There are so many things that change when you grow very, very old. Most of those changes are rather predictable and unwelcome, but one has come as a pleasant and liberating surprise; time has lost its power over me. Without the demands of a job, dependents, a husband or a household to regiment my hours, the days and weeks drift together into an amorphous cloud. Within its soft confines, I simply exist again, freed from all expectations, from all the constraints of responsibility.
I still need to eat and sleep, of course; although another curious effect of being very elderly is that one needs so little sleep. Often, I’ll find myself wide awake in front of the television in the smallest hours of the morning, and must quite firmly tell myself to go to bed. Food has also become something to remind myself about; my appetite is small and simple these days, lost as I am in other more interesting activities.
In many ways, I feel my childhood self once more. She did not anticipate the horrid responsibilities of adulthood, the untold banalities that steal our joy when we’re not looking. No-one does. Growing up is like a grey rain, cares pitter and patter at your soul, drizzling it with worry until your true self is lost in a constant fog of anxiety about nothing. When you are old enough not to have to worry, when time is so short it somehow no longer matters at all, it seems less twilight than springtime.
Now, my mind is free to play again, to wander the dusty corridors of memory, seeing which doors still open. Some swing ajar to reveal faded scenes from the past; behind others wait only echoing, empty rooms, not even cobwebs of the original recollections remaining.
But there is one room that is always alive and vivid, one impossible memory that I will never lose. I met him very young, and his light stayed with me through the mundane years. Perhaps he is the source of both my dotage, and my gift of this second spring.
I called him Pickled Puck.
My great aunt owned an impressive house in the rural reaches. It was built on chalky soil, at the end of a winding limestone driveway shaded by craggy, ancient wych elms. Befitting the stern and peculiar woman she was, she had her own rooms, which none were permitted to enter – not even my mother. But children are curious creatures, and although I was a girl – or perhaps because I was a girl – I was particularly good at sneaking into places where I was forbidden. And of course, nobody suspected duplicity from the polite cherub with primroses in her cheeks and golden ringlets in her hair.
My great aunt’s rooms were, by today’s standards, gargantuan and gothic. The ceilings were high enough to intimidate, and the doors and crossbeams were a full handspan thick, massive and elaborate things of ancient, darkened wood. I well remember the hewn roughness beneath my palms as I crept, hugging the walls, lest my stockinged feet cause the floorboards to creak and betray my presence. Fusty furniture and precious objects were arrayed according to some esoteric pattern, no doubt derived from my ancient aunt’s Victorian upbringing. The placement of each piece seemed precise, conforming to convoluted edicts of etiquette, long lost to all but the odd periodical article about banal and outdated curiosities.
One room, however, was wholly different. It was certainly not laid out according to those archaic rules, but was so cluttered with junk that I imagined myself the bold heroine, chanced upon a dragon’s hoard.
It was a slope-roofed attic room, and my aunt had filled it with all manner of unwanted and unloved things. The room itself appeared just as forgotten as its contents; rot, mildew, webs and dust blanketed everything with black-spotted layers of grey. The shed skins of spiders gently vibrated as my intrusion stirred the stale air.
I could have lost hours in there, prising open old hat boxes, rubbing mould off stiffened silk and taffeta dresses sewn with seed pearls and moissanites. But I did not, because I knew my time to pry was short, only as long as my aunt deemed proper to entertain my parents in the solar.
In those times, we did not have the sensitive and sensible laws and niceties we do now. The age fostered a morbid fascination for all things macabre and dead, and hence there were many collectors of specimens and whimsies – taxidermied animals, and preserved, foetal creatures, their waxy white bodies suspended in jars of potent alcohols.
I’d seen one such collection at a travelling circus carnival the year before, and had been horrified and fascinated by the deformed babies – both human and beast – floating peacefully in their glass-and-ether wombs, never to be born. Pickled Punks they were called, and though my father assured me the two-headed babies and eight-legged kittens were rubber fakes, I wasn’t so sure. After my precious penny had disappeared into the pocket of the man running the sideshow, he lifted the jars to show us more closely. I had seen soft, prenatal hair stir gently in the yellowed fluids; hair far too delicate and perfect to be faked.
For weeks after viewing them, their pale presences bobbed and swirled in the back of my mind, serene and freakish, the perfect childhood combination of terrifying and alluring.
And so, when I saw the large, grime-speckled specimen jar resting amongst battered leather suitcases in that room full of junk, my heart leapt with excitement. When I wrestled it free and scraped a window in the patina of dirt, I was not disappointed. Inside the jar floated a foetal creature, one far more queer and wonderful than any of the pickled circus menagerie. It had long, pointed ears, a pinched, almost human face, and delicate, facetted wings like those of a dragonfly. Pinpoint flakes of silver fluttered and swirled in the fluid surrounding it, like the dance of tiny stars.
Without another thought, I snatched it up and hurried out of my aunt’s rooms. I stowed the jar away in my own little travelling trunk, carefully concealed beneath a pile of neatly pressed winter pinafores.
