Short Fiction: Goodbye, Marigold

‘Goodbye, Marigold’ is a short story I wrote while I was travelling in Morocco. The idea came to me on my birthday while I was sunbathing by the pool at a country club called Beldi. As I looked around at the different guests, and thought about the isolation of the place, Marigold seemed to birth out of nowhere and her history unfurled itself before me. I hope you enjoy.

TW: MURDER

MARIGOLD lay on her back and counted the olives as a warm breeze shook the branches over her head. She closed her eyes and listened to the leaves rustle against each other like a long taffeta skirt sweeping the floor. She thought briefly of beauty pageants, rosettes and plastic crowns before she steered her mind sharply out of the past. There were lime trees too. The limes, camouflaged between leaves of the very same green shade, were fat like American oranges. She wanted to take a bite out of one, to roll its perfect roundness against a tabletop and feel the give of the ripe fruit-flesh inside.

Marigold had all kinds of strange impulses coursing through her brain at any one time. When she’d been young she thought this had been the same for everybody but as she’d grown up she learned this was not the case. The impulses were typically sensual, occasionally violent, sometimes a mix of the two. The theory was that so much grief at a young age had put a kink in her wiring. But being very pretty, Marigold gave the impression of relative normality and her past made her a sympathetic figure, so Aunt Clementine said that as long as she kept a hold on herself she’d be just fine. She had lately let things get out of hand. That’s how she’d ended up in Marrakech with Tyler.

The resort, which was enclosed by high walls like a miniature city, looked like it had sprouted out of nowhere at a turning off of a long dusty motorway with grassless fields either side of it and the Atlas Mountains looming grey and jagged in the distance. Mirage Country Club. Marigold had thought it was a beautiful place when they first arrived, all those fruit trees and red paving stones and terracotta outbuildings and an enormous glass greenhouse full of flowers in four-foot plant pots, small yellow, violet and pink amongst spidery heat-hardy leaves. They were half flower, half weed exploding all over the place like warning flares. And the trees, tall, accusatory fingers pointing up at the sky from the vast green field beyond the gates, gave a Tuscan feel to the landscape as the yellow taxicab drove them in.

‘It’s like we’re passing through all of Europe in just a few minutes,’ Marigold had said, smiling eagerly if not hysterically, her face pressed up close to the murky tinted window in the back of the car. Tyler grunted in reply. His mood had been darkened by the lack of reliable internet signal since they’d arrived in North Africa, hers secretly elated by it.

She soon discovered that the resort had seen better days, the persistent golden sun lent a generous filter but could not quite bridge the gap between the glossy photos in the online catalogue and the time-weathered reality. The rooms were a little dilapidated and not totally clean. The maid had left two long black hairs clinging to the outer trunk of the toilet bowl and one dried in a tangle in the basin in such a shape that looked like a crack in the porcelain at first and so Marigold had rubbed at it with her fingertip and then watched with astonishment as the crack came off in her hand.

Doesn’t matter, Marigold had told herself, she’d chosen the place for its isolation and on that front it had met her expectations entirely. They quickly settled into a routine, they had breakfast on their balcony and then Marigold went to the pool while Tyler lifted weights in the gym before meeting her poolside for lunch. Then they’d go back to the room where they usually had sex or occasionally had a nap, then Tyler would work on his laptop until dinner time while Marigold lay naked under the bedsheets with the air-conditioning on full blast, watching TV and eating pretzel sticks before taking a long shower and putting her makeup on. Then downstairs for dinner, and onto the bar where time fell away like rubble at a peaked cliff edge, slowly and then all at once from under her feet, a crumbling downward plunge into the dark.

She knew she could go on like this forever whereas Tyler was bound to get restless. She tried not to worry quite yet about what she was going to do next when the day came that he’d inevitably had enough and wanted to move on to conquer fresh pastures and new women. The same thing that in him that was like a well-stoked fire was in her like a dam on the verge of breaking.

IT had been an ordinary day for Marigold until about 12 o’clock when she sat up to apply more sunblock and saw a ghost. The ghost wore a green bikini and a floor-length crocheted cardigan and stood by the bar on the other side of the swimming pool. This ghost was now the focal point of the over-vivid garden. An impending sense of doom blew in with the breeze through the jacarandas. Marigold was momentarily cool despite the imposing intensity of the afternoon sun.

There were two things about her that struck Marigold. The first was that she looked, in profile, like the spitting image of Marigold’s dead sister Hannah. Marigold’s skin prickled with goosepimples so large it was like they could be burst with needle pricks or scraped from her flesh with a vegetable peeler. Marigold watched the woman as she turned over her shoulder and said something to the man she was with. She lifted her sunglasses onto the crest of her forehead, pushed back like a hairband into her shiny black hair. Just like Hannah’s.

A small child, a little girl of two or three with her hair in ribboned pigtails, came running from the open door of the restaurant hotel out onto the paved garden area leading to the swimming pool and promptly slipped over on the wet tiles at the edge of the swimming pool. There was thud followed by a loud cry. Marigold watched as the woman’s face creased with pity and she took her bag from off her shoulder and handed it to the man. She began to walk swiftly but cautiously – careful not to slip on the wet tiles herself – over to the little girl.

