My aunt lived in one of those wooden sorts of houses you see in American films but never usually see here, where you step up onto an outdoor porch before you go in, and the whole house is raised up slightly above the ground. It never seemed natural to me having a gap beneath your own house. I used to wonder how she could sleep at night, imagining the insects down there, spiders and worms and lizards and worse, crawling around just beneath your feet, and not even the cold comfort of several feet of concrete for protection between you and them.
But I loved going there to see her whenever we could. And I always wanted to crawl under there, to find a gap into which I could squeeze and slither along and hide there away from everyone, to roll onto my back and look up through the floorboards and watch everyone from below and see somehow their true selves, the selves they hid from me because I was a child, because I was alone. But I never did find a gap, and I’d never have been allowed to crawl under there even if I did. Nor would I have dared to, in any case.
She was huge, my aunt. Huge, loud, exuberant, exciting and offhandedly kind. Every time we went she seemed to me to have grown, not only wider but taller too, deeper, more solid. Louder, lovelier.
I can still hear her laugh.
My dad was always subdued when we went round, his sternness lessened, his sureness rendered slightly stumbling. Probably in retrospect this was because she reminded him of my mother, brought out the sadness in him. But to me then it just seemed inevitable in a way. Everyone would have seemed reduced slightly by the overwhelming immensity of her presence, her brightness rendering everything else slightly dull, making us all seem slightly washed out, like a faded monochrome photo in comparison to her vibrant unreal technicolor splendour.
And maybe her brightness and sparkle was her response to that sadness, too, a protection for her heart and for my father’s too. And for mine, without me knowing. Without me even realising the possibility of it until just now.
I remember one christmas when we went there, on boxing day probably, or perhaps the day after. Her house was filled with elaborate hand-made paper decorations. Her tree looked as if it had always been there, always would be (and not even a single pine needle on the floor).
I worried about the candles in its branches, imagined everything going up in smoke, the tree, the decorations, the whole wooden house. But she just laughed and swept me off my feet, and we danced round the room, me in the dress she had given me for christmas and her in her in her jewels and her bracelets and her layers and layers of wool and fur, while my father played song after song for us on his violin, each one slowly seeping away into melancholy before a cough from my aunt would cause him to look up from his reverie and see us both there as if for the first time. Then an apology in the face of her ironic stern look, and a return to something jauntier, for a time.
Later, at the kitchen table, me and my aunt, separated by an endless array of cakes and chocolates, a rainbow of jellies and jam tarts, bowls of sweets and trays of enticingly dusted cubes of turkish delight.
“How old are you, now?” she said.
“Sixteen.”
“And how tall?”
“Five foot,” I said, and then quickly: “Four foot eleven, actually. And three quarters!”
We both laughed, although my aunt only quietly.
“You never did grow,” she said, as much to herself as to me. “She never did, either… You’re so like her, sometimes, you know? Like your mother…”
And she looked away and I caught a glimpse of tears at the corners of her eyes.
Then she stood up and walked away and when she came back holding a new bottle of wine she was as bright and as happy as always. She popped out the cork with a sly grin and poured me a glass to go with hers, and we went back to the living room and danced along to my father’s playing some more.
I’m sure that wasn’t the last time I saw her, but it feels like it. That winter or maybe the next my father got sick, and stayed sick, and with both the demands of work and of looking after of him, we travelled to see her less and less until eventually we stopped completely. After that we spoke through postcards and christmas cards and birthday presents and the occasional unoccasioned gifts.
And I thought of her every time my father played his violin, though that too was less and less each year.
Now, in the silence, I think of them both. I think of them always.
__________
Notes:
1. Written on September 8th, 2016
__________