The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore (3 page)

I picture her walking into the lounge, seeing the tree in front of the French windows and having a final seizure on the spot. Night-night, sleep tight.

*

She stands over me at the kitchen door – Mum – tying the strings of a cotton sun hat under my chin, and it's a bright summer's morning. I feel her fingers working the bow, but pinching when she pulls it tighter.

“For goodness sake, hold still, child,” she says. And: “Now, don't you just look handsome in that.” She leans forward to plant a kiss, but the garden's a world of light and bird-song, and the world beckons.

Tottering down the path, I stomp through the shadow of a young almond tree, trying to splash it apart, and then jump from the path to the grass – hoppity-hop – to break into a dizzying run, round and round, discovering how to make the world spin faster, faster, faster, until tripping over the sun and landing in a heap with the world still spinning. Looking up and up and up – stretching up – and discovering a blue, hypnotic vastness that's the sky above. An ocean.

This garden is divided into a vegetable plot and a square carpet of lawn, with a border of plants and rocks between. Mum will always like masses of colour dancing together here: the yellow of jasmine spilling in cataracts over moss-softened stones, pools of pink and mauve aubretia swimming with bees, green fountains of gladioli spurting orange and red spears. It's forbidden to walk on the border – by my dad, my mother and, later, my step-father – but there's a short path of stepping-stones which steal a passage through the waves of leaves and stems and flowers, linking the land of lawn with the land of lettuces, marrows, potatoes, rhubarb.

If, as a toddler, this garden is paradise then it's a serpent-less Eden at that. And of the sprawling housing estate being built beyond the creosote-stinking fences, which border the garden's length and breadth, I don't have the faintest idea. It remains a flat world with walls.

My head still spinning, I'm scooped up and thrown into the air like a bird, then caught and perched on my dad's shoulders. Daniel Thomas Passmore. I can't see his face, only the top of his head, but I can feel the roughness and strength of his hands, and can smell the sweetness of tobacco in his clothes and hair.

He sets me down on a patch of lawn and then he's gone again.

Dad.

The arms of the honeysuckle stretch along the trellis, tying it in knots, and it's laden with clusters of knotted red berries, which I begin to pluck and squeeze between my fingers – the colour of thin blood – before wiping their stickiness across the grass. Knowing they must be delicious, I long to plant a cluster in my mouth, but daren't.

Next to the honeysuckle, a cluster of crimson pæony drowse languorously. There's a richness to their colour, texture and scent which I'll always find sensuous, and their languorousness and sensuousness will one future day put me in mind of the sexuality of beautiful women. Some petals, already dropped, lay wilting on the soil; other stems are expectantly heavy with tight balls of bloom bursting to unfurl and deliver their display. Each pregnant ball is a tight furl of unbloomed secret, and I begin prising with clumsy, untrained fingers to unravel the buried passage and core of one flower. When it rips, I move to an open blossom and am about to bring it to my mouth when several petals of the fleshy velvet fall at my touch. Broken that easily.

Startled and guilt-ridden, I retrieve the petals, then bring them to my mouth and bite with my front teeth, but the scent's too strong, so I tear each of the fallen petals into strips and bury the evidence of this dissection in a hollow of dirt I've scooped out. This will become my first remembered experience of sensuality and brutality; my first experience of death, guilt, burial.

Playing with the crumbs of dry soil, it's amazing that such juicy berries and soft, crimson wafers and giant honey-suckled beanstalks can be created from dirt and fed by it. I stroke my fingers through the dust and lumps – ploughing, then harrowing the soil into a new dusty fineness – then pick up a chocolate-sized crumb, sniff it, and pop it in my mouth.

Yuk! I spit and dribble the grit from between my teeth, rubbing my lips and tongue with the fingers of a dirty hand. Cheated, but wise enough to keep quiet about it, I run inside to the kitchen, where Mum's baking a cake. I wait at her side, tugging her apron, urgent to lick the mixing bowl.

“Wash those grubby hands first,” she says, not knowing where my mouth has already been.

THREE

My dad was in glass, as they say, but got smashed when I was seven. He turned sand into glass, white light into a rainbow of colours, but was careless with himself.