The dry tiles burned Marigold’s soles as she walked the perimeter of the pool in their direction. The little girl was still laying on her stomach, one of her feet had come halfway out of her sandal. Her face was pink with the crying, her scalp was pink where it had been parted for the pigtails. She was almost done though, the frightened tears steadied to a serious of half-hearted splutters. She seemed to be enjoying the attention of the kind lady with black hair who had crouched down beside her, squeezing her arm ever so gently. Marigold looked around and saw that people were watching, there were curious glances from the smattering of sunbathers, a couple sitting on stools at the bar, a woman swimming laps. She heard Aunt Clementine’s voice in her head, her disapproval at the quantity of flesh on display, at how said flesh was tattooed or pierced or presented. Aunt Clementine had become a leech in Marigold’s brains since she died, her point of view as archaic as bloodletting itself. Marigold shook the noise out.

‘Is she alright?’ Marigold asked. She looked down at the top of the woman’s head, a fleck or two of dry skin straying from the white parting in her black hair like stars in a dark sky, ‘I saw her go down, poor lamb.’

Marigold was dying to touch her, to pluck the white flecks from her hair and let them dissolve on her tongue like snowflakes.

By now the little girl had worked her way into a seated position, her legs stretched out in front of her, she wiped the last few tears from her eyes with fat, pink fists.

‘Is she yours?’

‘Mine?’ a small, flowery laugh accompanied by a brief glance, up at Marigold’s face and then at her right hand, at her rings or maybe her bracelet, all of which were heavy real gold. ‘No, no, she came running out of the restaurant, didn’t you? I bet your mother’s in a panic,’ her voice suddenly took on the very slow, cartoonish voice people affect when talking to infants, she tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear. ‘Should we go and find her, sweetie?’

The woman stood up and held her hand out for the little girl, who paused for a few seconds, perhaps considering something her parents had told her about strangers and then, deciding it was safe to trust the woman, she held out her hand.

The second thing that had struck Marigold about the woman was the aura of goodness, of kindness that seemed to surround her. And children are supposed to be sensitive aren’t they, like horses or dogs, to the nature of a person? She’d seen it when she first laid eyes on the woman, the soft permeating glow. Marigold was hungry for goodness. When she imagined her soul it was shrivelled and sickly, like something that had been locked up for years without daylight.

Then a woman came tearing from the restaurant door. Clearly the child’s mother, she shattered the air with desperate cries of ‘Lucy! Lucy!’

Marigold saw that the child was frightened and instinctually clung to the edge of the black-haired woman’s crocheted cardigan, her fingers through the loops in the fabric like she was a great pink fish caught in the net. When the woman spotted her daughter, she came and snatched her by the hand and hauled her back toward the restaurant, glaring at Marigold first and then at the kind woman who looked like Hannah.

Marigold felt a pang in her heart for her, the disappointment in the woman’s face. Already Marigold felt that she was thawing, a feeling of compassion flexed somewhere inside of here.

‘That was rude,’ said Marigold.

‘She was beside herself,’ the woman answered.

‘I’m Marigold,’ Marigold said, holding out her hand. ‘Marigold Daniels.’

‘Tess Grainger,’ she shook it, a little colour returning to her pale face as her eyes met Marigold’s and saw that they were friendly and earnest. ‘That’s my husband Cameron over there.’

Marigold followed her as she began to walk toward the bar where he was waiting.

‘Oh dear,’ he said, putting his arm around her shoulders and planting a kiss in her hair, ‘she didn’t seem grateful.’

‘She did not,’ said Tess, she took the hand he’d left resting on her shoulder and kissed it, ‘this is…I’m so sorry…’

‘Marigold,’ she said, ‘not at all honey, I’m a faces person too. That’s my…’ My what? she thought, my no-one, ‘I’m with Tyler, he’s around somewhere. It’s so lovely to meet another couple our age, will you come and have lunch with us later?’ she asked. ‘If you don’t already have plans, of course.’

A hesitation.

‘Please,’ said Marigold, she knew she sounded desperate and she was. Her smile was taut and twitchy. ‘It’s been just the two of us for so long now.’

Marigold saw she was weakening, Tess, she looked up at Cameron with small, solvable questions in her eyes. He shrugged.

‘We could do lunch,’ he said, ‘sounds great.’

‘Oh great,’ Marigold said, ‘I’ll tell Tyler. Three or four o’clock, something like that?’

When Marigold watched them go. She knew that this woman, this stranger, wasn’t her sister. She knew it and yet she felt a desperate need to be close to her.

Marigold flagged down a waiter for another drink. She found that the heat relaxed her body and together with the alcohol lifted the veil between consciousness and unconsciousness so that any moment she might slip easily into a delicious sleep. The funeral, Aunt Clem’s funeral, was the first time she drank to numb something. It was like getting under a warm, weighted blanket.

MARIGOLD thought then of her childhood friend Brittany, and all the days of their long summer breaks from school that she’d spent stretched out on the stiff white deckchairs by the outdoor pool at Brittany’s house in Austin. To Marigold, Brittany had been rough and funny. She could picture Brittany’s chipped blue nail varnish and her ex-gymnast thighs as she practiced cheer moves and back flips in the back yard. Sometimes she turned on the sprinklers and dragged Marigold through them, scream-laughing until her grip loosened on Marigold’s arm and she could shake her free. Taylor Swift, Hawaiian Tropic, Strawberry Hohos, Texan sunshine.

Brittany’s mom let her put pink streaks in her hair at the start of summer break and Brittany was always complaining about the state of her split ends. Marigold remembered brushing it for her when they were done swimming and sat on deckchairs drying in the sun, the scraping sound as she began to tangle-teeze out the knots. Brittany had a lot of damage because she bleached a lot and didn’t deep condition. Marigold remembered the look of all the broken blond and pink hairs between the bristles of the brush, the strands were wet and soft, like down. Later when she was home and the hair in the brush had dried, she gathered it up as if she were a mother bird feathering her nest and fluffed it out between her fingertips before putting it in her bra. Or sometimes she put it against her pillow and pressed her cheek there to keep it in place. The comfort it brought her was immeasurable.

