Thursday – Hazel Smoczynska

Hazel Smoczynska lives in Leeds, England, where she works for an environmental conservation charity. In her free time, she tends to her allotment and pursues her passion for writing.

 

 

The day I returned to Thursday had a dream-like quality. It was the middle of Long Summer and, as was usual when I was traveling, I had risen with the sun. My lower body ached from cycling miles of overgrown track, the back of my neck smarted from sunburn, and the exposed skin on my legs and arms tingled from the whips of tall grass.

I had imagined coming back many times over the years, sometimes in those relaxed, lucid moments just before sleep, sometimes deep in concentration as I stared at maps spread out before me, desperately trying to latch on to forgotten landmarks that might direct me to the location of this lost outpost.

Thursday was never mapped. I knew that. Its small footprint was, by design, both discrete and ephemeral. I had no idea if, were I to find it, there would be anything left to identify it by. The laboratory had been dismantled. This began before we left, a painstaking and methodical deconstruction that I remember in timelapse from my walks with the girl who looked after me at the end. Jean? Jane? All those errands she had concocted for us in the final weeks, to pass the time and keep up an impression of normality. If there was anyone else still living that remembered Thursday, it would be her, or perhaps her husband, who could only have been a few years older. Both so young compared to my father and the rest.

When I had finally left the garden city behind, the structure of the land had broken down more quickly than I expected. Those first nights were the most difficult, finding somewhere to camp out of sight, within the huge farming grids. Travel was easy, along the smooth, clearly marked roads, but I felt watched from the twinkling windows of the industrial grow-houses and flashing eyes of the silos. Then, quickly, order disintegrated, and fields began to revert to their historical boundaries. The further north I cycled, the more difficult the tracks became to ride. The sand that had swept in from the East had formed into soft dunes over forty years, held together by restharrow and centaury. My tyres struggled to grip, and the sun glanced unforgivingly off the landscape. Instinctively, I crept west, where old roads reasserted themselves and ancient woodlands had halted the sweep of coastal debris. 

When my grandmother’s tea grew cold on the dresser, I remember I went out to find her. Hidden by the washing half-hung, her face had dropped on one side, and in that moment the whole world felt like it had tilted on its axis. It was the start of the strange months. Some of these events were written for future generations to learn from, and some have ended up mine alone. When my father returned, he was embarrassed. His elderly mother and young daughter had always been unconventional additions to the Thursday community, permitted only on the strength of his reputation. Within the walls of his laboratory, he didn’t see everyday life passing, and didn’t understand that everyone had brought bits of the outside world in with them. He also never really understood how unimportant his work would prove to be, overtaken by events in the real world that, over years of charting had, in his mind I think, lost some of their danger through their scientific predictability.

In the end, I found Thursday by looking for absence. Not only would it not be on any map, but neither would anything else. No areas of outstanding natural beauty, no historic landmarks or sites of scientific importance. No lakes, no rivers, no streams. That was the most important. From the little I understood of what my father did, I knew that the absence of overground water was the key. That was how the site had been chosen, and in the end that was how I found it again.

The whole landscape whispered. It must have been later in Long Summer than I remembered, because the air was no longer still, the first breezes of seasonal change rippling the long grass. I stumbled through dense tussocks of cocksfoot grass, seedheads catching in the weft of my t-shirt and then, there it was, a blaze of colour emerging from the mist of meadow. 

In all the times I had imagined returning to Thursday, I realised then, I had anticipated the route we had taken by car, a long straight driveway flagged by prefab houses on one side, and a crude cricket pitch on the other. Now, my navigations had brought me in behind the houses, stumbling onto the back gardens scratched out of the landscape over long days of loneliness and monotony. They were women’s gardens, by and large, created by the wives of my father’s colleagues. They remain in my mind a peculiar, amorphous group, women with neat clouds of tinted white hair, pinkish or slightly golden, like umbels of elderflower. Their clothes bright and synthetic, flushed skin sagging gently as they raised their arms to prune the rose bushes they had planted in imitation of the gardens they’d left behind. Though nothing but meadow grew beyond the houses, by mutual agreement each garden followed the line of the house it belonged to and ended abruptly at the same point, as if they had expected more people to arrive and begin another street behind them.

The gardens as they now stood were ragged and overgrown. Anything that had once been lawn had turned back to the swaying grasslands that grew beyond it, but each small patch of wilderness was contained by riotous colour. Trained no more, roses climbed as high as they were able to support themselves, clouds of pinks, white and delicate yellows bursting haphazardly, defying the stately reputations of the people they were named for. Vast hydrangea bushes, un-limed for decades, grew garishly blue, under which bursts of lupin and hollyhock thrust at angles, seeking the sun.

I knew our garden instantly. My grandmother, out of time with the wives of Thursday, reverted not to suburban neatness or carefully orchestrated long borders, but to a messy approximation of a country childhood. I could have located our garden by the sound of the bees alone, hanging in the air around the spires of verbena and salvia, the froth of yarrow and angelica. The herbal, heady chaos was the Thursday I had come looking for.

By accident and design, I didn’t attend school until I was nine years old. My father taught me to read, and devised an idiosyncratic syllabus which he entrusted his mother to impart. Though he had been in a unique position to predict the momentous events that occurred just months after the laboratory was dismantled, he had been unable to comprehend the disruption to infrastructure that they would produce. This was my father all over.

Afterwards, Father didn’t adapt to town life any more than he adapted to anything. Away from Thursday, he found he was still embarrassingly encumbered by an elderly mother and a young daughter. While my grandmother, though recovering, stubbornly continued to become more elderly, I did not remain young forever. I think this made life easier for him. My education continued to be improvised in the years between leaving Thursday and what became the new normality. When I did eventually go to school, it turned out I was no more ill-equipped for the future than anyone else of my generation.

