Having overgrown Sixties children as parents had caused much embarrassment to Tryphena Celestial Lovechild Rainbow over the years.

As she saw it, life had been a humiliating experience, right from the word zygote. It was no secret that her conception, planned for the almond groves of Kathmandu,  had apparently taken place in an old post office van stuck for thirty-six hours in the no-man’s land between Turkey and Iran whilst border guards indolently swatted blue-bottles and philosophised over the lack of requisite documents. A mere thirty thousands rials, Allah O Akbar, might have changed the course of her life, but bribery, man, was out of the question. The pair were turned back, only to be stoned, or rather pelted with bones and over-ripe water melons, the minute they re-crossed the Turkish frontier by villagers who knew all western women were harlots.

Six weeks later, the van died noisily on the European side of Istanbul and, since details of  a motor vehicle appeared on their passports, it was impossible to leave the country without it. Tryphena’s mother, morning-nauseaus and desperate, finally traded her waist length red hair an inch from the scalp in exchange for being smuggled into Greece in a consignment of carpets. Penniless and suffering from dysentry, they were repatriated from Belgrade and forswore foreign travel for all time.

Back in Britain, they opted for a simple life, in harmony with Mother Nature. Their families packed them off to a semi-derelict longhouse in deepest Devon with enough capital to set up a cottage industry - both had dabbled in Art College ceramics - provided they suffered the compulsory twenty minute registry office ceremony.

The story, variously embellished, was trotted out at social gatherings with monotonous regularity, to justify, Tryphena suspected, an existence lived festeringly close to the earth. She hated Nature. She loathed sweetness and light. Anything that shattered life’s saccharine monotony attracted her. Her first clear memory was of sitting in a meadow, slowly and carefully pulling all eight  legs off a trapped spider whilst her mother waxed lyrical over the first cuckoo and gathered young Urtica tips to make a version of Samuel Pepys’ nettle porridge. Her handiwork had been greeted with appalled silence and a swift slap, for which her mother profusely apologised. A diet of bedtime stories personifying insects followed, but Tryphena had already learned to conduct her experiments in secret. She relished that sadistic streak. At school, she studied ancient history before she fully understood the mechanics of reproduction and honestly believed that genetic material from the bellicose Medes and Persians had somehow been drawn from Iranian clay and ether to spark her embryo self. Even when interminable afternoons of Mendelism and sex education  seemed to disprove her theory she went on harbouring a secret belief in some psychic connection because she felt totally alien from her floating, doting, mutually dependent parents.

They were now quite elderly - in their mid-forties - still objecting vociferously to various aspects of the Establishment; still wearing variants of the beads, loons and kaftans of their youth; still growing, and smoking, weed, and making annual foraging trips for magic mushrooms to the lower slopes of South Dartmoor. It was sheer fluke that Norn Pottery made money. Both of them professed to despise filthy lucre and spent little, driving around, barefoot, in a decrepit Morris Traveller held together with baler twine, and surviving on a macrobiotic diet mainly consisting of brown rice, more brown rice, and whatever ventured its head above the soil in the dank half acre garden.

Tryphena grew up thin, mean and troubled. Puberty brought… bewilderment. She beamed hate. Harmony and Peace refused to be shocked. They were so damned understanding that whatever rage-fuelled course she attempted to explore was fine with them.  Nicotine-yellowed fingers didn’t merit comment. The filthiest of language was merely an experiment in self-expression. No garment was so weird that Harmony didn’t try it for size. By the age of thirteen, both buttocks and her left ankle bore intricately vulgar tattoos. Later, she took body piercing to its innermost limits. A newspaper photograph of Tryphena, fourteen, mud-encrusted, naked and stoned at Glastonbury was enlarged and framed for the dining-room, replacing the prized (but not for its value) Macartney-Snape sneer at the English aristocracy. Publicising the early jettison of her virginity earned her dinner at a Plymouth health food restaurant. Harmony wore patchwork.  Peace brought his own wine: a pungent home-made 1989 elderflower champagne smelling of tomcat and secretly fortified with vodka. As the old car lurched and bucketed back up the A38, Tryphena crouched low, wishing herself invisible whilst her parents loudly invented contemporary lyrics for Joan Baez protest songs.  Halfway through a maudlin elegy for cows exterminated during the BSE scare, Harmony began to weep for the wickedness of the human race and the deliberate misinterpretation of Genesis 1: v.26 to justify eating their fellow creatures. Peace pulled over. They hugged and congratulated each other on their vegan purity. Tryphena smiled into the darkness. Next day she brought home two lamb chops and half a kilo of pigs’ liver. The smell of charred flesh brought her parents screaming from their kick-wheels. Scarlet-faced from prolonged retching, Tryphena announced that she had become a carnivore. The results were gratifying. Her mother wept. Her father cursed. Within a fortnight both Harmony and Peace wore the abstracted, non-comprehending faces she had observed in her friends’ houses.

