My First Colouring Book by Lloyd Jones Page A

enough, not over a lifetime. He was tired of thinking these thoughts over and over to himself. Should he tell her? But she already knew, surely. What was the point of an autopsy?
    As he drifted off again, Morgan thought about the chapel and its neat little cemetery, yews and graves in tidy rows. Because there was one decision outstanding: when he’d suggested – as was natural – a joint grave she’d gone strangely quiet.
    Let’s talk about that another day, Morgan, she’d said.
    Whoever lived longest, it seemed, would decide on the final pattern.
    In the conservatory all shapes and lines faded into darkness as he snoozed in the company of an old but tumultuous aspidistra plant. The smell of chocolate pervaded the whole building. And his final thought as he drifted away was that his very first map of their relationship, drawn on graph paper, had put that plant in a perfect isosceles triangle between him and Mags as they sat in an old newspaper office at the top of the stairs, the only room in the world for him then, when he was young and ready for love… so many years ago.

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    MY Great Aunt Mary died recently.
    She was a mountain dweller – and a sizeable mound in her own right, a formidable matriarch who wore a hefty Paisley-patterned apron and Wellington boots for six days of the week (we thought she slept standing in them, at the kitchen sink) and a black coat plus floral hat on the seventh. The hat was a statement, never to be understood by mortal man.
    Like most farmers’ wives of old she had never been seen eating, but spent almost all her life preparing food for an extended family of bipeds and quadrupeds: she didn’t seem to care much who got what; I wouldn’t have been greatly surprised to see a lamb at the dinner table and a greedy child nuzzling a bottleful of milk in the yard.
    I can see her now, waddling towards me across the farmyard, carrying two large pails of pigswill, making one of those ancient noises used on farms to call the animals; experts say these chucka-chucka-yaaa noises are probably the oldest in the human repertoire. On workdays she wore a headscarf which accentuated her chubby red cheeks, and the plentiful hairs on her chin seemed as natural as her husband’s. Standing in the kitchen with an industrial-sized rolling pin at the ready, her heavy apron held together with a broad leather belt, she had the air of a tired and greying Bedivere or Gawain girt ready for the Battle of Camlan. She smelt chaotically of bacon, soap, beef, custard, suet, manure, flour, iron, blood, hay, toffee, udders, mothballs, bibles, babies, hen-huts and butterchurns. To be frank, the apron was a large rustic corset which – like an African dictator – tyrannised a small country of flesh and held in thrall a continent of smells. It was hardly surprising that she was surrounded almost always by a ring of open mouths, as if she were a bird with her chicks at the nest. Out in the yard she was immediately surrounded by concentric rings of animals: pet lambs, calves, hens and children, all waiting to be fed with soft brown eyes full of love and gastronomic expectation.
    Never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine that Great Aunt Mary – who’d sown, weeded, reaped, washed, prepared, cooked and served up more food than all our celebrity chefs put together – had a dark secret. My first intimation of it came at the wake, when my Uncle Dafydd, himself a spindle of a man (bachelor, raconteur, expert wielder of crook and billhook) made a comment about the size of the coffin in relation to the size of the little girl who had very nearly starved herself to death in the distant past. I barely registered his words, but they returned to me when I received a dusty, battered case – a Victorian portmanteau – containing Mary’s personal documents. The job of sorting them was allocated to me partly because no-one else wanted to do it, partly because I had