Thursday, 24 July 2014

Thirteen crucifixions 22

Here is some more novel, boys and girls.  I'm too tired to write tonight:


                                                            1986


            The bees hovered lazily amid the swollen purple blue flowers that dangled like voluptuous grapes from the wisteria vine.  Wisteria.  That was the name Pamela had given it.  Stephen had never really noticed flowers before.  Often, in the mornings, Pamela would walk with him in the sumptuous garden, telling him the histories of the various flowerbeds, borders and hedges, and the names of the flowers and shrubs and trees that flourished there.  To his bemusement he actually found this interesting.  He found nearly everything about her, his mother, to be interesting.  He had already given her permission to form him, to shape and order his life, though Pamela had shown virtually no interest in doing this.  She simply seemed to enjoy his company.  When he moved here with Pierre more than two months ago Pamela told him that he must tell her everything about his life without her.  She wanted to know, she needed to know, to make expiation, for the results of her folly with that priest, of concealing her pregnancy, of abandoning her child.  She was afflicted with guilt over Stephen.  She confessed this to him, and had asked that he please tell her everything that he had suffered.  To his surprise, Stephen was able to do this.  He was angry.  Of course Stephen was angry, but his birth-mother’s penance softened the edge of his wrath.  He at times still wanted to punish her, but she had already accepted Pierre as part of the package. They didn’t really communicate, Pamela and Pierre.  Each acknowledged the other, and had silently agreed to coexist peacefully.  There appeared to be no tension of rivalry or mutual jealousy.  Each appeared to have conceded the importance of the other in Stephen’s life.  Each accordingly backed off to allow the other space.  They remained too resolutely distant from each other for Stephen to be able to play one off against the other.  Each rather had become for him a refuge from the other.  Stephen could easily become happy, very satisfied with this sort of arrangement.  The daughter, his half-sister, Martha, remained a problem.  He couldn’t simply write her off as that stuck-up and uppity blonde bitch as he’d first referred to her with Pierre.  He had grown to respect her, at times he was almost on the verge of liking her.  But she did not like Stephen, or Pierre.  She remained icy and aloof to Pierre’s overtures of friendship.  Stephen had simply maintained a safe and respectful distance.  It was after all a big house they were living in.  But last night began the appearances of a breakthrough.  They both happened to be in the kitchen at the same time foraging for snacks.  With tea and cake they both sat simultaneously if rather silently at the table.  Stephen, upon learning that Martha had made the cake—it was chocolate—his favourite, tersely complimented her.  She thanked him primly, and offered him a second piece, which he accepted.  For some minutes they sat thus at the table, chatting between mouthfuls about the weather-- recently greatly improved--, and about Expo, which they both agreed to be overcrowded and overrated.  Martha asked if he’d seen her son lately. Stephen replied that he hadn’t, that Matthew seemed to be spending most of his time with Pierre, and that this concerned him, since like Martha, he felt a little wary of his partner’s influence over a vulnerable adolescent male.  Just ten minutes ago, before she left the house, he said good morning to Martha, and she responded to him in a rather warmer than civil tone.  The ice was breaking.

            He saw little of Pierre, except at night, in bed, and in the mornings.  To his surprise he felt not a bit put out about his friendship with Matthew, since he was still working at bonding with his mother.  But he did feel concerned.  He didn’t expect they’d be sleeping together, since he had no doubts about Matthew’s degree of heterosexuality, neither did he care personally whether they went to bed or not.  But sex or no sex, this constant togetherness between them was simply rocking the boat.  For a while he’d tried to alleviate matters by joining in as much as possible, but this thoroughly convinced Martha that together they had plotted to undermine her son and corrupt his morals.  Only now was he finally disabusing her of this nonsense.  And spending time with Pamela did require both time and energy.  In a way he was grateful that Matthew had appeared on the scene as just the foil to free him up from Pierre’s habitual neediness, thus clearing the way for him to be with his birth-mother.  Melanie, the daughter, was almost never at home, or she was always going somewhere with Martha.

            The air was warm, summery.  From the warm stone steps of the terrace he stared up at the purple wisteria blossoms and the yellow-orange bees that lazily feasted in them.  Stephen’s first coffee of the day steamed from a mug next to him.  He had a sip, then began to really look at the garden, the rose beds, the satyr fountain.  The fountain intrigued him.  He got up and carrying his coffee with him, ventured out for a closer look at the statue.  The grass was still cool and damp to his bare feet, though the skin of his face, arms and shoulders—he wore a white singlet--rejoiced and thrilled at the sun’s warm caress.  The statue was hideous, if otherwise well-made.  It was, Pamela had told him, at least two hundred years old and had adorned the estate of her late husband’s ancestral home in England.  Moss grew up its cloven hoofs and legs.  In the sun it shone with a gold luminosity, though it was carved out of cracked and crumbling grey granite.  The nose had been broken off.  Otherwise, the pensive, sage’s face remained intact.  He felt at one with the satyr and reached across the dry basin to touch its left hoof.

            This would be his first visit in the holly maze.  Pamela had told him about it, that she herself, just three weeks ago, had gone in there for the first time in the forty years she had lived there. He had never been in anything like it.  The holly hedges were perfectly perpendicular, freshly manicured, and they towered to at least twice his height over him.   Turning right angle after right angle after right angle he was surely by now lost.  He thought he must bring Pierre in here.  What fantastic games they would have.  He thought that if he kept turning left and only left that he would be more likely to find his way out.  He turned again, and again, and again.  To his surprise he was not frustrated.  He didn’t even think much of getting out, since he knew that eventually he would.  More, he was determined to find his way deeper, deeper into the maze, deeper into its secret.  He came out into a clearing.  A giant sundial stood in the centre, flanked on four sides by benches made from carved stone.  With his coffee he sat on a bench and looked down at the numeral III.  The grass here was dry to his bare feet.  He was getting sleepy.  He removed his clothes and lay down naked on the grass in the May sun.


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