O Caledonia

Late in the afternoon she did something which even she regarded as criminal, albeit an act of retribution. She slipped into Francis’s room, haven to his bizarre collection of cacti. Some stood in sandy desert land, a miniature Arizona, curvaceous and, as cacti went, normal-looking. Others were veiled by tawny tresses or wispy white beards; some sported jaunty and unconvincing scarlet flowers as though trying to pass themselves off as South Sea Island beauties. Some pointed stiffly with odd truncated limbs, reminding Janet of the amputees among the war-wounded, so long ago. There were tall ones like trees and little ones like hedgehogs; and there were succulents. Janet disliked the succulents. Their complacent, smooth green flesh bore witness to ugly subterranean greed. She could imagine them feeding off blood. They were dewy and plump. They were repulsive. With care, she selected her victim. The rising moon assisted her, illuminating the spectral throng. She stooped over the tallest, broadest succulent. It was crowned by a moist jade leaf, a new leaf, the product of many months of self-regarding ingestion. She plunged her thumbnail, filed to talon sharpness, deep into its thick flesh. She stabbed it through in one deft movement, leaving a crescent-shaped wound. With a sigh of satisfaction she turned away. She paused to look at Francis’s slow-worm, known to him as Montgomery, known to all others as Gloria. In his huge vivarium, Gloria was contemplating his prey. Sometimes he did this for so long that even slugs moved out of his reach. The moon rippled across his burnished pewter back and lingered on his azure spots. Janet stroked his ancient forehead. He ignored her, gazing balefully into his litter of earth and leaves.

Within a few days the succulent’s proud new leaf had withered, etiolated, and fallen off. The wound gaped. Francis was mystified. Eventually another leaf took its place. On its bland surface it bore a crescent-shaped mark and as the leaf grew the crescent cracked open, until this leaf fell also, fatally wounded. So began a long sequence of doomed leaves, always growing singly in that same spot, always stamped with the crescent of Janet’s thumbnail. She felt no guilt. She believed it was the moon’s revenge.

That year the daffodils would wait no longer. They forced their way through the earth’s chill carapace and bloomed in the tarnished snow. At once a wild wind swept in from the west and whirled them into crazed confusion, snapping the stems, tearing off the golden trumpets, tossing and flattening the survivors. The cats paced and hovered by the back door, uncertain whether to risk the outdoors; with wrinkled muzzles, they tested the wind. Among the swirling daffodils the old labrador lay out, in the heart of the gale. Her head was raised, her ears were pricked; alertly she snuffed the air; she watched the world turn, the new season approach. Looking at her, Janet thought in sharp sorrow, “I will not see this again,” for now the labrador could scarcely walk; her hind legs were emaciated and she had to be helped in and out and up the stairs. Yet she was couched out there, unafraid, welcoming with dignity whatever was to come, among the reckless, gaudy flowers whose time was even briefer. “Fair Daffodils, we weep to see / You haste away so soon.” Fair labrador. Sometimes Janet thought that life’s sole purpose was to teach one how to die. As in most spheres, so in this, animals did better than people.