Stained Lips

How do you tell a story that has not yet ended?
So many beginnings and endings,
Twisting roads and little detours,
I’d love to show you them all.
I don’t quite know what to tell you about myself,
The tragedy? The joy? The affairs?

I will begin.

Summer had England in her sweaty grasp
And somewhere in the West Country a woman was screaming,
All brown curls and grey eyes
(Apparently pleasant but plain looking)
Squatting in the living room of a rectory.
Four hours of labour and only her mother to assist.
A wailing child, underweight and wrinkled,
Messy with blood in Grandmother’s arms.
But the woman carried on bleeding and didn’t stop
Until the breath left her body.

The Priest and old woman named the child Aimee-Ilene,
A pretty name for a boyish girl.
She loved to run down the garden and swing
On the orchard branches,
She learnt to trespass on Farmer Whitlocke’s land from three
And there she met a funny boy with black hair,
Samson Whitlocke.
They made mud pies and
went scrumping every harvest for seven years,
Plum stained lips that Grandmother chided her for.
Church every Sunday,
Daddy saying mass for everyone to hear,
But she preferred pulling faces from the choir stalls
At the messy black hair two pews back.

A new Mother and a new baby,
A beautiful girl they named Megan.
And Megan made the sun-drenched wheat dull
With her golden hair and freckled nose.
They fed the fish to the cat
And ate the last of the cheese from the store.
Grandmother left the world in Winter
To walk somewhere nicer and see a plain woman,
Aimee barely understood.

Stealing the school library books to sit
In the orchards and read until her eyes hurt.
Lily found her sat with an apple in her mouth –
“Are you allowed to eat that?”
“No.”
The blue rings around the redhead’s eyes clashed with her clothes,
Aimee learnt lessons in violence from her,
How it changes people.
And Daddy stopped her seeing that black-haired boy
When she started to lose the lankiness of childhood.

Lying on the roof of the church a flash of red
In the early winter sky joined her.
No words were exchanged between the girls.
And defiling the holy roof
The skinny redhead planted an awkward kiss on Aimee’s
Bow-shaped lips stained with communion wine.
Secrets and sneaking around the rectory,
Making dresses for wheat dolls out of the bible pages,
Jeremiah made a frock for the wheat woman
And Genesis her shoes.

A bunch of lilies in a flower’s hand,
The aisle longer than Aimee-Ilene ever remembered.
She’d never been emotional at a wedding before.
The perfect bride met a perfect country husband
And she turned to flour in that instant,
White scattered over the altar.
She left the church as Mrs Baker to keep children and chickens.
Aimee-Ilene sat for hours in the orchard,
A bottle of water and unstained lips, no food inside,
Silently a black-haired man joined her in the grass,
Side-by-side,
No words exchanged for seven years,
He handed her a plum.

Megan lay in the snow.
They told her that she’d died in the night,
Cardiac arrest from an overdose.
She looked like a winter angel with her hair sprawled
And her arms spread like wings.
Off to Grandmother, away from Jamie,
A boy,
A rapist.
The funeral was well attended
But Aimee-Ilene hid on the church roof instead.

Flushed from the Maypole dancing,
White ribbons in her hair and mud on her white hem
A figure approached her saying:
“You got an offer from Oxford.”
“I’m not going to go there.” Indignant girl…
“But I am.”
“We’ll stay in contact.” So sure. Always so sure.
“I love you.” Samson.
Eyes downcast in the spring evening,
Pointed nose and darkest eyes,
So intelligent,
So beautiful.
Kissing was more like a holy sacrament than a sin,
Finally, the long deprived union.
Falling into the last of the winter hay stores,
Sweet treacle scent filling the heady evening,
Darkness shrouding lovers.

She packs the suitcase and puts in pictures,
A Lily pressed in her bible,
A plum stone in a wooden box,
She hasn’t eaten in days and is dropping weight again,
Samson’s ring on her right hand, he’s gone to Oxford,
She’s going north,
A frown on her lips.
She’ll leave the red hair behind in the country
And go to the city to be a writer.

Where does the story end?
Either way I’ll be forgotten by history;
Inconsequential lives so passively impacting,
One day we’ll all be forgotten.

But I hope this story will end with stained lips
On a day sat in the orchard with a friend.