MARIGOLD was rudely disturbed by a kid catapulting himself into the pool. She wondered at how many liquid hours had already slipped away. Her skin was hot, the towel she’d been laying on was damp with sweat, the towel fibres slicked down in a wet shadow of her body. She blinked around at the scene of the pool, sleepy eyes swimming with solar flares. Another cocktail. She thanked the waiter who responded in Arabic. She noted the print of red dust in a stripe along the back of his black trousers as he walked away, red dust from the clay. The cocktail came all trussed up like a beauty pageant contestant, and Marigold should know, her own mother was Miss Junior Texas in 1989. Their house in Fredericksburg had been filled with grainy pictures of her Vaseline-d smile. She’d been in a few junior pageants herself before the tragedy, after the car crash Aunt Clementine said it would have been grotesque for a new orphan to be smiling like that in public. Marigold stared at the tall glass. What did the Muslim staff think of her merry sin-making, did they marvel at the way these Westerners seemed to gild their descent into hell?

She took an icy mouthful of the cocktail onto her tongue in a smooth slurp. Sometimes Marigold wondered why she’d had been the only one out of her immediate family to survive. Perhaps she was a conduit for death, it spread through her to everyone else, like the electric orb at the science museum which bloomed with fluorescent sparks wherever you touched it. Maybe all those times she’d sat on her father’s lap to play horses, or wrapped her arms around her beautiful, immaculate mother, or pressed kisses to Hannah’s cheek, she’d been killing them, softly. And she’d never been any good at house plants or goldfish, she’d burned everything she’d ever tried to cook. It checked out really, she was death with a nice face and a good pair of legs.

Even with Brittany there’d been a death of a kind, not that Brittany had physically died or anything but with the end of their friendship Marigold had felt the death of their female world and the unceremonious genesis of another. One that seemed to revolve around men and boys, one that she knew she was going to be dragged into eventually whether she liked it or not. And she did not expect to like it. She’d never encountered a man whose hair she wanted to gather up and slip into her underwear.

THE change had started in their early teens, when Marigold’s bones seemed to blossom into a picturesque ideal of feminine beauty and Brittany’s did not. By the time they were fifteen the gulf was wide enough to draw attention and by seventeen the situation had become untenable. There hadn’t been a fight just a few tense words and awkward silences over a boy called Jenson. Marigold was surprised that Brittany, who always seemed so tough, didn’t have the balls to end their friendship herself and left it up to her mother who answered the house phone one night in late September.

‘Is Brittany okay?’ Marigold had asked though she knew the answer. Brittany had avoided her all last week at school and her trickle of one word responses to Marigold’s texts had dried to nothing.

Brittany’s mother explained, calmly, that Brittany didn’t want to be Marigold’s friend anymore. Grown apart, she’d said, and Marigold felt herself very tiny inside her childhood bedroom whose walls and window ledges propped up her brass-framed shrines to an unreachable past. When Brittany’s mother said ‘Goodbye Marigold’ she said it with relish, like there was dignity in it, like the goodbye was being placed down and nothing on God’s green earth could ever uproot it. After all, Brittany’s mother did not like Marigold being around and barely hid it. She thought Marigold must have been cursed. She prayed hushed fervent bedside prayers about ‘sins of the father’ which Brittany’s dad thought was uncharitable. But he also conceded that it was indecent to have Marigold lounging around their house practically naked every weekend like some kind of Texan Venus de Milo and far worse than having no arms, Brittany’s parents had thought, Marigold’s were striped with small silver scars from cutting. ‘They noticed your scars,’ Brittany told her unprovoked one Saturday afternoon, when they lay side by side at the edge of the pool. Marigold ran her fingertips along the self-harm marks which were fine and deep, and then applying gentle pressure she rubbed back and forth as if she could erase them.

After the phone call Marigold cried until her jaw ached and the whites of her eyes were bloodred. Aunt Clementine was not sympathetic. She called Marigold out to sit with her on the veranda, where she sat chain-smoking cigarettes from under an enormous canopy-like hat laden with silk-flowers in cerise and lilac, her face underneath it was shrivelled, her eyes dark. And Marigold remembered the wrinkled cavern of her mouth, the thin tongue lashing between her lips when she said ‘Beautiful women go through life alone, the men who’ll claim to love you, the friends who will swear devotion. Never allow yourself to forget that you are really alone in this world.’ Marigold followed her aunt’s gaze out to the bottom of the garden, to beautiful hedgerows of well-tended primroses. It was the prettiest place in the state of Texas and Marigold felt only anger.

POOLSIDE in Marrakech, Marigold finished the rest of the cocktail with ease. She looked up and saw that the sun had made progress in the path it was tracking overhead. She arched her back, flexing her hips to feel the bridge of fabric rub between her thighs. She was anxious to see Tess again, she felt positive about it.

She spied Tyler at the edge of the pool nearest her, up to his waist in water with his dark hair slicked to his scalp and dripping. They made eye contact, lingering and lusty. Then he climbed out of the pool and approached, pushing water back from his eyes and into his hairline. Marigold watched the water droplets run down him, chasing each other through the marshland of hair on his chest. His skin was dark brown all over, almost maroon, from the weeks they’d spent in the Moroccan climate together with Tyler’s mannish refusal of sunblock. Sunblock, condoms, sandals, all vehemently rejected.

