Excerpt: The Spike Garden (rewrite)

The Spike Garden
Or: a pointed person and the people impaled

My mother had five sisters, and so I had five aunts. I know many facts about my mother and her life but only one fact about her death. I know more than five facts about my five aunts' deaths. How many more I cannot count, although I have tried.
How this aunt's death was reported to me. One. Which predictions about that aunt's death turned out to be true. Two. What this aunt said two minutes before dying. Three. What noises came from that aunt's closing throat at the moment of her passing. Four. The crook that this aunt's right arm took when her death sent it limp. Five. The speed at which the disease crept through that aunt's bodily tissues. Six. Which servant had been sacked moments before the death of this aunt. Seven but this is an enumeration that I cannot complete. My own death would intervene and leave so many facts uncounted.
I can count the facts that I know about my mother's death. One: my mother's death has yet to take place.
I can count the surviving male members of my family. One: myself. I am therefore the inheritor, from my maternal grandfather, of the family home and its gardens.
I can count the gardens. Six: one for each of my grandfather's daughters. I could say plus one for each of his sons, but they numbered zero.
My aunts' gardens were my first five playgrounds: the Rose Garden, the Green Garden, the Water Garden, the Spring Garden, and the Fruit Garden. My mother’s garden is the Spike Garden. I never played there.
Now that all six gardens are mine, I wonder what should happen to them. I could let nature take its course, I could maintain the gardens as they are, I could change them.
If I let nature take its course, the gardens would smudge together into a wilderness. A wilderness is not a garden so does not have gardeners. But I do have gardeners, among the servants of the manor. I need the servants and their loyalty for ever. So I need gardeners. So I cannot have a wilderness. So I cannot let nature take its course.
To maintain the gardens as they are would be to build a flowery prison. Or should I say a rosy, green, watery, springy and spiky prison. What a prison that would be.
It would be a rare crime that deserved a prison of so many adjectives; I can think of only one. Imagine the perpetrator of this crime, this single prisoner, in their singular prison. Imagine a prison purpose-built to protect the outside humanity from one crime and one criminal alone.
The crime being punished must comprise a number of criminal acts in order to warrant singular punishment. To be considered one crime, those criminal acts would have to lay in a criminal sequence. Or, more properly, a criminal set, because a sequence has an order and these acts need not. These acts are each individually criminal, but are collectively more criminal.
What should a set of such acts be called? A play? And yet, crime doesn’t play. Crime works; it is effective. No, I see no need for an oblique collective. I see that a gathering of criminal acts is simply a crime. I also see that a gathering of morbid facts is simply a death. By my acts and my facts I may be criminal.
The matter could be placed before a jury for final resolution. It never will be but even the existence of the matter makes me unfit to be a prison-builder. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Our lord never told us was the qualification for casting the second stone. Perhaps it is a single sin? Then the third stone could be cast by him with two sins. And so on until the most sinful took their turn at the end. Let him who is full of sin cast the last stone. The church probably deleted that, even from the apocrypha. Of course, the final missile should be cast by the sinner who is being stoned. To take part in their own punishment would be their final redemption.
In these more civilised times, criminals are no longer stoned to death, yet stones are still used in their punishment. I have a modernisation of our lord's motto: Let he who is without sin lay the prison foundation stone. I do not qualify.
So I cannot maintain the gardens as a prison, and I cannot leave the gardens to become a wilderness, so I must decide.
To decide is to choose one possible course from a number. The courses that are not chosen cease to be possible, cease to exist. To decide means to destroy. I cannot decide on a single garden to destroy. I can only decide to destroy all of them.
More decisions are impossible; I am exhausted. There can be no decision about which garden to destroy first so all gardens must be destroyed in parallel. Their destructions must begin at the same time and end at the same time. To accomplish this, six gardeners could be retained. One gardener could be set to destroy each garden. It must be guaranteed that they start and finish in unison.
The six gardeners must be copies, grown from the same seed or cast in the same mould, or perhaps twins by six. I have encountered twins once or twice, though none were gardeners. I have read about twins by three; triple-lets they were called. But I have no information about their chosen profession or professions. I could track them down, approach them, offer them employment, wait for them to be trained, but I would still be three gardeners shy of the precise destruction required. I could search the world for twins by six; double-triple-lets as I imagine they would be known. It could be my life’s work.
