CECILY SCUTT
Cecily Scutt’s first story, “Spider’s People”, appeared in Hecate, and she sold a story, “Photographs of David”, to Southerly. Another short story, “Re-making”, has appeared in Westerly, and also in a Western Australian anthology, Over the Fence. An award-winning oral storyteller, she performs at libraries, schools, bookshops, cafes, and homes for the aged. (She says she also performs at aquariums and bus stops.)
When not writing, she works in Perth as a university tutor in the social sciences, and procrastinates over her PhD thesis. Her most recent technique for this involves research for a novel about evolution, racism, nineteenth-century factory practices, and Tierra del Fuego. She is also obsessed with cephalopods, but admits an older loyalty to Class Amphibia.
In this deft and wry story — her first fantasy tale — she takes us right into Hell ... to visit family, of course.
* * * *
I went to visit my Grandmother, in Hell. She had died about six weeks earlier, slipping on the wet paving of her back garden and breaking her hip. She lay there amongst the last of the tomatoes until her deaf neighbour looked over the fence and called an ambulance. She died of a heart attack on the way to Emergency.
The vicar said in the funeral oration that Mrs Southey had been an example to us all. If her formidable self sufficiency had led her to take risks, he said (a reference to her refusal to move into the local Home of Peace), still it was a virtue sadly lacking in the younger generation. She was, he said, peering over his glasses at her pale and shrunken descendants, one of the Old School.
Grandmother lay in her coffin looking strangely gaudy, the funeral directors having given her her first make-up job in over forty years. She seemed tiny. Alive she had been a big woman, running to fat and smoking too much. She hadn’t had much time for Church either.
All the same, I was surprised to find her re-housed in Hell.
* * * *
Hell is really small. They don’t tell you that. The corridors are narrow, and the ceiling presses down. The walls are painted green.
Grandmother shares her room with two other old women. She has a high bed by the window, yellowed blankets stretched into neat corners. The window blinds are grey and tightly sealed. One of the fluoro lights has a permanent flicker. She peers at me from the chair by the bed.
“It’s Rosa, isn’t it?” she says. “Or is it Bree?”
“Hope, Gran. Mary’s daughter, remember?”
“Of course, of course. Damn fanciful names. Did you bring me some fruit?”
“They took it from me at the entrance. Something about a balanced diet.”
She looks disgusted. She snaps off her glasses and polishes them on her old pink cardie. “Damn the lot of them. Imps and Demons! Stealing an old woman’s fruit!” She leans forward suddenly and hisses in my ear. I have trouble making out the sibilants. Her breath smells of Denture Soak.
“Sorry, Gran?”
She scowls at me and looks around. “I said, don’t you eat anything here,” she whispers, louder. “Remember Persephone!”
“Persephone?” I wonder if she means my sister Phoebe.
“Persephone and the pomegranate seeds!”
“Oh,” I say. “Right you are Gran. No problem.”
The other old women are staring at us across the room. There is a tiny blue-rinsed one with a pink nose, and a large black-clad one in a headscarf. The little one has a TV screen mounted at the end of her bed. Soapie stars swim across it, twittering vaguely. The scarfed one’s bedside table is cluttered with photos of smiling black-haired children. Their stares are unwavering. I decide to change the subject.
“So how are you settling in, Gran?”
She looks at me with disbelief. “How do you think? One minute I’m trying to die with some dignity in my garden, and the next thing I know I’m stuck down here!”
“I’m so sorry,” I say, inadequately. I look around for something cheerful to talk about. My gaze sticks on the drawn blinds. “Perhaps a little fresh air?” I jump up and pull at the blind cord.
“They’re stuck.” She rolls her eyes. I was never her favourite grandchild. Still, I’m the only one who has bothered to visit her. I want to prove my usefulness, and wrestle harder with the blinds.
They suddenly snap upwards, revealing the window. It has been bricked up. The bricks are a brutal red, with crumbling mortar. The room shrinks. The old woman in the headscarf begins to cry.
Grandmother clenches her hands, and speaks in a stiff, patient voice. “Perhaps you had better pull them down again, child.”
I get them down again. Silence falls. Behind the low voiced soapie stars I hear distant clatters, and the hum of climate control. The woman’s sobs slow, and falter. She hunches a black cloth shoulder against us, turning on her other side.
I stare at the covered window. Grandmother used to keep tomatoes on her window sill. She would pick them when they were still green, just hinting at yellow. Before the fruit flies were interested. In rows on the kitchen window they would slowly ripen in the sun.
