Uses of Agapanthus
Jonathan M Barrett
Copyright 2010 Jonathan M Barrett
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Brett glares once more at the dresser. "Where did you get those from, hey?"
It's painful to see how slowly his mother turns her head towards the overstuffed vase of agapanthus. But her face lights up as though she's noticing their luminous bells for the first time. "Oh, one of the girls. I told her how much I like them, and she picked me a huge bunch from the garden. They're beautiful, aren't they? And they last so well."
"Whether you like them or not is neither here nor there." Brett leans forward in the armchair. "They're weeds – you do know that, mom?"
"I always used to grow agapanthus in my flower garden on the farm. Don't you remember?"
"Yah, well. They're an exotic invasive here. We're spending thousands of dollars a year at the Council, digging them up from the roadside verges, but they just keep on re-propagating from people's gardens."
She smiles.
"Well, I don't mind telling you the ratepayers wouldn't find it very funny–" He coughs to tamp down his rising voice. "– if they knew all that money was going down the drain."
Mom flutters her fingers to shush him. She's always done this to nip his outrage in the bud. "They are a weed," he says, but she's not listening. It's like her off-switch has been flicked.
Brett looks around the compact unit. The design is certainly efficient. Every Thursday when he visits, he's impressed anew how they've fitted so much into such a small space. It was definitely the right decision to put her in here. He's sure of that.
Now his brother Giles is dead, there's no way Mom could have stayed on alone at the farm. All the same, Brett would be the first to admit, uprooting her from Natal and bringing her over here hadn't worked out that well. Just a month after arriving, she slipped and broke her hip, and that dragged her down into infirmity. Even Brett's wife, Suzie, who's a physiotherapist, couldn't really explain why breaking a bone should have such a terrible effect on her mind, but it certainly had. Giles would never have put her into care. He'd have made a plan for sure. Then again, he was always her favourite. That's not fair, as Giles would have quietly pointed out, even if it is true.
"I said there's only a handful of engineers with dam specialisation in the South Island." Brett hopes repeating his news will fill the discomfiting silence. "So I'm seriously thinking about setting up my own consulting firm. It'll be risky, make no mistake, but, really, it's now or never." He glances at the geriatric bed. "I'm not getting any younger."
He doesn't know, and no longer cares, whether she's listening as he tells Mom again how well Suzie's practice is doing, and the top grades their daughters are achieving at varsity. Brett is not a sentimental man, but he feels a surge of love whenever he thinks of Suzie and the girls. He swipes his knuckle across his eyelids lest a tear has betrayed him.
Mom opens her eyes. "I used to know so much about the flora and fauna around me, but not anymore. They took us on a trip the other day, and I saw a herd of gemsbok in the distance, but, when we reached them, it was just deer, all cooped up in a paddock. So sad. Oh, but then, they took us somewhere else, and there was a bank of arum lilies by the roadside, and my heart leapt when I recognised them." Her smile fades. "And then someone spoilt it all – they told me they're a weed here."
"Well, take it from me," Brett says, "they are."
"Isn't it funny how you can step on an aeroplane at one end, and step off the other end, and everything changes?" She checks Brett's expression. "Not that I'm complaining, of course. But it is funny how the most beautiful flowers can become weeds, just like that."
The day before Mom's fall, Brett had lost it with her constant sniping about everything being so much better at home. "This is home now. Don't you understand that?" Suzie and the girls were out, so there was no soft touch on his arm and a mollifying 'Darling' or 'Daddy' to calm him. "Are you really that blind to the truth?" He prowled the lounge, just as Dad would have. For that moment he was Dad – channelling his booming voice, clenching his capable fists; the big man railing in vain against the obdurate, fragile woman. He stretched his shoulders at the doorframe. "Mom, I'm sorry I raised my voice. But, please try to understand that Suzie and me are settled – we love it here. And the girls think of themselves as Kiwis." She was staring, unreachable. "Well, that's the reality of it, and you'd just better get used to it."
