CELANDINE’S ROAD

Celandine, whilst waiting for something to happen, conteplates her life's journey

Celandine sat quietly on a picnic seat on the edge of the field that lay just beyond the woodland in which her home had been built so long ago she couldn’t have said when.

And she looked across the meadow, and sighed. Why had it come to this, she asked herself.

She didn’t know the answer probably because she couldn’t guess the question, but there was no doubt that it had come to something.

She shivered despite the August sun because she knew that she was approaching a junction in her life, a life that had already had too many apparently random forks in it.

Like all those years ago when her daddy had died. In those days people died but these days they pass on, which she supposed sounded more like there might be a destination to pass on to, though she doubted it. Her life had no place in it for Heaven or Hell or any kind of in between place.

Daddy had passed on, then. His ashes lay mixed with the roses in her garden, and they’d been there for years. Every time she tended to those roses she was, in a way tending to daddy.

He had been a b*****d, but in a strange way she had loved him and not minded some of the things he did with her when mummy was out. He shouldn’t have done them, though, she had known that.

“Celandine, my pretty, come and sit with me…” he had asked, and she had always refused because she had guessed what he wanted and what he’d get somehow anyway. But the guilt was his, not hers, and so she felt all right about it.

Then her life had taken another turning when mummy had died. She hadn’t been with her because, well, it wouln’t have been possible because mummy had been in prison. She had never found out why, though maybe it had something to do with the secret room in the attic where she often took visitors, and it was those visitors who never walked back down the stairs but were carried by paramedics on stretchers that caused mummy to go to prison for the rest of her life.

Then granny had died, leaving grandpa on his own to weep and gnash his teeth (his words) because she wasn’t there to do all the things that granny did, like look after him. That was another fork in the road.

Because grandpa passed on and she was taken in by Aunt Bessie, who was really nice and who allowed her huge freedoms, like spending the nights with friends in their homes, sleeping over in a grown up sort of way. And she got to spend a quite a few nights with Abigail and her brother Cedric until their house was raided by the police and Abigail was taken away because they said she was a habitual thief. And the road forked here even though she stayed with Aunt Bessie, but the freedoms went away. Aunt Bessie had said that she, Celandine, had been stung once, and that was quite enough. There were other Abigails in the world, she said, and other dangers.

Before grandpa died she had met Stephen, a tall boy with sandy hair and a limp, and when she met him again once or twice by accident she decided that if she was going to love anyone it might as well be him. But it turned out that it was a silly decision because, well, she had still been only twelve and he had wanted to take her off on a trip round the world.

They had set off, walking because he had said he’d only get his strength back if he exercised more, the doctor had said and the pretty nurse who made him exercise had agreed, and he trusted their diagnosis.

So the two of them had set out to walk around the world, but hadn’t really got any further than Old Bilton which was barely a couple of miles from home when he collapsed and almost got killed because he was crossing the road when he fell. An ambulance had taken him to hospital, and she never heard anything more about him until she had fallen deeply in love with Ruby and it she who had said how sad it was that Stephen was no more.

Ruby was a bright girl in the sixth form at school and she always wore the sort of clothes that she, Celandine, wasn’t allowed. Like shorts or other quite revealing stuff that allowed strangers to see how marvellous her legs were, which her late daddy had said would always be beautiful.

She fell out with Ruby, though, because Ruby went off to University and she was still too young. But Ruby had taught her a few vital things, like how to kiss really deeply and properly, and a few other personal joys involving poetry.

And the road had forked again. By the time it was the tenth anniversary of daddy’s death and she was perfectly capable of looking after herself, she left Aunt Bessie’s home to move in with the twins. They were identical boys, John and Jake, and she always struggled deciding which of the two she was talking to, and that was made particularly difficult because they insisted on dressing in identical clothes down to their occasionally displayed underwear, and found it comical if she called them by the wrong name, and they ended up having a dirty great bust up because of it, which sent her rushing blindly down another fork in her road.

And into the arms of David.

And for the first time she found herself with a completely wonderful human being because David was just that. The problem was he was too good to be true and when she suggested they went to bed together, that they slept as close as lovers sleep, he refused because he said he might be nineteen but she was still a child.

“And think of what people would say if we did what you want to do and you ended up getting pregnant?” he said.

“I don’t care what people say!” she retorted.

“But I do,” he said sternly, and she left him.

All that was before she took the first steps on the long, long road that had been her adult life.

In a whirlwind of almost lust and maybe love she settled in with Lenny,

Lenny was a teacher at the junior school she had gone to when Daddy had still been alive, and he was just about bearable in the same way as vegetarian sausages are just about bearable to a carnivore.

And the conversations, his moaning about kids today, the way he looked back fondly to the days of capital punishment and beatings once he retired and such things were irrelevant. But she was on his road with him, even when they went out to the theatre and boring plays.

“I thought Shakespeare was dead,” she said more tha once, and he merely snorted. This was their joint road, but he decided on direction.

And, boy, wasn’t that road long? With bumps and twists and turns all the way, and she ended up doing what her life had taught her might be the best way out of monotony.

She poisoned him and hung around until she was sure he was dead, then came to this seat, the one she was sitting on, waiting for someone, maybe a policeman or maybe a homicidal maniac, to show her where the next fork in the road might be. She rather hoped that it might be better than all the others because, at seventy, she suspected that didn’t have so long left to discover life.

© Peter Rogerson 12.09.24

xxx