it wasn’t trickery or childhood imaginings. For the slightest of moments she was real and Patrick and I were two of the chosen few. And we believed, as I still do, that there is magic in this world.

This is not a political blog by any means but I am personally saddened today by the assassination of former Pakistani PM, Benazir Bhutto. While some of her political choices may have been ill-conceived, I had a great deal of admiration for Ms Bhutto. Imagine, just imagine, being the female leader of an Islamic nation. How can any of us living in the West really know what that meant?

Benazir Bhutto was fearless, strong, forthright, forward thinking. She knew what she was up against yet she pressed ahead. My first thought when I heard she had been shot in the neck and chest was for her children. Were they aware of what was happening? Had they seen the news footage? How would they come to terms with losing their mother by such violent means?

I will leave the discussion of her political worth and the impact her death will have on Pakistan and the rest of the world to those better qualified to discuss it than I. My thoughts are with her children who knew her not as a politician, just as their mother. I hope that as the years pass and they begin to come to terms with her death that they will be able to believe, as she did, that one person can make a difference. May she rest in peace.

We had a nice Christmas. The turkey turned out great (thank you, Jamie Oliver,) the chocolate cake we had instead of fruit cake (all of us hate mixed peel,) was moist and the champagne was flowing. My sister, Millie, was following her drug regime and was pleasant and chatty. We ate, joked, sang Christmas carols, and played charades. After pulling both ‘Gwyneth Paltrow’ and ‘Homer Simpson’ out of the charades hat, I now have a newfound respect for those who participate in improvisational theatre.

My Aunt took Millie home. I got a panicked call shortly after they arrived to say Millie’s estranged ex was waiting on the doorstep, noticeably drunk. Millie wanted to let him in but my Aunt was refusing. Aunt Jo is a strong woman but she is 65 and not really up for a tussle on a doorstep in suburbia on Christmas evening. Yet somehow she managed to get she and Millie inside the house where they double bolted the door.

The ex hung around for over an hour, hovering like a bird of prey, eventually disappearing into the night. Millie and Aunt Jo relaxed, thinking he had decided to leave them alone until they heard the sound of glass being smashed. The ex had gone round the back and broken one of the bedroom windows. He was attempting to climb through when Aunt Jo attacked him with a copy of the Yellow Pages. She beat him so hard that he fell backwards, cutting himself on the broken glass. Aunt Jo dropped the phone book in shock, yet was unable to disregard the irony of it falling open at the section on security padlocks and windows.

Millie called the police and the ex was hauled away leaving a trail of mindless insults in his wake.

You’re nothing without me. No one else will want you. You’re a psychotic. You’re so ugly not even a blind man would find you attractive. You’re old and alone and childless. I never really loved you.

Millie was devastated. Despite all the recent troubles, she still loves him. She thought they had a chance to reconcile. After over an hour of heated argument on the phone on my part, I managed to convince her not to take him back - EVER - and to press charges. The police are holding the ex for two days. I am hoping when he gets out tomorrow that he doesn’t immediately go over there and cause a ruckus. I’m fed up with it. I’ve worked so hard over the past few weeks to help my sister resolve her mental health issues and I will not have that progress compromised by an alcoholic buffoon.

Aunt Jo is staying with Millie for the next few days. She is keeping a baseball bat under the bed. I have come down with a case of the ‘flu and am feverish and slightly irrational. The whole situation is beginning to resemble a very absurd French farce. All over the house I have candles burning, lit as an offering to all the gods I can think of in an attempt to ensure my sister’s protection. I can’t sleep for fear of the smoke alarms going off.

Sometimes the price of love is very little - a smile, a touch, a gesture of affection. Sometimes the price of love is too much - manipulation, control, coercion. Millie rang me half an hour ago, assuring me she would not take the ex back even though he’s the only man who has ever told her that he loved her. This pronouncement of love is what she craves more than anything else in the world. It is a timeworn desire. So all night I will pray, ungracious with desperation, that overnight her ex will be struck dumb and will not be able to tell her he loves her in the morning, causing her resolve to waver. Take his voice from him, I pray, coat his tongue with paralysing ashes, make him mute; for the price of his words of love is far too great for my sister to bear. Oh Lord, hear my prayer……