Granny Blue

Each detail of my world was a wondrous discovery when I was a child, though nowhere exceeded this sense of wonderment more than in Granny Blue’s garden. Every dewdrop was a moonstone carbuncle back then, and every granite grave was a sparkling monolith. I explored with accepting eyes, not questioning what I saw, though perhaps I should have. All seedlings reach for the light regardless of where it comes from.

“One day, you’ll inherit it all,” Granny Blue would tell me. “You have gumption, unlike your father.”

Even back then, I sensed my grandmother’s frostiness to everyone except me. Others, children and adults alike, seemed to respect and fear her. Her smiles and compliments were reserved for me alone, and in return I never dared cross her like I might with Mum or Dad. She respected me as my own person, and I loved her for it. I wanted the qualities she possessed, which made others bend to her. I was an unusually small girl with a shock of frizzy white-blonde hair, tired of bullies picking on me.

At 12 my wonderment and knowledge were balanced on a fulcrum; I could name every plant in the garden and remain lost in their magic. On family visits, usually school holidays, something interesting always sprouted in Granny Blue’s garden.

At Easter, the garden glowed with daffodils, forsythia, swathes of neon spurges and alien-green hellebores. Later, tumbling yellow flowers, like bunches of yellow grapes, would dangle from the laburnum tree that leaned over the second greenhouse. By midsummer the palette grew hotter; the pink spires of foxgloves and the blinding white umbels of water hemlock towered around the pond. Lilly of the valley sprouted from the front of the borders, the flowers like little white fairy hats filling the garden with a sweet scent. Meanwhile the yew trees sported pixie-sized pompoms.

The garden grew sinister towards autumn; fat spiders spun webs bejewelled with dewdrops across fading foliage. In the darkling days leading up to Halloween, Granny Blue’s favourite time of year, she sent me to collect windfall apples. She made apple crumble with the flesh, but kept all the seeds in a jar.

The garden was a mystery of curves and bends, which hid a few buildings. The greenhouse containing her exotics was the best in autumn, and I spent inclement days admiring the giant red, horn-shaped flowers of her brugmansias, angel’s trumpets. We placed boughs of laurel, holly and mistletoe above every lintel in her little cottage come yuletide.

A blue paisley scarf always covered Granny Blue’s wild grey hair. Her dungarees, threadbare at the knees, had faded to insipid blue over her little sagging form. She was no beauty. Among her features was a hooked nose and beady obsidian eyes, which seemed to be able to penetrate skin with their gaze. Despite her outward appearance, she was kind to me.

She wasn’t the same with Dad. Granny Blue constantly disapproved, nit-picked, or downright criticised him, even in front of strangers. Despite being an adopted child, I was never treated the way Granny Blue treated Dad. In spite of the friction between her and my dad, her only son, it seemed I could do no wrong. She called me Belladonna, a nickname as well as a plant found in one of her greenhouses.

Mum didn’t like Granny Blue, so I only got to stay there alone when my parents were desperate for a babysitter. On the few occasions I slept at Granny Blue’s, away from my parents and my big brother, she would have me assist her with botany in the second greenhouse called the glasshouse.

The glasshouse was a grumpy-looking, tumbledown, Victorian building tucked away behind rambling roses with thorns like needles used for sewing through leather. One side and the roof were glass and the rear was red brick. However, little light penetrated the mucky glass panels through the roses. One year there was a dead magpie decomposing against the glass ceiling. I watched the process over months with fascination and disgust until nothing but bird bones remained. Perhaps that was the first indication of my dark delights; I was disgusted because I was supposed to be, but the macabre fascination with the dead bird was all mine.

The glasshouse contained few plants for its large size and looked more like Dr Jekyll’s laboratory inside, strictly off limits to the rest of the family.

“These botany sessions are to be our little secret, Belladonna,” Granny Blue would tell me. In my naivety, I thought it was because I was special, and I prided myself on this preferential treatment.

One evening I was in the glasshouse helping Granny Blue with her botany. She stirred the contents of a pot on her makeshift gas hob attached to a big red gas canister. The smell of burnt honey filled the room. “Fetch two Carolina Reaper chillies and a limb of mandrake root,” she said.

Her grimoire was open on an iron stand beside her. She scanned the book with one eye as she stirred. Meanwhile, I scanned the jars of tinctures, salves, powders and dried fauna along the back wall. Her concoctions were well known, and people were always coming and going from her cottage with them. When the law couldn’t provide people with justice, they came to Granny Blue. I wasn’t exactly sure what her concoctions were for; I only helped brew them.

When inside the glasshouse, Granny Blue insisted my skin was covered and I wore long sleeves as well as a pair of roomy gardening gloves. I brushed past the few strange plants in the central aisle as I skipped to the stepladder and fetched the chillies. I knew the variety was so hot a person would think they were on fire from the inside if they ate just one. From the bench, I lifted the little contorted figure of mandrake root and snapped off his muddy little arm before returning to Granny Blue.

“Almost done,” she said with a crooked smile as she relieved me of the ingredients.

My nose barely reached the countertop where she worked, and she stood on a step to reach everything comfortably. Her pointed orthopaedic shoes peeked out from beneath the ragged bottoms of her dungarees.

Her gnarled hands gripped a stone mortar and pestle and she crushed the dried chillies. This was when she would start to sing. It was unfailingly eerie. The language was nothing recognisable, although I could mimic it, and the glass panels of the greenhouse would quiver at her high-pitched, plaintive songs. Often while Granny Blue was entranced, I would peek at the beautiful and foreign cursive writing in her grimoire.