My mother won't tell me what his job at the glass factory involved. It's one of the subjects she won't allow to be broached. As a teenager though, I'll discover several books stacked in a dark corner of the attic, which she's somehow failed to find and throw away, and I'll guess from a couple of these that he worked in the accounts department, balancing figures, income and outcome, positives and negatives, black ink and red. But he could've been a draughtsman or a glassblower. My dad could've been anything.

There's the time he gives me a glass prism, when we spend the whole evening shining a torch beam through it at different angles, creating spectrums of colour out the other side and doing experiments. And there's the time I think of as Our Best Day Ever, shortly before the day of his dying.

It's a Saturday morning and we're sitting at the kitchen table. There's a loose edge of veneer at one corner of the table, and it's my habit to pick at this with a thumb nail. The breakfast dishes are on the draining board, and Mum's standing to one side of the small kitchen, slightly separate to the scene, but smiling.

“Come on, Tommo,” he says, “it's that time of year. Sling your coat and hat on. We'll walk down the village. You can help me choose our Christmas tree this year.” And he unhooks my black duffle-coat from where it hangs and drapes it over my head.

The previous night's frost hasn't thawed, and my fingers and toes, my ears and my nose, ache with the sharp cold as I run to keep up with him – stride, stride, stride – but it doesn't matter. Two of my steps to one of his.

There's a crowd at the greengrocery and the floor is damp and dirty. As Mr Hall scoops Brussels sprouts and carrots, or tosses King Edwards onto the scales, his breath creates foggy clouds and his bulbous red nose has a drip on the end. Dad sorts the stack of Christmas trees – Norway spruce,
Picea
abies
– and pretends to seek my advice.

“We should get one with roots and a clump of soil on, Tommo, do you reckon? It'll last longer.”

“Yes,” I tell him, and make a show of examining and rejecting the trees he's passed over. There's the slish of tyres on the salted Main Road and the grumble of motors caught behind the town bus.

“It wants to have a good shape. Not one of those spindly things. One that's a bit taller than you, I guess. Can you see one, Tommo?”

And I point to the one he's holding apart from the rest, which he hasn't yet appeared to properly notice.

“That one,” I say.

“This one?”

“Yes.”

He lifts it off the ground, turns it round, inspects it from several angles. “I think you're right. Yes, he'll do brilliantly. Excellent choice. I'm glad you came. You know a good tree when you see one, that's for sure. We'll have to get you on this job every year.”

It may be a day of icy coldness, but the sun is bright.

Back home, we find a bucket and place a couple of clean half-bricks at the bottom, to stop the tree from toppling. The soil in the vegetable garden is frozen and, though Dad hacks at it until he's red in the face, he only manages to chip away a few crumbs and to bend one of the fork tines. He rolls a thin cigarette and lights it, and I hold onto the fork for him. I'd hold his pouch of tobacco too if he let me, and secretly sniff at its snug, honeyed aroma.

“There's not much joy in this,” he says, letting smoke drift out his mouth with his words. “We'll never fill the bucket at this rate. We could boil a couple of pans of water, I expect, to thaw it out,” but then he remembers a bag of sand stored next to the dustbin.

Together we carry the tree through to the lounge and place it in front of the French windows. He helps me decorate the bucket with red crêpe paper and the picture of Father Christmas I'd painted at school.

“That'll do,” he says. “Now for the real fun.”

From upstairs he fetches a large box of decorations and initiates me in the ritual of dressing the tree. First he strings the lights, spiralling them between the layers of branches, working from the tree's tip to its base; he plugs the lights in, switches them on, isn't disappointed when they don't illuminate, but fiddles with each tiny, coloured globe – twisting, tightening them in his large fingers – until they all light up. Then he introduces me to the baubles and the birds. There are about twenty glass spheres to hang – some gold, some blue, some green, some pink, but mainly silver – and half a dozen birds to clip on.

“These are very old,” he says, holding one of the glass birds and brushing a finger along the fine bristles that represent tail feathers. “I'll put these on. They belonged to Granny Potts – my grandma, your great-grandma.”