Yet even if they exist and I found them they might reject my offer. If they did not reject, it could be worse. What if one had been injured and worked slower than the rest? What if another became ill during the work? What if a third were to break his shovel? The fourth becomes melancholy in the eradication that I have demanded, and slackens. The fifth steals flowers from his garden.
He takes them home, concealed in the pocket of a gardening garment that I cannot name. He stashes them in a compartment of some crypto-hortico-criminal equip that again, I cannot even name. Is it called a pocket and an overall? Is called a tray and a propagator? I do not know, I am no gardener. I cannot question what he brings or takes if I cannot even name what he carries. Picture the scene:
I tell him to turn out his pockets and he laughs. I have no pockets, sir he says, emphasising the word pockets. I tell him to open the trays of his propagator. It has no trays, sir he says, emphasising the word trays.
His brothers the other gardeners stand in a sector equal to exactly one third of a circle. They position themselves like the petals on a spare daisy. At once, they all shout laughter. Derided, I must let him past me as though he had crept and I was a sentry gasping in his garrotte.
The seeds or seedlings or flowers or fruits are paraded out and he replants them. He nurtures them through season after season, year after year, generation after generation. The garden is not destroyed but moved, perhaps even made more, its seed sown. Now flowers spill over acres. Of course he must die at my hands, perhaps stoned. Yes, a variety of ornamental and structural stone would I cast at him. Enough to form a cairn so that if he survives the injuries, he surely dies by suffocation or starvation.
The sixth gardener is free from damage, healthy, has a full set of tools in working order, is happy enough to uproot his assigned garden and would never stoop to theft for he is a righteous man. But in his righteousness, he is loyal to his brother the fifth gardener. This is his brother in work, in the soil and in blood. I have stoned his brother to death, his righteousness compels him to avenge, and so he pursues me. He is implacable.
With a taste for poetry in his justice, he uses a variety of gardening implements in his vengeance. He asks me to identify each before striking me with it and shouting the correct name, which in all cases I have got wrong. Until it comes to the onion hoe, with which he would have struck the coup de grace. My mother made sure I could identify that particular tool. He is stunned by my correctitude. In that moment, I snatch the onion hoe and set it in him. He dies but has injured me so badly that I also die, by bleeding. In the ebbing of my life’s tide I see the ebbing of my life’s work. Two brothers dead, two gardeners short, two gardens not destroyed; three if the fifth gardeners stolen beds are counted.
So no, I will not scour the earth for double-triple-lets. I will not attempt the impossible. How sad that sounds.
Birth might seem impossible, in the mind of a soul not yet alive. But then, a soul does not attempt the impossible, to be born. A soul is pulled to its birth, dragged screaming to its baby’s body. Before that it passes through its baby’s mother’s gate. Before that, it has had to simmer in its mother’s brewing beaker. Yes, her beaker. A bubbling retort heated by her acidic fire. The fire fuelled by fizzing logs of need supplied by her mate, her soul mate.
And then death might seem impossible, in the mind of a soul unfolding the petals of life. But then neither does that soul attempt the impossible, to die. A soul is pushed to its death. There it is, riding, taking life at a canter. Alongside pulls a hooded rider on a pale horse. The soul whips its life into the gallop; the hooded rider recedes but then resurges. The soul whips its life but it can go no faster. It whips and whips; fury mounting as the hooded rider keeps pace. Spittle froths from life’s nostrils. At first it is a filmy transparence. The soul whips and the transparence solidifies to an opaque white steam. The hooded rider keeps pace and the steam shades to a pink shower. The shower thickens to red blurts that rack life’s body and set the saddle bucking under the soul but … it works. The pale horse is not alongside, the soul has outrun the hooded rider. Can the soul believe it? It risks a glance over its left shoulder. No hooded rider. It risks a glance over its right shoulder. No pale horse. Then it risks a look ahead. Then it sees that it is riding not life but the pale horse. Then it sees that is not holding the reins but is hugging the hooded rider. Death had been impossible, now life is.
So the impossible happens every day, hundreds by hundreds of times. Birth: impossible and happens. Death: impossible and happens. But double-triple-let gardeners are a different kind of impossible. My mother would wish me to attempt this impossible. I have given her one impossible already, my birth. She has not yet given me her impossible, her death. She owes me an impossible debt. As a debtor, her wishes are merely wishes, she has no currency with which to commission the impossible.