Granny Blue’s songs always sent me to sleep, regardless of the hour. The notes issued from between her crinkled lips were enough to make the steam from her pot dance and my eyelids turn leaden. I would awaken always on the following morning in a cot set up for me in the attic. Odd rhymes lingered in my mind as I drifted through no-man’s land between sleep and waking:

Slumber sweet Belladonna,

The world’s not going to end for me or you,

Sleep well Belladonna,

For tonight another’s death is due.

I did wake up once, which must have been a mistake because it was still night. I clambered on the old toy chest so I could see out of the window. From outside came the sound of metal crunching against flint. I peered out on tiptoes and saw my grandmother digging in the flowerbeds. The moonlight cast a shadow from her hunched form and beside her was a rolled-up carpet. I asked her about it the following morning.

“I was planting a magic carpet tree,” she told me with a cackle.

I accepted this at the time without question. I hoped the tree would grow quickly so I could go on adventures like in One Thousand and One Nights.

Granny Blue’s mesmerism stopped working on me by the time I bore a child and worried about her influence on my little girl. More than that, I worried about the growing darkness inside myself. I was a young mother whose boyfriend hadn’t stuck around. Despite the years flying by, Granny Blue clawed against her grave. I watched my grandmother crumble along with the garden she had built. I glimpsed beyond her magic, but not beyond the awe her wild garden inspired in me.

The exotic flowers faded for me on the night a fat policeman came to Granny Blue’s door and asked to speak to her. Alone. My daughter was asleep in the cot upstairs. Dad, frail himself by then, shook his head with disapproval before disappearing outside for a cigarette.

“What’s this about?” I asked Dad, following him into the tepid night.

“I’m sorry you had to see it—"

“What? She helps people find justice. What’s she done wrong?” I asked defensively, still unwilling to see the odd seeds planted to spawn trouble.

If he was surprised, he didn’t let it show. Dad’s grey eyes, once insipid blue, affixed their gaze on me. “You still don’t see what’s going on here, do you? Never mind. It won’t last.” He would say no more and walked away to enjoy his hit of nicotine alone.

A prickle crawled down my backbone. My gaze lifted to the odd tombstones nestled in the long grass. They were anonymous, and it was strange because I always assumed they were the markers of many deceased pets, perhaps thirteen in total, but I could only recall her having an ancient black cat called Wilfred. He was a mercurial feline with thick black fur who slept above the oven’s extractor and had a penchant for torturing fallen fledglings.

My skin was tight from being in the sun all day, watching over my daughter and making sure she didn’t touch any of the garden’s poisonous plants. I was exhausted by the time the policeman left. Despite this, I stayed up. Earphones plugged into my phone kept music thumping into my brain, the volume turned low so I could hear what was going on. At ten, I heard Dad go to the spare room. His snoring made the walls vibrate soon after.

I kept vigil.

Tires crunched gravel as they crept along Granny Blue’s driveway, and I tiptoed to the attic window to see the policeman’s car return after midnight. A thrill ran through me, my darkness delighted. The fat policeman lumbered from the car in flannel pyjamas, as if he was sleepwalking. He shuffled to the porch, and I could see the shadow of Granny Blue cast from the door across the gravel. She must have been waiting for him. A few notes of her high-pitched song wormed past my earphones and into my ear canal. I turned up the volume of my music, steadying myself against the initial sweet insult, which threatened to anaesthetise me.

I waited.

The policeman departed again. In one meaty hand, he clutched an extravagant bouquet of deadly flowers. From it peeked the red trumpets of burgmansia, steeples of iridescent-blue larkspurs and frothy hemlock flowers used to soften the pallet like a florist might use baby’s breath. In his other hand was an unmarked bottle of what looked like wine; I had seen such bottles in a rack in Granny Blue’s glasshouse. The hand-blown green bottles were unlabelled unlike everything else in there. These bottles stood like a regiment of soldiers awaiting orders on an unreachable shelf. I was forbidden to even look at them.

The car door slammed. I edged away from the window as tires retreated along the driveway. I made my way around my sleeping daughter, avoiding the creaking floorboards as I went.

I came upon Granny Blue in the hall as my sock met the last step.

“Everything all right?” I asked. Despite my adulthood, I dared not fling accusations or be anything less than respectful to her.

“Problems that needed solving.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“As wise women throughout history have done, I help others by using my knowledge of botany. It has its price.”

I frowned, unsure I wanted to disappear down that rabbit hole. Like Dad, maybe it was better to ignore the poison garden, the shoes, the black cat, the cauldron and the grimoire. Not to mention the songs that anaesthetised people. I didn’t want to think about the somnambulant policeman in the dead of night, or Granny Blue’s forays into moonlight gardening. I dared not contemplate the tombstones of pets never seen.

“Go to sleep Belladonna,” said Granny Blue. “You’re not like the others. Soon you’ll inherit all of this. Your dark delights will be sated.”

Her vow roused fear and excitement in me. What Granny Blue offered was the greatest gift for which an adopted albino orphan could hope. Power. The power to mete out justice, the kind I could never find before being adopted. I went up to my room and gazed out of the window at the small gravestones almost hidden by grass. Unlike the others, I would not fail Granny Blue.

Darcy L. Wood

Darcy L. Wood's short fiction recently featured in the Thirteen Podcast and After Dinner Conversation, while non-fiction has appeared in The Daily Drunk. In 2019, Darcy was long-listed for a flash fiction Competition held by Shoreline of Infinity. Darcy lives with a Swedish boyfriend and their menagerie in Oxfordshire.