Nursery – by Nicola Redhouse
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She grows the tomatoes by accident. Something alchemic in the compost. She has a few weeks where she feels almost maternal toward them, as each flower gives way to a tiny green bauble.
A man on the radio says this year a small average temperature drop has reduced a certain quality needed to turn tomatoes red. She cannot remember the details. She is neither a gardener nor a chemist, though she works in a nursery. She listens to this show, a gardening show, because she likes how the host rolls his rrrrs: says rrrhododendrrrhon, starrflowerr. She knows now that starflowers are a north American perennial.
On the news there is a report that people, civil servants in a hotel in Cuba, have been attacked by some sort of wave. Electric waves. Micro waves. (She is not a physicist, either.) These people are now tormented by a high-pitched noise, headaches. It has been months. They may be spies, the papers are saying.
***
The urge to make something is there every day, despite. Your heart will break, her mother told her, a thousand times in your life, and you won’t even know it. She wonders if this is one of the thousand, or if there have been others she has not known. Perhaps she is reaching the nine-hundreds already. But her mother did not say if a thousand is the end of the heartbreaks or the end of your life.
***
The years have gone quickly. She has a job in a fish-and-chip shop. She has lived out of home for a year. She has a job in a shoe shop. She has lived by the tram tracks too long. Now near the river she can’t sleep without the thunk thunk and the electric whip of the tram line connecting. The vaults are shooting through. She is like a bat, she thinks. One day she will stupidly or blindly or without knowing put each foot on a different wire.
Now she is twenty. Now she is thirty. Married and pregnant. Then pregnant again. Now, out in a double-brick by the same river, upstream, closer to the vineyards, she is forty. Divorced.
She has the two children and though they have thick hair and clear eyes full of health she breaks them too, frequently. The older one, a girl, won’t go to school most days. The younger one, a boy, talks about horror movies all the time. She doesn’t know how he knows about them. Maybe his father lets him watch them. Mothers break their children, though it is the thing they most want not to do. She walks one night for air, for exercise, and takes a shortcut down a lane. A mother on the other side of a high wooden fence is yelling at her child: ‘You are a trouble-maker! And God punishes trouble-makers! He will punish you with children worse than you!’
***
After the shoe shop and the fish-and-chip shop and then babies and a long string of jobs so brief she barely recalls them, she finds herself at a nursery. Along with natives and vegetables it stocks outrageous kitsch; objects unintentionally comic, almost always profoundly useless except in unexpected ways. She considers, for example, the wrought-iron motivational quotes: obvious contenders for murder weapons. She comes close to testing this, particularly with customers who disobey the clear signage about masks or who crane their heads around the Perspex at the register to speak to her.
Tuesdays to Fridays she is here, answering questions from people who aspire to lives of rural charm, who think a vegetable patch in an urban courtyard will neutralise the corrosion of their screen-bound lives but have no idea how to graft a tree. People who kill cacti with too much water. She is not like them. She wants to know what to do with plants; she is trying to learn.
Sometimes she can feel a turn coming. Recklessness, bad luck, an itch that moves, infuriating and without relief. This time she only knows this: summer is nearly here again and if it all burns to a crisp she will be relieved.
***
When the children go to stay with their father she watches true crime. She is, oddly, soothed by shows about serial killers. They remind her that people are capable of doing terrible things while appearing completely normal. This makes her feel better about choosing bad men. Men with whom she pictures herself coming alive, but who end up being unable to show love or unable to use words or unable to be truthful.
Men who burden her with their needs, and whom she, being someone who likes to make other people happy, ends up trying to please. The man who came over for coffee when the kids had gone to bed, excused himself, and returned from his car with an old television and a VCR player into which he slotted 1970s porn. She’d asked him to leave, but not before wrapping him a piece of the kugelhupf she had bought for the evening. And she had apologised to him as he lurched off with the slice balanced atop the TV unit – ‘Sorry,’ she’d said. Sorry. As though there were something wrong with her for not wanting to take in an evening of vintage grunting and heaving beside a complete stranger in her own house while her children slept nearby.
Her children’s father, with his strange beliefs about disease and health and water and animals, mass production and cement and beaches and almost everything, occasionally seems steady among this kind of thing.
***
But the waves. The micro waves. Air. What could move in it unseen; that masks could prevent illness, some better than others. She can’t stop wondering about the people in Cuba. And about what came together to give rise to the tomatoes. In South Korea they were now making masks that covered only the nose. Kosks. People liked them for restaurants, where they could keep their noses protected while eating. What you could will into safety, what you could cleanse and sterilise with only thought, amazed her. Like children who have not yet developed object permanence: if the nose is covered the mouth does not exist.
