Being Light 2011 by Helen Smith Page A

the soft shoots on the branches to remove the leaves. She takes the very ends of the slimmest branches in her two hands and bends them until they break, the muscles tensing in her upper arms and her back under her tight pink T-shirt. Other, thicker branches are trimmed and cut to length with secateurs. Sylvia parcels them up using garden twine and places them lengthwise in a shoe-box shaped woven basket with a handle to take them to the wood store, which is actually a garden shed. The leaves and twigs that she can’t use for firewood in the kitchen and the living room are sorted into piles, the leaves going on to a compost heap and the twigs carried to a brazier in the back of the garden to be burned with the household rubbish.
    There is something different about the orchard at the bottom of Sylvia’s garden this morning. Roy looks very carefully at it through the foliage of the rose bushes that frame the kitchen window. Something has changed. Spring is coming but it’s not that. He studies the view from the window. Soft shoots and hard buds are appearing on the flowers and trees, red and green among the grey. Clematis has wound itself through the rose branches, teardrop flower buds poking out at the top like little green vipers standing on their tails above a nest of prickles.
    Roy looks through the sunlit space among the roses to where the sunlight reaches the apple trees. He watches two of the trees pick themselves up and move away, slowly. He looks again and sees they are Sorrel the elephant’s legs moving, not the apple trees. Roy loses sight of her among the trees, then catches the movement again as she walks down to the beach. He feels lonely, watching her unobserved.

    Ella Fitzgerald is potting up the geranium cuttings that have over-wintered on the window ledge in her spare bedroom. The leaves are variegated; soft green with thin maroon lines traced in them. She touches the leaves and the contact intensifies the distinctive, spicy smell in the air. The flowers, when they come, will be shocking salmon pink and red pepper red.
    Ella thinks about her husband, long since dead, who suffered from colour blindness. Men are more prone to the condition than women. Four per cent of men suffer from colour blindness, compared to one per cent of women. She pauses for a moment in sympathy for those who will never enjoy the garish clash of geranium colours when the flowers start to appear on the plants. How can such vibrant, different colours be indistinguishable? Her husband never liked to discuss it. He couldn’t explain whether he perceived the colours as a muddy mixture or whether he saw both red and green as some exotic extra colour that she didn’t have access to through normal vision. He only said that he couldn’t see the difference between them.
    There is a very rare colour blindness in which everything appears as a shade of grey, like a black and white photograph, or a television advertisement for an expensive perfume. Also very rare is blue blindness, in which sufferers are unable to detect the colour blue. More common is green blindness, in which bright green is confused with dark red, and red blindness, in which dark green is confused with light red. Mrs Fitzgerald’s husband, whose disability would have disbarred him from taking a job as a signalman on the railways or a pilot on an aircraft, had chosen a career in the law and made a great success of it. Mrs Fitzgerald sighs a very tiny sigh, thinking about her lost husband.
    She turns to the pots. She’s using a compost that doesn’t deplete the natural peat resources, emulating Geoff Hamilton, who until his death a few years ago was a stalwart in her life with his sensible advice on Gardener’s World on Friday evening television. Mrs Fitzgerald sighs again. She sometimes feels she goes on and on through life, carrying its burdens, as men fall away. The earthy smell of the compost connects her to deep thoughts. She brushes away the dirt that clings on her