The Clutching Leaves

The brambles clutch at Roger. Their broken stalks grip him in awkward places, depositing viscous sap onto his shirt and trousers. His hair—always longer than it should be but always kept in line with lashings of gel—becomes unstuck, chemicals undoing in the moist air. The noise of the wedding party glimmers behind him, fainter now but not faint enough.

Bridget is probably looking for him, glowing on the lawn in her white dress. Maybe she’s calling his name. If he strains, he might hear the tracery of her voice through the rustle of leaf and snap of branch. He should go back but he knows he won’t. The path before him undulates, dizzying, roving through empty patches of hollow bedding like scorched firepits. Gravel gives way, becoming a series of mud mouths which slurp over his shoes. The moon, bloated and red, peeks at him from between over-sized fern fronds.

Roger's ruining his suit. Abandoning Bridget. He finds it hard to care. All that matters is Silas. One last fuck. That’s all he needs. Get it out of him, expel the poison. Then he can return fully committed, fully in.

Leaves curl over Roger’s face. His trousers grow taut, clumping around new growth, displaced soil in a pot. He can’t hear the reception anymore. Only his own feet schlepping through the mud, breath like steam inside him. A thickness to the air, spores catching on the moonlight like snowflakes. Voices in his head which don’t seem his own. Silas will be close, won’t he, Rodge? Of course he will. Right around the next corner.

The path forks. The soil here is fresh and fluffy, recently laid in preparation for another exhibition. Roger thinks of his mother. How she would rush over here on a Saturday morning each time they added a new array of plants. What would she think of him now?

There is a trowel jutting from the mulch, close to the path. The ornate etchings on the handle bring it closer to a ceremonial hilt than a miniature spade. The metal paddle gleams in the reddened moonlight. It could mean anything or nothing, but Roger knows better. He’s seen it many times, gripped in Silas’s delicate fingers.

Roger picks up the trowel. Runs a thumb over the caverns and fissures of the etching, like directions on a tactile map. The air tastes like pollen and rot. He picks a direction without much thought, trusting in the path to take him where he needs to go.

***

It was here, in the Botanical Gardens, where Roger and Silas first met. Not long after Roger’s mother disappeared, but a while still before anybody started calling her dead. She’d always loved the place. Dragged him there almost every weekend. Roger supposed that was why he kept returning. He wanted to relive their shared trips, sketch her memory with his footsteps. In some of his madder moments, he hoped he might find her stretched beneath the bulking boughs of some North American aspen, curled up behind a corpseflower in the tropical greenhouses. He never did, of course. But there was a certain peace here all the same. His jittery impulses would still as he stepped between trunk and leaf and branch. As he read placards telling him how each particular species was uprooted from some faraway place, transported to England to pout beneath matted clouds.

He found Silas on a rainy midweek day. Water lashed like needles over the gardener’s back and collected in dark patches on his uniform. He was tending a plant Roger had never seen before, and it was the plant, rather than Silas himself, which first drew Roger in. He almost shoved Silas aside as he bent down to inspect the urgent purple-yellow petals which ruffled from the thing’s centre. Gawped at how they moulded into the shape of some kind of flying insect. It looked a little like a wasp, a little like a bee. Some bluebottle features.

“Hypnotised?” Silas leant beneath Roger’s umbrella, bouncing on the balls of his feet. His wide set eyes sat on rounded cheeks like little suns cresting over little hillocks. Corn-rows lined his brown head, their woven ends dripping with rain.

Roger reached out, meaning to touch the plant. Silas drew Roger’s hand away gently, as if turning over a sprouting leaf.

“I wouldn’t,” he said.

“Too delicate?”

“Too glamorous.” Silas’s touch lingered and Roger found heat rising to his cheeks. Silas’s eyes needled at him, piercing and searching, pinning him in place like a dead butterfly.

Silas removed his hand, returning his attention to the flower. “It looks that way because it needs to attract, is what I mean. It was symbiotic, once. Depended on a species of bee to pollinate. It grew flowers which looked like the female bee to entice the males. Ensure contact, dissemination, germination. But everything’s a lottery, isn’t it? The flower survived and the bee didn’t. Now the plant’s all wrong. Burdened with the shape of a memory it can’t remember. It takes the form of a love it doesn’t know it’s lost.”

Roger wrinkled his nose. “Love?”

Silas smiled. His teeth were slightly yellow, the colour of buttercups or young dandelions. “What would you call it?”

Silas entered Roger that same evening a few hours after the rain stopped. There have been so many other times since, but that first go still pulses stronger than all the others, a dull constant heartbeat at the base of Roger’s chest. Any time he wants he can conjure the damp grip of the grass against his knees. The drip of rain-dregs as they sluiced down leaf-veins. The gentle throb of Silas inside him, how they crescendoed slowly together.

