The Apple-Tree Throne

by Premee Mohamed

Autumn is when adventures begin, when the air is crisp and the paths are dry and the leaves whisper and the scent of smoke on the downs travels like a secret. It must be autumn, when everyone is held in abeyance between their home and their destination, when every trip is a journey.

The black hair, the pearly eyes, like high, far-off clouds.

Take the body and go. But he cannot go where the others went; and not one shilling will we pay.

Black backs, like droplets of ink, trickle down the slope towards the steam-tram line shining just beyond the cemetery gates.

the scar on his cheek, splendidly marring what everyone had to admit was a preternatural beauty.

no rose blooms in this intemperate land but is watered handsomely by their heroic blood.

in my damp and wilting dress uniform of London smoke,

Both her sons clearly got their eyes from her— long-lashed, a pale blue-grey. Hers are somewhat swollen with tears, but still luminous, as if a match-head burns behind each one.

He was barely real, Braddock, wasn’t he? He was a Boy’s Own Adventure book. Anything as flash as that isn’t long for this world.”

I think the brass that made him killed him. I think too many old men told him he could do no wrong, and he believed it.”

“A man makes his own decisions, Ben.” “If a man’s his own man,” I say, finally turning from the grave. “Was he, do you think?” “Of course he was.”

We eat rich fish soup, and chicken with lemons, and roast potatoes, and an apple tart to accompany the postprandial brandies.

am impressed by her hair, and spend an injudicious amount of time staring at it, for ‘chestnut tresses’ are referenced often and carelessly in pulp novels, but I have handled my fair share of conkers and the precise colours of sepia and vermilion that must be mixed to produce true chestnut hair outside of a literary setting is surpassingly rare.

The older woman turns at once in her seat and embraces her tenderly, all their lace crackling together as if they are stuffed with dry leaves.

I bow over it and touch my lips to one cool knuckle— a whiff of gardenia soap. How interesting. Everyone knows Wickersley liked roses.

feel tears rise, not in my eyes but seemingly my entire head, as if a small ocean is forming somewhere in the region of my jawbone.

Here, this was his chaise-longue, upon whose green velvet his long elegant body has left a long elegant dint;

And we laugh uncomfortably, because she is well aware that we loved him, but she was not there in the battlefield with us, where all we could do was speak ill of each other to survive. Laughter was better than bread, we used to say; it could be shared infinitely amongst the squad, and it did not have weevils in it.

A deepening lilac sky burns above the grey stone of the walls, stars glinting in mimicry of the glass-topped bricks.

putting away his double portion of fish curry and potatoes, which gradually dyes his light-brown moustache a tarty shade of brass.

The pain in my leg exhausts me and reduces my appetite, drives the Sand-man from my door,

“Let’s get a Clark’s Garden in you,” Clark says, and gestures to the waiter, ignoring my groan. This is a beverage of his own design, comprised of rosewater and orangeblossom, as well as quantities of lemon juice, salt, black rum, and strong, carbonated ginger beer. It is not dissimilar to drinking a flask of cheap perfume, and God help you if you should spill it upon your shirt; you end up smelling like, not to put too fine a point upon it, Shipton Road.

Even as I think this, my leg twinges and I feel all the blood drain from my face.

“I say, don’t mind me asking, but you… do you…believe in…” “A reasonable rate of return? Yes.” “No — “ “That redheads are inevitably trouble? Yes.” “Well, yes, but in — “ “That the ladies at the next table are looking at you with disreputable intention?” “Are they? Oh dear, there’s no accounting for taste.” I shake my head. “In ghosts.”

you didn’t grow up believing that witches lived in the brambles in Farmer Sorley’s field, or that they changed themselves to bats during the day-time,

“Sometimes I feel it made us…well, unfit in some way for life back here, do you ever feel that? We’ve seen too much. No one else here has seen anything like that.”

“Strange to come back to someplace without enemies,” he says.

“And the leg?” I open my mouth, and close it. I want nothing more than to tell him how it screams and howls sometimes, and sometimes is as silent and obedient as its twin. I want to tell him how when it is rainy or foreboding I wake in the middle of the night muffling screams into my pillows, how the pain comes in low like a wave and then washes over me,

the femur as flawless as a white porcelain replica of itself.

I want to tell him there is no rhyme or reason for this pain, and yet it is always with me, sometimes asleep, sometimes awake, like a large dangerous animal I have been forced to host in my rooms.

we are being approached by a small pack — herd? flock? — of ladies of more distinguished age, their bearing that particularly English type of beamingly self-righteous, each bracing the other in some way that we men can but dimly comprehend.

The cream of the country, dribbled between the enemy’s voracious and waiting lips.

As a boy, I used to have terrible nightmares — as if my brain chewed up the day’s events, like a wasps’s mouth making paper for its nest every night, that terrible efficient manufactory of wriggling grubs and fiery stings.

I wonder how calm he truly is — does he wear a mask? Would he prefer to be screaming half the time, like me?

One of the servants — surely young Alastair, not sullen Mrs. Boyle — has put a bowl of plums upon the table and the light dances off the clouds in their glossy surfaces.

What interest could they hold for a boy adventurer such as he? Just as Clarkie had said, Wickersley had never outgrown styling himself as such, not till the moment of his death. He truly believed that everything would turn out all right if you could simply bash your way through it, brazen it out.

He joined the army, I think, so that he could have brothers who might actually play with him.

“I like magpies,” Greene says. “I know most folks don’t. How’s the rhyme go again?” “One for trouble, two for tears,” I say. “I suppose it’s not their fault. Three for courage, four for fears…” “Five for a journey, six for a home, seven for a ha’nt doomed ever to roam. Well, there’s our one.”

my leg begins to tune up for the evening.

can the woman not see that you are nigh-on a starless night?”

the soft damp dawn so full of hope, smelling of impending rain and strange herbs,

The worst is behind. That is its home now.

a chilly dusk, stars twinkling above the lavender mist rising from the Pondsmiths’ orchard. It smells of frost, and apples, and Miss Meyers’ gardenia powder.

Nothing compared to Wickersley’s double-row of stars, crosses, blossoms, crests, and wings, and more than I wanted; I only meant to serve as long as I was forced to, and come home in one piece. I only meant to live.

I wonder if any of them have coins with the Queen’s head upon them, for all that the monarchy was abolished years before I was born. There could very well be a few. All the coins were recalled and transformed, melted down for the new ones, and yet coins have a permanence that verges on human stubbornness; a coin wants to exist unchanged.

I remember this from childhood — squirming on the smooth wood, the sweet smell of the lacquer and the mustier one of incense in the hangings. My fist feels empty without a coin. And of course, it is not my own parents next to me. No, no, stop thinking about it — the past belongs there, not here.

the great thing, they say in their terrible pamphlets — yes! I have read them, the better to know the enemy — is that a man’s life belongs to himself, rather than to God.

I think of an ancient massacre I read about in an old book— Breziers, had it been? Yes, Abbot Amalric. Of both innocent and foe he had said Kill them all, for the Lord will know His own.

The sun is long and golden in a dark blue sky,

Children dart and shout around the fountain,