On hot summer afternoons I used to visit her. She lived in a rundown cottage near the river, cracks in the walls, white paint flaking like old skin. I would touch those walls with my finger, imagining I was touching a tree and trying and guess its age. Ring on ring. She called herself a happy spinster. She hated men and mirrors. She said both were liars.
Sometimes she would make a pot of tea and we would sit and feed the birds in her little garden, mostly blackbirds and one very overweight robin who was her favourite. We sat in a lazy dream listening to the slow fat beat of wings and the soft slithering of snails. Sometimes she would read my palm. She had an interest in the occult. Her grandmother Molly had been a fortune-teller in Brighton on the pier. There was a strange old photograph of her in the hallway with a red turban on her head and a dead stuffed snake coiled in her lap. She looked like a fraud. Auntie Eva would polish her picture every spring like an ornament to make sure Grandma Molly could keep a watchful eye over us. I wondered why. There really was nothing much to see.
The cottage was small and painted with the colour of sunflowers, which had faded over the years into a smoker’s-finger yellow. The furniture was all from philanthropic charities, a broken sofa with a floral print and a ringworm occasional table. Wonky legged chairs and a strange squashy cushion seat with bumblebees embroidered on it, flying in circles. Her strange assortment of relatives adorned the walls in old frames, a photograph of Grandma Molly’s father, Reginald Crump, a taxidermist who was hung for poisoning his wife. Reggie’s portrait was appropriately hung in the outdoor privy. In Aunt Eva’s bedroom, in a beautiful ornate frame decorated with dragonflies coiling like the fingers of a magician, danced around a picture of twin baby boys in a pram. The names underneath read Arthur & Goliath, Cairo 1850. Their father was as rich as a prince and was an explorer and archaeologist and his name was Gawain Honey-Flower, a huge man who had travelled out to Cairo and, as Aunt Eva fondly recalled, met a beautiful Egyptian woman, plump as a pagan goddess. The story changed depending on how much wine Aunt Eva had drunk. Sometimes she was “a witch, who had caught Gawain’s soul in a mirror”, other times “the daughter of a pig farmer, who had a toothy grin like a carved pumpkin on Halloween”. Either way, the fate of their children remained the same on each story telling. A year later the twins were born: Arthur who sucked his fingers and Goliath who gobbled everything up just like a bear cub.
Goliath was sent to a boys’ school in England whilst Arthur trained with his father as an archaeologist and participated in the excavations of the tombs of the Pharaohs and the deciphering of hieroglyphics. At the age of 22, whilst exploring the Nile with a French aristocrat, he fell in whilst drunk and was eaten by a crocodile. Goliath was Aunt Eva’s favourite relative because he was “physically enormous and hairy”, two attributes which she thought of as wondrous. The remaining less interesting relatives were spotted throughout the house: a sturdy housekeeper, a balding pharmacist, a non-descript postman, a shrivelled florist and finally, lurking rather suspiciously in a mother of pearl frame by the cat flap, an incredibly ugly coffin maker. I wondered where she would end up putting me.
Aunt Eva was a great collector of knick-knacks and loved roaming round the flea markets, sometimes picking up the most disgusting and unusual items. In her kitchen drawer was a jar with floating glass eyeballs, a pair of birthing stirrups and a quack doctor’s prescription: Dr Tumbleweeds “Magical Remedy” for ailments of the heart, as thick and black as syrup. I opened it once, it stank of toffee apples and something rotting. On her bedroom table sat an assortment of coloured glass perfume bottles, aquamarine, ruby red, snail silver, flamenco pink. Little magic jars, each with a strange smell: peaches and cream, mothballs, lavender and butterfly wings, tickling the nostrils. On her hand mirror there was a picture of her and my mother when they were my age, wearing strange dresses and holding hands. I examined the photograph carefully; they were almost identical, it was only the sly look in Aunt Eva’s eye that gave her identity away. My mother never looked sly, always calm, always snow white.