The Last Anniversary

‘They made me partner. It pays better than white-water rafting, and you don’t get so wet and cold.’

‘Well, congratulations partner-man.’

‘Thanks. Hey, I’ve got spare theatre tickets for Friday night if you’re interested?’

65

Oh my goodness.

My goodness me.

I think I could…

I think I will…

Cook? Sew? Have a bath?

Dance a jig?

Rose slowly, sinuously unfurls her hands above her head like a flamenco dancer. She feels gloriously pain-free. She has got back her light and free ten-year-old body. It’s all thanks to Rick the Gardener.

When was it? Of course, it was the Anniversary Night–months ago now–before all the business with the Kook and Grace’s allergic reaction, when Rose got chatting with Rick while he was preparing his fire-eating equipment. He’d admitted he got terrible stage-fright before he performed and that his hands shook all day thinking about it. He’d noticed Rose rubbing her back and asked if she was OK, and because he’d been so honest with her about his stage-fright, Rose told him that sometimes the pain of her rheumatoid arthritis was so bad she wanted to lie on the ground like a two-year-old and cry, and if she’d been an old dog it would have been kinder to take her out the back and shoot her. Rick said he knew just the thing to help the pain and took out a fat, neatly rolled cigarette from his jeans pocket, and Rose asked, ‘Is this an illegal drug?’ and Rick had answered, well, yes, sort of, but it was just marijuana and they let cancer patients smoke it, so why shouldn’t she? She had put it in her jacket pocket and forgotten all about it, until tonight, when she was watching TV and saw a fire-eater being interviewed, and all of a sudden she remembered and thought, Why not? It would be better than having another chocolate biscuit.

So she sat at her kitchen table and found a match and lit it up. At first it had made her cough and splutter and burned the back of her throat, but then she had got the hang of it again. She and Connie had both smoked for years, but they gave up, at Connie’s insistence, when the Surgeon-General released his findings on smoking causing lung cancer in the Seventies. ‘Throw them all out right now!’ Connie had said, marching over, brandishing the newspaper. Of course, Connie had been the one to get Rose smoking in the first place. Smoke, don’t smoke; sun-dried tomatoes are far too fashionable for us, sun-dried tomatoes add quite a nice touch to an omelette, sun-dried tomatoes are old hat; no you can’t tell your daughter that you’re her mother, not until she’s forty and doesn’t really need a mother any more and is too old to make you a home-made Mother’s Day card, no you can’t be mother-of-the-bride at your daughter’s wedding, no you can’t stand up at Nat’s funeral and tell everybody that he was the most wonderful son-in-law you could have hoped to have, no your granddaughters won’t ever call you Grandma, this is business now, Rose, this is serious, this is about money.

No you can’t tell the world that you’re a mother and a grandmother and a great-grandmother, because where would that leave Connie? Not the family matriarch, just an elderly childless old aunt.

Rose inhales deeply and watches the smoke curling from her nostrils like a dragon’s. She is ten years old and she is in big trouble from her mother, for something to do with Connie. ‘Don’t you know your big sister adored you from the moment you were born? She’d do anything for you! Anything!’ She is twenty-five years old and she has walked in on Connie crying in her kitchen–she says it’s because she’s chopping onions, but nobody cries so hard from chopping onions that their eyes are all swollen, and finally Connie says that she had been a few days late, and she’d allowed herself a glimmer of hope, so stupid of her. She hadn’t told anyone, not even Jimmy, and then this morning–well, she just had to bloody well accept it wasn’t going to happen, didn’t she, and for heaven’s sake, don’t just sit there, Rose, you may as well chop the carrots.

If it wasn’t for Connie they would have taken Enigma away and she would never have seen her again and there would have been no Laura and Margie, no Grace and Veronika and Thomas, no Lily, no Jake. No Sophie. No children holding their faces up to be painted. No money for beautiful fabric or Christmas presents for the children or a dishwasher that left the glasses sparkling.

Rose breathes in Rick’s lovely home-grown marijuana and feels a sweet melting sensation, as if she’s just bitten into a chocolate truffle, as if she is a chocolate truffle. What will she do now? All at once she knows exactly the right thing to do. She wants to paint. Not face-painting. She wants to paint a huge canvas of big brave splashes of gorgeous colour. Grace is right! What’s wrong with her? Why doesn’t she try some form of art other than face-painting?

She floats around the kitchen and finds her paint-kit. But where will she paint? Where is her easel? She must buy herself an easel! She and her beautiful great-granddaughter Grace will paint together, and while they paint she’ll tell her what she couldn’t tell her before. She’ll tell her to stop tying herself up in knots worrying about whether she loves Jake like a proper mother. She’ll say that she didn’t love Enigma like a proper mother either; she felt nothing at all, not a thing, but then one day it came–a rush of love so powerful, so raging and dangerous, it nearly swept her off her feet.

Rose sways slightly, remembering exactly how it had felt that day, how it had come from nowhere, flaring like a gas flame. She frowns and bites her lip. Of course, she won’t tell Grace what happened next. It was such a long time ago and she has never regretted it, not once, but still, she wouldn’t want to give Grace nightmares. Not like some of the nightmares Rose has had over the years that have left her weak and sweaty and sick in the stomach.

She looks down at the glimmering white tiles of her kitchen floor, paid for by the shadowy, mythical figures of Alice and Jack Munro, who also paid for the nice girl Kerrie to come and mop them once a fortnight. The perfect canvas!

She takes one of the cushions from the kitchen chairs and puts it down on the floor, so she can kneel on it without hurting her knees. Sensible, says Connie in her head. The paintbrush in her hand feels like it’s part of her body, an extra-long alien finger.

She begins to paint, tentatively at first and then wildly. Her paintbrush moving on its own. She lies down and puts the pillow under her stomach and uses it to sort of scoot across the floor as she paints. This is fun! Funny! She imagines her daughter’s face if she were to come in and see her now, lying on her kitchen floor, painting her memories. Enigma would say she had the Alzheimer’s for sure.