Through the flower

Abstract

When Lucas was a little boy his mother would take him, every Thursday, to his Grandfather's house in St. Leonards. He would stay all of Thursday and be picked up early on Friday morning from the blue-yellow garden where they ate breakfast with the blackbird. The sun would just be picking edges off the flowers when she came. Grandfather would pause in the middle of a bite of burnt toast. He would put his newspaper down on the marble table and prick up his ears. Grandfather's ears never made a mistake: there was his mother, click-clacking up the path. Lucas thought his earliest memory was of Grandfather's garden. So he had a date: the first memory was on a Thursday. There were the flowers, the great blue flowers looking like the scrubby thing the cleaning-lady washed the bath with. They had a dreadful name which he had to ask Grandfather for over and over again because he could never remember it. Hydrangea. The roses were easier. The pink one outside Lucas's window was Constant Spy because it was always peering in at him and nodding. The blood-coloured rose which climbed up over the trellis was Blackboy, which reminded him of the stories about boys climbing up chimneys to clean them. Then there was his favourite rose: a bush with little knotty flowers which grew over the fence. His grandfather called this one Rambling Rectum.