Yuletide is over and the year twenty-one-seventeen has launched itself into the hopeful projections of all who will sail its seas while Mo Constantine, Director General of the Jezebo Corporation begins his slide beneath the waves, his pain gathering itself into a white hot storm, his cancer seeping its toxicity through flesh and bone and his internal organs quivering at the brink of failure, he lies secluded behind the curtains of his canopied deathbed, measuring out his life of seventy-two years, trying to extract the source of a suspicion that something essential has been left undone.
The pain congeals across his chest pushing the breath from his body and tilting his mind through morphia's mists where hallucination comforts him with a curative vision of a summer garden with a song thrush on a wall, a spider repairing its web in the branches of a pear tree , rows of vegetables, a bed of herbs and the floral splendour of a fallen rainbow's gentle fragmentation into petals of peony, marigold, hollyhock, delphinium, pansy, foxglove, honeysuckle, lupin. Moon-daisy, mallow, iris, poppy...poppy..."Poppy"...
Poppy is his favourite grand-daughter, a dark eyed beauty who cannot decipher herself as she leaves the childhood her body has outgrown and though she tries hard to gather together an assortment of personality traits and borrowed opinions she falters, unnerved and unenlightened, at the gateway through which she must pass into her adult life.
Mo's mirage recedes as he resurfaces to his four-poster bed and the business of dying, death's shadow gaining on him rapidly, its proximity apparent in Poppy's sweet face now set in a torque of grief and concern as she lifts his shoulders and tries to get water past his lips as though she might delay his passing if she could only re-hydrate him, but the water she administers runs from his chin in rivulets of rejection from a fallen leaf too furled and brittle to absorb any water, to absorb life, to absorb Poppy's will that he live on.
Poppy's presence comforts Mo though he cannot oblige her need for him to re-engage in the life now ending and fully accomplished but for one missing feat he can sense but not trace and feeling the softness of his grand-daughter's hand around his old gnarled fist, he draws on her vitality to focus on the nature and events surrounding whatever it is he inadvertently missed, intent on discovering the where, why, how and when of his deed unknown and as yet undone.
Still holding hands, Mo takes Poppy back to the garden to accompany him on a wooden bench encircling the trunk of an old English oak that is the catalyst to profound recollection, taking the illusory setting out of the realms of fantasy and into the realms of memory and Granny Walcott's garden.
Granny Walcott was an old crone with eyes of forget-me-not blue and a walnut brown face that could shape itself into an impish grin, a solemn scowl or worst of all a sour half-lidded contempt for the human race, a tribe from which she had revoked her membership and kept at bay by means of a sturdy dry-stone wall built around herself and her garden, across which the occasional trespasser might find themselves made uncommonly welcome by involuntarily proving themselves wiser or in possession of more noble intent than their fellow folk.
At seventeen Mo had been one such trespasser whilst out walking in the undulating glory of Dorsetshire, trying to dilute the confusions of youth in land and skyscapes, having taken leave of his three mothers, his adopted mother The Good Lady Angel, his birth mother and actress Elena Joy Constantine and his godmother Amelia Faith Moonbright, all three of them sharing a common goal but differing wildly in emphasis and opinion on how the desired outcome of securing Mo into high office at the Jezebo Corporation should be accomplished. At the centre of their feuding, Mo had felt his convictions begin to dissolve, a fizzing away of years of grooming and he had excited their conference disturbed, shifted from his own axis by their resolves.
Disquiet turned to rage as Mo stalked the remnants of aspirations already haunting him like phantoms from a fruitless past, his future fast losing itself to the byways of unfulfilled ambition unless rescued with an urgency Mo found in his angry stride as he skirted the base of a long-barrow and climbed the perfect dome of a round hill, stomping out his fury to the top where longer views afforded him some relief from the nearsighted perceptions of panic.
From that vantage point, Mo spied a distant white cottage and with his back turned to the expectations of others he strode out, unblinking, toward that tiny speck, disconnecting himself from all things maternal, disengaging himself from his origins and seeking out those other sources of self quite independent of parental authority and well beyond the limited imaginations of guardianship's so biased toward a refusal to believe that a fledgling might actually fly and stay airborne by means of its own two wings.