***
One man she fell in love with. He lived in another city. They met once in a while at the airport hotel when he travelled for work. He wouldn’t go further than the airport hotel, where he conducted meetings with business associates in the foyer. Sometimes she would arrive early and watch him in his meetings, watch his mouth move, just for extra time with him. She saw a card once that said: ‘If you don’t love yourself you can’t love someone else. Finding someone who loves themselves is the biggest act of self-love.’ She found that so confusing. Did she love herself? Did he love himself? Should she love him more than she loved herself? Did he even love her at all?
She found out soon enough – no, he did not love her. Not enough, not at all. He told her this while she was face down on the quilted hotel bedspread, held by his knees on either side of her. ‘Sorry,’ she’d said, as the door to the hotel room sucked closed behind her. Sorry.
The figs on the trees start to give off a pungent smell. She can walk at night and smell a fig tree from metres away. Again, she thinks of growing something, making something. She remembers that destroying or removing is making, too. When she cuts the children’s nails – they grow so fast, like travelators spooling endlessly from the cuticle – she keeps the moon shards. She makes a ghastly thing with them, a matchbox coated in nail clippings, painted over with gold. The nails make a texture like scales. It is, in fact, quite beautiful, she thinks. She stores it in her bedside drawer, over the years keeping their lost teeth in it.
***
‘What are you doing?’ her friend Sylvia asks. She is out in the backyard, holding the phone between her shoulder and her ear. It is a Monday, her day off, and the children are at school. Those days she calls all her friends. Sometimes she has the same conversation, over and over again: the children, school, thank god no more lockdown, where to get lightweight masks, how’s work, god it’s hot—
‘I’m gardening,’ she tells Sylvia. ‘I am getting so good at gardening.’
‘What are you growing?’ Sylvia asks.
‘Oh—nothing yet,’ she says (the tomatoes don’t count; they were an accident). ‘I’ve just been pulling out weeds.’
Sylvia laughs.
***
They flood cranberry bogs with water to harvest the berry. She watches a documentary about this. The berries are dislodged by a giant stirring machine and float to the surface. Mangoes can spray a corrosive liquid when picked. Sometimes mango-pickers end up with rashes and sores from the acid. She watches a documentary about this, too. Kiwifruits grow on vines. You need one male vine for every eight female vines. This she learns on Wikipedia.
There is so much harm and good and waste and effort you can put to it all.
***
Maybe it is the pandemic or the zeitgeist or maybe she is alert to it but everyone seems to be interested in heartbreak. She watches a morning television interview with a woman who has written a whole book investigating why heartbreak feels bad: this woman has spoken to neuroscientists and concluded that it comes down to dopamine and attachment. In a magazine she finds in the nursery tea-room, another woman – always women writing articles and books on heartbreak – looks at the social psychology of it. This woman says the feelings tell us it is bad not to mate; that it is in our best interests to stick with a partner.
What do the feelings tell me, what do the feelings tell me, she asks herself in the mornings when the pain is greatest. It is in her throat, the pain. She listens to a meditation that asks her to stay with the feelings. She stays. The meditation asks her to conceive of the feelings as images. What do they look like? She sees a golem in a book from her childhood, ranunculus flowers growing wild, their hairy stems gnarling around each other, a cartoon panda bear, the face of a man she has never seen, pasted together like an identikit, confetti, roadkill. It makes no sense.
***
Reports on the people in Cuba say some are experiencing insomnia, headaches, nosebleeds, problems understanding what is communicated to them, speech, visual and balance disturbances, feelings of pressure or vibration. Even brain swelling.
Some of them have made recordings of what they say are the sonic attacks. Biologists have studied the recordings and concluded the noise is the calling song of the Indies short-tailed cricket. An entomologist interviewed on the news says: ‘This is not a case of terrorism but of lovelorn suffering.’
***
How can an insect call cause a brain to swell? In French, the way you tell someone you miss them is to say Tu me manque. You are lacking to me. In this way heartbreak is a physical amputation, she supposes. She supposes the remnants of the limb become useful again somehow. She supposes the missing goes somewhere. Gravity, heat, light, infrared, pressure, ultrasound; all these things that act on the world invisibly. Never put a whole egg in its shell in the microwave, she recalls learning.
Going on the forensics, you’d say she murdered the tomatoes: each once-lustrous ball, exploded. The microwave causes the water molecules in food to vibrate and therefore heat up. The heat has to go somewhere. Sometimes the heat finds its way out a while after the food has been zapped. That’s why they say be careful of heating a cup of water – you can be badly burned by the delayed eruption.
What does it mean for a heart to break? It is a cliché. Her heart has nothing to do with feelings.
She wraps the tomato stalks in wax paper and puts them under a rock by the driveway. A burial.
The night the children return from their father’s house, she finds seeds stuck to the ceiling. ▼
Image: Patrix on Flickr
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