Their meetings since weren’t always in the grass or soil or mud, but they were always within the walls of the gardens. Silas said he lived in the caretakers’ cottage, wherever that was. Roger never visited. Instead they walked the paths, holding hands, each trying to one-up the other’s knowledge of the place. Roger told Silas about the ornaments and statues dotting the gardens. What his mother had called true grotesqueries, because they were profane exchanges between animal vegetable and mineral. A rabbit made of stone, eyes of moss, back covered in what looked like real fur. Stone snakes weaving over a tree, their scales made of bark. Silas knew all the biographies of all the explorers who had plundered the world to fill the garden. He scoffed at the placards saying how they’d discovered this, named that, wrinkling his nose at the proprietary stink wafting from the words.

They’d steal little pecks beside the pool where dog-faced carps twisted white in the water. Waited until dark—Silas knew all the hiding places, how to evade the other employees—and fumbled under the bristling cowls of the bushes. There they hardened slowly together, legs tangled beneath the placid eyes of the stone animals.

It couldn’t last. Roger’s mother had always been very clear about him settling down with a nice young lady. She’d arranged plenty of futile dates with her friends’ daughters, in between wondering openly about what Roger was really into. Roger never gave her an answer. If he was honest, he wasn’t sure himself what, who, he was into.

Didn’t matter that she was gone. She’d disapprove of Silas, and that was enough to set an unpleasant itch beneath Roger’s skin, an internal rash. His mitherings worsened when he considered it was all happening under her nose, in a way. In her gardens. On her turf.

Bridget lacked the tenderness of Silas. She was pleasant, stern and ethereal. A little like Roger’s mother, which Roger knew she’d approve of. They met in a big flat box of a garden centre to the North of the city. Roger heard there was a sale on variegated monsteras, but he arrived there late and Bridget had taken the last one. She asked him out at the tills—a commiseration prize, she said, as he wouldn’t be having the plant.

They did things like go bowling, to the cinema or Ask Italian. They made love on the fifth date and moved in together after the twenty-fifth. Roger was always unsure if they’d ever fucked. They bought a house and filled it with variegated plants, an expensive little in-joke.

Silas was always there, of course, twisting in the background like a knife. But he only ever wanted to meet in the gardens. Wouldn’t give his phone number and seemed more than fine with long periods of silence. Roger became sure Silas, himself, had his own partner—a woman. Kids, too, probably. True or not, it was easier to think of him that way. It meant he wasn’t disappointing Silas quite as much.

He couldn’t disappoint Bridget either. They settled into an easy suburban rhythm. Lived separate, if entwined, lives. Many evenings, he would come home from his own secret visits to the Botanical Gardens to find the back door ajar, no trace of Bridget but a muddy footprint on the step. Wake up on Saturday mornings to a still and empty house, glistening leaves and moist soil like breadcrumbs, clues to where she had been and where she might be going. She said she loved him often.

***

Bridget is here now, a few feet in front of Roger. Her face swims from the dark, imprecise at first then clotting into something solid. Roger falters, confused. She’s never followed him before. Never shown more than a passing concern when he’s stayed out late. He struggles not to think of her as a mirage. Moves to step past her like she’s a felled log on the path.

“Rodge,” she says. Her voice is high. “You’re here.”

“I am,” Roger says. He tugs at his sleeves, preening. Tries to matt down his wild hair.

“You’ve ruined your suit,” says Bridget. Mud hems her wedding dress, a dark ring. Her arms are scarred by bramble-blades.

“You know I don’t really like suits,” Roger says. He breathes in, drinking the air, the soothing prickle of the vegetable scents. He knows he should make some excuse, some pathetic cliché like needing a breather, and follow her back to the party. Bridget stands there like she’s waiting for exactly that. But all he can think of is what he might say to get rid of her. He’s so close, after all. One last go.

“I’m cheating on you,” Roger says. “I’ve been cheating on you since we met. I might love him. Well. Maybe not. I don’t know, really. But I need to see him. And I know it’s a head-fuck, annulments, divorce, all that. But we can talk about it later. So if you wouldn’t mind just....” He presses his hands together and moves to slip around Bridget. She stays put. Her face is placid.

“Bridge?” Roger pauses. He touches his wedding ring, its cool surface still so strange around his skin. Bridget smiles at him.

“I know,” she says. “It’s okay. I know about all that. You want to find him? Let’s find him. We can go together. I think I know where he might be.” She pulls Roger by the wrist, leading him down the muddy path. Roger would like to object, but can’t think of what he might say. He’d expected acrimony, anger. Anything but unflinching acceptance.

