Delosperma cooperi.
Not knowing whether or not she speaks the Latin properly.
You don’t know unless you’re told, she thinks.
You don’t know unless you try it . . .
A cactus stands taller than herself, skeletal and branching. Naked with your arms up in the air . . .
Succulent.
The word feels succulent itself.
This cactus, says a sign, can store a tonne of water fully grown.
When she sees the insect-eating plants, the sticky drops on some of them make her purse her lips.
~
In the orchid house, as if hair clips have been used, there are plants held on branches with thin wires. A sense of moisture in the air.
The flowers bold and blatant. Vivid. Seem fake. The paper flowers on the patients’ tables more real-seeming than these.
Loosed and partly sunken in the soft moss bed, a gorgeously puckered bloom.
She feels a rush, a heady indecision as she softly tunnels her finger to it. The confident intricacy it has. Her blue uniform reflected in the glass of a display case. The sense she steps towards herself.
She’s still thinking of the cactus flower. It’s daring garishness. What underwear she should put on tonight.
As she leaves the room she sees the plaque. The collection sponsored by the media company that owns the newspaper Colin works for.
And it’s as if he’s seen her. As if she has been caught.
~
Seeing the name of Colin’s company has invaded. Told her somehow that he knows. That brings her don’t-be-silly voice again.
‘You can’t.’
The soft electric recklessness that’s set in beneath her skin seems suddenly chased away. A hollow left.
A slight sick feeling.
The liquorice, always in the end, disappearing on her tongue.
~
She sits outside the Grand Pavilion at a white table on a patio, before a meadow of longer grass.
Impossibly, the grasses dance with small blue butterflies, the pale blue of her uniform. Others with buff-coloured wings, fringed, some of them, with orange. Some petal-shaped white flags. Then comes a sudden scratch of grasshopper song. And the buzz of honey bees.
The cells of her body seem to understand that this is how things should be.
How things could be. A money spider on her pale skin.
Her body adrift on Colin’s huge indifference.
There’s something about the way the butterflies flit above the grass that reminds her how the ward lights catch the translucent covers round the beds. The way their blue uniforms float in the corner of their eye, reflect briefly as they pass.
From the inside, it must seem as if you’re looking out from a cocoon. The thin skin of a chrysalis.
Hoping for change. Waiting. Hoping that you will find a way to emerge from your own old skin, to the idea you have of yourself renewed.
She looks up. Lets the coffee fill her mouth and holds it for a while. Feels it re-warm as she does.
She almost wants Colin now to know. To watch her. To have him see her do it. And when she thinks of that, his eyes on her tonight, a warm edge comes back to her skin.
That was always a difference between her brother and her. Leo would just chew the liquorice. Could never wait.
But she. She was always so careful. As if not giving in to that temptation made her somehow better. And all the while the thing was just dissolving anyway.
She’d always put it down to a boy girl thing, but now she wasn’t so sure.
Maybe Leo was right. What’s the point of having a thing just to see if you can keep it?
~
She had decided that the alginate bags amongst the trees and shrubs protected gangs of caterpillars from predatory birds. That the bags were hatching butterflies. But the bright kid behind the cafe counter explained, pointing at the mural.
The strange bags in amongst the leaves were hung there to collect water. It’s amazing, what we do.
‘Leaves breathe out,’ he said. ‘There’s water in their breath. After a while they breathe enough to make a single coffee.’
She does not care how much it costs.
Yes, she thinks. Tonight. I will. In knickers the colour of the cactus flower.
Wonders if the taste of coffee will stay there on her lips.
A dizziness from the thought coming, that it will be so new, to feel a body that is so nearly like her own.
COAST
David gave an abrupt flick with the handle of the knife and the limpet prattled off the piling.
Many times he’d done this, but each time felt the mixed sensation of apology and surprise at the morbid, expressive putty of creature set into the shell.
It did not look appetising and was not; but ‘I am an old man,’ David joked to himself. ‘They are plentiful, and I neither have to run, nor – which I’d surely have to were I fishing – pray.’
He felt, every time, the further surprise, newly, at how a thing that had taken on such ancientness to look at from outside was so bright within.
The pad of his thumb around the smooth inside; the coarse surface on his fingertip. Of all the artefacts he and his wife had collected from the beach he’d take a limpet shell for wonder.
The day seemed indecisive. The breakers of the outgoing tide smushed and drew. Sand martins spun from their tunnels in the cliffs.
Every so often there was a ticking pitter-patter as the low breeze rattled the dry seaweed.
There had been another August storm.
It had washed the sand from the foundations and fallen rubble of two houses that had recently gone onto the beach, and from the skeletal groyne that stretched into the sea.
Against the shifting contours of the shore, the pilings of the old sea defences looked ancient and immoveable. Pitted and barnacled and hung with algae.
David considered that the principles, of how to build a structure to hold back waves, were the same principles his team had used to build footings for the pipeline, all those years ago. Before they had a train to carry water to the city.
That had been his life. The engineering of support. Holding things back. Or holding things up. His wife, Helen, joked he should have designed bras.
He took a few more limpets. Where they were gathered into a family circle on the pilings, he could not take them. He never could. But he was even more conscious now of how it must be for one of a loving group to be knocked off the rock.
That was the hardest thing. Trying not to think of them, his family circle.
At least for the limpet everything seemed fine until that sudden tap from nowhere.
He stood and helped himself to a small diamond of liquorice from the tin he carried. The flavour sat well with the salt air.
He was patient with the stiffness in his back, knowing it would loosen as he walked.
The bright collecting bag was full enough. Helen was right. More sensible to use the gaudy colours now their eyes were going. He’d conceded this the third time he’d lost his grey canvas sack against the stones.