Now Brett gropes for a gentler tone. "That business with weeds – it's not that difficult to understand if you think how many hours Dad spent ripping out Australian wattle from the stream to our dam – and that's their national tree."
Mom laughs too. "Varkblom – pig flower – that's what they call an arum lily in Afrikaans. I always thought it was such a funny thing to call a lovely bloom." She shakes her head. "Pig flower."
Dickie, John's younger brother, had taught her all these things: the names of the flora and fauna, about rocks and the eras they were formed. When you were out walking with him, Dickie would stop without warning, and squat to pick up a stone. And he'd hold it up, turning it in the sunlight. Maybe it was just a shard of flint, but he'd examine it as though he'd stumbled on another Koh-i-noor diamond. Then he'd build a world around this fragment, telling you when it was formed, and push his fists together and up to mimic the rupturing mountains.
"So, with the tectonic plates pushing against each other like this–" Dickie let his hands fall to his sides. "Are you laughing at me?" He was squinting against the sun, trying to read her expression.
She shook her head, but she had been laughing – in joy.
"It's just that I do get a little carried away. I know I do. Sorry. Sometimes my students laugh at me too."
"No. I'm sure they absolutely adore you."
He blushed. "Here." He handed her the stone. "It's flint, a kind of quartz. It would have been very precious to the first people for making fire."
Later, she wrapped the shard of flint in tissue paper. It's in an old jeweller's box in the top drawer of her dressing cabinet.
Before Dickie, how ignorant of the world around her she'd been. She was a farm girl who'd slipped from gymkhanas and polo club parties into marriage with John without a thought of other possibilities. And, whereas John had no real interests beyond the farm, sport and politics, Dickie's mind was on fire. Nothing missed his attention. He was always badgering the servants and labourers about their names for things, and he seemed quite oblivious to the ragging John and his mates gave him. Behind his back, they said such horrible things about his interest in the Africans, and used words that, after Dickie, she'd never allow to foul her mouth. She took to tagging along with him on his walks of discovery, picking up scraps of knowledge. She started to count away the days until the weekends when Dickie came up from the university in Durban. She felt so much more alive with him than she ever could be gossiping and lounging in the sun with the other wives while John and his mates sweated at the crease.
One Sunday, she and Dickie were walking through long grass by the stream that fed the farm's dam. She'd driven down to Maritzburg on Saturday morning for a perm, so she was hatless. The heat and the insect noise were disorienting, and she panicked when a cicada jumped and lodged in her hair. "Dickie, Dickie, get it out. It's horrible. Kill it. Please."
"Don't worry. Be still, my beauty." She blushed but realised he was talking to the cicada. So gently, he delved to rescue and cup it in his hands. "It's not horrible at all." He slowly opened the cage to reveal the squatting insect. "Look how beautiful those wings are
."
"Yes." She peered. "They're like lead glass windows." She was also examining Dickie's hands; smooth, quite small, almost childlike in comparison to John's. "So delicate." She jumped again when the cicada launched from Dickie's palm, but it was, she thought afterwards, a religious moment they'd spent, almost cheek to cheek, contemplating the insect's chapel window wings.
"Do you know where the word 'agapanthus' comes from, darling?"
Brett lowers his Construction Monthly. So, she's back. The on-switch must have been flicked. Brett thinks about her question; he hates to admit ignorance about anything. 'Panthus' – is that something to do with lions? Don't be stupid, man. "No," he says at last. "It must be Latin."
"It comes from 'agape', the Greek for love. They're flowers of love."
"Oh."
"You know the Zulus use agapanthus to cure all sorts of women's problems."
Brett winces. "Oh."
"They have lots of different words for agapanthus, umhlambezo is the one I can remember," Mom says. "I used to know so much Zulu, but now it's almost all gone."
Brett sits back in the armchair and