Flowers (by Michael Lawton)

Have you ever noticed how people treat you differently when you are carrying flowers?

That is what I am thinking about as I hurry through town.

People are just generally more solicitous, I seem to have more space around me. I think everyone values a gesture, everyone appreciates that you have made an effort.

Women definitely treat you better. For a start they actually notice you, and they recognise that you are the type of person they’d like to go out with. You seem to be added to some mental list of theirs. You’re carrying flowers after all.

Men also respect you more, they see you are trying, ‘having a go,’ and they respect you for it.

I almost didn’t get to the market in time to buy flowers; the bus didn’t turn up. Fortunately the next driver was in a hurry. We were going so fast down the hill the bus seemed to come apart; we were a landslide of machinery; hammering, screaming, and sliding. I jogged to the market and came out with some daffs, some tulips and some exotic looking ginger stems, which are about three foot long and mean I have to carry the bunch like a bayonet.

I remember in the early years of ‘me and Arabella’ I had decided to get her flowers simply because I’d realised it had been a while since I’d done it. The florist was an old woman who explained to me that the young appreciated the cool crystalline beauty of lilies. They are too funereal for the old.

As I stood at her door I turned around to see the large house opposite full of spectators. A girl about my age caught my eye and nodded, smiling in encouragement, as if to say:

‘Go on. Give her the flowers, how can she refuse?’

As if it was our first date. It was then I realised the power of flowers and how women like them. They are never as hackneyed as we might think.

As I stand there thinking about what is past I think about the more recent past and I realise how stupid I’ve been, how tawdry the flowers seem when compared to the hulking weight of my actions, my manic performance.

I look down at the ginger stems; appropriately they seem to carry with them the stench of violence and sweat of the illicit. They have a musky allure with their bruised red brooding heads they cause the bundle to list forward and the daffodils slide out, lisping along the paper like a swollen alcoholic. Their palette matches the contusions on my hands caused by slapping the doorjamb in anger the night before.

I know the flowers are not enough but they are a start; they are a start and I will fall with them at her feet as she is the Heaven; I am the earth; and my tears like sins nurture the blooms that are Hell beneath me and I will cry:

‘Forgive me Bella. Forgive me. For I am a wretch and I am nothing without your love.’