Roger’s eyes itch and sting. There is a pollinated tickle somewhere in his throat, behind his nose. He trips and skips over thick roots as he struggles to match Bridget’s pace. Begins a dozen different sentences, each one designed for contrition or anger or delirious lust. But what’s the point? None of them will get him what he wants.

Cacti paddles loom past their fences, jabbing at him. A giant rhubarb plant hangs its leaves over the path like a frog’s foot, wet and clammy against Roger’s midriff as he brushes past it. The pool—that place filled with pale carp, where he and Silas had spent so many hours—comes and goes, little more than a quicksilver shimmer in the dark before it’s gone. The ground dips lower and the air thickens until it sits heavy on his chest.

“Bridge,” Roger says. “Bridget. Maybe we need to talk.”

“We can talk later, like you said,” Bridget says. Her voice bounces around Roger, an echo of itself. He can no longer see the moon. The leaves clutch and tear at them both. Wet thin bristles like grasping hands begging them to stay put, to dissolve into the fecund air.

They unfold from the darkness all at once, hurtling from the bracken into an opening. A stone path weaves its way between rows of ornamental animals. More grotesqueries of miniature lions and giraffes and elephants, bodies made of stone and leaf and unknown quivering soft things.

At the end of the path is a low, slanted cottage. Its windows burst with light. Roger’s mother’s words swim up at him, recordings of a forgotten conversation: This place is not a garden.

“This will be it, won’t it?” Bridget says, tugging at Roger. “Your little boyfriend’s place. I’d love to see it.”

Roger would love to detect a sneering sarcasm in Bridget’s tone. A little shard of anger that tells him she is acting out of spite. That at least would be understandable. But there’s nothing. She seems genuinely curious, like she’s about to meet his parents.

The door is open. Inside, the jaundiced light makes Roger squint. Wispy soft things spore and fume in the air. Silas has his back to them, his uniform strung taut over his back. He is fussing over something, some plant, humming a familiar song to himself.

The door creaks shut and Silas turns. “Oh,” he says. “I had hoped it would be you, Rodge.”

“I call him Rodge, too,” Bridget says. She’s smiling. Her cheeks redden, bright and sheening, ripe fruit.

Roger is trapped, caught in the middle of them both. He wishes he knew what to say. Something to placate them. To keep them happy. His mother, too, or the memory of her.

“Don’t feel bad,” says Bridget. She embraces him from behind, arms like wet vines snaking over his dress-shirt. “You did everything right. Your mother wanted you to marry before you came home. To see you right before you settled down, settled in.”

Silas moves forward, hands cupping Roger’s shoulders. “But we had to think about what you wanted, too, didn’t we? We had to make a shape that would actually bring you here. Keep bringing you here, so you could be made ready.”

“I don’t understand,” Roger says, though he worries that he does. Wetness blurs his eyes and breath hiccoughs out of him. Dark roots worm in the borders of his vision.

“Come on,” says Silas, disbeliving. “You must.” He looks different through the film of tears. His brown skin is covered in dark striations and whorls, sandpapery ridges. His hair bristles, unruly, long strands sprouting amongst the tight curls. Bridget’s movements behind bristle and flow, a sound like soft leaves unfurling. Roger shakes his head but does not fight against them. Why would he? Between the pair of them, they’re all he has.

They lead him past the potting benches and bags of compost, through a doorway into a small adjoining room. Here, most of the tattered floorboards have been prised off, the foundations rent away to reveal the speckled mulch beneath. A wide divot has been scooped in its centre as if in preparation for a new root-bound plant. One that needs more space to grow.

“Step in,” says Silas. His eyes shine with nothing, dark pools. His teeth are increasingly yellow.

Roger does as he is told; he always has where Silas is concerned. He removes his shoes and places both feet in the soil. It’s moist and not-unpleasant, bunching against his skin like a thousand little wads of cotton. Bridget grabs both of his hands, helping to steady him. Her hair is a pluming trail of acer leaves. Teeth grey. Skin chalky, crumbling against Roger’s thumbs like limestone.

“You’re doing the right thing,” Bridget says, encouraging.

“Let it happen,” agrees Silas, from Roger’s peripherals. Their voices seem to harmonise, to echo pleasantly against each other. “You’ll remember what to do.”

Roger’s fingers feel strange. Heavy. Their tips are hard and calloused, rough-hewn like stone or bark or both. Looking down at his arms, he can see veins shifting from blue to green and back again. He breathes deep and the air tickles at his throat. The unpleasantness inside him crests then dissipates as he lowers himself into the earth’s open mouth.

***

Tom Maguire is a writer and DJ based in Birmingham. His short fiction appears in Digbeth Stories, by Floodgate Press, and the forthcoming hybrid theatre production, The Encrypted Forest. His non-fiction appears in the online critical theory magazine, Blue Labyrinths.