This House of Cards Must Fall
by Aran Ward Sell
What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?
– Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Every Sunday morning, she walks with her mother to the gates of the church, but she does not go in.
She slips her hand from her mother's and, not pausing to watch the churchyard gate swing shut, the huge red door open, she continues on her walk.
Not many turnings until the streets grow narrow. You can tell the rough streets by the grubbier class of chewing gum in crevices. Adolescent invincible, she walks erect.
Shocked to see uptown assurance walking junkie pavements, grey men approach her. Careful not to touch, they press her close with invitations. Ever wanted to belong honey? Ever find yourself out of luck, just call, awright chick? Pushing strangely professional laminated business cards into her hands. She takes them smiling, no intention of ever calling, they will make a pretty collage in a scrapbook. Haloed she walks.
She knows where she is going.
The oddest place for a sweetshop or maybe not.
Window promising a golden age of childhood with old fashioned jars, glass and square behind a curlicued font announcing the name of a longdead proprietor EST'D 1882, humbugs bullseyes chocolatepillows. Speaking a Twentieth Century language to a girl born at the Millennium. Aniseedtwist sherbetfountain gobstopper. Gobstopper: what do the foreign words mean, child?
She steps inside and a bell chimes.
A friendly shopkeeper sees who it is and knows not to distract. She is portly, smiling, aproned, halfmoon glasses, hands dusted in sugar. The girl is slim, straight, yellow hair waistlong, dressed in sexed-down copies of adult fashions. She is drawn to certain jars. A carafe of sherbet with a long ornate spoon. A huge jar, unopened, brimful of suckable orange baubles. She halflooks at the shopkeeper for permission: a smile and a nod.
The girl begins to journey through the candies, taking samples here and handfuls there. Chocolates shaped like seashells and frogs are chewed in mouthfuls with juicy green sourworms. Caramelised petals dainty as daydreams are destroyed by the same sugarlusting molars which gnaw at dark twists of liquorice. Coconut mushrooms stand no chance. Acid-yellow boiled sweets purporting to taste of fruit get crunched before their time. The juices of different sugars run into each other, a sicklysweet stream into her gullet.
Bloating, approaching fullness, quieting, the girl walks to a door, furthest from the door she came in by. A dark door leading down.
Steps lead down into the cellar; every step.
Somehow the blackness here is less alien than the grey outside: there she must deflect and defend. Here she can combine, and welcome. Open her boundaries to osmoses of difference.
Each step down and forward and the girl is changed. She steps flickering through futures and back. Puberty flashes across her like strobe lighting. Breasts form and melt. Menopause and menstrue leave her legs sticky and her skin loose, suddenly tightened again as she steps forward again and is as she was before, precorrupt and taut as a drum. Childbirth spasms her abdomen: she shits mewling infants and they shatter.
Who could say whether her mind kaleidoscopes as her body now does? Who could dare to venture a guess? What immortal eye?
Her hair falls out and sprouts again, sprouts and falls like crops across years. Her face, that ballooncanvas stretched across her skull, takes on and loses the worrylines of womanhood. Her posture bends, flexes, straightens.
And she emerges from the flux reclothed in innocence. Do her blue eyes now carry indelibly the greying of experience? Does a postvirginal warmth now fecundise her form? No, puerile observer, no! There is none of this. She is a candleflame.
Through the black of the cellar she emerges into light. Her chosen environment is a clearing in an impenetrable wood of curling boughs. The clearing is tropical and humid, filled with bulbous roots and housesize flowers. Flooded with golden light and rich with snails and hummingbirds. Lazy summersounds chirruping the air.
The girl reclines on a stump and arranges herself in a series of postures. Hair flung back she reads an imaginary book. Fanning herself with a giant leaf she is a lady of leisure. Sitting primly she breaks off a mushroom from the fungal stump and she is Alice in a world of eatme. She is entertained. Her girlish laugh is genuine.
Time passes and she tires. Sun suffuses her skin. She thinks of where she is not.
And stands atop her podium, and cups her hands around her mouth to chant.
Who called up this garden?
Her voice: high, thin and strong.
The stump erupts, tearing itself from the ground, widening and growing, high as a stage at a stadium concert, a presidential inauguration. From roots and butterflies a crowd erupts, to chant back in tremendous unity: You did! You did!
She chants, on and again.
WHO called UP this GARDEN?
YOU did! YOU did!
WHO called UP this GARDEN?
YOU did! YOU did!
WHO called UP this GARDEN?
YOU did! YOU did!
Over and over and into a haze. Until dark crystallises around them and the massed crowd below her lights red flares and flaming torches. Searing light and heat. And still on and on chanting. Pulsing like a heart on a sugar rush.
WHO called UP this GARDEN?
YOU did! YOU did!
Exhaustion bites her sinews. Her young bones strain as the hours wear by. She grows hoarse, and so do the sweatsoaked, raving, fistpumping crowd. The chant abridges itself:
WHO?
YOU!
WHO?
YOU!
Finally dawn scratches the night, and her body gives out. The crowd melt back into branches and fungi. The stage subsides back into a stump. She lies across its surface in the lightening clearing. The forests around – were they ablaze? They are restored. Her sprawled body is now empty of artifice: it is simply asleep. She will wake, she hopes, in an incongruous downtown sweetshop, her lips still stinging with sherbet.
On the rotting pew, her mother clasps her hands and prays.
Artwork by Rebecca Brown.
©' The Treacle Well 2013