rare flower.
Rare Flower – a tribute to a treasured neighbor
by Susie Surtees
Beatrice Southall’s eyes are the colour of milky forget-me-nots. In her tender youth, did anyone, trembling with desire, gaze into them and call them limpid? Mr. Southall’s desire gave her a sulky pony-tailed daughter, whose irregular visits often end in a crescendo of shouting, a slammed front door, and car wheels slipping in angry spurts of roadside gravel as she makes a swift escape. As a parting gift, long ago, Mr. Southall creased Beatrice’s forehead with a deep diagonal gash between those lovely eyes when he struck her with an axe. Conversations with her are unpredictable as her altered brain builds one fanciful story on another. For almost two decades, from the year Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband’s penis, to the transit of Venus across the sun, we’ve slept alongside each other on the same street, four walls and a driveway apart, our bodies lying in the same direction, slumbering under the same stars.
I come across her lying on her stomach, parting the foot-high grass in her front yard, muttering curses at weeds. Or gazing lovingly at ladybirds on the lurid orange rose by her front verandah. And when they’re flowering in her garden, I find bunches of creamy freesias perfuming my doorstep. She leans at her half-opened front door, her thick dishwater-coloured stockings rolled down below her knees, an open bag of potato chips in her hand, surveying the neighbourhood for threats to the way she believes things should be. If anyone knocks at my door when I’m away, she’s there to tell me, or to leave a note. Every now and then, she reminds me we’re the only single women in the street. We need to watch out for each other; those cigarette butts by the gate could mean danger. She considers it her duty to call the police when she feels something’s amiss. And when it rains hard enough for her rusted galvanized-iron roof to leak, she prefers summoning a truck full of hulking uniformed men from the emergency services to calling a plumber.
Beatrice is as stately as a galleon and figurehead combined when she’s on the move. Her vast soft breasts – unfettered by a bra – part the air as she travels, and flow softly over her big belly like syrup over a sundae. I can picture the huge white cotton bloomers that stretch around that stomach – the ones I see filling with air and bobbing like balloons on her backyard line. In winter, her threadbare houndstooth overcoat – that in some places looks as if a hound has sunk its teeth in and enjoyed the tussle – is held fast by gasping brown buttons barely able to take the strain. Beneath rosy cheeks her neck is swaddled in several hand-knitted scarves, and on her forearm she carries a roomy beige handbag with the corners rubbed back to the natural leather and the gilt worn from the snap clasp. She glides up our hill with a certain majesty on her way to the movies, eventually dissolving below the horizon by degrees until all I see is the cream woollen tea cosy on her head, the little tasselled cord on top drawn tight and tied in a neat bow.
The latest class of VerbTribe just ended. This week, I will feature on 37days the writing of past VerbTribe members. These excerpts are in response to daily prompts the class provides, and I hope you will appreciate the voices of these writers. If you’re interested in becoming a VerbTribe member, go here for more information on the next class that begins January 3, 2013.
