Free Mystical Rose by Richard Scrimger

sticking out his tongue and glaring. I smiled up at him.
    Just a few hundred dollars more, said the estate agent. Please, ma’am.
    No, I said.
    Please, Mrs. Rolyoke.
    No.
    A sigh from beyond the veil that falls over me now and then. I can’t seem to push the veil aside, but sometimes I can hear the world through it.
    If you don’t eat you’ll feel really sick, and we wouldn’t want that.
    Now there’s a gap in the darkness, like a policeman with a flashlight looming out of the night. I can see my favourite nurse, the one with the tight grey hair and nobby nose, holding out a spoon full of whatever it is I’m supposed to be eating.
    Oh, hello, I say.
    Hello, Mrs. Rolyoke.
    What is that? I ask.
    Rice pudding.
    She’s kidding. I know what rice pudding looks like, and it isn’t that. Actually, there are two kinds of rice pudding and neither oneof them is that. My mama used to make rice pudding on top of the stove, thin gruel with milk and sugar and sometimes an egg for thickening. It tasted good, after cabbage — well, what wouldn’t? My daddy used to go off to the barn without finishing his pudding. Mama and I would huddle together over the table to share the rest of his bowl, a spoon for me and a spoon for her. Hers was bigger than mine.
    And there’s another way to make rice pudding, a grand and elegant one in the oven with raisins and currants and extra eggs and cinnamon on top. Sometimes Parker made it for Mr. Davey, the chauffeur, if he’d run an errand for her. I wonder if she’d have made it for him if he hadn’t run the errand. He shared with me, and I remember the feeling of wonder I had, all that cooked rich goodness. I tried to compliment Parker but she snorted and turned away.
    No, I say to my nurse. I turn away my head. Just like Parky, only my face isn’t red and I’m not filled with self-disgust. I like rice pudding, I say.
    Then try some.
    She doesn’t understand. What I mean is I like rice pudding and this isn’t rice pudding.
    Please, she says.
    I hate it when they beg. I make a no no motion with my head, back and forth, tick tock like a clock, back and forth.
    Robbie loved the house. He liked the neighbourhood, with all the houses close and friendly, and the front porches with people sitting out in the cool of the summer evening. He liked the smell of the lake and the hot pavement, and summer strangers walking by with picnics and beach umbrellas. In the winter he liked the quiet, theempty cold, the walls of ice piled up around the edge of the lake. But mostly he liked to walk around the block, smoking that ridiculous pipe he never got to draw properly, maybe pushing Harriet in her pram, smiling at the people he recognized, and then come home. His face would light up when he rounded any of the corners from which he could catch a glimpse of our house. Rosie’s house, he insisted on calling it. But he liked it too. Maybe he hadn’t ever had anything of his own either.
    Yes, the eaves hung unevenly, and the trough we put in didn’t attach properly, so that in a rainstorm you could look out on a solid wall of water rolling down off the sagging roof and into the shaded climbing garden at the back.
    Not much scope for flowers: a few yards of lawn in the back, even less in the front. I dug out the beds and planted — this was new for me — seeds and bulbs I’d bought. Cleaning out the basement I’d come across the book of Victorian flower language,
Love Letters from a Victorian Garden
, a thin foxed volume smelling of brickdust and rot, with a picture of motherwort on the cover. I found out that motherwort means
concealed love
— a powerful idea. I read the book over and over again, the only book in my whole life I have read more than once, surprising in myself a silent but unmistakable thrill at an instinctive understanding of a strict, arbitrary, and severely limited form of communication. Flowers are silent too, and patient, and impossible to deflect from their appointed purpose. Easy to