Category: fiction

Mould

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It was a moon-scape she saw, peering into the mug in her mother’s study. Yes, a moon-scape with little lumps of perilous blue and grey, seeping into one another. Or maybe it was another kind of space terrain: she imagined the ground of Pluto, with its eye-like holes and fissures. She gave it a shake, and watched the particles break up and drift away, flotsam on some unreal ocean. A polluted ocean; maybe the earth’s oceans in a hundred years’ time. They told her in school that the world was filling up with waste and one day everything would melt away, like those paintings of dissolving clocks she saw when her mother took her to the museum. You could already tell it was happening, her teacher had said, the way that it gets so warm these days. The mildness of winter. It wasn’t right.

Well, the moon wasn’t right either that night. No; she could not stop thinking about what she saw in that mug. Another world, was it? She wished she could go back and count the dots, knowing that if she did she could start to chart this new universe, and in knowing it better she could sleep. She could enter its landscapes, drift across it with the powers she had in her dreams. Her mother put a sachet of lavender under her pillow and she could smell it through the cotton, soft and sweet…but it was not enough distraction. She needed to know what she had seen. But her mother might hear her and send her back to bed. It had to be worth a try. Sucking in her breath, she tip-toed back into the study, closing the door quietly behind her and flicking on the light. It was an energy-saver bulb, that took ages to properly glow. So she stood in the dull orange light, watching the wall till it got brighter. Then she would pick up the mug and see. Then she would know again.

Finally it was bright enough and so she went to pick up the mug…but this time, oh how the smell caught her! It was sharp and evil like the stench of seaweed, only worse, like the most rotten thing in the world, slowly fermenting. Yes, she smelt it and was knocked backwards almost. But it was fascinating. She let her nostrils quiver and sniff deeper as she held the mug to her nose. The she looked into it again and saw how the dunes and lumps had mushroomed and the blue was turning greenish, or maybe that was just the duller light. Still, these were definite changes. And she was thinking of the clumps of toadstools she’d seen in the school playground, while they were out measuring soil quality and watching the teacher bending in the grass with a thermometer. They were big brown flat things, ugly and intriguing, and she knew that some of them were poisonous, and some of them if you poked them let out a puff of steam. She wished she could touch these mushrooms but the thought of putting her finger in the mug was repulsing. It was kind of like a horror movie, she thought, where they showed you somebody’s festering wound, only it never looked quite real. Still, you would not like to touch it, it was just sort of funny to look at. No, she would not touch it; instead she shook it again, and this time the dunes did not dissolve, but she could see little fissures rippling across them. Her stomach turned over as if emptying something, and she felt a surge in her gullet. She put the mug down and breathed in deeply, trying to rid herself of the awful smell that clung to her like a disease.

She wondered what it was that these microbes loved so much about her mother’s tea. She considered if they’d accept her into their colony. Like them, she was partial to a glass of milk, but maybe not tea, unless it was laden with sugar. She wondered how they’d order themselves, scattered about as they were like that. Bulbous, growing over each other. It would be a ruthless economy. She sat down on the comfy office chair and span around slowly. The queasiness was leaving. She liked how all the objects rushed around her, melting into long white and orange lines. She stifled a giggle; she must not wake her mother up. She whispered stories to the mug. Telling them about the boy she wrote a letter to once in class and the time she left her homework on a bus. Soon she would say goodbye to her mother. She knew that it could not be long before she was ready to join them. They would be like ants, or the tiny people in Gulliver’s Travels – Lilliputions – running all over her body. Only, they were so small you could not see them. You could just imagine them, growing and multiplying, all over her skin.

They made the moon rocky and bumpy, like that boy whose skin was cratered with pimples. She had seen on television once two fat ladies in white coats scrubbing away green things from the corners of a bathtub. She and her mother didn’t have a bathtub, but sometimes she saw things come out of the plughole in the shower. Great streams of wiry hair that poked out, or smeared themselves upon the porcelain. Once a huge spider. She heard its legs patter and she screamed, and her mother tried to lift it out with a gardening trowel. Sometimes there were little black seeds all over the bath, and the first time she thought maybe a plant had vomited up all its babies (in class that morning she had been drawing diagrams of sepals and stigmas and filaments and seed-pellets), but then her mother told her it was just exfoliating beads from some lotion she had. She tried the lotion and it made her skin burn, but it was not unpleasant; kind of like the scratch of dry sand. It left a pinkish blotch on her legs. She was wondering if the moon was like that: all pastures of dry sand. Were there lakes or ponds or waves? Trees, even? In the mug she could not see any trees, and the only waves were from when she rippled the sticky liquid with the swirl of her wrist. She thought maybe if she lived there she’d have to invent some more things, to keep her interested. There would be a gift shop, for one thing. You could buy t-shirts with maps of the land on them, with close-up details of the blue-green growths and the tea-stains that ringed the china walls. It was like a whole continent splayed out, with all the countries slotted together, their landmasses enveloping each other. A strange thing.

