The Wicked Aunt

It is a curious aspect of the human mind that what it chooses to remember is neither logical nor linear. This is especially true of childhood, where entire years of nursery and school are lost without trace, and our parents’ hard work, (if indeed they did work hard), is entirely forgotten, leaving only tableaus. When we scream at them as teenagers, we are working on poorly defined resentments. 

But Emma does have a memory, now two decades old, of her Aunt Fay: her father’s sister, childless, but so much more maternal than her own mother. That side of the family went prematurely grey, so Fay had a head of white hair, always worn in a single side plait for as long as Emma could remember, and her face was round with apple cheeks and blue eyes. She always smelled faintly but assuredly of cinnamon. Fay was always winter. She was crackling fires, (even though there were none), pretzels, gingerbread houses and wicked stories. 

The memory grows clearer as Emma gets older, which might suggest that it is more of an impression than a lucid narrative. Does the mind, each year, embellish our mental souvenirs a little more, and then a little more, until they become onion-like, where the truest, sweetest part lies in the centre of the bulb?

Perhaps life is not what you make it but what you think it. 

Two sleeps before Christmas. Emma was seven, which is peak-Christmas, the most magical age to be alive for it. At six you are still an idiot. At eight, you’re growing into a wise-guy. Seven is where it’s at, and every adult alive, when faced with the dreary reality of the season, will tell you the same. For Christmas, they would really just like to be seven again. 

There was tension in the house. Her mother was being brittle with her father. She was all dressed-up, ready to go to a party, and the babysitter had let them down at the last minute. Emma’s brother, most definitely at the wise-guy age, went to the neighbour’s, shouting ‘Fuck this!’ when he slammed the door. He wasn’t even a teenager then. It would get worse than that. 

And Emma cannot recall the sequence of events, but Aunt Fay must have been called, and the one thing Emma knows to be real is the look on her mother’s face when she ran to hug her at the door. Understanding one’s parents is a slow process, and perhaps the things we remember are those which so profoundly mark the stages of a child’s growing critique of them. At that moment, Emma began to realise that her mother did not like her sister-in-law, although she would have been unable to put that into words at the time. 

Later, when her parents had left in an irritable drift of perfume and aftershave, Emma and Aunt Fay watched The Witches. ‘You look like Luke’s grandma!’ Yes, I do, don’t I!

‘Are witches real?’ I have no idea, Em. But I shouldn’t think they’ll bother you. Not enough fat on you. Is that my present under the tree?’ Yes. ‘What is it?’ Eye of newt and toe of frog. ‘Eeeuuu.’ Don’t knock it kiddo.  

When Aunt Fay tucked Emma in, her niece gave her a tight hug. ‘Can I have a story?’

‘Of course. Let me see what there is —'

‘One of yours,’ Emma said in the imperious manner that children often have. ‘Out of your head.’  

And so Aunt Fay began to tell Emma of the Brothers Grimm and how they had collected all the fairy tales and folk tales from Germany and surroundings, stories that went back hundreds of years.  ‘You will have heard of some’, she said. ‘Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood …. but the original stories, before Mr Disney got hold of them, were much scarier. Even two hundred years ago, it was thought that they were not suitable for young children, and young children in those days had much harder lives than yours. But you can still read the old ones, if you know where to look. So I will tell you the story of The Seven Swans.’ 

One thing that no one ever remembers, ever, is the moment of falling asleep. We can toss and turn all night long, willing ourselves to unconsciousness and then, every time without fail, it happens behind our back, often when the birds are calling. And so it happened with little Emma, of course, drifting away to the sound of her aunt’s voice, just at the moment when the wicked step-mother was being burned at the stake, and the seventh brother, although rescued from the family curse along with the other six brothers, ended up with just one human arm and one great white wing. 

But she was awake later, when her parents came home. She could hear her mother shouting at Aunt Fay with the voice she used when she had been drinking, when her lips did a funny thing too, which made her look like Squiddly Diddly. Words like HIPPY! and BABY MONITOR! and WICKED STORY TO TELL A CHILD!’ came barrelling up the stairs like a verbal tidal wave. Emma’s brother, who had been listening, although it required no particular stealth, crept into his sister’s room when things had quietened down and Aunt Fay had gone. ‘Hippy?’ he said. ‘Fay’s a librarian! God, I hate my parents.’ 

‘It’s the plait,’ Emma remembers saying. 

That particular Christmas Day, (that one that should have been the last word in Christmases), has been mostly forgotten by Emma’s arbitrary mind. She realised, much later, that Aunt Fay was absent, and was never invited to the Christmas table again. Her only memory of that day is that the present she left under the tree was a story book of fairy tales. She was familiar with them, the sanitised versions, but it was the illustrations which captivated her. The vivid depictions of witches and wolves and impossibly beautiful children drawn by the hand of Packham, Crane, and Greenaway sent Emma, in her very heart, to a nebulous place that her own childhood, so full of tension and argument, could never capture. Her mother, she did recall, made no comment about it. She was, no doubt, embarrassed by the scene she had made, and did not welcome the allusion to it, however innocently gifted. 

Emma, her brother and father would visit Aunt Fay. On one car journey, Emma had asked her father why Fay had no children. He explained that his grandfather had contracted TB and had unknowingly passed it to Fay when she was little. Her symptoms were outwardly asymptomatic, but the bacteria had infected her ovaries. My brother, five years older than Emma and more capable of understanding adult loss, asked why their mother was such a bitch to Aunt Fay, and why she often accused her of childlessness even though it was not her fault.

‘For as long as I’ve known her,’ their father said, ‘your mother has despised single women, particularly those who are childless. I used to think it was jealousy, but I struggle to understand why she is jealous of her own sister-in-law.’

Emma’s brother said, you should leave her, and the siblings both remember that their father’s eyes looked at them in the rearview mirror and he said, ‘because quite frankly, Robbie, I can’t be arsed.’ 

Emma remembers that visit the most. It was just before her brother left home and forged a life that is unsatisfactory, perhaps unstable. Aunt Fay still exuded cinnamon, and the love between her and her brother, her father, was palpable. I was a teenager then, not the cute girl Fay once tucked up, but I recall thinking that all fairy tales settle around beleaguered children, nasty mothers and ineffective fathers. Or in this case, brothers. 

*****

The hospice is located up a side road in a linear village. Emma’s father believes that she elected this more executive approach to death because when their own father had died, they had to sit in a room with his corpse for seven hours before they came to take him away. Fay is just in her early fifties, and although she is dying, she still looks just like the Grandma in The Witches. And when forced to face the reality of someone’s death, Emma has been suffering the sharp realisation that no one had ever asked her how she had spent her Christmases since her mother’s irrational outburst. She would not ask her now, because Fay would be forced to lie and say that she had been inundated with invitations each year and that she struggled to choose which one to accept. No one should die with a lie on their lips. 

And here she is, in Room 17. Fay is lying prone now, all thoughts of reading and television lost in the small comas and the ripples of morphine. She is awake though, and the scent of her is still that of cinnamon and gingerbread houses. She smells of Christmas. 

‘I found a book,’ said Emma. ‘Of course, it’s a new printing but it is the first edition of The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Completely un-sanitised.’ 

Aunt Fay murmured something which Emma struggled to hear. She repeated it. 

‘The Robber Bridegroom,’ she requested. ‘It is quite …. disgusting.’

‘Marvellous,’ said Emma, consulting the contents page. ‘Here we are! Are you sitting comfortably?’ Aunt Fay made a smirking sound. ‘Then we shall begin.’

‘Once upon a time …’