The Disestablishment of Paradise (71 page)

Read The Disestablishment of Paradise Online

Authors: Phillip Mann

How the Valentine Lily Got Its Name

Once upon a time, a long time ago, before I was born, there lived in the small town of New Syracuse, on the planet called Paradise, two families named the O’Dwyers and
the Pescattis, and though their gardens shared a common river that flowed between them at the bottom of their gardens, they hated one another like fire hates water. If Mrs Pescatti put the washing
out, Mrs O’Dwyer lit a bonfire and the smoke always dirtied the washing because she burned sooty things and fanned the smoke with her apron. If Mr O’Dwyer was sitting down to watch a
tri-vid of a distant conflagration, for such was his passion, Mr Pescatti would start his lawn mower with the faulty coil and mow the patch of brevet he called a lawn until there was no plant left,
and he would not stop even though the sun went down until Mr O’Dwyer had come to his door in a rage and shouted across the ravine which separated them.

Now the O’Dwyers had a son called Valentine, a tall handsome dark-haired lad much fancied by the girls of the town, who would hang out their washing in the rain just to catch a glance of
him. But he had no eyes for them. He looked for and sighed for and stiff-ached for Francesca Pescatti, the only daughter of Mr and Mrs Pescatti. And she, Francesca, beautiful as dawn, with skin
like the white Crispin lily which grows in the cold plains of Ball, and hair that was golden and curly like maid o’ the lake, and full-breasted too, like her mother (but firm and tight, not
slack and slouched, so that her mother had to keep adding darts and pleats to keep her decent) she moist-ached for Valentine.

Valentine and Francesca grew up like poppies in a coil of barbed wire. When they were little – I mean younger than me, about your age, Jemima – Francesca would put on a white dress,
for she loved wearing white, and then she would slip through the loose fence board near the garden shed, hidden behind the family blue waltzer, which is, as you know, the protector of the good, and
run down to join Valentine. He had come crawling through the hole he had cut in the Machiavelli nettle, which is, as you know, the protector of freedom, which he had lined with tin sheet so he
didn’t get stung. They would meet at the little bridge which crossed the stream which separated their houses and play quietly. They floated boats of hybla under the bridge and pretended to
cook meals on a campfire. They didn’t play mothers and fathers as that didn’t seem much fun. But when the jenny bobbed up to feed, Francesca would put her finger to her lips and whisper
she had to go home, and they would arrange the next time they were to meet. Once Valentine kissed her quickly, and she said she would tell, but the only person she told was the big blue waltzer,
and he wasn’t telling anyone. But her mother would catch her when she got home and say why was she wearing a white dress to play near the dirty back shed. And Mrs Pescatti would have to wash
it, and no sooner was it pegged on the line when out would come Mrs O’Dwyer with her matches, like a smelly one after monkey nuts.

But they grew up, Francesca and Valentine, and the day came when she could no longer get through the fence and he had trouble with his tunnel. And besides, boat races and pretend cooking had
lost their tang, so what were they to do? They didn’t know it, Jemima, but they had fallen in love, like you will one day, and love is like a Rex with her fanny up – she always finds
her mate.

Now there was in the town of New Syracuse a woman who had a shop where you could buy everything from pens and pins to prayer books and potions. So Francesca would hide her mother’s prayer
book and Valentine would hide his father’s pencil – and they would be sent down to Mrs Lorentz’s shop for replacements. And she looked on them fondly, for she remembered what it
was like to be young and let them sit in her back parlour, face to face, knee to knee, holding hands and hurting for something they could not name. See, they had never been told what bodies are
for, and they could not read very well so they couldn’t go to the library and get a book about bodies. And they didn’t have a nice big Auntie Sasha to tell them. Course, they knew that
if they touched themselves in certain ways it was very nice and made them feel alive and drowsy at the same time. So they sat there aching and then they got to peck-kissing, and then they got to
touching and then Mrs Lorentz threw them out because she had to shut up shop.

One day when Valentine was sixteen and Francesca was just fifteen, he said to her, ‘Meet me at your blue waltzer tonight after the streets lights are out.’

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I’ll be in bed.’

‘Well, get out of bed when you hear your dad snore. Come down the stairs and don’t slam the door.’

She told herself she wouldn’t, but when the street lights of New Syracuse went out she was out of bed in a flash. There was no sound in the house but the snoring of her dad as she tiptoed
down the stairs and outside into the sweet night air.

Yes they had stairs in their house, not like ours, and I don’t know why they had street lights, Jemima. Perhaps so that people could read on their way home from the library. Now hush and
listen, because this is interesting.

She tiptoed down to the bottom of the garden and went behind the blue waltzer, which was a big tree by now, and Mr Pescatti was thinking of cutting it down so he could see when Mr O’Dwyer
was watching a tri-vid. Francesca looked and looked, but there was no one there. Then she heard a sound like
mee mee
– the sound a swing rope makes when first you swing on it –
and she climbed up on the old fence and peeped over and there she saw something very strange. Four of the big red fly-by-night balloons were coming towards her, and dangling under them was
Valentine, pulling for his life along a cord and getting closer. You see, earlier that day he had come over and attached a line to the fence to guide him. And he had practised for some time to see
how many fly-by-nights he would need to float in the air and he found that four would carry him easily.

He climbed down at the fence. Tied his balloons to a piece of wire he’d fashioned earlier. Climbed through the fence because he’d already put one of the palings on a hinge so he
could get in and out quickly. They were in one another’s arms in a minute like that drawing I showed you by Mr Sergel where the lovers are eating one another! And then the two of them were in
the shed. And she was only in her nightie. And then she wasn’t.