Well then, to the possible. Not any possible, though, only a possible that I desire. A desirable possible. I do not desire to let nature take its course, to let the gardens wild their ness. I also do not desire a prison, at least not for myself, so the gardens will not be maintained. But a prison is an interesting notion.
Prison as a notion catches on the tongue folded in my skull. That is what doctors call the brain really is, a folded tongue. The root is thick and grows from the bowel. Doctors say that this is not so but has not everybody felt a tugging there at times of danger? The excitation of danger causes the tongue to seek to withdraw from the precarious head and slither back to where it originated at birth: the lower of the gut. Any person with feelings has felt the dizziness, the clutching in the centre of one’s being, that accompanies times of strong feeling. For a doctor to deny that the brain is rooted in the gut is for him to deny the evidence of the senses. Unless the doctor has never felt the tug himself.
I suppose a doctor could be excused in that case. But he practise a mean, irrelevant form of medicine if he never has encountered the belly prickling of danger.
What, has he never faced death? Never seen himself with two futures and fate lingering her scaled hand over the more disastrous? There is a solution to that. All doctors should be threatened with death before they can practise. A machine could be made that would slay one tenth of the doctors placed in its chamber. Passing the machine would be a necessary and final examination.
Or should the machine be a necessary qualification before study of medicine could commence? No, better that a man learn the whole book of his ins and outs before he face one tenth of his death. Then he may truly test what he has learned, theory, in the face of what he feels, practise.
Why, if the machine death were slow enough, the doctor within could narrate his own passing, his sensations, his thoughts, his wishes, his analysis. All would be dictated and scribed down by a doctor that has already passed the machine. The resulting book, if good enough, could be bound in the dead doctor’s skin and placed upon a shelf of honour higher than all other books of science. The machine would have to be quiet though, or it would drown out the good doctors narration.
Then doctors would tell science of the tongue folded like a toad squatting in the head. It has a root in the belly and two stalks. One is the navel, really a vestige of when the tongue grew into the fugitive baby hidden in its mother. The other is the commonly known tongue, the tip of which reaches from the mouth. This is the little tongue; the one in the head is the great tongue.
The little tongue tastes little things: food, drink, the nipple when a baby, and the whole body including the little tongue when an adult. The great tongue tastes great things: ideas, horrors, bodily possession and physical idolatry.
My great tongue tastes prison. My little tongue never has. How foolish a man would look tasting a prison with his little tongue. There he stands against the great gates, his tongue hooked around one of the great bars, or forced into the keyhole of the great lock. That taste of prison would teach him nothing but the flavour of rust, and the inside of the madhouse. I was taken to a madhouse once.
My little tongue makes me fear prison. My great tongue makes me long to own one. I could never build a prison, for reasons relating to the first and second stones, where there has been no official episcopal guidance.
I suppose that prisons are never sold neither. Not if they are to continue to be prisons. One might perhaps purchase a prison building in which to live. But all prisoners would be removed along with other fixtures and fittings. A prison without inmates would be like a garden without plants, or a boxing match without blows, or a brain without a lurking thought.
So my prison, the prison I own, must be made, and not by bricks. It must also have inmates, thought not those convicted by the courts. Those convicted by me and by themselves. The great taste of inmates goes with the great taste of prison, like pork fat with apple.
The gardens shall be my inmates. I shall put them in prison, as they sought to imprison me, for is not exclusion a kind of imprisonment? The punishment shall fit the crime. My punishment shall fit their crime. Their crime was to bar me from playing. All the gardens, one after another, from which I and my play was barred, shall be trapped. The Spike Garden shall be exempt. It was my choice not to play among the spikes.
Some might be repelled by spikes, indeed I might be if they were lowered as from a phalanx. The spikes of the garden never massed against me. They may have tickled me, scratched me when I itched, pointed the way for me, but never pointed at me. Some aunt or other said it is rude to point. A spike cannot be rude, only a person can be rude.
Whichever aunt it was that caught me pointing would have barred me from playing in her garden. Even if I cannot recall her name then I know she barred me, because they all did. All my aunts are persons who barred me from their garden, therefore this aunt of mine is such a person. Such persons should be imprisoned. More inmates.
So a prison for dead aunts and dead gardens is what I shall have. It shall not be built, but created. It shall not be created by me but by another, which means I need to recruit.
I shall post an advertisement in The Times.