Marigold could smell the sweet white meat of the seafood skewers, the smoke mixing with traces of burnt marinade, red pepper, tomato probably, burnt black to the stokes of the grill. And then from somewhere below her ribs a bubble of hunger reminded Marigold that she was a body and not a rambling, boundaryless cluster of nerves and memories that needed to be subdued and sedated. Soon Tess and Cameron would be back and they’d spend a perfect afternoon together. Marigold could envisage it clearly. They’d stay up talking and laughing as the balmy evening cooled into night, and then tomorrow their friendship would be cemented by an adventurous day trip out into the medina where Marigold would buy Tess a bracelet in the Souks.

‘Smells good, doesn’t it?’ Tyler dripped water over Marigold’s feet. The water had been warmed by his body heat and she resisted the overwhelming urge to wipe her feet off on a towel, repulsed by the intimacy of it. But Marigold knew she could not react. There were three people in the relationship, the two of them and Tyler’s ego which required especially careful handling. Tyler had been her lucky ticket out of town, and a very bad situation. He walked into the jewellery store like something gleaming, like a silver watch just polished.

Working in the jewellery store had not been a glamorous job. Jewellery cleaning was the most popular service at Fieldman & Sons. The watches, chains, bracelets and earrings were embedded sometimes with personal dirt. They had a smell from where they’d been worn daily against the skin, and no matter how Marigold cleaned them she couldn’t get rid of it, even when they sparkled to look at.

She missed Fieldman & Sons, the busyness of the job and being on her feet, she missed wandering next door to the coffee shop for an apple and cinnamon muffin on her lunch break, which was always warm with a sugar topped crust. She’d worked there since high school, changing watch batteries, polishing silver, selling engagement rings to young men who flirted with her and spent less than they ought. She would never go back to the coffee shop or to Fieldman & Sons. She would never go back to Fredericksburg. She would never go back to Texas. But that didn’t matter now, not now that she’d met Tess. Perhaps she’d been a gift, ushered in by the spirits of her parents and her sister. She didn’t imagine Aunt Clem would have sent her a gift, a punishment perhaps or a note critiquing her choice of bikini. She refused to believe what Aunt Clem had said about her being destined for loneliness and she was going to prove her wrong with Tess.

‘I met a nice couple,’ she said to Tyler as he sat down on the edge of the cabana bed and rubbed his hair with a towel.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘I invited them to have lunch with us.’

‘Long as they’re quick,’ he said, checking his phone. ‘I’m starved.’

‘What time is it?’ Marigold began digging in her beach bag for her own phone, a cheap replacement she’d picked up before they left Texas.

Tyler held it out for her, ‘Right next to you,’ he said, smirking. ‘You’re drunk, come on let’s go back to the room.’

He squeezed the top of her thigh and then he ran his hand down to her knee and gripped her kneecap between his thumb and index finger. Marigold didn’t like the feeling of him touching her bones.

‘It’s the sun,’ she said. ‘I’m fine. Oh, there they are! That’s Tess and Cameron,’ Marigold waved at the couple, who were freshly showered and changed, as they began to walk toward her around the perimeter of the swimming pool. Their faces had the ghostly pallor of high factor sunblock residue applied beyond the threshold of absorption.

Tyler sighed and parted his lips to show his veneers, tastefully done they veered only slightly onto the side of too-white unreality. Marigold knew that he liked her insomuch as she was a beautiful girl and a good lay and had a Southern Belle sort of thing going for her that was a refreshing change of flavour from the Miami swimwear models and New York trust-fund club-rats he usually chose as companions. She was spontaneous too, convinced him to book a flight at the end of their first date. He’d liked that, the contradictory sides to her, buttoned up and ladylike one moment, almost feral the next. But this, Marigold was well aware that he couldn’t be fucked to make small talk with her friends. He’d paid for the trip; he thought any changes to normal scheduled programming should be run by him first. Plain and simple. Marigold only had a small leeway of her own and had to manage Tyler carefully.

Tess came up to Marigold and pressed her lips to her cheek.

‘Should we grab a table?’ Tess asked, when Tyler and Cameron had clapped their hands together and nodded their greetings.

As macho and unyielding as steel construction beams, their wide-footed stances almost inviting challenge as they sized each other up.

‘Maybe over here?’ Tess wandered over to a table for four.

Round and set with cutlery wrapped in paper napkins, the seats were dark metal, and the joints laced with rust. The tabletop itself, where it was visible either side of a burgundy tablecloth, was made up of tiny mosaic stones faded to grey, peeling varnish in patches.

‘Great,’ said Tyler, spreading himself out onto a chair. ‘Let’s eat!’

Cameron pulled out the seat for Tess, who folded herself into it with a self-conscious and pitying glance in Marigold’s direction.

‘What a gentleman,’ said Marigold.

‘That’s the Southern charm in him,’ said Tess, and she and Cameron held hands across the table.

Feeling, suddenly that her own hands were empty and restless, Marigold spread her fingertips across the corner of exposed tabletop, rubbing at the patches of varnish, the uneven edges of rough-cut mosaic stone.

SHE thought of her Aunt Clem’s funeral. It was a day of strange sensations, the faux velvet upholstery on the chairs in the crematorium, the varnished grainless wood of her coffin which looked like it had been drenched in clear nail varnish enamel. She had a terrible urge to sink her teeth into the wood of the coffin and press her tongue against it, hold onto it with her nails.

