>Serena Longhi Gelati
Instructions In The Cauldron
Tradotto da Valentina Giglio.
© Serena Longhi Gelati 2019
To someone who isn’t here anymore but is watching from up above…
I. The Holly Bush Cottage
It was Friday and like every Friday Sarah and I would go to our granny’s.
The Holly Bush Cottage, as we called it in our family, was our second home, we had spent there every weekend and the summer holidays since we were babies.
A nice cottage in the English countryside, in Marlow precisely. Our great-grandparents had built it, our grandpa had inherited it later and it was inhabited by our granny Susan.
The house was composed of a living room, a kitchen and a dining room on the ground floor, three large bedrooms with two nice bathrooms on the first floor and a wooden attic with two large skylights opening on the surrounding countryside. I had spent so many evenings watching spellbound the clouds from up there!
Our pride was however the garden, where the big holly giving the name to the building dominated, followed by the oak near the gate and by a hawthorn bush, standing next to the main door. Of course, roses weren’t missing, and lavender bushes, orchids, pot marigold and a small place dedicated to officinal herbs like sage, rosemary and mint.
Our parents ran a cafeteria called Café Room in Newbury, a nice wooden place whose specialities were, besides coffee, apple pies and scones.
Mum and dad didn’t have much time to devote to us at the time. I wondered who would have looked after us if our granny hadn’t been there. In my eight-years-old child mind, however, this problem was solved in a short time: granny was there and she would never go away.
I wished I could spend more time with my parents, the only time to stay with them was a week in Palma de Maiorca in the summer. I hated the cafeteria.
“You shouldn’t talk like this, Anne!” my mother scolded me, “that is our job and it enables us to live a comfortable life”.
I didn’t exactly understand what “comfortable” meant, I only understood that my parents devoted more time to work than to us.
“Sarah, have you forgotten your rucksack at school again?” I reproached her when we got into the car.
“Oh, no, don’t tell mum” she begged me.
“Don’t tell me what?” mum asked, driving in the Friday afternoon traffic towards Marlow.
“I should have taken the M4 instead of going through Reading. Hell! It will take ages. I don’t understand why your granny doesn’t want to move closer and live in Newbury…it all would be easier”.
The same old story every Friday, but our granny would never move, she would never leave The Holly Bush Cottage for anything in the world.
“By the way, mum, Sarah has forgotten her rucksack at school again!”. I always felt a bit of fun in putting my sister under a bad light.
“Sarah! How will you be able to do your homework for Monday now?” our mum screamed, hooting at the same time to a big SUV which had cut her way. “People can’t drive…especially on Friday evening. So Sarah, how are you going to do without your books?”.
“I’ll use Anne’s books!” my sister answered innocently. She never got upset, even before the most resounding scolding, she just stared at you with her big eyes. Nothing could trouble her.
“Your sister won’t be always there in your life. You must learn to be more responsible and to take more care of your things!”. I didn’t understand whether my mum was nervous for Sarah’s fault, for the traffic or for the fact that the previous SUV was still before us and it was continually slowing down.
Even if it was almost dark, my granny was waiting for us in the garden, in her apron with pink flowers and a wonderful smell of apple pie associated with her.
“My two naughty little monkeys! Here are my girls!” she received us with a warm hug of the kind she was the only one who could give.
“Where’s Sarah’s rucksack? Forgotten again?”.
“Yes, granny…”.
“She would forget her head too if it wasn’t attached to her neck! She’s terrible, mum, terrible! Her teacher Richie is really worried, she looks as if she lived in a world on her own” my mother mumbled getting into the house with our bags in her hands.
“It’s probably just like that, Rebecca. Tell me Sarah, what were you thinking about at school this morning?”-
“I was fancying I was already here with you, granny, sitting on the armchair in front of the fireplace, caressing Kiki…”.
Kiki was my granny’s big cat, black and lazy, he lived just for eating, sleeping and being fondled by my sister.
“I’ve been thinking about that all the while, but I’ve also listened a bit to the lesson, I swear”.
“She has got a natural aptitude for visualization, my little witch!”.
“Mum, please, don’t tell her she’s a witch! If she started fancying about that too, it would be the limit” our mother said in her usual brisk voice.
“I wouldn’t consider it bad at all, Rebecca, really at all”.
“And what about you, miss Anne? Always serious and composed?”.
“One girl with her head in the clouds is enough, granny, isn’t she?” I pointed out seriously.
I was the responsible and cynical one, sometimes even a bit nasty, but that was a part of my role.
Being a twin is difficult: you want to preserve your own identity, to make the world understand you’re a single person and, to do it, you sometimes have to be completely different, not only in your clothes. I had asked my mother to stop dressing us up in the same way since I was five years old. I was tired that people always mistook us.
I would never want to change Sarah, I would be always there for her, but my task was to show her the rational side of life, I didn’t have to nourish her fancies. I was just the opposite she needed to be whole and she was the same for me.
“You must go now, Rebecca, or you’ll be late!”.
“If you lived closer, mum, it all would be really easier! There are some nice little houses near Newbury…”.
Mum was never going to stop insisting on making my granny move.
“Go, Rebecca, go…You know I’ll never move! It’s more likely you’re going to move closer in a few years’ time…”.
As soon as my granny received us at hers, it was as if we were thrown into a different reality: the sweet smell of the apple pie just taken out of the oven could be felt more intensely, the cat Kiki arrived, scraping against Sarah’s legs,
