Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

Some trees grew tall as houses.

Some trees grew fat.

The trees were so beautiful you wanted to watch them all the time, and people did.

It seemed the trees absorbed light as well as lead because the world seemed duller, anywhere the trees grew.

They bore no fruit.

Not at first.

Saturn is time. Saturn is the Bringer of Age. Saturn is the bringer of melancholy and dismay. We didn’t notice the effect; the tiredness, the melancholy. The graveness.

We didn’t notice.

Not at first.

I scoop up the shards my son’s clumsiness knocked off and drop them onto the upper branches of our Saturn Tree. If I had the patience I could sit and watch them being absorbed. It’s hypnotic. It would distract me from thinking of him, out there amongst it. There are no good people this week. No one who will look after him, bring him home to me.

I wasn’t allowed out during the first Saturnalia. I stayed at home, listened to the dogs howl. By the time I was 16, though, they were mandatory and I was out amongst it. Blind drunk most of the time. Those crystals! And no regret the next day because who remembered anything? It’s why we don’t know who his dad is. Could be one of many. I don’t blame any of them. I don’t feel used by any of them. It’s how it was, it how it still is.

I don’t like having methylated spirits in the house. The alcohol smell of it takes me back. I’ve not touched a drink since the day he was born and we knew. We could see what he was. So many of them like that; damaged by the booze we’d drunk during Saturnalia and beyond. We didn’t know. We didn’t think. All we knew was that the crystals, dissolved in alcohol, provided an almost instant high and somehow negated the hangovers. Sparkle, we called it. They still call it. I spent a month in a state of numb euphoria; I didn’t care when Saturnalia started or finished.

He came out smelling of booze. I swear it. Not that sweet baby smell they are supposed to have. And his tiny eyes, his flattened cheekbones.

“We’re seeing a lot of these,” they told me gravely at the time, as if that made it better. Holding that tiny baby, his tiny head, and they say no one was to blame. Because no one wanted the Saturnalias stopped; they still don’t.

My son; what worries me most is what happens when I die. But I probably won’t die before him. He’s clumsy, so accident prone. His liver is shit and he’s impulsive. I can’t see him lasting too long. If he survives this Saturnalia, out there with the lunatics (not lunatics though. We’re not talking about the moon. The Saturnine) then perhaps he’ll be safe for another year.

He should be safe, and return to me and our quiet, clean life. He can help me move some heavy furniture around. It’s a good time for change, after Saturnalia. Good time to pretend things are different.

If he comes home in time he can eat with me, but I don’t mind eating alone. It’s a quick clean up. No spillage.

We are in the Saturnian days, my father used to say. He liked to quote from things he didn’t understand. “The days of dullness, when everything is venal,” he’d say, nodding as if we should know what he was talking about.

I feel dull. We all feel dull, but they numb that with alcohol. Drugs. Sparkle. With sex and dancing, throwing themselves to the ground in a passion they do not feel. These times are when Saturn is unbound. When we are all so grave on the inside if you cut us we’d bleed tears.

My father always did call me fanciful. I used to talk about Saturn, bound with woollen strips beneath Rome to stop him leaving, unbound only during Saturnalia. I think he is with us now, unbound because we worship him with our dullness, our melancholy.

Satin stains badly and is difficult to clean. I can do it, though, if you give me the time, some cool water and some delicate soap.

I hope my son comes home unbloodied.

I hope he kills no one.

He is back. He leaps and jumps about like a frog in a box; I’ve never seen him energised before. His clothing is in disarray, stained, his hair is shaved on one side, his face cut, his chin dark, his arms bruised, his legs bleeding. He talks without taking a breather for an hour or more, while I clean his cuts, feed him and give him tall, cold, sugary drinks. I sponge the stains with cool salted water, then rinse a dozen times with clean water. The rest I remove with hydrogen peroxide.

Dark days follow. After the excitement fades and the ordinary returns, the melancholy seems more intense. As if Saturn is angry that the revels have ended, and is exerting his power, laying his lead-weight against us. Some communities leave up the banners and bright ribbons, but they fade with the sun and became sadder than anything. I could wash them in vinegar but that wouldn’t be enough.

I try to help my son. I put him to work, because work distracts, and I need him to keep up. We took in more purple stains than usual; he told me they were passing around a grape drink that tasted like medicine but that numbed the entire body. I tried to find this drink, to give him a taste, cheer him up but there were no supplies in town.

He carries a tiny Saturn’s Tree with him everywhere, carefully, as if it was a full cup of tea.

Then a customer tells him about the grove.

“The greatest Saturn Trees you’ll ever see!” she says. “And you walk in amongst them and can feel your blood racing, your heart so solid and strong, and you smile, and you should hear the laughter in there. Strangers all together as one. It’s beautiful.”

I think of our own Saturn Tree, how even standing next to it makes my mouth droop, and my eyelids heavy.

“That doesn’t sound right,” I say. The customer laughs.

“It’s not really for people like you.” She actually winks at my son, and he winks back, as if he knows what she is talking about.

He leaves with her. I tell her that he needs help and she laughs at me again, as if I am making things up, have invented all the hours I spent cleaning him up, trying to teach him.

He isn’t gone long. He comes back quiet, but he seems happier.

“It’s so beautiful there. The sky looks bluer than it does here. But she was wrong, that woman. It is for people like you. It’s for everyone. Next time, can you take me?”

“Maybe,” I say, the universal, eternally polite parental No.

Ninety-seven customers later, he goes out and doesn’t return. I know where he’s gone; I only wonder how he travelled. I call him. He says, “Come and see, Mum. You’ll love it, you really will. I’ll meet you at the entrance.”

He sounds so bright I wonder if something has changed within him.

I set some clothes to spin and close the shop.

The streets are quiet with the Saturnalia well over. There is a low hum, a low moaning, I think, but I see that people are humming and I realise it is music.

I drive to Saturn’s Grove. The sign is cracked, tired-looking; the “o” lookes like an “a”.

From the moment I enter, I am filled with a sense of my own worthlessness. Pointlessness. I am uninteresting. Unlovable. I think the customer was right; this place is not for me.

There are hundreds of metallic trees, growing as tall as redwoods, wide as sequoias. I can barely see the top of them.

I find my son, his arms stretched around the base of one of them.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” he says. He’s never cared about anything before, beyond food. He reaches his hands up to swing on one shining branch. He winces, pulls away, and I see that his skin has reddened.

At the base of many of the trees are clothes. Perfectly good, most of them.

“What are these?” I say, smiling. I think He brought me here, to collect the clothes. It is kind of him, bringing me here.