There’d been the touch of so many strange hands, cheeks, chests, hair, lips. More people came than she’d imagined, and they all wanted to touch her. Marigold remembered the grey moustaches and the wrinkled jowls that accompanied especially long embraces and kisses that strayed a little way from her cheek in the direction of her lips. She was passive to all this, outside of it. She let herself be a doll for Aunt Clem on that day of all days.

‘SHE’S had too much to drink,’ said Tyler.

Marigold realised they’d been talking about her and she was mortified.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘I daydream something chronic. Always have, I’m sorry. What were you saying?’

Cameron cleared his throat, ‘I was just telling Tyler how rude that woman was earlier, the one who lost her little girl.’

‘And I was saying, it’s understandable,’ said Tess. ‘You don’t always think straight in a panic.’

‘Glad I wasn’t there,’ said Tyler, his eyes searching the seating area and the bar beyond for a staff member to flag down. ‘I’d have given her a piece of my mind- DAMMIT! There aren’t gonna be any good cuts of steak left.’

Marigold watched the discomfort play on Tess’ face, barely imperceptible to others perhaps but Marigold could sense it, something inside of her shrinking into itself. She had barely stopped looking in her direction for a second after they’d sat down. Her shiny black hair, her dark brown eyes downturned in the corners, her freckled face and the slightly too-large mouth, the pretty pointed chin. Hannah, Hannah, Hannah. Even her mind, losing a grip of itself in a meditative swim back down into the inky past, began with the image of Tess’ face across the table and ended with the vision of Hannah’s.

Marigold had so much she needed to tell her sister. She imagined her sister as something haloed and glowing in immortal wholeness, and this woman her representative on earth. Tess was like a freckled nun in a dark habit. The desire to confess burned her but she couldn’t do it like this, she needed to get her alone, she would have to wait.

‘I’ll go and find someone,’ said Marigold, pulling her seat backwards from out under the table. She tripped somehow, over the scalloped lace edge of her beach cover up and fell, softly to the floor like a heavy curtain cut loose from the rail.

She thanked Cameron profusely, giggling a little and apologising as he hauled her to her feet in a swift and easy motion. The three of them watched as she appeared to glide to the bar, as smoothly as if she were hovering on air.

AFTER Aunt Clem’s funeral, Marigold had drifted out of the crematorium building and somehow back home. She didn’t remember the journey, who’d driven her, but somebody must have. She hovered close to the wall and watched as a relative whose name she didn’t remember played the piano. The children played in the hall. She heard their laughter. They didn’t know somebody died. More people arrived carrying boxes of flowers, their faces all sympathetic like they were wearing masks. Marigold kept moving around the house seeking solace, she visited the quiet corners and nooks on a rotation, the reading spot under the stairs, her parent’s bathroom. She carried two glasses around so it looked like she was waiting on someone but really she was drinking a glass of whisky and then a glass of wine. The more she had the better she felt about being a cursed unlucky death-magnet.

She was just passing by her front door on her way to the reading nook when she heard the doorbell ring. She froze, hoping that if she didn’t answer in a couple of minutes whoever it was would give up and go away but the doorbell kept ringing, polite but insistent. A chime every minute or so and the figure, blurred by the frosted glass, up close to the window, peering in. Marigold saw it was the tall outline of a man, dressed all in black but gold around the face. And then there was a shy knock on the glass, so she opened it. It was Jenson, the boy from school who’d caused the drift between Brittany and herself, his parents had known Marigold’s parents once upon a time, maybe they’d even been friends.

‘Marigold,’ he said, surprised to see her as if he hadn’t just knocked on her door.

‘Jenson.’

He rearranged his sympathy mask, not properly, he was a boy who hadn’t encountered much use for it. It made her want to remove his face and the false impression on it, not in a gory way but a gentle one, she’d peel it off like orange skin. He told her he was sorry for her loss and that Aunt Clem had been a fine woman everybody admired, she said thank you. He told her his mom wanted to invite her over the lunch next week. She watched him go thinking there’s a boy who has everything, and she hadn’t even seen the expanse of it yet, of his broad-backed, cornfed happiness, but she soon would.

‘MY beautiful boy,’ Marigold planted a wet kiss on Tyler’s mouth while the wearisome waiter stood with his notepad primed, his eyes pointedly averted.

‘Sit down babe,’ said Tyler.

Sensing his growing agitation with her, Marigold gripped him tighter around the neck and kissed his cheek once more before she let him go, returning to her seat on the other side of the table. She wasn’t hungry but ordered prawns and a glass of water, the rest of the party kept passing her the breadbasket and she kept pushing it back into the middle of the table, their conversation falling in fragments around her so that by the time she’d caught up, they’d moved on something new.

‘I like your dress,’ Marigold said to Tess, interrupting her without realising.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘My mom owns a boutique in Brady, it’s from there.’

‘Brady? That’s pretty near to where I grew up.’

‘Where’s that?’ Cameron chimed in.

‘Fredericksburg,’ Marigold said, surprised to feel a lump in her throat.

‘When I met her,’ Tyler explained. ‘She was working in a jewellery shop.’

‘How long have you two known each other?’ Cameron asked him.

Tyler stifled a burp, threw his napkin down on top of an empty plate that shone with grease and blood from the steak.

‘About a month now. I was in town on business, stopped in to get my sister a birthday present, was gonna swing by her place in Austin for a couple nights before I went back to Miami, met Marigold in the shop there and asked her out.’

‘And you came away so soon?’ said Tess. ‘Whirlwind romance.’

‘We went out that night, got drunk,’ said Tyler. ‘She convinced me to book us a trip, get out of town.’

