Grass (2) or The Missing Arrow (2)

When Child Arthur returned to the house - following his defilement of its
perfect lawn - he held out his hands to be washed.

"Good Heavens, what have you done to the skin?"

He looked up at his benefactor. There was no love in the eyes, not even
any concern for the predicament of the apparently ruptured skin.

"The grass was sharp."

"Sharp? Grass is not sharp. There must have been something under the
grass where you dug - something that cut your hands so badly."

"Grass has blades. Grass has blades." Arthur repeated the lesson. A
lesson he had had learnt by rote - a lesson at at the City Institution which
taught him that every living creature - however soft on the inside,
however soft on the outside - had unexpected, often invisible, edges. He
could not remember the subject-name of the lesson, perhaps it didn't
have one, or a lesson in anonymity. It was a lesson he kept inside him,
churned and matured, kept inside his head, only to bring forth as a
memory, whenever it occurred to him to be useful as a memory;
sometimes the memory came unbidden, like many memories; sometimes
it came without coming at all, merely sitting on the edge of his
consciousness like a cow ready to be milked, once the dawn came.

"What's that on your hand? It looks rusty, whatever it is. Get rid of it.
You need to wash your hands to get it all off."

He stared at his own hands. He wondered if the redness was blood or just
colour.

There in the centre of his left palm - both of which palms he held out like a
supplication for more (more food, more love, more nothing?) - was a
bent key. Rusty-red like his hands.

He allowed it to be removed tentatively between scissor-blades by a
second benefactor who had just entered the room, whilst the original
benefactor bandaged his hands one by one. But he could not
remember them being washed first.

He was sat down at the dining-table and a covered plate was pushed
towards him while there was invisibly pointed out to him a lump of cheese
sitting under the cover - with hard rind and colourless rings of staleness.

"I won't eat it."

"You'll starve then."

From the distance, Arthur could hear the squeaking and grinding of an
unruly lock, back and forth, back and forth, as the iron flag stirred its
mechanical innards, till its tumblers tilted towards tipping the balance
of falling - on the brink of opening yet another invisible barrier. Although
invisible, he imagined it as sturdy oak - impenetrable bar this access of
an untempered lock and a lucky choice of keyfind. Except this particular
key was bent, he knew. Another memory he retrieved. Whether short-
term or long-term, memories seemed ever of the same vintage when they
arrived. Arrival made all memories bear the same timbre of memory by
the overbearing strength of the memory having arrived at all. A million
memories. And only a few ever got through.

Meanwhile, the cover had been removed to reveal grilled lamb chops, new
potatoes and greens, drenched in thick gravy. He tucked in with gusto,
despite the difficulty of manipulating the cutlery with his bandaged
hands. The knife-blade was not even blunt; it was simply too thick for
that. Someone (ch)eerily whistled in kitchen, as the lock finally gave.

After he finished, indeed, the other benefactor returned with a letter in an
envelope which was passed to Arthur, via the original benefactor. It had
his name on it in signaturish handwriting.

"Open it."

Arthur took the dirty knife and tried to slit the envelope open with it, in the
same way as he had often seen those uniformed people in the City
Institution carry out with the morning mail, them all having posh airs
and graces.

"It's a love letter."

Arthur looked up. Lessons at school had told him about love. He therefore
expected the envelope to contain some message concerning bodily
functions, stickiness, the guts of guilt, things coming out from
Mother Nature, as it were. He couldn't remember everything about love.
He couldn't write joined-up, so he also found it difficult to read joined-up.
He was helped to take the letter from the envelope, because the
bandages were working loose from the tiny limbs of what he thought he
saw as two hand creatures - making manipulation even more difficult.
Scissors had replaced the knife in the process - and the watermarked
letter-paper itself had been slit as well as the edge of the envelope as if,
perhaps, ready for folding into a childhood origami paper sculpture
bearing strategic slits ... one which he had been taught, in lessons, to
harden by means of dried milk paste dampened with bodily fluids.

It was red-skinned - a smooth strong rind. Perhaps it was all rind with no
middle. No seedbed within for memories to incubate. Redness or simply
colour? An immature mystery of mindless matter skewered by a bent
arrow.

After dinner, he went out to play in the garden. At his age, he could slip in
and out of himself at will. Up or down, neither mattered. The lawn was
now smooth all over as if he'd never played at digging on it before. He
knelt in the centre and sent a prayer for love.