after Joe Brainard
I remember the row of tiny cottages by the police station, accessed through a door in the crumbling city wall—like the secret garden. Ours was number 4. You painted the front room a rich burgundy, the colour of venous blood, or a red wine stain.
The blue velvet chaise longue that had belonged to your mother—I remember when you positioned it under the mirror, along the longest wall of the burgundy room. Now it languishes in storage, and I can’t bring myself to replace the fabric with its constellations of cigarette burns.
Do you remember letting me stub out your cigarettes in the Murano glass ashtray that stood on the side table in the burgundy room? Once I tried to inhale from the filter, putting my lips on your lipstick marks when your back was turned.
I remember stuffing a bead from the Galt Threading Kit up my nose in protest after you switched the television off in the burgundy room and banished The Flintstones. Your lips thinned in anger, but you gently tilted my chin to remove the bead with a pair of tweezers.
I found my Barbie doll in the burgundy room one morning. I remember how she leant against an empty wine bottle; her hair shorn into a crew cut like Action Man.
In the darkest corner of the burgundy room, I remember hiding beside my step-mum’s legs as Dad broke your records in half across his knee when he returned me on a Sunday evening.
Auntie Mavis shouting through the letter box that you needed to see a psychiatrist. Her disembodied voice in the burgundy room. The clatter of metal and the scrape of high heels on concrete. I remember.
A dead bumble bee outside the front door—I mourned when you told me it was the queen. I can remember laying a dandelion beside it, plucked from a crack in the wall that held up the burgundy room.
When light from the television flickered across our faces, we curled up on the brown settee in the burgundy room—the one with the William Morris pattern—do you remember? The flowers and leaves and thorns grew around us, winding through our hair, weaving us together.
I remember playing The Snowman soundtrack while you slept upstairs. I stomped through the flurries of carpet snow. I flew from blue velvet to brown as the violins soared and the burgundy walls shimmered with the aurora borealis. I even melted at the end.
I can see the twinkling Christmas tree and remember the crackle of the fire in the burgundy room as you sent my letter up the chimney. The sparks swirled towards the North Pole at midnight.
I remember standing alone in the burgundy room, wrapped in my stripey dressing gown, watching you walk away through the secret door into the city, the streetlights blurring into stars.
© Gemma Downing March 2021
Illustration: Atlanta Wiggs