Anna Martin

Amaryllis

Day one

The bulb is in the soft, dark earth.

I planted it as per the instructions, lowered it like a sleeping baby into its bed and covered it over, a stump and a bald curve exposed and now slightly mouldy. For two weeks it slept.

Now the winter amaryllis is waking up and my sister has mentioned liking girls.

From the folds and creases of the stump, a plump green tongue emerges. It has poked its way out with a sharp tip. It is busy behind our backs, working on a slowness we don’t have a name for.

Day two

My sister watches it grow, my mother watches her. They have been like this since the day she came home from university. No one waits for anything anymore, Gran said.

I stay out of their way as they pretend to stay out of each other’s. They throw blankets over their words in rooms with doors clicked gently shut on the sneck, hissing and snapping under the light babble of Radio 4. Someone always leaves first. When I enter, the air in the kitchen is as bitter as the bulb.

At night I dream of strange houses with too many rooms, rooms that appear and disappear, rooms that are accessed through tight corridors that widen into vast spaces. Rooms that should not exist and that I should be scared of. But I am not scared, and through the windows our amaryllis watches on from behind its milky mask. In oak panelled halls I clamber through loose panels, in a barn I climb the beams to a secret hatch, in my mother’s kitchen a cupboard is not a cupboard, and behind the familiar orange pans is somewhere that feels like home.

Day three

Mother scans the fiction, damp against our cold walls, but if there is help here she cannot remember it as her eyes pass over the titles, her head tilted sharply on its side.

My sister bites her painted nails at the window, little flakes of red cling to her lips.

I will not say please, she says.

The amaryllis too leans towards the light, its tip bulging with secrets. Fresh green lashes open, but not enough. The shafts of sun await the velvet petals and the books watch it, heavy with forgotten knowing.

I speak to it when the room is quiet, encourage the lashes open with my little finger, peer in.

It will not be rushed.

Day four

I go to the library with mother, she pretends to be interested in True Crime and I want to use the internet.

Our Amaryllis belladonna may not, in fact, be an amaryllis at all. They are frequently mistaken, the article says, for something called a Hippeastrum. We will not know until it flowers.

In areas of its native habitat flowering tends to be suppressed until after bush fires, as dense overhead vegetation prevents growth. Strong winds shake loose the seeds, which fall to the ground and immediately start to germinate, aided by the first winter rains.

I print off the page and pocket it for my sister.

On the old beige computer next to me someone has left a browser open at a piece about a TV romance. Jen has fallen for her best-friend-since-childhood and kisses her over a pizza in her parents’ living room. The will-they-won’t-they is over.

I go and look for mother.

I can hear her mumbling in the next aisle as I round the corner where Modern History meets Biography. She is seated cross legged amongst small collapsed heaps of books.

I pick one up from where it lies face down on the sour smelling carpet. In Women’s Rights: A Practical Guide, my mother has learnt that it was not banned in Victorian times, the queen not having the imagination to find anything to ban. I raise an eyebrow in mother’s direction, and she shrugs and shakes her head; her hair is coming undone.

This won’t do, I say, and she laughs her little shoulder laugh, the first in three days. I help her up.

She toddles off vacantly, perhaps she’s seen too much. I pick each book up one at a time, close them and place on the shelf wherever there looks to be a gap. The librarian will have a job to do later, I regret. Someone else picking up this mess, someone who knows what order things go in.

Day five

They take it in turns to stand at the back fence looking across the fields. The chickens peck away from both of them, hopping slightly, unsettled. My sister kicks the old flower pots in her path and mother rips scraps of sheep wool from the barbs in the wire. In the evening a cow comes to lick my sister’s hand and she lingers, wiping tears away with her sleeve. I think her heart is as big and heavy as the cow’s head.

When she comes back in she does not take her boots off, instead stomping clods of damp garden through the kitchen and up the cream carpet. Her door slams, something unbreakable is thrown against a wall.

Day six

It leans, top heavy. The pot tips. Earth spills in crumbs, unidentified white nuggets roll. Kitchen towel is enough, this time. I spread newspaper on the floor and use the big spoons from the bottom drawer. The news is old and boring, the pictures scattered with dirt. Its new pot is heavy, deep-bellied and cracked once from a frost. I pat the earth down once more and watch the water sink patiently into oblivion. Mother stares at it angrily before leaving the room. There are not the right conditions here, she says.

Day seven

Mother has sprayed the stair carpet with foam and we are not to touch it for an hour. My sister is trapped upstairs.

More than usual I have imagined, perhaps mouthed, conversations as I go about my day. I squat beside the amaryllis and stare into its hidden face.

Are you lonely? I ask it, silently.
Are you a bit disappointed?
Do you want children?
What do you actually, you know, do?

It does not have any answers for me.

Day eight

We are waiting, Gran, but the promise of a flower dozes in the opalescent womb. Its skin is satin and tracked like a walnut. It smells new and green, as in not-of-this-world. My sister has taken it to the sitting room and put it in the window next to the piano. This morning we played Chopsticks together to entertain it out of itself and whilst I can’t be sure, I think mother listened from the landing.

Day nine

It is morning, but only just, and I hear her dragging it out through the kitchen door, the terracotta pot scraping the tiles of the porch.

In her room her bed is thrown off and warm in the creases. Books are stacked neatly on the floor. Her jacket is folded small next to her white trainers in the corner of the room. There will be spiders in there by now, I’m not sure that she has realised.

I watch from the window.

Like a cow tugging on a rope, she pulls it backwards across the wet lawn. It is too heavy to carry for this journey, and too light to explain the look in her eyes.

At the fence she lifts her leg and flattens the wire with her rubber boots, without fear of the barbs.

She drags it over the trampled boundary, out into the wide-open field.

I will wait.

If she comes back her hems will be wet with dew and her fingers sticky and heavy with earth.

Anna Martin is based in Oxford, where she is studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University and working in community development with a local arts charity.