She built on her success by developing an unhealthy obsession with the power of hard cash and threatened to take a degree in Business Studies. Her parents despaired. Actually, she had no interest in an academic future. Although she was not artistically gifted - in spite of having learned to throw pots at the age of four - she had already decided to apply for a graduate course in Visual Performance at the local Arts College, an institution which prided itself on its avant garde reputation. With her sights firmly fixed on financial success, Tryphena had studied the work and shock value of certain Turner Prize winners and knew that the College would provide her with the support and contacts she needed to replicate the drama of that moment in the kitchen, when all emotional hell had been let loose. One A-level and a portfolio constructed inside a lavatory pan won her an unconditional place. She cooked tofu and rice with dandelion leaves and marigold petals before producing the written offer. Again, her parents’ reaction proved highly satisfactory. This time Peace wept with gratitude. Her mother uttered orgasmic cries and promised her the financial earth.
 
For most of the course Tryphena bided her time, quietly experimenting with animal bits and pieces - bones, particularly skulls, fur, teeth, and feathers, a frog skin or two, rabbit tails, occasional wings. For her first individual project, entitled Talking About Women’s Problems: Shhhhhh! she covered an entire studio floor with eggshells which she had collected from local restaurants, bakeries and nursing homes. It had taken a month to amass such a quantity. They lay, pale green and six deep, sliming quietly onto the bare boards.  The sulphurous stench coiled along the corridors, fingering under doors, wafting through kitchen and  refrectory, sneaking past coughing, choking secretaries to linger in the complacent warmth of the Principal’s office. A large audience was drawn by the nose to the haunt of this noxious Pied Piper. Violently crunching the shells beneath her Doc Marten’s intensified the smell to the nth degree. Two students fainted. The bar opened early. Tryphena refused to explain her piece and became flamboyantly aggressive when pressed.

 The stage was set. Her fledgeling reputation established, she next devised an installation (Mute comme un Poisson) centred on a large and very dead rainbow trout, stinking to high heaven and seething with maggots bought from a local fishing shop, amongst which she distributed tiny slips of acetate, each bearing a single letter. Bizarre word combinations formed and re-formed as the maggots wriggled, and tunnelled, and waxed fat. This was so badly  received that she delightedly moved on to exhibits of accident victims. Spring had come and the Devon lanes were thick with sacrificial victims. The Quick and the Dead  featured advertising material for a new offering from the Rover stable untastefully wrapped round half a dozen flattened  hedgehogs. She laughed in the face of the assessor who questioned her on the content, and scraped a bare pass. When the remains of two cats, one ginger, the other a portly tabby,  were arranged so that their mangled intestines spelled out Catastrophe,  the cleaner contacted the local  Cats’ Protection League. Their outraged reaction earned her a visit from the RSPCA and two lines in a London broadsheet courtesy of  a freelance journalist.