I went to Gran’s quite often, when I was little. I remember long summer afternoons playing in the back shed while she napped. Helping her with the compost. The sound of the sea sifting the evening quiet, while we ate hot buttered toast in the kitchen.
“Remember the way you used to mix together butter and marge?” I say suddenly. “I saw in Coles the other day they’re now selling it as a special new blend. More spreadable, and lower in fat.”
She gives me another of her looks, scratching her faded curls. They are still not entirely grey. “I learned that in the War. It made the butter last longer. And the marge by itself tasted like” — she lowers her voice, conspiratorially “— bird shit.”
I laugh. She pulls her head back, looking haughty but satisfied, and checks out the others with a careful sideways glance. “Not that I should use such language. I try to set a good example. So tell me about the family, child.”
The blue-rinsed old lady from the far end interrupts my first sentence. She nods her head continually, smiling anxiously. “Is this your lovely daughter, Joan?”
Grandmother frowns and shifts in her chair. “No Maisie, this is my granddaughter Faith —”
“— Hope,” I mutter.
“Hope,” she continues in the same breath, “who has come to visit me. We were talking.” It occurs to me that she is possessive of a visitor, even me. This is gratifying. I smile graciously at the little woman.
“Welcome to Hell, dear,” she pipes. “Are you here to stay? You must have done something bad. I did something bad. Yes I did. I used to touch myself. The priest said it was a sin. But at boarding school I was so lonely. It helped me to sleep. I just wanted to go to sleep.” Her eyes are fixed on a point just above my eyebrows. I stretch my neck to try and meet them. “So here I am, as all sinners should be.”
“Nonsense,” snaps Grandmother. Her face has that rigid look talking about sex always gave it. “All that pious stuff about sin! That’s not why we’re here. She takes too many pills,” she adds, in an audible hissing aside. “I spit mine out.”
“But Joan dear —” The little woman’s head is still nodding.
“I’ll tell you, Maisie, why we’re here. Because nobody wants us. We are too old and too ugly. Can you imagine me in golden wings and fluffy clouds? Me with my dentures and my stomach problems? Or you with your bedwetting cluttering up the angels? They don’t want us there.” She coughs her familiar smoker’s hack. “And Limbo’s for babies. So they send us here. All the unwanted.”
“You are lying!” The woman in black sits up with a sudden rasp of bedsprings. “He is coming to fetch me! I was promised he will come!” Her fingers send photos sliding as she gropes on her table.
Grandmother sighs. “If you’re looking for your rosary, Elena, they took it away, remember? Why don’t you get up now, and we’ll all go down to the TV room.” She gives me a martyred look. I think of her down at the local RSL, her almost brutal practical help for those she called “feckless”.
“I think you should go now, child,” she says briskly. “Visiting hours must be almost up.”
I feel both guilt and relief. I get up in a hurry, before her mood changes again. “Shall I come back next week?”
She slides her glasses along the bridge of her nose. I see they have been mended with pink Elastoplast. Her arms have a marked tremor. “If you like. But go now. And remember” — she reaches out and snags my wrist. Her hands are cold — “remember not to look behind you!”
* * * *
Hell is very small, and very crowded. The corridors are narrow, and the air smells of old cooking. My Grandmother sits on her chair by the white bed, receding.
I walk quickly through the corridors. I avert my eyes as I pass through the gates. I am holding my breath. I am concentrating on tomatoes, ripening on a sunny windowsill, and I don’t look back.
* * * *
AFTERWORD
I wrote “Descent” at a round white plastic table in the kitchen of a flat in South Perth. I would like to say that there was a bowl of pomegranates in the centre, but in fact it was covered in junk mail and tea stains. I had brashly rung up the Perth women’s performance group WEB and announced I wanted to read. The reading was on Tuesday, and this was Sunday afternoon.
I had been playing with an idea of a theatrical troupe putting on Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in the lower regions of Hell. (As you may guess, I had recently read Neil Gaiman for the first time. Also Erica Jong quoting Edna O’Brien, saying that Hollywood movie people are possessed by demons, but a very low form of demons.)
It finally occurred to me I knew too little about theatre direction. On the other hand, I knew more than I wanted about Sunday visits.
When I finished this story I couldn’t place its genre. How do metaphor, fantasy, and allegory connect? My previous work appears as just “fiction”: this is “fantasy.” A strange divide! One of my ambitions is to join those writers happily messing up this boundary.
I would like to thank Peter McMahon for (among other things) lending me his kitchen table; Stephen Dedman, who told me this was a fantasy story; Grant Stone; the Thursday Nighters; and WEB, who gave me a deadline.
This story is dedicated to my own grandmother, who also grew tomatoes.
— Cecily Scutt