Lost The grass cuts when I brush too close. Tall stands of it. And a brilliant yellow pea I recognise uselessly as senna. And if there was a path, it’s petered out now, leaving the ground littered with little rocks. A likely place for snakes. The hill in the distance ought to be [...]
Tannery Bungalow What must our mother have made of it? After Wood Farm and the outside privy where the door didn’t shut. That white mansion with its cupolas – their finials and quatrefoils – like bells perched on the roof to summon the servants, its sweep of steps to the veranda flanked by [...]
Arriving in Chennai What am I doing in a hotel where soup is poured from a teapot and the houseboy flattens himself against the wall to let me pass? Fifteen floors below the sea-view infinity pool and potted frangipanis lie piles of rubble, paving stones rearing skywards like graves shattered at the Last [...]
The Birth Of The Owl Butterflies They hung in our kitchen for days, a row of brown lanterns that threw no light, merely darkened with their growing load. Pinned to a shelf among the knick-knacks and the cookery books; ripening in the radiator’s heat: six Central American Caligo chrysalids, five thousand miles from their [...]
By Heart Because we’re running out of time for you to talk and me to listen, I want to get things straight – to know which brood of Holly Blue feeds on ivy, spring or summer, and what distinguishes the Gatekeeper from the Meadow Brown, at twenty feet. To hear you talk of flight [...]
Waking In A Strange RoomIt’s as if a dome of glass were perched above the city, and high up there the swifts were searching for an exit, their cries defining the fixity of space –the way that slab of morning sunlight on the floor defines the heat outdoors, while through the window red geraniums [...]
Metamorphosis First came a taste for meat and odd bursts of irritation like an itch along her spine. Then she lost the urge to speak. She’d curl up in the back room, whole days at a time, and at night she’d sleep-walk through the house, nudging at the windows and the doors, lifting her [...]
Blade Some vegetables resist more vigorously than others. To vary things, she plays at cutting herringbones and ovals, teasing the skin with her point before penetrating the heart, pictures a fingertip nestling among peelings on the spattered board, and, for the luxury of granting him a reprieve perhaps, imagines stepping to where her husband [...]
Scarlet Tiger We’d have killed it if we’d had the courage – to crush a body this bloated or stamp on wings like shrivelled walnuts. Was it a mutant? Too slow to break free and make for the open? It scuttled out of the leaves and frass, climbed our stick and hung there. Like [...]
The White Garden I’m going to rip out the iceberg roses, the rocket whose sweetness, after dark, attracts the moths, the Madonna lilies and myrtle and pale bleeding hearts; inject the heat of marigolds and blowsy orange poppies and plant that rose as black as a woman’s blood before it flows. I’ll call a [...]
