To say my grandmother was eccentric is an exercise in gross understatement.
Particular to the point of painful, she needed everything done just so, or she would throw impressive fits, and claim she would never speak to the perpetrator again.
How my father put up with this, I am not entirely certain; the man should have been canonised as a saint, since his patience seemed as endless as the universe itself. He would simply go along with my grandmother’s requests, docile and compliant, the most perfect son one could imagine.
And so, as his daughter, I also learned to behave myself around my grandmother. I never put a foot out of place, kept my thoughts to myself, and lived in dire fear of the ‘consequences’.
What those consequences might be, it took me years to figure out; but given how terrified my father seemed of whatever-it-was, as a child I didn’t dare to gainsay anything dear Grandmama asked me to do.
For that I must thank my father, for it saved both of us from a terrible fate.
I must preface this next part by telling you a little more about my grandmother’s other eccentricities. Proper in a practically Victorian manner, she covered every inch of herself in embroidered clothes, with frothing lace, ankle-length skirts and high boots concealing everything but her fingers and her face. I sometimes wondered what she would look like naked; imagining a pale, wrinkled thing, the likes of which you would see if you turned over an old tree stump, or dug deep into the soil of a gloomy forest. Certainly, she never let anyone ever see her anything other than fully clothed; she even slept in the same sort of attire, never showing a scrap of skin beyond her heavily lined face and her gnarled old hands.
Her house was kept similarly prim; with a place for everything and everything in its place. From a very young age, I learned to sit still on my chair, never to fidget, and never to touch anything. Once I dared poke a painted porcelain pitcher filled with geraniums, and she shrieked blue murder at me until my father begged her to let me be.
And there were treasures all over that house, which enticed my childish mind something shocking. Impressively ancient grandfather clocks clanked away, winged by gilded statuettes. All kinds of jewels and baubles were placed in display cabinets and drawers, and my fingers ached to touch and try on every one of them. It was a paradise lost; a child’s playground in which nobody played, a museum of things my grandmother had accumulated during her life.
Locked away in a special room behind her bedroom was a particular treasure; one that my father had warned me to never go near. He said that the room was a study, panelled with oak and brass. It contained only a table and chair, and upon the table rested an iron case, which I was never to even look at – let alone dare to open.
Not that anyone could open it, he told me, because the only key hung around my grandmother’s neck, under all those layers of fusty old clothes.
And so I never went near that room, nor did I ever dream of touching the precious iron case; even though I burned with an unholy desire to see what was within.
That all changed the weekend my grandmother passed away.
I was the one who found her, sprawled on the polished tiles of her third bathroom, one of the two such rooms upstairs. I was still so terrified of the ancient harridan that I gingerly nudged her stockinged leg with my foot, then finally called out when she didn’t rouse. I had no hope of feeling her pulse through the lace around her throat, so instead I pushed back the stiff sleeve of her left wrist, to feel for a beat under that papery bluish skin.
