Sunflower Heart

They say I have to write a story.

It’s what I wanted when my back was breaking. You should be careful what you wish for.

At least there’s a window and I can watch the evening primroses opening while I think. I lift the lid on my tea mug and smell the green tea. This one has a fishy overtone: not quite as good as the ones I grow. Grew.

I thought the chair would be softer.

As long as it’s funny in places, and uplifting, they say, it can have adventure of the Right Kind. I’m lucky this state educated me — a peasant and a woman — the lady from the Ministry of Literature would never have taken me with her if I hadn’t been able to read her map. She expected me to grunt and point, bent over waist deep in flowers. Flowers to sell; not for us, though I keep the broken ones, with torn petals or bruised faces, smiling at me from old cups.

None on this desk, though.

She liked them, the Ministry lady, so I cut one for her as we were talking, a vivid red one with a perfect corona of yellow, black stamens tipped with purple. I can still smell the sap on my thumb, so I fancy, when I press it to my nose. But that cannot be: it’s been a week since.

Her name was Miss Bird. She said she was sorry about flying into my field and disturbing me. We laughed: she’d come a long way, driving for days and nights. Her car was parked on the edge of the road, its wheels sinking into the mud. She was rubbish with maps, turning it the wrong way up, not understanding about north and south. She said she might never get to her new office at all, left to her own devices, so I wiped my hands and told her I’d go with her to the main road.

My fingers were yellow with pollen. I tried not to touch the dash or the seat of her car as I got in. It was very clean, although it smelled of smoke and the ashtray was full. She’d left her neat, grey jacket on a hanger in the back. There were dark rings of sweat under the arms of her pale pink blouse and she smelled worse than me: nervous, fearful about the new job. She laughed too loudly as she told me about it: the new boss she’d never met, the office so far from home. She wasn’t allowed holiday for a year, and her friends had been deployed all over the place, so only the Heavens knew when they’d meet up again.

I have never had a holiday. You cut flowers when they’re ready, dig holes when the soil’s warm. You get no second chance if the weather turns. Wet flowers rot on the tractor. She was going to sit all day drinking tea and typing stories for the Workers’ Journal. I settled into the car seat, my toes wriggling. The day before, I’d lugged hod after hod of manure across four fields because the boy that normally helps had broken his collarbone falling off the tractor. His father had taken him to hospital, so neither of them was around and the flowers needed their manure.

I am not a crazy person who says flowers talk to them, though I sometimes talk to flowers; tell them how lovely they are. The Ministry of Agriculture says that the carbon dioxide in your breath is good for them, and I think you might as well say nice things as gibberish. When I was nine, the Ministry had our whole school out in the fields, breathing on the bean flowers. We played find-the-most with the striped caterpillars that eat the beans, squashing them on the road, competing to make the biggest patch of mush. Now I know there were so many because the year before, the older kids had been told to trap all the birds that were eating the seeds. Some of them evidently ate caterpillars too.

We ate the sparrows. They roasted well: not a lot of meat on them but a nice little meal for a child.

The evening primroses are coming out: the movement keeps catching my eye. It’s nearly dark now and the petals look white, flapping like butterfly wings. I am very still. It is quite cold in here.

Miss Bird told me about working for the Ministry of Literature, and I said how interesting it sounded. She relaxed a little, her voice became less shrill, and she said why didn’t I try for a job there, but I am good with flowers and I didn’t think there was much point in applying for redeployment. We’d climbed quite a long way then and she pulled the car up so we could look back down the hill at the fields of yellow, red and orange. She’d stuck the stem of the red flower into the car’s air vent so it sat upright on the dash, its petals fluttering. It was quite a modest car, but a lot nicer than a tractor.

Before long we were in amongst my neighbour’s sunflowers and there was no more view as they came right up to the road edge and higher than the car’s roof, just grown to their full height, their faces yet to open. You can see over them from the tractor and so I had a good idea of how the little roads went this way and that.

I wonder how long they expect me to sit working here. They said they’d bring me dinner, so I guess they don’t want me to stop. The woman with the very narrow eyebrows said I wouldn’t want to “spoil the flow”.

If this story could grow as fast as a sunflower, that would be a fine thing.

It must hurt to pluck all the hairs out of her eyebrows like that. Perhaps it’s a kind of pruning.

My back’s aching and I wonder if I could sit on the floor, with the keyboard on my lap. It just about works, but the floor tiles are hard as road, and colder. Under the desk I can smell mice. There’s a piece of chewing-gum, pink and hard, but when I press it the skin breaks and spreads sticky stuff, just like those caterpillars in the beanfields. I pull it free and after a lot of effort getting it off my fingers, smear it on the inside of the wastepaper bin. Then I scrub the mark with a bit of notepaper, chip at it with the edge of the tin the boiled sweets were in. I don’t have my pruning knife.