‘And you did it? Just like that?’ Cameron said.

Tyler smirked and tipped his Casablanca beer bottle at his lips, ‘She was very convincing.’

Tess seemed to cringe slightly, she smiled at Marigold, ‘We’re talking about you like you’re not here.’

And she wasn’t there, not really. Marigold had sunken down into a strange state. Tess reached out and patted Marigold’s hand which rested on the tabletop. The skin on the inside of Tess’ hand was a little soft, crumbly, it felt like a dry bar of soap, like something that would melt if submerged in water. Marigold pressed Tess’ palm to her cheek for a few seconds before guiding it back to the tabletop. Tess didn’t object to any of this though she certainly found it peculiar.

‘Well, this is our honeymoon,’ said Tess. Looking around pointedly, she let out a melodious sigh. ‘And I have to say it is even more beautiful here than I imagined.’

‘Which is a relief,’ said Cameron, ‘after the wedding.’

The look Tess gave him was withering.

‘Cam,’ she cautioned.

‘What?’ he held his hands up, ‘it’s not a secret.’

Tess withdrew her hand from Marigold’s and tucked it into her own lap, her gaze fixed on the tabletop and the hard flakes of bread left lingering in the breadbasket, the round-bodied fly encircling them.

‘We had a big wedding planned,’ Cameron explained, ‘but we had to elope.’

JENSON lived in a wide symmetrical white house, colonial style with a richly green striped lawn and flowers- fuchsia and yellow- hanging either side of the door in wicker baskets. His mom, Ellen, put her arms around Marigold like she was family.

‘She’s been lookin’ forward to this lunch like nothin’ else,’ that was Jerry, Jenson’s dad, who appeared over Ellen’s shoulder.

Jerry was balding but still had the crystalline eyes and firm jaw that he’d passed on to each of his sons, he was tall too, all of those boys were six-two at least.

‘Come on inside,’ said Ellen, and she went on ahead calling, ‘Boys! Boys!’ up at the ceiling.

‘We were awful sorry to hear about your dear aunt,’ said Jerry, he walked beside Marigold down the corridor, which was large enough to fit them both, a stooping ceremonious walk with his hands clasped together behind his back.

‘Thank you,’ Marigold said.

Ellen got her to sit down in the well-lit kitchen where there was a pitcher of lemonade with a hand painted lemon on the front of it and glasses all lined up to the side of it, lemons on those too. Ellen spooned in heaps of caster sugar so the lemonade sparkled in the sunlight. The boys descended, Jenson among them, cautious at first of Fragile Marigold before their propriety collapsed and they fell into familiar behaviour, jokes and teasing and talking about sports. Jenson gave her a wide berth at first, but he took the seat next to her after the boys had got up to help their dad wheel a pallet of furniture into the front room.

‘Delivered just before you came,’ Jerry explained, ‘excuse us a minute.’

Ellen had kept her company, and did her a kindness, talking mindlessly about the weather and the sales at the mall.

‘My beautiful, beautiful boy isn’t he just beautiful, Marigold?’ she’d said when Jenson returned.

Jenson had looked at Marigold then, charting her reaction, looking for agreement so she nodded and allowed herself to blush a little, a trick she’d learned she could achieve simply by picturing a candle held under her chin.

‘Handsome pair, aren’t they?’ said Jerry, washing his hands in the sink and drying them off on a dish cloth. Then he held his hands up at them like he was framing the shot, ‘So darn good lookin’.’

Marigold was confused by this but didn’t say anything. She let it wash over her- the layers of happy-noise, of cutlery on plates as they ate a hearty lunch, the pantomime of fraternal jokes rallied back and forth until Ellen chided the boys and Jerry stifled his laughter behind his napkin until Ellen chided him too. The joy taken greedily, fearlessly, spread out on every chair and lain across the pure white tablecloth. Marigold felt her shrunken stomach swell with the volume of it. It was a gluttony of happiness with its pies and potatoes, and cold crisp beers, the metal tops of them like scalloped pendants, twinkling into a pile in the trash.

After lunch, Jenson took Marigold for a walk to see the horses, there were two of them, one a dappled grey and the other chestnut coloured and velvet nosed. The barn smelled of sweet faecal rot like fruit gone bad and the warm sunlit hay that was shovelled into piles.

‘I’m glad you came,’ Jenson said.

‘Me too,’ said Marigold. ‘Your family are great.’

Jenson grinned, ‘I’m happy you think so.’

And then the silence was heavy, and Marigold kicked about a bit of straw under her feet while she waited for Jenson to get up the courage to ask what she knew was coming next.

He cleared his throat, ‘Would you like to get dinner, maybe this weekend? I know it’s not the best time and all, you’re probably so cut up about your aunt but could be a nice distraction, for the night.’

Marigold thought about what Aunt Clementine had said about it being inappropriate for someone to be out in public smiling at a beauty pageant when they should be shut away at home to grieve. She thought beauty pageants and dates were probably comparable. But Aunt Clementine was dead now, so Marigold figured her opinion didn’t matter.

She said yes and then Tyler showed her how to feed the horses with the carrots and apples his mom had given them. Marigold knew how to feed a horse, she wasn’t stupid but she let Tyler show her. The chestnut-coloured horse wouldn’t take the carrot from her hand- or the apple- it turned its head away and when Tyler tried to pull it in closer by the rope around its neck it backed away, neighing and restless.

‘Bad mood I guess,’ he said, shrugging.