For her penultimate show, Unspeakable, the first open to the public, she decided on risking an action packed performance.  A neighbour who had seen her collecting feathers in the early months of the course, presented her with a mature cock pheasant, decidedly dead, but hardly marked. Tryphena thanked him prettily, hung it till it was well and truly high, then bribed a fellow student with a motorbike to run across it in front of  the audience. He agreed, but made the mistake of returning to inspect his handiwork upon which he promptly threw up.  Tryphena and the more robust of the onlookers responded with raucous cheers. Harmony and Peace watched in stunned silence. Some of the gore had splashed the drooping sleeves of Harmony’s dress, a green velvet creation bought specially for the occasion. Glancing down, she saw that her husband’s sandals were speckled with blood. His face was pale. His hair was stringy and grey. His hands were knotted and gnarled. Sudden terror washed over her, great waves threatening to engulf her, a mélange of dark memories and realisations which boiled down to two simple facts: her daughter was a monstrous stranger; and homo ludens had ceased to exist - they were no longer the carefree innocents who laughed and celebrated, and who had promised each other never to grow old. She ran from the building before the seventh wave could break. In the silence of her room she made a brave try at turning back the years, clipping off the white-streaked hair to within an inch of her scalp. It was full moon and the habitual agonising stomach cramps accompanying the winding down of her internal clock knotted into her centre, drawing upwards, almost becoming reversed birthing pains. Peace locked himself in the studio and threw pots until his hands seized up. In the morning Harmony, preparing to fettle, noticed  how uterine they were, how fragile. Working methodically along the rows, she squeezed the life from each of them. It was three days before they could bring themselves to speak to each other. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Laughing inwardly, Tryphena professed not to notice anything amiss.  She was already engrossed in planning her degree show, less than two months away. Already attracting considerable attention, this was her launch into the art world. Her big chance. Someone from the Arts Council always attended.  Commissioning agents would be present. Whatever she produced had to be truly, deeply, madly shocking; so sickening that it would earn national condemnation.

Like so many others before her, she turned to myth and legend for inspiration. Something from the land of her spiritual birth would have been ideal, but since she envisaged drawing on the work of both Hirst and Whiteread she was forced to settle for Greece, focusing on the story of Pasiphae. Over Sunday breakfast she outlined her idea. She had recently viewed a video of a Dartington performance artist meticulously taking apart a grey suit and laying out the components on the floor of a large warehouse. She would do the same with a cow, scooping out its organs with a silver spoon to leave a cavity into which she could climb. It would take her three days. Perhaps a little longer. She would have preferred to turn the creature inside out, but this required the guidance of a scientist, and Tryphena was not one to share her glory. The carcass would be purchased locally, from an old-fashioned local farmer who butchered his own animals. This meant, she sniggered into the chill silence, that she could pick her own  beast as it wandered around the buttercup meadows. What did they think of Pasiphae Disremembered as a title? No? She was well and truly stuck on this one. Any better ideas?

“Maybe,” said her mother, wearily getting up to make a herbal brew from leaves in one of the fifty or so stoneware jars stored on top of the dresser. Today she was wearing a jumble sale cardigan over her flowered Indian dress, but shivered violently in spite of the bright June sunshine. Peace, who had aged ten years in as many weeks, mumbled some unintelligible expletive through a mouthful of organic muesli. Harmony poured boiling water into three mugs.

“Drink this. It should make everything clearer.”

Tryphena finished the pale gold, green-smelling liquid first. She had never really bothered with that question of genes. Perhaps she should have done. In her own way, Harmony was just as ruthless as her daughter. Certainly, she knew when enough was enough. It was she who had broken the stalemate all those years ago on the Turkish border whilst Peace lay sleeping. She could still smell the fetid air in that customs building… Tryphena’s oily dark curls never let her forget it. And her pact with Mother Nature also meant she knew a lot more about the properties of  flowers, seeds and leaves than was possibly good for her.

Considering the variety of plants growing in the Devon countryside, relatively few are poisonous to humans. But there are enough. Both sorts of  hellebore can kill, so can cow-bane and columbine, the spindle tree, monkshood, baneberry, all species of buttercup, lily-of-the-valley, laburnum, fritillary, spurge, privet, dog’s mercury, ivy, buckthorn, water-drop hemlock, bryony, naked ladies, foxglove, and, of course, deadly nightshade. The mystery is, why the self-styled Harmony should have so carefully collected and preserved them.

NEW STORIES & POEMS BY LIZA GRANVILLE
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FLOWER POWER . INDIAN SUMMER . LEGACY . LONG ARM OF THE GODDESS
THE HOUSE AT THE CORNER OF JERICO ROAD . TWISTED DISTAFF

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CROCUS PATCH . WAITING FOR THE INEVITABLE
AND AFTERWARDS . FEAST DAYS (A RECIPE POEM)

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