She collected lolly sticks,
The ones with jokes on them:
Why did the chicken cross the road?-type stuff,
Which she stained brown and used as floorboards
in her magnum opus.
The Tudor house was the best one.
It had servants’ quarters
And a kitchen with little hessian potato sacks made
of something or other she salvaged from
somewhere or other;
And the floorboards looked so real:
painted lolly sticks
but almost evoking the smell of varnish,
layers of polish on a floor trodden by centuries
in perfect miniature;
Almost.
This was the last of the three
or four
dolls’ houses she built;
The devil’s work for her idle widow’s hands.
She built this one while you were entering your final
stalemate
that doomed dance that sits so permanently
on your conscience
like a sack of compost
full of water.
(I choose this simile only because
I found this in my garden yesterday,
and it was ******* heavy.)
On paper it was simple:
You gave her your house,
She gave you hers.
And so her house shrunk around her and
became a dolls’ house of your own making,
Irrationally
she saw your god-hands reaching in
to manipulate and
extort her.
She was wrong, of course.
You were making good on your promise.
You would come through for her in her frailty.
You did – but
it was a promise you made more to yourself than her,
And she let her illogical mind
never analytical to begin with
now razed and blinded by grief and loneliness
(there was nothing to work with)
poison your good deed,
you were both dolls now.
Eight years later she died lovelessly.
She retreated into her sitting room
the only part of the house that stayed the same
after you moved in –
the walls closed in to contain it
constrict it
a hospital bed and vinyl chair with commode,
and the brown laminate floor
just like
her lolly sticks.
You administered painkillers
Admitted the nurses
Negotiated with your estranged brother.
but her paranoia rotted everything
and your hands cared with compassion but not love.
Gone, now,
the dolls’ houses remain.
An inheritance of clutter
in a house you bought.
You answer the phone
breathlessly
aggressively.
You have been heaving the big one up the stairs
that sack of compost
that heavy conscience of yours.
You will be heaving those ******* dolls’ houses around
until I have to buy your house and care for you.
But I am telling you now:
I am putting them in a skip
the moment I have the chance.
They are not imbued with the joy they gave her
any more than
by keeping them safe from landfill
you can imbue them with the love you withheld.
They are painted lolly sticks and sewn hessian.
They don’t contain any more of her
than the bits of paper she kept
passwords and bank balances
dates and instructions for the Sky box
There is nothing left of her to protect now.
Open up the hinged false front,
tip out the miniatures
let the little figures be free,
be landfill
(isn’t that what dying is anyway?)
all the tangible things she touched and loved
are not avatars for her touch and her love.
The past is not present through the preservation of objects.
The past is not erased by the advancement of time
nor can it be undone by corrective action.
Now she is on the other side of the road,
(why did the chicken–
behave.)
She has no further use for the things she left behind.
