Victoria Williams: 0089

Alright so Diane has come along and pointed her finger and decided that something must finally be done about me and I can’t go on lying about the house and weeping, weeping and leaving emotional, sloppily-written goodbye letters everywhere. And also I must start bathing again. Soon.

She is trying to reduce my concerns to the point where I will only worry about finishing one book in time to start another. She has brewed up a remedy of Water Violet, Gorse, Crab Apple and Walnut for me from Dr. Bach’s* 38 Flower Essences. She has me burning incense by night and has shown me that nostalgia is a disease. Looking back in so many years time, this will probably be the obvious point at which my tower started to fall.

(This is halfway related by the way, to the story of my Grandfather, whose tower started to grow from a crack between the paving slabs in the back yard, and split the land as more of it revealed itself and it stretched skyward like a tall stiff lily stem, until finally at the top an oily lamp-wick bloomed and was lit by the sun and the sentient lighthouse stood there before us. Somehow, subliminally, it commanded him to Bring home the Ocean, and this he did, and it was this task he was engaged in when he died suddenly but quietly one day, among the 364 buckets of saltwater he had placed in circles around its base.)

My tower was going to be a man-made structure, and I would slowly build it up storey-by-storey, year-by-year and move with it so I would always be at the top. The sign on the door would read Ivory Towers. Private Property. Eventually it would reach to such heights that at the top there would be no gravity and no oxygen, and there I would live burning incense and drinking flowers and hanging upside down from the rafters like Le Pendu, waiting for an epiphany to strike me.

But Diane, alas (alas!) has seen to it that I must undergo the rite of passage and give up my dreams of immortality and besides I should have listened to the two things my Grandfather told me all those years ago about mortals; firstly that we must not chase after royalty, and anyway don’t you know that we each obey our towers – they are not ours to build.

* Let me tell you about Dr. Bach…

Here’s how it worked supposedly: Before he got to be bald-headed and middle-aged, Dr. B, in his youth, accidentally found that the morning dew from the petals of certain flowers had remedial properties, and more amazingly, different flowers had different properties and could treat the different and true emotional, psychological root causes of most common ailments. And he discovered 38 different flower essences like this, and wrote extensively and gave lectures and basically got laughed out of London by the medical establishment.

So just picture our young maverick doctor, all wild-eyed and raging, with something to prove, delicately collecting flowers from the Oxfordshire hedgerows of his boyhood and then leaving them in bowls of spring-water out in the sunshine for hours, and then bottling this water for his remedies, and then preaching zealously to the public because he just wants to help them.

“Remedies come in 10ml or 30ml amber glass bottles. Mix two drops with fresh water. They’re pure and harmless – just sunshine and flower essence. They are my children, they can only do good.”

Now some years later in the mid-1930’s and his hair has thinned. Disciples are spreading his word and he is old, he is tired. In Dr. B’s private collection, which is kept in a large mahogany box, there is a secret. Each of the 38 essences are mixed not with spring-water, or even a little brandy, but instead, with tears. With real teardrops, gathered through the years from each patient whose suffering he has removed. Now late on this night, Dr. B locks his door, lifts the old lid and sighs, and probably thinks to himself: “Oh mama, now that you’re dead I have all this rage and no target for it.”

Next morning they have to jimmy open the door- well anyway… “Next morning dead in his study he’s found, with 38 empty bottles scattered around.” – G Foster