Non Fiction Fiction

I managed to write! Every word of it is true.


Non Fiction Fiction



My grandmother is sitting. Her armchair looks coarse and feels soft, and is roughly the colour of tea with not enough milk in. Her cobalt eyes look wet, but she says they are always watering. I think of my old green watering can with the purple flower on it: I never did like gardening, and watering eyes is a peculiar concept.
She tells me stories, my grandma; black and white stories: men in top hats with canes; ghosts in top hats on the stairwell. I and my technicolour do not fully appreciate these stories until I am much older (my grandma also predicts this).
My grandmother rests her bad leg on a stool with a blue and yellow blanket. That blanket always made my eyes dry and itchy. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a 50p coin and rosary beads. ‘This is for your pocket money’, she says, ‘and now it is six and we must pray.’
I watch and mime as her thin lips fumble over the Mary Full of Graces. Her watery eyes are closed. The rosary beads are made of real dried rose petals. When I use them I close my eyes and hold them in the groove between my nose and my mouth. Grandma thinks it is because I am passionate; they are old, but if you hold them close enough to your face and breathe in through your nose then you can still catch a whiff of musk.
Grandma’s flat is very different to the way it is now. Now, as I write this, they are stripping the walls of their paint, and they are hanging up ‘aubergine’ curtains. Grandma’s curtains are deep red and regal. My hair then is still blonde and long past my waist. My mother brushes it everyday- one hundred brushes- and scolds me when I put strands of it in my mouth.
Grandma has finished praying and I have finished pretending to. She reaches over to the plate on the table by her chair and produces an aniseed ball. I like the way they burn your tongue at the beginning. When it starts to taste sweet you can pull it out of your mouth and it is white; and if you suck it small enough and pull it out of your mouth, it looks like a tooth. I tried putting a small white aniseed ball under my pillow one night, but the tooth-fairy is not easily fooled.
I have finished my homework, and crossed out the tasks in my diary. My grandmother tells me I am a very good girl when I show her this. When I show her my mathematics copybook she tells me she can only remember her calculus because her teacher was a nun who wore her spectacles too far down on her nose and handed you caramels when you got your answers right. She tells me I must improve my handwriting: it looks like a mischievous spider swam in an ink-pot then danced on my copybook. I giggle and think of Little Miss Muffet. Her spider wore a top hat too. I decide that I like spiders. I do not like cockroaches.