Sometimes Demeter needed to smell old leather. Her mother had exchanged the dark red chair that faced the garden for something her new husband had a special word for, and neither Demeter nor her brother Calum remembered. They spent their time in the house forgetting what he said. The had developed a deafness to all his pharses. his insights wrapped in neat syntax. Words were like scaffolding to him, he was under construction like a contempoary Cheops. If they forgot all his words however, if they deleted them daily , then one day, please God, he would disappear. He would not be there. People are the sum total of their words.
So today, this morning in fact Demeter was hunting the red chair. Leather like skin held the scent of the past. She trailed around the top of the house opening doors and taking long breaths; each room had been cleaned with supermarket polish, each spray wiping away the smells of her childhood. There were neat bags of books behind the study door. Black plastic sacks of yesterday. Demeter noticed the firmly tied tops; her step father had marked each bag with a white label. They were all going to his acquaintance’s shop in town to be sold. Demeter felt momentarily sick as if she was stuck behind a truck of animals going to be slaughtered.
But there was the chair, masked by papers, in the corner. Quietly neglected. It was labelled and Demeter stepped across the room and ripped off the tag. the house had become like a foreign battlefield. She no longer moved fluidly, she was always checking her feet, the corners of everywhere, odd shapes overhead. Demeter couldn’t bring herself to stuff the label in her pocket. His writing was too much like him to feel so close. She dropped it onto a black bag and left the room.
Through the landing window she saw a girl in the garden waving, wearing a gold and red dress. Demeter lifted the sash and leant out not knowing what she would say.
‘Are you looking for anyone?’ she risked.
‘No’ replied a voice ‘ I’ve come only for you. We have all afternoon.’
Demeter found herself in the garden, looking at the girl who smiled and raised her hands to the side of her face and held her carefully.
‘Say vermillion Demeter. And jasmin, and frankinsense and amber.’
So Demeter did, slowly into the palm of the girls hand, so that each word left the shape of her mouth on the girl’s skin. And then she moved her mouth to the girls neck and slowly inhaled.
‘Come to Arabia with me Demeter, I’m wearing Cinnabar.A thousand and one nights.’