What happened that night I do not know. Well, not exactly. And even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you, Jemima. Not yet anyway. But soon there came the dawn. Night’s candles were all
burned out and sunrise turned the misty mountain tops to gold.

She ran to her bedroom and stood at her casement and waved as he pulled himself over the dark ravine. The balloons he rode on were red as the blood that she found on her nightie and washed out
herself with pride, her mother never knowing.

That day she offered to clean out the shed and her father approved. She made improvements. Sharp things were hidden. A couple of cushions from the summer house made a big difference. A couple of
plums picked at dawn set in a bowl. Clean water in a jug. A candle down low. Her father approved. ‘I can come here when your mother is in one of her moodies,’ he said. ‘And get
some calypso in, girl, and it’ll be shining.’

Valentine came the next night, and the next and the next, until soon his garden was running out of the big red fly-by-night poppies and he had to steal from the neighbours. But their love grew
with every touch and sigh, and soon they became bolder. He came to her earlier and left later. They felt like gods in their fortune.

And then one night, Mr Pescatti coming home late, smelling of beer and perfume, heard strange sounds in the shed while he was smoking his last pipe of calypso in the garden and relieving himself
into the honeysuckle. He knew those sounds, heard his daughter sigh, saw the balloons, heard her love cry, went into the house and got down his gun, preparing to shoot the O’Dwyer son.

But he was cunning too, as well as mean. He sat up all night in the garden, and when the dawn, in russet mantle clad, touched the misty mountain tops, he saw the young man kiss his fair
Francesca, long and lingering, one hand on her breast and the other above holding the balloon tether. Then Valentine swung away and pulled himself along his line.

Mr Pescatti hid until the girl was in her room and the boy was waving kisses from above the dark ravine, and then he shot him. Not him. He shot the balloons. One. Two. Three. Four. And the boy
fell down into the stream and lay still among the rushes.

Francesca looked down from her window and she heard her father laugh and saw his bald head below, pale as a graveyard mushroom. She took the big Bible, the one she was given when she was eleven
after her first bleeding, the one with the wooden covers and the big crucifix, and she threw it down from the window as hard as she could and she sconed him.

Then she ran into the garden, down to the fence, out through the hinged paling and down the path into the ravine. Behind her was confusion. The neighbours came running. Men in pyjamas. Women in
nighties. They found the man stunned, the Bible, the gun and Mrs Pescatti crying that her daughter had gone from her bed and run away. No one knew what to think but they looked to one another in
the knowing way that grown-up people do when they don’t want to say what they think but want you to know that they are thinking it. They did not think, however, to go looking behind the wise
old waltzer or down in the muddy ravine.

Francesca had found her Valentine. He was not dead but wounded. She plucked down osiers and wove a willow platform and placed him on it. She sang cantons, whatever they are, to the wanton air,
whatever that is. And then she gathered nine fly-by-night balloons from a secret place she knew. Four for the head. Four for the feet and one for luck. She tethered them, and she lay down beside
her Valentine. They folded together like hands at prayer, and she cast off.

They floated up from the dark valley and into the bright morning sunlight. The neighbours looked in astonishment and pointed. People came out onto their balconies and saw the bright red balloons
of the fly-by-night as they lifted high above the town. Dogs barked and children rubbed their eyes and stared up from their windows in wonder. And all the lovers of the town rang their bells
lustily, laughed aloud and fell upon one another.

The willow bed went higher. It drifted out over the sea like a small cloud, and then over the horizon like a lone bird, and was gone. Francesca and Valentine went to their own place, you see, a
bay not far from here. And when they got there, they put down, built a house and lived happily ever after. And she had lots of babies and he wrote her lots of poems and made her laugh.

And as for the families, the O’Dwyers and the Pescattis, they took their fences down and became friends. They even built a bridge between their gardens. They had learned their lesson, you
see. They had both lost children, and that is a terrible thing for a parent. They left the wise old blue waltzer alone and the pull-line in place and the hinged paling so that they never would
forget the time Francesca saved her Valentine.

And that is why the fly-by-night is now called the Valentine lily, why the dashing silver stream that runs through New Syracuse is called the Valentine River and why every year, on the
anniversary of that day, lovers of all ages write messages on hybla leaves to the one they love, tie them to Valentine poppies and send them up into the sky.

And you can do that too, Jemima, when you get a bit older.

Sleep now.

End

For a solution to the 12-ball problem on page 341, please visit www.phillipmann.co.nz, where you will also find more information relating to Paradise.

Endnotes

1
. This is the plum referred to by Professor Israel Shapiro in Document 5, the plum he left to Hera in his will.

2
. See Document 6.

3
. See Document 6.

4
. Thomas Babbington Macaulay, ‘Horatius’, verse 27.

5
. See Document 7.

6
. See Document 11.

7
. See Document 5.

8
. Hera is referring to Sasha Malik, ‘If You Go Down to the Woods Today . . .’ here published as Document 8. She may also be thinking
of the strange lines that Malik wrote at the end of her short love story ‘Getting Your Man’ (Document 2).

9
. See Document 12.

10
. For further information on Professor Shapiro and his addiction to the Paradise plum, see Document 5.

11
. See Document 2.

12
. Evidence of conflicting attitudes to the Michelangelo-Reaper can be found in Documents 2, 8, 9 and 10.

13
. See Document 6.

14
. See Document 11.

15
. Hera is referring to ‘Shunting a Rex’. See Document 6.

16
. Sasha Malik in ‘If You Go Down to the Woods Today . . .’ (Document 8) gives a humorous account of this kind of event.

17
. See Document 12.

18
. Waltzer or blue waltzer was the original name of the plant which later became known as the Tattersall weed.

19
.
Rex
was the early name for the
Dendron peripatetica
.

20
. The solar powered utility tractor used on all farms.