He showed her the charming and impressively well-built tree house propped up in the lower boughs of a giant oak at the bottom of the yard.

‘My kids will play here one day,’ Jenson said.

Marigold found this very presumptive.

They wandered back to the house and Todd, one of Jenson’s brothers, yelled for them, ‘we’re in the library!’

They were all sat around a low table on leather couches and chairs.

‘Do you play Black Jack?’ Jerry asked Marigold, shuffling a deck of cards.

Marigold shook her head.

‘That’s alright lovie,’ said Ellen. ‘Neither do I. I’ll fix us all some more lemonade.’

‘I’ll do it,’ said Marigold.

Ellen protested theatrically.

‘No really,’ said Marigold. ‘It’s no trouble, I’d love to do it.’

‘Aren’t you precious? Well, lemons are in the fridge, everything else is already out.’

When Marigold got to the kitchen, she put her hands on the edge of the sink and cried. She’d felt the tide rising ever since she’d first sat down in the kitchen and looked at the painted pitcher of lemonade. Her heart ached. She was so happy and so alone. She felt the loneliness as something sharp and bitter, like she was being sliced all over.

When she said goodbye all the family put their arms around Marigold and thanked her for coming and made her promise to come back. When it was just her and Jenson left standing on the porch, he looked at her like he already loved her and the setting light picked out the caramel in his hair.

‘Jenson,’ Marigold said, ‘maybe I could come back here later, and we could stay up in the treehouse together.’

‘Why later?’

‘What would your mom think?’

‘Alright,’ he said, ‘if you like, I mean I’d like that, I’d love it of course but I’m happy to wait. I really like you.’

‘I know all that,’ Marigold said, ‘and I really like you too, it’s just, I don’t want to be lonely tonight.’

Jenson nodded like he understood, ‘Park up at the path round the back,’ he said. ‘After twelve, just text me when you’re here and I’ll come and get you.’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

And she did go back, she parked on the pathway behind the house just like Jenson had told her to and he collected her wearing a pair of worn tracksuit bottoms and a checked shirt unbuttoned over a white vest.

They climbed up to the treehouse, hushing each other and giggling and then they talked for a while, inching closer on the sleeping bag Jenson had set out for them. There was electricity in the treehouse, a single lightbulb hanging by a cord in the middle of the room, it cast a soft glow and flickered gently every few seconds. It was a clear night outside the window, which was just a hole cut in the panel of wood that made up the wall, Marigold could see the stars. Jenson had prepared a bottle of Jack and a bag of potato chips, but he seemed almost ashamed of them now, they were boyish snacks and seemed ridiculous against the fact of Marigold’s sophisticated beauty. Marigold liked Jack Daniels, she said, and took a gulp from the bottle to prove her point. They kissed and then they had sex.

Jenson kissed her bare shoulder,

‘Are you cold?’ he asked her.

He handed Marigold his checked shirt and she thanked him, pulling it tight around her. She knew she must have looked startling, her dark hair falling tousled and loose at her shoulders, the little makeup she’d been wearing smudged at her lips and her eyes, and Jenson’s shirt pulled around her with her shoulders left bare and the triangle of flesh between her breasts exposed.

‘You want something to drink?’ he asked her. ‘Some water or something?’

‘Are you gonna risk it?’ she teased him. ‘Don’t want you getting in any trouble because of me.’

‘Nah they’re all passed out,’ he said.

‘In that case sure, some lemonade if there’s any.’

‘Sure,’ he said.

As Jenson began to climb down from the treehouse he whispered to Marigold in the dark, ‘There are cigarettes and a lighter in that little box if you want.’

‘Thanks,’ Marigold called back at him.

She listened for the soft thud of his feet landing on the soil at the tree roots and then the swish of his sneakers against the long grass as he headed to the house. She opened the box, which was a small wooden chest, and lit a cigarette for herself. As she smoked it, she sat at the treehouse entrance with her feet hanging down over the void. She wanted to dip her fingers into the wetness between her legs but did not because she wouldn’t have any way of washing them after. The treehouse was at the very bottom of a long quarter-mile garden, she could see the outline of the barn up ahead on the right and then the house, white and watchful beyond the stretch of planted flowers. A ghostly hammock set up on the patio, swung gently. It was all so placid, so unjustly undisturbed, like it had been waiting for Marigold. Like he had been waiting for her. Drawn to her, despite everything, and so many people knew better.

Marigold had an idea then, it would be too perfect, too simple. She knew Jenson was fatally allergic to aspirin because someone gave him a pill for a headache in the ninth grade that turned out to be aspirin and he’d started foaming at the mouth and had to be stabbed with an EpiPen. Fatally allergic to aspirin which she happened to have a full bottle of in her purse, so she crushed a couple of tablets with the bottom of the Jack Daniels bottle and held them in her palm, ready for his return.

The sound of Jenson beginning the climb made Marigold startle, her heart race, it had sounded like an animal in the dark, climbing the tree, something with sharp teeth coming to get her.

‘Shit, fuck.’ It sounded for a few seconds like he lost his footing, ‘Can you take this?’

He held up one of the glasses of lemonade and Marigold took it with her free hand, turning her back and scraping her palm against the top of the glass to deposit the aspirin. She panicked when she felt that her palm had been a little sweaty, she hadn’t anticipated the powder forming clumps. She cleaned the rim of the glass with her finger, she pushed the clumps of powder below the surface, and watched them sparkle in the glass of cloudy lemonade, some particles of it clinging to the ice cubes before melting away into nothing.

‘I spilled most of this one.’

