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Isle of Man
- University of Wisconsin Press
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192 Isle of Man T he smell is cream and brown and soft, is things which push up out of the ground at night and grow without leaves, which smell the opposite of green, the underneath of green. Granny looks in my basket. She touches each smooth cap with her long white finger. She knows which are poisonous, which are safe. My heart is getting big. I’m happy. This is happy. Everything is a smell. I’m a smell in the grass with the mushrooms in the wind in the morning. My knees are wet. A rabbit is watching me. Only his nose moves. Don’t be afraid. The smells make a song that’s louder than waves. I lick the dew from a blade of grass. The rabbit bounds away, the tips of his brown ears bobbing up above the grass. It will always be this morning and me kneeling and the sun where it is and ladybirds sleeping in the clefts of grass. My mouth waters. I smell bacon frying, salty and smoky and fat. It’s like another bird joining in the song. A cuckoo that squeezes the others out of their nests, nudges their eggs to the edge, fat cuckoo sitting in a robin’s nest, all the robin’s blue eggs in pieces on the ground. No, it’s just another smell song. The sun puts his hand on my back, I can feel his fingers in my hair. When I look up there is a mountain where there was only blue mist before . Where the sun touches, the mountain is purple. In the shadows it is dark blue. It looks like another island floating just above this one. The air shimmers over the frying pan. The blanket is warm and scratchy on my legs. “Who’s for fried bread?” says my father. He lays two slices of bread in the dark brown juices of the mushrooms and the fat hisses. I take the purple-grey plastic plate. “Can we climb that mountain?” Granny smiles. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I nod my head because my mouth is full of mushrooms. Granny believes in fairies. She reads tea leaves. When we get back to the house in Castletown it is raining. She says, “I have a present for you.” We climb to the attic. It is grey and old, it smells of ginger and mice. Cobwebs cover the only window. You can hear the sound of rain on the roof like the pattering of mouse feet. She lifts the lid of an old brown trunk. The smell of mothballs covers all the other smells. In the top of the trunk is a tray with wool vests and flannel trousers. “Help me with this,” she says. We lift out the tray and I see two pith helmets side by side like two ducks nesting. Next to them are instruments in a leather case whose seam has split and a metal tripod folded up. Granny takes out a small round tin and hands it to me. She takes out a book too but she keeps that. We put the tray back in and close the lid. The pink of her scalp shows through her hair. Her hair looks like a dandelion seed. When she looks at me I am quiet inside. I turn the tin around in my hand. I know what it is. The lid is rusted tight but I open it. It is the cooker she showed me before 193 C y c l e 3 [54.81.157.133] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:52 GMT) 194 we ever went to Nigeria, the one she took to the Gold Coast. I remember it. I remember how the metal legs fold out to hold the saucepan. “You can make your own tea and fry your own mushrooms whenever you go on expeditions,” Granny says. I put the lid back on and it looks like an ordinary biscuit tin. Her eyes are shiny. She’s given me a secret. “It was such an adventure,” she says, “the two of us, your grandfather and me. Not many women went to Africa in those days. And of course I had to come back when I was going to have your mother.” I know that bit. “My grandfather.” The word feels funny in my mouth. My mother has a photograph of him. He’s standing in a river, fishing. He’s wearing rubber waders up to...