The Summer Ghost
written by: Polly Oliver
Choking slowly with the heat and fast-growing weed, the pond exhaled stagnant breath into the stifling June evening, mingling with the white cloud of cow parsley clustered round its banks.
The miasma briefly lurched Isobel’s stomach as it reached the worn wooden bench where she sat. Her first Trimester fragility in the face of unexpected smells and tastes was still not quite past.
Beyond the pond, shadows thickened under the freakish leaves of a patch of Gunnera. The alien world appearance of the giant plants had always carried for her the hint of nightmare, and as she waited in the garden a little girl memory rose within her.
While a blackbird called out the approach of dusk from somewhere in the trees behind her, her mind was back under the unnaturally blue sky of a childhood day amidst Cornish gardens, one of a clutch of memories usually so beautiful and vibrant they sparkled like green and blue gems in the strange lake of recollection.
But not this one. On this day the greens were poisoned with menace, the blues too bright. She had worn her favourite pink broiderie Anglaise dress proudly, running too far from her sisters in a game of hide and seek, she had found herself amidst the Gunnera.
Thick fleshy stems wider than her arms shocked her with their spines. Umbrella-like leaves squeezed out the bright afternoon sunlight, shadows coalescing around her crouching feet.
Away from the sunlit mica-flash of the gravel paths and soft sweep of lawns, she could hear her sisters’ calls faintly, triumphant in the cool green dark of her hiding place.
She couldn’t recall how long it had taken for the panic to grip as she turned wildly between the hostile stems. Or the exact sequence of her younger sister’s crying, her mother’s angry words belying the fear in her huge eyes and pale face, and the silent car ride home.
But the luminous day was forever clouded by shame and fear and had sat still as a toad under subsequent events in her life, stirring slightly and sickly if prodded by something in the light or by the whiff of warm soil.
Or by a shadowed patch of Gunnera in a garden far in time and place from those of her childhood, where she waited for her husband ahead of one of a finite number of dates as a unit of two before, all being well, they became parents.
A flurry of feathers and claw-scratch as a single magpie made a sudden landing on a nearby bench, head cocked her way, perhaps in the hope of a dropped morsel. It startled her more than it should have. The drone of flies under the tree branches seemed closer, more intentional, and her skin felt prickly and tight.
Something dragged her gaze back sharply to the pond to the left of her vision; a mist forming over it now as the thick air finally began to cool. She could almost feel her pupils dilate, breath catching in her throat at the distinct flicker of movement in the darkening Gunnera.
Praying her husband’s evening class had already finished and that he was already on his way to this lost corner of the college grounds she rose slowly and edged towards the pond, eyes glued to the looming cluster of grotesque plants.
The noise and the flash of pink in the green-black at the heart of the towering plants were simultaneous. Sobbing, small frightened sobs, where the hem of a pink dress appeared then was gone again.
Hand on the imperceptible mound of her still-small belly, tears tickling her own cheeks, Isobel whispered across the water.
“It’s alright, you’ll be alright. We will be fine.”
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