Marigold turned over her shoulder and saw Jenson standing there, golden boy under the golden light, his brow moist with the effort of his quest.

‘That’s okay,’ Marigold said, approaching. ‘We’ll share this one.’

She pressed her lips to his, he tasted of salt and death. He was warm and the glass in her hand clinked with cool ice.

‘Here,’ she gave him the drink and he took it, a few strong gulps and then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and squinted at the glass, interrogating the source of the slightly strange taste.

Marigold lit another cigarette and sat once more at the mouth of the treehouse with her legs hanging over.

‘You want some of this?’ Jenson asked her.

‘Sure, in a minute,’ she said. ‘Just leave it on the side.

She waited and waited until she could be sure, and she could be because she knew well enough what death looked like, and then she put on her shoes and made certain she’d got everything she came with; she took the glasses too, the lemonade sloshed an acidic tide at the satin lining of her handbag as she climbed down. She rushed toward her car in the dark, certain only that she needed to get home and of nothing else, not even her own name or the country she was in. She hadn’t planned it, had she? But why had she taken Aunt Clementine’s bottle of aspirin with her, what a strange thing to do. Marigold knew about the allergy, she happened to have the poison, she’d long been a conduit for death, this she knew.

‘THAT’S a beautiful ring,’ Marigold said, reaching out and brushing the emerald on Tess’ ring finger with her fingertips.

Then Cameron said, ‘Should have seen what the wedding would have looked like. Would. All green to match the engagement ring, green and gold.’

‘Thank you,’ Tess mouthed at Marigold, obviously uncomfortable.

Marigold realised she’d been wrong, Cameron wasn’t the considerate Southern gentleman she’d first assumed, he couldn’t tell when his new wife was in distress, but then again, she considered, it could have been the alcohol.

A waiter arrived to collect their empty plates and Marigold pointed up at the fruit tree nearby and asked him what it was. She’d thought lemon, perhaps.

He leaned in close, answering in thickly accented English, ‘You call them, I think, clementine.’

The clementines were unevenly speckled in orange, yellow, green. Their skin looked thin and hard, they weren’t at all what Marigold had envisaged when she thought of the fruit her great aunt had been named for.

But Tess was here, her presence like a silk blanket or a cool glass of water, whatever the climate required. Marigold felt that she couldn’t be close enough to her, even if they shared the same chair, even if they drank from the same glass sliding it across the tabletop between them. ‘And where did you say you were born, Tess?’

Marigold wanted to know everything about her, her whole childhood, to mine it for cosmic similarities to Hannah’s. No coincidences, only destiny.

‘Born and raised in Brady,’ she said. ‘Got family all over the area, Austin of course, some in Fredericksburg too, we used to come down there and go hiking at Enchanted Rock. My aunt and uncle have a beautiful ranch there, one of my mom’s cousins own Crabapple Ranch but I think they turned it into a hotel.’

No coincidences, only destiny.

Cameron and Tyler came to some sort of consensus and pushed back out of their chairs, heading to the bar.

Marigold inched her chair closer to Tess.

‘I don’t really like him, y’know,’ said Marigold. ‘I mean he’s not the type I’d…’

Tess nodded, she understood, of course she did. Marigold thought her face was beatific, her serene expression gave the impression of endless understanding. Marigold was sunken under and longed to pull Tess beneath the bluish below. There was also the feeling of time running dry, a change in the colour of sky from blue to lilac, less birdsong, a narrowing gap, the door closing on Marigold’s opportunity to escape from an eternity of loneliness.

‘It’s hard to find someone I can really talk to,’ she said. ‘Tyler doesn’t count.’

Tess nod and smiled like she understood. Marigold felt for her dry soft hand and entwined her fingers with Tess’ which she held in her lap.

‘A boy died,’ said Marigold. ‘And it was my fault.’

Tess tutted softly, a clucking sound like she was soothing a baby, she squeezed Marigold’s hand, ‘I’m certain that’s not true,’ she said.

The breeze was a little sharper through the jacarandas now, a little cooler, more insistent but the sun hadn’t let up completely, offering her most beautiful light before her nightly descent and the moon was above them, translucent as a cut of lace. It was easy for Marigold to forget the earlier upset of the clementine tree and let herself absorb the happiness on offer to her. Absolution at last.

‘It’s so lovely of you to say, Hannah. But I’m terribly afraid that it is.’

‘Hannah? What?’ Tess gave her the same broad smile she had all afternoon but this time with something sharp stuck in it, something that shouldn’t have been there.

Marigold began to cry then, soft tears that were neither happy nor sad but symptomatic of too much emotion stopped up in her for too long. Tess’ face, which had been set like a portrait of a saint before, cracked up into a picture of bewilderment.

‘I did it on purpose,’ Marigold wiped her eyes and made her confession plainly, she felt as though she were purging her soul and that Tess was going to shine her goodness onto her and remake her anew. All phrases and concepts she had remembered from childhoods dressed in white tights and lolling bored in the church pews but had not fully realised until now. ‘I used the aspirin when I knew it would kill him.’

Tess withdrew her hand from Marigold’s, a dimmer switch over her face turned her brown irises black.

‘What was his name?’ she asked.

With a small sigh, Marigold prepared herself to unload the last of her burden. She hadn’t realised how much it had been troubling her, this secret, she felt light enough to float away.

‘Jenson Matthews.’

There was a terrible frightened look on Tess’ face, one that disturbed Marigold deeply.

‘What is it?’ Marigold asked her, ‘please, what’s wrong?’

‘Jenson Matthews was my cousin.’

THE END