“It’s just sitting in the garden,” mum says. She is looking out of the glass door to the line up of objects in the back garden. The garden wall is fully covered, and the actual brick only occasionally peeks through, shyly poking around the red robin planted years ago, supporting the shed that looks like someone spray-painted an old air-raid shelter to make it look natural. Whoever tried this did a bad job. The brown is the kind you find on a cartoonist’s colour picker, an over-saturated kind that only has a hint of wood. It is framed by white beams, also metal, yet incongruous to the corrugated shed. The apple tree, in full leaf, shades the shed’s sloped roof. Its boughs reach low, guiding the eye to the left corner, where mum looks now, towards a small house.
And she’s right. It is just sitting in the garden. It has been sitting in the garden since we moved here over a decade ago, when we packed it up and carted it in the back of a van from our old place to our new place. It’s covered by the rosemary, but that doesn’t stop the cats from laying on its rotting porch. The door is no longer yellow, and the windowsill is painted in flakes of magenta. I’m sure the false widows find it a lovely place to live.
I pour her tea. “Well, what do you expect it to do, walk around? You’re not Baba Yaga.” She laughs, politely. I once made a Notes app list of the quotes and in-jokes we have with each other, and this is one of them. I can tell her mind is preoccupied.
I join her in looking towards the house. “Is the easel still in there?” As a child, when I could still fit through the door, I’d have friends round to my Wendy house, after I’d enlisted my dad to scrape the ceiling’s cobwebs away. The thought of the little tea set, and the pastel pink and purple beanbags,and the chalkboard easel where we’d make up our own languages, the thought of all that sitting and waiting for me in the garden, shut away. There’s no other word for it — it frightens me. How much has it all rotted? There must be insects that live on the crumbs we dropped all that time ago. When was the last time I went in there? Because there must have been a last time. I never thought that there would be, perhaps. It was not momentous, no big goodbye. I can’t even conceptualise how old I must have been. Pictures of myself ages 5 to 12 are superimposed in the doorway. They flicker there like the end of a film spool.
“I think so,” she says. “I don’t think I ever threw it away.”
“The spiders must love it.” I place the mug in front of her, and her hands come to meet it, almost on instinct.
She drinks her tea, never once looking down at the mug. She keeps her eyes on the house. “But if we get rid of it, it’s going to look so bare, just a patch of blank earth.” It’s not just that, I want to say. It’s not just that it’ll be a blank piece of earth. There are, and I know it sounds silly, memories in those walls. Dad laid down all those carpet scraps so that we could stand in there without our shoes on. The ceiling beams, the ones that are almost caved in, contain the time my young cousin told me about her favourite TV shows and her playground crushes in there. Written on the floorboards are the fantasies I’d make with my best friend about us being old women, living in the same house, with matching tattoos and matching dogs. We’d never get married, because boys were yucky, and we’d giggle on the swings in our old age, just like always but with grey hair and more cake in our tummies. Is mum thinking the same as me? She must have these memories too, of looking at her daughter learn who she is, watching over her from the window by the sink. I want to ask her. Is this why you’ve taken so long to get rid of it? It’s falling apart, I want to say. Not even the memory of it being intact will be able to hold it together, not now. Things have changed, haven’t they.
“Yeah,” I say. I drink my tea.
[day 14 - a very happy two weeks! it’s been fun.]
— r <3