And when we've done that, he tugs out streams of gold and silver tinsel, which we layer from branch to branch.

He stands back and squints his eyes. “Just like snow,” he says.

I copy him and can see it myself. “It is,” I say. “It's like snow on the branches.”

“But it's not finished yet.”

“The star,” I announce. It's wrapped in tissue in a separate box, but I can tell from the shape what it is.

It has a long point at the bottom and shorter ones all the way round, suggesting rays of light, and again it's made of glass and is coloured silver, gold and blue. Dad pegs it to the tip of the tree, and there's a different light to the room now, and the air is rich with the scent of spruce sap.

“How about that?” he says. “Perfect. Shall we call Mum?”

“There's one more thing,” I say.

“What? We won't fit anything else on.”

“Just one thing. Please.” I run upstairs and fetch my prism. “If you tie some cotton round it, we can hang this too.”

“No, Tommo. I think we've got enough. We don't want to overdo it, do we?”

“Please.”

“Why? It's not a decoration.”

“It'll catch the light, if you tie it in the right place, and make a rainbow.”

“I don't think – “

“Please, Dad.”

“Well, alright. But only this. Nothing more. Let's see how we can do it.”

And then it's time for Mum to admire the magic.

Christmas is just four days away and he's late home. Not so late that Mum's anxious or angry, but for some reason I'm standing on a dining chair waiting at the window, pressing my forehead against the cold glass. Perhaps he's told me he'll bring back sprigs of holly or mistletoe from the market, or balloons.

“Come away from there,” Mum says. “Find something to do, for goodness sake, child. He'll be home when he gets here.” And she mutters something about a traffic jam or a flat tyre.

The village bobby arrives as she's taking mince pies out of the oven. I watch him cycle up the street, take note of our house number and clamber off his bike before it's properly stopped, the way I've seen cowboys dismounting a moving horse in films. Leaning his bike into the privet hedge, the policeman blows his nose on a big, white handkerchief before crossing to the front door.

“Mum!” I shout, running to fetch her.

She wipes her hands on her apron as she moves towards the bulky shadow, which fills the glass panel and spills darkness down the hallway. I stand behind her, not wanting to miss out.

“Mrs Passmore?” the policeman says in a voice that's deep, but which he softens in a way that makes it sound misplaced.

“Yes.”

“It's about your husband. I wonder if I might come in.”

She stands a moment, unmoving.

“Go to your room, Thomas.”

I scramble upstairs and lay on the freezing lino, hoping to hear from there, but can't. All I hear is the murmur of a deep voice, which sounds like water burbling over rocks from where I am, and then a silence, followed by my mother saying, “Thank you.”

Only that is clear: ‘Thank you'.

There are no tears or screams to remember.

I find her sitting in my dad's armchair. She doesn't see or hear me at first, but is looking down, staring at her clenched hands, pinched tight and frozen.

“Why did the policeman call?” I ask. Twice. “Mum?”

“Weak,” she mutters. “So weak.” And I wonder whether she's talking about the policeman, me, my father or herself.

Extending an arm to draw me to her, she then withdraws it and folds her arms, squeezing herself in and upright.

“Go to your room, Thomas. Go straight to your room. No, wait; come here first. Stand here. I have to tell you something.”

To begin with, my childhood imagination paints a simple picture of his death. I imagine a cartoon-like collision between two cars, similar to scenes from my favourite comics. Kerpow, bang, crash! The smash snaps something vital in his body, like the filament in a light bulb, the snuffing of a candle, but everything else remains intact. Kerplonk! Dead. No blood, no gore, no disembowelling agony; no chest-embedded steering wheel, no shredded limbs or dismemberment; no ebbing, waning, draining of consciousness among shards of plastic, chrome and rubber littering the bitumen; no expanding puddle of oil, petrol, brake fluid, blood, piss.

Our house becomes crowded with visitors, relatives, well-wishers, busy-bodies, who suffocate Christmas with their shrouded whispers and morbid clothes, and their stink of eau-de-Cologne and mothballs. There are aunts I've never seen before, who expect me to sit still or play in silence without toys, and when I ask if I too can go to the funeral they ignore me so furiously that I daren't suggest it again. So I find pleasure where I can, and it sits in a bucket, decorated with red crêpe paper and a painting of Father Christmas.

