Wildflowers: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff

I glanced at him and then returned to the painting. ‘Hello,’ I replied.

‘It’s my mother’s birthday and I was thinking of buying this for her.’ He sounded posh, but he was at least ten years younger than me, probably around the twenty-five mark. ‘You’re a woman, do you think she’d like it?’

I glanced around the gallery and clocked at least three other women more likely to be near his mother’s age who he could have asked, but instead he chose me. I turned to face him. ‘There are better chat-up lines, you know,’ I told him.

Saturday, 9.07 a.m.

After some faffing around, she has ‘requested’ that I drag a chair over from the dining table in the bay of the window and place it in the middle of the room. That way she can sit on the sofa and watch to see if I make any sudden movements or attempts to escape. She almost collapses onto the sofa, so I’m assuming she has driven all the way down from her lavish country pile up in Yorkshire to confront me.

‘Mrs Shibden, what are you doing?’ I ask her.

She sits with the knife beside her, her grey-blonde hair a wiry, unruly mess around her head, her eyes out on fierce stalks, her thin lips pressed together in barely contained rage. ‘I am doing, Zillah, what I should have done years ago – ridding myself of you once and for all.’

Eleven years ago

I tore off the brown wrapping paper with all the excitement of a woman receiving a first anniversary present from the man she loves. The flowers, our wildflowers, were hidden behind the brown paper.

‘Oh my—’ I covered my mouth with my hand. I couldn’t believe he had done this. Fabian came from an extremely wealthy family, there was no escaping that, but this was too much.

‘I couldn’t give it to my mother, not when I saw how much you loved it. I promised myself I’d buy it for you if we were still together in a year. It reminds me of the flowers near where my parents live.’

‘It’s absolutely beautiful,’ I said.

‘I’ve been dying to tell you this, Zillah: when I was telling my grandfather about the picture and how I was going to buy it for you for our anniversary, he kept asking about your name and saying how striking it is.’

‘That’s nice of him.’

‘He’s brought it up more than once.’

‘Maybe he knew someone who had the same name or something?’ I replied not making too big a deal of it. Clearly Fabian had no idea about my name (and he hadn’t looked it up), but his grandfather did.

‘Maybe,’ Fabian said.

I hadn’t taken my eyes off the picture. Beautiful seemed such an insignificant word for it. And … ‘I can’t accept the picture,’ I said to Fabian. ‘It cost thousands of pounds. I just can’t accept it.’

‘All right,’ he said, slipping his arms around me, not fazed by my discomfort. ‘How about we keep it here, at your flat, but officially, it stays mine? Will you accept it then?’

‘Yes, I will accept it then.’ I stood on tiptoes and kissed him. ‘I love you.’

His eyes lit up at hearing those words for the first time. ‘I love you, too,’ he replied.

‘Let’s hang it in the bedroom so we can sleep each night in a field of wildflowers.’

‘And make love there, too.’

Saturday, 9.15 a.m.

Mrs Shibden is glaring at me as though there is not much stopping her from doing me serious harm. No one would believe it if they knew. Mrs Shibden is a ‘good egg’. She is involved in her local community: she makes jam for local fairs, she ferries elderly people to and from hospital, she sits on the boards of several charities. She has been in the papers, on the radio, and many television shows, fighting for her largest charity. It empowers girls and women in developing and third-world countries – helping brown-skinned girls to understand that they matter; they can be whoever they want, they can learn whatever they choose, they can love whoever they wish. Unless, of course, one of them happens to be sleeping with her son.