Fiction

Gerberas

Mr and Mrs Williams live on a large property where they raised their children. The children are gone and now there is too much house. At first, they liked spreading out, claiming rooms for their hobbies. Mr Williams designed the Gym, the Library and the Oratory.

Mrs Williams created the Sewing Quarter, the Spooky Suite and the Decoupage Den. Both had a hand in creating the Kitty Room, a place of carpeted ladders, dangling woollen balls and boxes, where their cats once pursued their obscure feline purposes.

There are no more cats at the house, the special rooms are unused and Mrs Williams has dementia. The disease has had less impact than either anticipated. Details have fallen away, but they’ve adapted and the losses are rarely consequential.

He brings her the same breakfast every day – a fried egg with spinach, a single slice of burnt rye and sweet, milky tea. Sometimes Mrs Williams recognises Mr Williams and sometimes not. When she doesn’t, they spend a few minutes getting to know each other again. She is always delighted to meet him and she often concludes their meeting by giving him gerberas, which she collects in the garden.

Mrs Williams has always had a predisposition towards joy, and she retains this in the absence of most details about which such a predisposition might rightfully find its reasons. She has taken to sitting for long periods on the back landing of the second storey of their house, admiring the view.

When Mr Williams comes to see her, she always says the same thing: “Would you just look at this vista! It goes all the way from here” (signalling with her right hand, extended far to the right) “to here” (now signalling with her left, extended far to the left). She is always well pleased.

When she relates this to Mr Williams today, he is distracted by other matters. While walking home from church on Sunday evening, a woman he’d never seen before accosted him on the street. “Ah, Mr Williams,” she said, “the so-called good Mr Williams. Mr Williams, the noble Mr Williams – but I know how bad you are!”

People turn and look. Mr Williams blushes and hurries off. He is shaken. He tells nobody about the incident, scared people may take the woman’s side, although he is unclear both about the nature of such an allegiance and what ideas about him it would endorse. Sleepless in the early hours he wonders whether the woman is right – that he is a bad person. Unable to settle on a metric, he cannot make an adjudication.

Soon he rarely leaves the house except to shop. He goes to the supermarket just before it closes, wearing dark glasses and a full-length coat. One evening he sees his reflection in one of the aisle mirrors and notes how shifty he looks. In fact, he looks just like the Mr Williams referred to by the unknown woman, the bad Mr Williams nobody knows.

The next evening, while at the pharmacy, he thinks he sees his accuser on a convex security mirror. He is seized by panic, immobilised, dizzy. The world falls in on him, time clots, something chemical flares low in his gut, a hot bloom rises to his throat. Mr Williams begins to lurch forward as though he will faint but at the last moment he rises and runs.

Mr Williams has not run in more than 30 years. Shop alarms sound – razor blades in his pocket have set them off. He doesn’t stop, doesn’t turn around and later cannot recall the journey home. He leans over the bathroom sink and sucks oxygen into his lungs. In the mirror Mr Williams’ eyes look coated, yellow. He has cut his forearm.

A picture of Mr Williams appears at the front of the pharmacy underneath a sign that says Hall of Shame. There are grainy pictures of suspected shoplifters. Mr Williams never returns to the pharmacy and so will never see his likeness.

Soon he draws all the blinds and avoids peripheral areas, any room with windows or doors adjacent to the street. He largely lives online; he shops, researches, declaims, interacts, diverts himself there. He asks that drivers leave parcels at the front so he can collect them under the cover of night.

He now moderates a website called Hidden in Plain Sight, concerned with medical malpractice, geopolitical scandal and natural nutritional supplements. He veers between thinking the website has attracted too much attention or not enough.

He circles the house twice each evening before bed, checking dark corners for ambush, indentations on the lawn, for things out of place or out of the ordinary. Mr Williams believes he has trained himself to smell small malevolent shifts in the night air.

Leaving the house requires preparatory reconnaissance. He uses military binoculars to check the street outside. To avoid being seen at his window holding them, he has set up a complex system of mirrors. He now only departs the house disguised with a theatrical beard and wig fashioned from a plush Vizsla. Mr Williams talks to local shopkeepers with an accent, although if pressed, he could not tell you which. People know it is him but say nothing.

He no longer visits Mrs Williams on the back landing in person but rather communicates with her using an intercom. He thinks she is acting coldly towards him and suspects the woman from the street encounter has got to her and poisoned her mind, although he has no clear idea how she has done this.

He returns late morning Monday from a medical appointment. The front door to the house is wide open, Mrs Williams is nowhere to be seen, and apart from a trail of gerbera petals leading from the front door to the street outside, nothing, he thinks, is out of the ordinary.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 23, 2026 as "Gerberas".

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