Each morning I turn the tree lights on and leave the rest of the room to winter darkness. Sitting cross-legged in front of our tree, I soak up the warmth of its brightness and the richness of its scent, until Mum comes in and switches them off again.

On the second morning, she says, “Leave the lights alone. I don't want those bloody things on.”

Someone calls and delivers a clear plastic bag that contains Dad's ‘effects'. Mum thanks them and leaves it untouched, unopened, on the cabinet near the front door, at the bottom of the stairs. When she's not looking, I stare at the contents: keys, his wallet, some coins, his wristwatch on its brown leather strap, his tobacco pouch and his comb. I want to open the bag and touch these things, but daren't.

On Christmas Eve, I know everything's gonna be okay again – we can't forget Christmas, even if there's no presents under the tree yet. And I turn the prism by its cotton until one of the lights shines through, although I can't find the rainbow among the baubles and tinsel, among the shadows behind the needles. It's the first day the house doesn't fill with visitors by lunchtime and the first day I don't have to squeeze my nostrils against the stink of their mothballed Sunday finery.

I sit in front of the tree until mid-morning, building a farm out of wooden blocks and stocking it with pigs, two cows, a carthorse, one sheep and a few hens. I drive a tractor through the yard, build a shed for it, with a book for a roof, and then decide to people it with my collection of cowboys and Indians… after which the slaughter begins.

Mum walks into the room, holding my coat, scarf, hat and gloves. Both gloves are attached to my coat sleeves with elastic, so I don't lose them.

“I want you to go to the shops, for milk and bread. But be careful on the pavements – they may be icy. Don't try sliding. I won't be pleased if you skin your knee again or break a leg. Oh, and Brussels sprouts and spuds too. I'll write it down for you.”

“I don't like Brussels sprouts,” I tell her. “Do we have to have them?”

“Your father likes them,” she begins, and then drifts into a poisonous quiet. “Just go.”

When I get back from the village, the tree has gone. There's a telltale trail of sand on the carpet and the step by the French window, which she hasn't yet swept up. Across the lawn is a scattering of broken baubles and a strand of tinsel; across the patio lays the broken shards of glass birds, the star and fragments of my prism, and at the end of the garden, dumped on its side, with several decorations still draggled around it, is the tree.

“I hate you!” I shout, and run to the kitchen where she stands at the stove. “I hate you!”

But she doesn't shout back or smack me, or send me to my room, or even turn and look at me, so I slam the kitchen door and crawl under my bed to cry among my toys.

That afternoon, when she's fallen asleep in front of TV Christmas carols, I grab a cardboard box and pad down the back garden to the tree, picking up baubles and tinsel along the way. Dragging the bucket off the root ball and sand, I shove the tree upright against the fence. The decorations have lost their glow outside, so I begin undressing it, untangling the gold and silver tinsel, unclipping the remaining birds, taking off the baubles and unwinding the lights.

The soil is rock-hard, so I run a saucepan of hot water in the kitchen and pour it over the spot I've chosen. I find Dad's spade in the shed and scrape away an inch of topsoil before hitting the freeze again, so hurry back to fill the saucepan once more and put the kettle on to boil. Mum's in the deepest of sleeps, curled like a baby, but with her mouth wide open and her hands tucked beneath her chin. She should be in bed. I'm about to sneak past her and turn off the TV – the King Singers are beginning
The Holly and the Ivy
– until I realise the sudden quiet might wake her.

The afternoon light is fading, but the boiling water sends up a massive cloud of steam that fills half the garden. When it clears, there's a slush of stones, grit and a twitching chrysalis, which I shovel to one side. I pour more water and probably scald a few worms to death, but I'm creating the hole. It'd be good to dig all the way to Australia and leave this mess behind, but night is drawing in and the ground's too hard. When I'm about a foot down, and ready to drag the Christmas tree over, among the washed stones is a piece of white flint which, I'll learn before too long, was knapped into a point thousands of years previously, and it's waiting to be noticed and picked up.