The sweets tasted of oranges. I ate maybe thirty and now feel a bit sick. I’ll be all orange inside like a caterpillar that only eats green, green to the core. If something ate me I’d taste of orange sweets. Not quite the same as oranges.

Back on the chair. I type “eqruioutireuitoeuifkl” and then go back to put some spaces in it. The software programme draws wriggling lines under it and I’m reminded of worms. I should write my story now. The ending should be happy. It would have to be heart-warming to read, like the other tales in the Workers’ Journal, with lovely descriptions of the land, the sunsets. I can only smell compost in my mind now, and imagine thin red worms eating away at something, feeding it to the flowers with their excreta.

Miss Bird got her laptop computer out of the bag on the back seat and showed me one of her stories. I only read the first page or so, but she told me it was about lovers separated by their work, inspiring each other by letters. She said maybe I could do it too. It was only a little story, she said.

It was a lot better than “eqruioutireuitoeuifkl”, which is the sum total of my literary output so far.

I wonder if anyone remembered to turn on the irrigation in the polytunnels, what with the boy in hospital and his father all of a fuss.

They’ve given me pens and paper, in case I’m the sort of writer who likes to put it on paper first, they said. I’ve never seen such pens: one is black and the other green (for editing, Skinny-Eyebrows said). They write such fine lines, such smooth lines. I write my name as small as money spiders, then scribble it out and eat the paper.

Outside the window, it’s dark and I’d be making dinner before going out on slug patrol. The pesticides don’t get them all and we have to pull them off the tenderest plants. I don’t like killing them; their bodies are too rubbery. They say you can sprinkle salt on them but we don’t have salt to spare and so we have to use our boots. Nothing eats them. It’s a shame we can’t.

I don’t have my boots here. Just house slippers and a pair of dark grey court shoes with a little heel, which I’m tapping against the star-root foot of the chair. It’s like a little black tree.

Miss Bird liked the sunflowers too. I don’t think they grow where she comes from, a big city far off in the north. She thought it was charming that I knew all the farmers whose land we had seen from the hill. No-one in the city knew their neighbours, yet they lived two feet apart in rooms like planting trays, listening to each other snore and sneeze and break wind. The man in the room next to me talks in his sleep.

I hope I don’t.

Miss Bird wanted to get out of the car and walk right into the heart of the sunflower field, but they are all so close together you can hardly see between them, and the hairy stems scratch your skin. I let her borrow my hat and sleeves and she wriggled her way into the green. You could get lost in here, she said. They wouldn’t find you till autumn, I called back. Come back here a moment, I said, your smart clothes are getting ruined, and I loaned her my smock, my work trousers, my boots. We were the same size. I sat in her car in my underwear and put my damp-stockinged feet up on the hot plastic dash. She was nimble and determined, in love with the flowers. I heard her giggling, then the snap of a pig trap, a scream.

She’d gone too far in to see, but she yelled that her foot was caught. The trap’s chain clinked as she struggled.

I’ll come, I said, keep shouting. She was sobbing, actually. Those pig traps are strong, made for the boars that nibble through the sunflower stems. Don’t panic, I said. I slipped her blouse on, and her skirt, to protect my bare skin from those prickly stems. Her shoes fit me perfectly. I felt for my pruning knife, but of course it was her pocket, and there was only a business card, with the name of her new boss at the Ministry.

In thin clothes and with no knife, there was only one thing I could do. I turned the car key in the ignition. She called out to me and I replied that I was going back to the sheds to get help, to get a machete, something. There was a big hole, full of water, no way to tell how deep it was, so I drove round it and when I did, the car was pointing away from the sheds, towards the city and the Ministry of Literature.

I’ve drawn sunflowers in green on the paper. I should write the story of how I saved Miss Bird from dying of starvation in the sunflower field. She could have been there till autumn, till the reaping machine cut her composted body to pieces before anyone saw it, and found my clothes and then remembered how I’d gone missing at the start of summer. She was very lucky that I was there. The readers of Workers’ Journal would lap up the tale and I’d be so glad I had a new job as a writer at the Ministry of Literature, thanks to my friend Miss Bird, whose life I’d saved.

I can’t write it. What Miss Bird did was not actually as easy as it looked. You plant flowers and they grow of their own accord, but stories aren’t like that. Stories don’t break your back with digging and weeding, they bend your neck like a sunflower’s as you sit in the chair watching the little words try to grow.

So when Skinny-Eyebrows comes in with more tea and some soup and asks does Miss Bird need anything else, I’d really like to climb out the window and flap away with the night flowers, the moths.

Fiona Jefferson has been making up stories since she was a child, but hardly ever shows them to anyone. Works include fantasy, poetry and non-fiction, the latter mainly about travel and nature, and she rarely goes out without a camera and sketchbook. The seeds of a website have been planted at fionajefferson.com. Who knows what will come up?