ROT

STOP TELLING ME I'M BRAVE - POST 114

It’s the second bank holiday weekend in 2023. Lizzie has gone down to Devon for a few days to hang out with a friend and paint seascapes. And I’m having a proper old lazy time, in the way I only can when Lizzie is out of the house and isn’t making me feel like I need to do chores.

I’ve just sat in the garden for half an hour and read my book. When Lizzie is at home, there’s no sitting in the garden and reading books. The garden exists solely to be gardened (I always think it’s unfortunate that the verb ‘to garden’ suggests working at something – i.e. improving your garden. Wouldn’t a better meaning of ‘to garden’ be ‘to laze around in one’s garden, doing absolutely sod all’? It would be to indolent old me, anyway).

Anyway, Lizzie’s not at home, so I’ve very much been ‘gardening’ in the latter sense. The book I’m reading is Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle – which my friend A. sent me as a 50^th birthday present.

The book is dark and difficult… and completely at odds, in feeling, with the bright spring weather and chirruping birds of our garden (even though the chapter I’m reading is set in spring). But it’s also weirdly compelling.

I’ve just read the following sentence:

‘Perhaps someday soon Jim Donnell would die; perhaps there was already a rot growing inside him that was going to kill him.’*

The line makes me think of our old leaky house… and how I’m constantly concerned that we’re going to get dry rot, because of how our two showers continually leak onto the ancient wooden floor beams beneath them. Sometimes when I think this, particularly since Lizzie’s illness, I think dry rot is like house-cancer. And as soon as a house has got it, it’s going to be a battle of survival for the building.

Shirley Jackson’s sentence above, however, is the first time I’ve heard actual human-cancer described as rot (if that’s Jackson’s meaning). But that’s exactly what it is, isn’t it? Rotting away a person’s insides… irreversibly damaging their internal structure… just as wood-rot does to a house.

March 2023

*We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson; The Viking Press 1962.