A Midsummer sun at its zenith bore down on Mo and he reached the cottage craving shade barred from him by a closed gate in a dry-stone wall behind which he waited to be granted an entry by the old woman sitting on the bench round the trunk of an old English oak, her back humoed over a bowl in her lap from which she topped and tailed gooseberries, dropping them one by one into a colander at her feet, marking slow time scaled to an insular reality into which she had withdrawn, rendering herself oblivious to the stranger at her gate.
Elongated minutes drew themselves well beyond their true length before Mo's presence finally punctured the time shield safeguarding her world from his, startling her into the here and now, her head lifting abruptly and her wide blue stare parrying his encroachment with accusation and affront, but her intruder politely stood his ground until she reluctantly responded to his needs by fetching cheese, apple and water and setting them down on the circular bench one-hundred-and-eighty degrees from her own position before opening her gate to him without welcome or enquiry.
Respecting the silence she evidently required of him, Mo expressed his gratitude with a brief nod and followed her to the tree where they took their places on either side and back to back, she resuming the topping and tailing of her gooseberries and he drinking cool sweet water and eating his cheese and large red apple in the shade and unassuming wisdom of the oak.
Sunlight filtered through the leaves at the edges of the tree's green canopy, encircling shadow with an emerald haze, inducing an enchantment that soothed Mo's angst in an easy exchange of strife for clarity.
The oak embraced Mo, lifting the weight of negativity from his heart, dowsing desperation to rekindle hope and eliminating the threat of failure that had so recently sprouted out of his need to succeed like a tumour now removed, leaving certainty once again in control.
Relief brought relaxation and the vacuum left in tension's wake sucked Mo into a deep sleep that drew him into the tree's own dream of a vaulted chamber ornately filigreed with the tangle of its own roots, a cool, earthy room lit by the radiance of the old lady, the guardian of the oak, handing him a goblet of clear water, a piece of cheese and a large red apple but before he was allowed to eat or drink he was sworn to the secrecy of this sacred place, given adage "The acorn is the oak", and asked to fully absorb his future life that would end with one permitted breaking of his oath.
Mo had woken to the sound of children, their voices rolling down the hillside conveying excitability from a bold frontier where the limit of their daring met the boundary of their fear, puffing little chests with the courage to chant;
Granny Walcott, Granny Walcott
Throw open your gate,
Granny Walcott, Granny Walcott
Tell us your fate,
Granny Walcott, Granny Walcott
Sitting under your tree,
Granny Walcott, Granny Walcott
Who might we be?
Listening to the children rhyming their way through the tail end of his arboreal dream, Mo was able to complete an understanding of his subterranean tutoring and he took care to etch Granny Walcott's instruction into the bedrock of his self-knowing where it would stabilize and support him through the many fickle and deviating pathways to the leadership he had no doubt he would eventually attain because certitude had granted him an audience and reliably informed him that, "The acorn is the oak".
Forgetting all other dictum's, Mo melded this one phrase to his future prospects as an absolute assurance of a desired outcome by means of his own succinct formula, the blueprint of his life neatly condensed in an acorn as complete as the oak that must await an unfolding of time and events both challenging and enabling progress and ultimate completion of Mo Constantine's singular task.
The Jezebo Corporation had swallowed society whole, leaving no leeway between corporate need and the human soul now severed from its natural habitats in one mass indoctrination by the corporation's rule as sole employer, sole educator and sole governor, a conspiracy of control through which Mo must climb by the rungs of his own guile as a co-conspirator until he reached the very top from where he would dismantle existing structures of corporate toxicity and theft, releasing a population to reclaim its air, its water, its land and its individuality of thought, by altering the Jezebo Corporation's financial equations to the algebra of Love, Faith, Charity and Mo now comprehended the panic that had struck all three of his mothers who, although they had nurtured him for this very position, were unable to entrust such responsibility to a callow youth and had made anxious attempts to influence him from three different standpoints into which each one of them had ferociously dug her heels, instantly sealing him into a triangle of self-doubt.
Granny Walcott broke her silence with a mischievous smile and a timely reminder that he could break his oath at the hour if his death and at that point of bidding her farewell, Mo found himself overwhelmed by the privilege of her acquaintance.
Mo leaves the garden as an old man backtracking through memory to his present hour in which he is designed to die and he returns informed of the one thing not yet done and still holding Poppy's hand he realises that she had not after all left his bedside to accompany him into his vision but would find the place soon enough as he breaks his oath by instructing her to scatter his ashes beneath the oak in Granny Walcott's garden.
All done.
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