MORNING SERIAL
AND I was so glad it was my home, snaking all the way back from the ivory house with its cottage windows and sloping, charcoal cap, and then right to the end, where there was a hedge so high that we couldn’t see anything beyond it, which Mam used to laugh was her plan all along, so nobody could snatch us away.
But one late summer day stays with me more than others, rises to the surface like a bruise: changes colour depending on how I’m feeling.
I was nine years old. Everything was a flickering yellow and the rain had been hushed away beneath the twinkling blue sky. I remember how still everything felt, far from the bustle of Mam and Dad’s barn shop and the cluck of hens, just opposite our Wendy House, as I – in my daffodil-yellow swimsuit – dangled on my swing under the tree of greengages, staring at my bony ankles and knobbly knees while I waited for Melody.
Some people may have found the place unsettlingly still, too comfortable a bubble, but I knew of the life that was brought to it whenever Melody arrived.
I remember gazing – one of those extra-long gazes – at Secret Haven, lengthening my neck and adjusting my head to frame everything in the best way, and then blinking to take a snapshot with my eyes. Perfect. That image is always the first one that creeps into my mind.
There was Mam, entering the shot in her paint-splashed summer dress, with a watering can in one hand, secateurs in the other, and her amber eyes reflecting the whole garden in sepia sunlight. Mam belonged outside, in the physical world, so at home with earth on her hands and petals in the ends of her chestnut hair as it fell over one of her shoulders every time she leant forward and then back, the odd, silver streak breaking free.
Mam always meant business; it was in the movement of her strong, freckled arms, the restful rhythm of her footsteps, something so sure, so the world moved with her, shadowed her, even, rather than her moving with the world. I suppose, in a way, she’d grown herself at Secret Haven too.
Unspeakable Beauty by Georgia Carys Williams is published by Parthian at £10.99. parthianbooks.com