Puddle Revisited

Puddle Revisited

by Anthony Richardson

 

My father has that face. He gets that face when I push him into the car and we take the A34, that crumbling road that leads us to my mum. His nose has grown since last year. The rest of his face has shrunk. My father has the face of a man that’s eaten a wasp, then forgotten he’s eaten a wasp and is wondering what all the damn fuss is about. He has on those shiny black shoes. Same shoes, always the same shoes, but polished, as if each time he’s wiped off the mud from that puddle, as if each time he won’t jump into it again. My father mumbles in the passenger seat, sitting up like a child, dribbling at the tiny country cottages that we pass.

‘Magic…magic…magic…’

We are going to see my mum. Not see, not see, but get over. Mum once shone like a beacon in every way. She lit up the dirty skies of Wallingford.

            My father is mumbling because he is practising his speech. Soon he will recite it and I will react in all the right places. His speech is a private play we’ve performed for five years, one night only 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006. I’ll stop it this year. Enough. My father brurrrs his lips and takes shallow breaths. Once, years back, a school recital I think, Mum and he helped me warm up. We breathed in together and loosened our lips. I suppose my father is imagining that. He clasps blue flowers – Spring Gentians. The petals are like raindrops.

            We’re driving to Wallingford, that old market town with its thatched roofs – straw, the colour red, Britain in Bloom. That’s where Mum is. My father shuts up like a fire door when we park in the square. He’s all warmed up, no need to mumble anymore. Wallingford doesn’t change.

           

 

 

The two of us stand and stare at the oldest puddle in England. My father and I, at the edge of this murky thing, like last year, and the year before that… The puddle has been here since the fifties, since nine months before my birth. Why is it still here? Geography and neglect – the water lies in a tiny valley, shaped by the ancient pavement’s disrepair.

 

‘Magic,’ my father declares, old and broken as the flagstones.

 

Mum’s grave is just a stone’s throw from here, but the puddle stops my father like an old friend. A medium sized puddle, the size of a window – never larger nor smaller than before, despite the rain, the drought, despite that heat wave that made those sparks fly around the houses. He stares at the thing so intently that it ripples. Sometimes I think the script of his speech is in the water but it’s too cloudy for me to see.

 

‘All the men in the room ogled her at that dance.’

‘But you were the one that took her home.’

 

My father nods. He peers past his reflection. Five years since she died.

 

‘I left that dance with your mammy on my arm. The men, the women, the menanwomen watched us as we left. Magic is what that puddle is.’

 

 

He met this puddle after my mother. The puddle had nothing to do with how he wooed her, but my father links the two as if one caused the other. They left the dance at midnight. They strolled towards the puddle, she on his arm like a prize at a fair. The puddle was newly formed with the rains that soaked the town. The moon bounced off the water. My father plucked up his courage to lift her up and over.

 

‘She stopped me and made me put her down. I was too rough with her, she said, and that I shouldn’t be so hasty. Oh, but she was laughing!’

 

Mum made the puddle permanent with her magic.

 

‘We stood about as lovers do, but then she took me by surprise. She undressed herself! Not bashful, your mammy. Right there and then that midsummer’s night!’

 

Flecks of white cling to his lips. He grips my wrist with feeble fingers as if to steady himself. But he never takes his eyes from the puddle, not once (‘and back then the water was so clear!’). Why would he, when that puddle is all that’s left? It is as if he’s paid to look at it, a demented salary, a top up to his pension, and I’m his assistant who mmm-hmmms and yes-Fathers and moves him on when he reaches the end. I picked those blue flowers for him – part of my job.

 

‘Undressed! Yes! Shimmied her yellow dress down to her ankles! Slipped off her shoes and dived right in! Head first, with nothing but a petticoat!’

 

Head first. She dived right in. It was midnight in the fifties and she jumped head-first into a puddle. My father tries to bend his knees as if to demonstrate and splish splash in himself, but arthritis has locked them up. 2004 2005 2006 he jumped a little bit, enough for me to get the picture. Clean shoes this time.

 

‘But something strange occurred. As she touched the water with her fingertips, she shrank! Shrank, she did, shrank to the size of a doll!’

 

The puddle is large enough to be a swimming pool for an eight or nine inch woman.

 

‘AND SHE SWAM! From end to end, she did, a tiny, beautiful, magical… YOUR MAMMY! Splashing about doing lengths in a puddle!’

 

He’s moving his arms, still grabbing my arms so tightly. I try to keep his movement to a minimum. When his fingernails dig into my skin like this I imagine a desert, and the sand around is white hot – Mum and him alone at an oasis.

 

‘And the strange thing was, the most curious thing of all, her clothes had shrunk as well! Shrunk! Tiny clothes, a little costume, as if a fairy had undressed!’

 

Her discarded clothes shrank, even though they hadn’t touched the water. Now I try to move him on, but my father won’t budge. He trembles with the memory, jaw hung open to give his tongue some air. So much for stopping the speech.

 

‘And do you know what I did with her clothes while she swam? I’ll tell you what I did. I got her outfit all in one and put it on my whatsit.’

‘Please, Now.’

‘On my member.’

‘Stop this.’

‘My cock.’

 

My father wore her dress on his penis and danced around the puddle while she did backstroke in the moonlight.

 

‘Dad. Come on now, will you. Enough, Dad. Enough’

 

He lets go. His arms drop all limp by his sides. That’s his speech. It ends like that and now he forces his head away. This is his face – crumpled. Finished. Nothing left to say. Does he think about this story at other times? Hard to say. Does he think about anything at other times?

            And soon he is jabbering and gesticulating over his sweetheart’s grave. The grass has grown over the headstone but Mum’s name is still clear, etched black like cinders into the marble.

 

And under the earth is a nine inch coffin.

 

But it wasn’t the puddle that made my mother small. The puddle was there, they saw the puddle, but it wasn’t that. She’d been burnt in a house fire. You remember that fire, don’t you, Dad, while you dribble and point? You saved yourself, you saved your damn shoes, but you didn’t save her, and when the firemen fought with that black thatched roof you stood in the street with those shoes in your hand and a light went out in your head. The puddle went grey with the smoke like a horrible dream. I think you remember that.

I’ll say this to him, I’ll stop his speech. Next year. First I’ll ring the council. The pavement needs renewing. I’ll pay for it myself. I’ll get a Hoover and suck all the water up.

 

But I called him Dad.

 

And this is the bit where he takes the blue flower and pulls off its petals, and they rain like teardrops on her grave. This is how he puts my mammy out.