I struggle to find words to describe Thursday; such a strange little place. It was as if a storm had lifted a row of houses intact and deposited them there in the middle of nothing. As if, somewhere, everyone woke one morning to find a street missing, homes whisked away forever, complete with their Anaglypta wallpaper and Raylon curtains. Where wives had brought roses and soft furnishings to Thursday, their husbands had brought work and cricket. The old pitch, once the centre of the social calendar, was now indistinguishable from the native vegetation around it, but perhaps for a finer texture to the grass that grew at chest height. It all moved as one in the breeze. The loose stone of the street had erupted with plumes of willow herb and spikes of cat’s-ear, wild vervain breaking through the cracks where the ground met the paving of garden paths. It was exactly as I had remembered it, yet smaller and shabbier, and terribly, terribly quiet.

I chose the house that I slept in that first night on the basis of the curtains. The door had been locked, but I found a spare key under a disintegrating rattan mat. As a child, I had visited every house on the row as part of the continual round of social functions that characterized the small community. Our own hosting duties were never greatly anticipated. In the absence of a wife, my father felt distinctly at a disadvantage. My grandmother was an able substitute in almost every regard, but a great hostess she was not. At such gatherings, I would be enlisted to take coats, a role I found baffling as no attendees ever travelled from more than a few doors away. It would be a relief when the door was closed for the final time, and we knew our social duties had been fulfilled for a while. I believe the only people that enjoyed these events less than us were the young couple next door. My bedroom window looked directly into their back garden and, when everyone had gone home, I would often see her – Jean or Jane – crying on the little bench by the rhododendrons. 

In the short period of time we all lived in our odd little street, some people seemed more in a hurry than others to make their mark. Many of the houses, but not ours, dispensed of numbers in favour of quaint names, thoughtfully chosen to give character to the nondescript enclave in which we lived. I chose to stay at ‘The Wickets’ on my first evening in Thursday. I hoped, behind the full complement of drawn curtains, there might remain some basic furniture. No longer a young woman, the preceding days of sleeping under canvas had taken their toll, and I longed for a real bed. In the event, the house had been almost completely emptied, but I spent the night quite comfortably on a beautiful chaise in the front room, thoughtfully protected with a sheet. I slept deeply and without dreams. 

I slept late. Food threatened to become a real issue before long. Now I had found Thursday, I should be able to make my way back, but I calculated I would need close to a full day for a round trip to the nearest approved town on my bicycle. Water, thankfully, was no longer a concern, and though the whole house had grumbled and shuddered as the pipes cleared, the connection to the deep spring still seemed good.

While I boiled water for coffee on my travel stove, I wandered around the place that, I discovered, from an old envelope, was once the Atkinson residence. I no longer remembered which of the blur of adults from early childhood they had been. The house felt familiar, but only because all the houses had an almost identical layout, each paired with its neighbour as a mirror image. The décor was shot through with the bland good taste of the 1970s, beige and lightly textured. Only the precious green velvet chaise I had slept on the night before felt genuinely familiar, as if I had curled up there as a girl, falling asleep to background chatter and the clink of Vermouth glasses.

I felt a residual unease about rifling through the Atkinsons’ remaining belongings, scant as they were. The mass lootings of my childhood had fueled nightmares for years, and though I knew that the Atkinsons, long dead, would never have begrudged me a handful of candles or a box of matches, the disquiet it triggered could never be trained out of me. I piled my small stash of useful items on the kitchen counter, to return for when they felt less connected to the people who had put them away in cupboards and drawers. I drank my coffee on the kitchen steps, looking out into the verdant garden.

When I was eventually retired from the seed bank, almost all of my colleagues devoted their lives to preserving the progeny of plants they had never encountered in real life. I was the last of the line, but few were really curious. For most of them, we were preserving objects, not potential. They had lived their lives without these plants and did not miss them. Occasionally, someone would ask, awed by the idea I had tasted some of the things we protected, smelled their fragrances, but I found talking about these fruits and flowers was akin to retelling ancient myth. I sensed they thought I was embellishing. Not that they minded; they’d retell my stories in time themselves, perhaps to children even further removed from the lush world I grew up in.

I doubt I was the only person to ever steal from the seed bank. By their very nature, seeds are easy to appropriate. However, I don’t think anyone else stole as prolifically as I did. I imagine one or two people guiltily signed out for the day with a nigella or poppy seed pushed beneath a fingernail to carefully cultivate at home. There would be penalties if caught, but the chances were low. Worth it for that illicit thrill of seeing something grow and come into bloom. To wonder in its fleeting beauty and then press the flower between the pages of a heavy book, a special secret.

The key to our old house remained in my father’s possession until he died, identified by a paper tag, but never again leaving his desk drawer. I kept nothing else from the desk, the objects and paperwork all obsolete, and only a vague hope remained that the door which the key fit still existed. Once inside, after all this time, I passed through the house quickly. All traces of our life there had been taken away, and beyond a brief nostalgic rush at the familiar wallpaper in my former bedroom, I felt little for this anonymous space. The garden was why I came.

I rubbed a fennel leaf between my fingertips, inhaling the scent of aniseed before tasting it. The herb garden had fended well for itself, though I was sure some of the more delicate plants had fallen victim to the brutish habits of the mint and marjoram. I thought I had moved beyond tears. There seemed no point in crying when we’d all lost as much as each other, but they fell now all the same. Perhaps they were tears for my grandmother, who had spent her last happy years here. Or perhaps they were for another old lady, who just wanted, once again, to taste fruit warmed by the sun.