She would take the mug into school on Monday, for show-and-tell. It was the right thing to do. Everybody else would bring in their cinema tickets, their remote-controlled helicopters, Pokemon cards, a book they had read over the weekend. And they would talk about themselves, nattering away about this thing that had brought them  their childish joy. Then she would take to the stage, like the prime minister on the telly, clasping her precious mug, and she would tell them how she had found the moon. At first they would laugh, she recognised that, but then they would realise how clever she was. How amazing was her discovery. She giggled just thinking about it. But I must let it rest, she reflected. After all, she needed to let her colony expand, for the spores to pile up higher upon one another until they were spilling over the edges of the mug. She wanted her colony to be huge and impressive. I mustn’t let them escape. She took a postcard from the wall – it was a painting of a lemon and a teacup by Francis Cadell – and she placed it over the mug. The moon was safe, and its surface would continue to bubble and grow in their new warmth and darkness. So she tip-toed back to bed and lay awake, her mind floating around this wondrous space. Each star was a point of contact, a possibility.

And she spoke to the stars, even as she jumped between them, as you jump between chairs and tables and sofas when you play ‘The Floor is Lava’. Each one told her a story, and she basked in the glow of all those words weaving a tapestry around her. Soon she could slip into sleep, soon, soon, soon…she closed her eyes to a new darkness, felt the warmth of the space beneath the sheets. The smell of mould dissipated from her brain, and now there was only silence, the scent of lavender, wafting in delicate waves…

When tomorrow arrived, it was Monday, so she got dressed for school and went downstairs. To her horror, she saw the mug up-ended on the draining board. What on earth…? Mummy? Her mother came down to boil the kettle and make her porridge, but was startled to see her daughter crying so early in the morning. What is it, darling? She was already late for work, and starving. She threw her handbag on the table and brushed down her jacket. What is it? she repeated. The child was pointing at something next to the sink. Mummy! she wailed, you’ve killed the moon! 

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Oranges for Bonfire Night

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(from a Creative Writing Society freewrite with the prompts ‘fireworks’ and ‘oranges’)

She remembers the days when she and her brother popped over to the neighbour’s house for Bonfire Night. She’d climb over the garden wall, wearing her wellies and her dad’s itchy jumper that came down to her knees and a hat her mother had pulled over her fringe. They’d play with the children next-door because they were good friends and the same age, more or less. Even though it was pitch dark in the November night, they’d dance around the garden, shrieking and playing tig or hide and seek while they waited for the fireworks to be set up. They were cheap fireworks, bought from the local store, which ordered them from some chemistry enthusiast in the city. This was, of course, before The Internet.

She can’t remember his name, the man next-door; the dad who told the kids off for laughing too loud and who’d sneak off for fags in the greenhouse while his wife did the washing up. She remembers the blur of his bearded face. His yell as he stepped back from the firework he’d just set up. She remembers the mum better; the mum used to bring out steaming mugs of soup and carrier bags loaded with oranges. She remembers standing in the cold bright air, peeling with the stubs of her fingernails the rind that came away like thick flakes of skin. Biting into the soft flesh as a flame-coloured Comet rippled above her. The sour sting of the juice squirting in her eye; the sweetness seeping over her tongue. Stickiness on her fingers. She’d toss most of it away, into the rhubarb patch. She wanted to save her appetite for the chocolate log and lollypops that awaited them inside.

There’d be the rockets, soaring and screeching in her ears like banshees, sizzling in her belly. The wheeeEEeeeee like electricity. She hated them, but they were a thrill. She’d look up to catch them but they’d be gone already. Then there were the pretty ones. She read their names off the cardboard box, discarded on the porch: Crosettes, Dragons’ Eggs, Ice Fountains and Blossoms. She watched them go off with the other children, trying to identify each one as if they were flowers in a biology textbook. Only, they were always too quick; their beauty dazzled her vision and then evaporated. There were the ones that overflowed like ocean spray, showering and spitting flickers of white and silver, like a jeweller soldering a giant diamond. Rainbows would spread out across the smooth sky, raining colours across the tall trees at the back of the garden. Her favourite was the Catherine Wheel. It took ages to set up, but it was magical. It spiralled like a wild thing from the pole of the washing-line, sparks flying around it with the craziness of broken machinery, or hypnosis. She adored the Catherine Wheels. They made her feel strange and unreal, as if she were looking into an abyss.

After all the fireworks were gone, the children were doled out sparklers, which they were only allowed to use with gloves. The sparklers let them write their names in the air, as if they were inscribing their thin identities into the vast constellations of the night sky, the atoms of the air around them. She misses how back then in the country you could always see the stars and the sky achieved a proper dark. In the city where she lives now the sky is always a murky brown, the colour of Coca Cola or dirty rivers.

She used to hate how eventually they’d have to go inside. She used to want to stay out in the garden forever, sucking in the lovely coldness of November night. She hated how the sparklers had to be chucked into water buckets, where they’d snuff out with a quick hiss. The adults would always check that they hadn’t burned their little fingers. She remembers the faint char marks that stained her gloves. Remainders. She found those gloves, only a few months ago, when she’d gone home to help clear the house. They were in that same yellow jacket she used to wear, and even just touching the plasticky fabric brought back glimmers of firework enchantments. But the gloves were full of holes, the stitches became undone in her hands. Everything was to be given away, sold or donated to charity, after her mother died and now that the house was to be sold as her father left for business in America.

He’d phone her from new places and his voice would crackle over the phone like a fading sparkler. She closes her eyes and still she smells the warm soup, the tickle of gunpowder.

And oranges. She remembers the oranges. She never liked oranges.