From the Bad Seed

Agatha Hock was doing Autumn again. She cut it into separate words, then jumbled them until a pattern emerged. Ah, autumn again...yesterday, I went down with Mary-Mary to pick the last dahlias... Agatha was gardening columnist for Womanly You. It should have been easy, as she did every year, to turn out another gardening romance, as her editor called it. After all, there were only four seasons. She had only to submit, each quarter, variations of the same story, each starring Agatha Hock once more exploring the treasures of her vast estate, with her cherubic daughter, Mary-Mary, assumed to be about six. (She had remained about six for several years, but no one seemed to notice.) She did prefer autumn to any other season, not only because the days were noticeably shorter, and she could thus start drinking earlier (her rule was - never before sundown). People who met her at lunch at the magazine thought, no doubt, she was a teetotaller, but Agatha, like most of us, had her side that only the moon ever saw. Agatha drank, not seriously, but consistently. She took a sip of whiskey. Still the red and yellow leaves, her daughter crunching them underfoot, the mulching, all that, were not jumping into any helpful formation. She shuffled the words again. ...at one's feet and just asking to be mulched. Mm. That was new... Ever since she had submitted her first column, all contact had been by email or phone, so no one had actually seen her vast estates, which was fortunate. Because even to glimpse a garden, Agatha had to leave her lime-green flat surrounded by sharp cactuses and gravel, and walk down to the nature strip bordering the freeway outside. It was true that she loved gardening, what she had done with the nature strip proved it, but she enjoyed reading about gardening more. She knew about Vita's Sissinghurst and about Hidcote and about Edna Walling's work, and the illustrations of these gardens were the inspiration for her columns. She allowed readers to picture her, the red leaves of her maple trees fluttering down onto her as she planted her snowflakes and daffodils and grape hyacinths (for the plot line of autumn included, as well as mulch, bulbs). As for her daughter, Mary-Mary, well, she had once had a daughter. A strange sentence that. She had once been a mother. Was she a mother still? All was unclear, since the disappearance. The truth about what had happened that night was still a dark place at the centre of her life. One she skirted around, eyes averted. Truth of another kind was threatening Agatha at the moment, and it was this which was distracting her from her current column. Her editor had suggested a readers' competition to be announced in the next issue of Womanly You. A tour of Agatha's estate was to be the first prize. Agatha had managed to put off this competition until next year, insisting autumn was the best time for her garden, her special time, and that it would have to be next autumn.... The editor had conceded, allowing it would give more lead time. After the launch the tours could be yearly, with workshops... Perhaps... And they would love to meet Mary-Mary... Who was, of course, Quite-Contrary, and another of the illusions on which her life was built. Mary-Mary's namesake was Mary Poppins, her real daughter's favourite book. Because she had never seen the saccharine movie version, she had been quite afraid of Mary Poppins, had nightmares about her, but had still loved reading it. So Agatha was now searching for some kind of cheap country place before her illusory non-garden was discovered. She had an appointment with an estate agent the next day. She would definitely have to go cottage garden - that was all she could possibly afford. She hoped her editor would approve. She sighed and shuffled the words around again. There is no time like autumn to plant bulbs in readiness for the splendour of spring. …

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