Flower power

FLOWER POWER

Having overgrown Sixties children as parents had caused much
embarrassment to Tryphena Celestial \lovechild Rianbow 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 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 bluebottles and philosophised
over the lack of requisite documents. A mere thirty thousand 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
stones, or rather pelted with bones and over-ripe water melons, the
minute they re-crossed the Turkish frontier. 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-nauseous 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 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 appeared to
disprove her theory she went on harbouring a secret belief in some
psychic connection because she felt totally alien to her floating,
doting, mutually dependent parents.
They were now quite elderly - in their mid-forties - still objecting 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 tied together
with baler twine, and surviving on a macrobiotic diet 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 newpaper photograph of Tryphena,
fourteen, mud-encrusted, naked and stoned at Glastonbury was enlarged
and framed for the diningroom, 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:
Shhhhh!' she covered an entire studio floor with eggshells which she
had collected from local restaurants, bakeries and nursing homes. 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
secreatries 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 fledgling 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 paper, 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 cobbled together especially 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 melange of dark memories and realisations which boiled
down to two simple facts: their 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 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 two 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 her degree show, less than two months away.
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, madle 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 would require
the guidance of a scientist, and Tryphena was not one to share her
glory. The carcass would be purchased locally, from an old-fashioned
farmer who butchered his own animals. THis meant, she smaned 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 still shivered in spite of the June sunshine. Peace,
who had aged ten years in as many weeks, mumbled some unintelligible
explative through a mouthful of muesli. Harmony poured boiling water
into a mug.
"Drink this. It should make everything simpler."
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 meant that she knew a lot more about the
properties of flowers, seds 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
every one of them.