The Tale of the Green Potatoes
The mid-day light streamed through the wobbly window and trapped itself in the empty crystal vase. Charlotte sat alone at the wooden kitchen table and sobbed from the core of her feeble being. The big tears streamed down her long oval face with vengeance. Instead of finishing the important note she was writing, all she could do was hold a lock of her creamy quavered hair and cry. Holding her hair had become a habit she had adopted as a child when feeling upset. Around the tops of her fingers she continually twisted the strands with uninterrupted motion as time ticked by to the rhythm.
After an hour or so she let the hair go and rose robotically to start the dinner preparation. The prep began with the chopping of four of the largest, greenest potatoes from stock. She mixed a tomato puree marinade and added the finest and strongest Indian spices. Using the ‘rub in and spread over technique’, she worked quickly to cover the diced tubers. Several stray tears dripped from her jaw and ran into the dish but she did not stop them. She needed to finish the job and get on with her more enjoyable quests ahead. She covered the food and began to assemble ‘Paul Morris’ from the Mr Potato Head kit. She chose a fat green and scabby potato for the model and, with a wiley smile pushed her chosen pieces into its hard waxy flesh by using brute thumb force. Two blue piggy eyes, then a pair of brown untidy brows, the biggest nose from the assortment, a small downturned mouth, and a pair of heavy rimmed glasses.
‘There, finished with you Paul!’ she squealed to the tuber. ‘What a fine resemblance, Mr greedy, inadequate bastard!’
She balanced the rotund, lumpy tuber next to the soggy note. The unfinished scrawl explained nothing more than instructions on when to remove the food from the oven. She turned her attention back to the part prepared dish and added some canned tomatoes.
‘Paul, you-will-adore-these-Madras-potatoes’, she said to the potato portrait in a robot-like voice.
‘I-kept-the-skin-on-to-maximise-the-amount-of-neurotoxic-solanin-inside-the-creamy-flesh.I-doubled-the-amount-of-chilli-and-turmeric-todisguise-the-colour-and-bitternessfor-you. Happy-belly-ache!’ Charlotte laughed heartily; she had cheered herself up a little bit. As a child she had been hugely fond of those Smash adverts!
For a few brief minutes she revisited the previous events leading up to today’s missions and doubted if she could go through with the plans. She felt the hurt still raw and bleeding inside her, as if the incident were only hours ago.
Charlotte felt her life had dangerously skewed a few months earlier, when Paul had insisted that she prepare a potato patch by the old shed. She had declined his insistence which led to a heavy disagreement between them. Paul’s ex-wife, Ellen, had grown lots of vegetables when she lived at the house, but Charlotte hated any form of gardening and certainly did not want to replicate any of Ellen’s ways. During the disagreement Paul had dared to accuse her of having ‘unspoken difficulties’ and went on to suggest that the potatoes would clean the soil and all the hard work involved planting them might clean her ‘crazy mind’!
The next spring day, Paul returned from a shopping trip holding two red nets of her namesake in seed variety. Charlotte was thrilled by this gesture, and instantly forgave him for the earlier insult. She clasped his huge body with vigorous romantic gratitude. After she let go, he claimed that he had chosen them not because they had the same name as her, but because the label said they were good for boiling, salads and roasting and he loved roast potatoes. With Paul food was always the priority.
All Charlotte longed for was for someone to love her, to cherish her, and show her wild romantic passion. All she needed was for him to adore her. She ached for him to say that he relished her stunning, youthful, primrose appearance and yearned for her tender body with its supple, buttery, delicate texture. She wanted him to say her edible creamy earthiness is all he hungered for, but alas, his passion was empty and voiceless. How stupid she felt for thinking otherwise. She felt down trodden again.
One week later Charlotte gave in and resentfully planted the potato seeds, but very soon afterwards she forgot them and the vegetable patch altogether. She knew nothing about the growing of potatoes and didn’t intend to learn.
Charlotte continued to spend most of her daytime hours in the shed. The rickety old six by eight building had originally been erected as a potting shed for Ellen, the perfect wife, the grower of lovely food, the infidel, who was not so secretly being potted by another fellow grower. When Charlotte met Paul and moved in years after Ellen left she had tried to turf Ellen’s memories well and truly out. There wasn’t a trace of old terracotta and growing dust or suchlike to be found anywhere in the shed now. Charlotte had claimed the wooden building as her safe space and sanctuary. She preferred to be there as to anywhere else in the world. Here was truly the only place where she could be herself and start to grow and blossom. Behind the wooden door she could be an inventor, a creator, a professor of experiments
At the back of the old structure Charlotte had hung two rows of long shelves. The lower shelf was full of various reels of wire, bottles and bags of different coloured chemicals, paint, dyes and thinners, all importantly taking their place. The top shelf housed dusty previous prototypes, all stored in hope of being modified or taken down and shown to other like-minded folk one day. Down the right hand side of the shed space ran a workbench topped with a mottled grey design on Formica. The workbench housed a tower of salvaged storage tins many full to the brim with small objects that might come in handy one day. Tea making equipment including one solitary tin mug sat grouped with a sandwich toaster, a soldering iron and a small radio the other side. A small window was present and danced dappled light on the space where she worked. Large and small hooks dotted the ceiling here and there. One huge black rack full of useful tools adorned the other wall; the tools all seemed to be waiting patiently for their turn at hammering, sawing, drilling or snipping something, sometime or other. A pair of green overalls hung on a rusty screw on the back of the splintered door. The floor was covered with orange lino that Charlotte had chosen and fitted specifically for the job. An ancient paint stained wooden fold up chair was tucked neatly under the workbench anticipating a new day of experiments to arrive. Her shed was tidy, spacious and uncluttered, it had room for improvement but for the moment she was very fond of it and to her it was just the perfect laboratory.
As summer pitched up and warmed the soil, Paul arrived home early one afternoon and so passed the vegetable patch on his way to the shed looking for her. He was mortified when he discovered the tubers were standing high on the soil and exhibiting a subtle shade of green. Furious with his discovery he yanked open the beloved shed door and exploded with rage at Charlotte
‘The potatoes! You forgot to earth them up!’ he roared savagely, as he pointed at the two rows of attentive tubers. ‘These Charlottes, Charlotte, are not fit for purpose. No good to anyone, like you!’ he shouted. Charlotte jumped out of the chair and took a step backward with fear.
‘You spend all your time in this bloody shed, playing with your idiotic ideas!’
Paul grabbed a ball of orange twine from the workbench and threw it the short distance at her head. She ducked in time and the ball thumped forcefully against the back wall but bounced off the lid of the top storage tin scattering small objects across her workbench creating chaos.
Paul continued to shout, his voice bellowing round the small wooden space. His face was like a glowing ember and white frothy spittle was hanging at the corners of his mouth. ‘What useless hair-brained ideas are you working on now; glow in the dark Gherkins or maybe something even better like.., like… how to make a tea bag fly?
Charlotte, what have you been wasting your time on again?’
Charlotte became frozen as the fog from Paul’s wrath and unkind words engulfed her. She was unable to speak to answer him and eventually he pushed the door shut and walked away leaving her to spend the night there. That very evening when she’d finally finished shaking, she gathered the green potatoes into a bucket and started work on making a bicycle pump spud gun.
The next day, as the sun, appeared from behind her shed Charlotte told Paul she was sorry for her failings and promised to be a better girlfriend to him.
Charlotte ran her hands over the table, just to reaffirm where she was, she had drifted back to reality, and discovered that she was still sitting in the kitchen feeling tired and a little sick but there was no more time left for mulling over and dwelling on the painful. She felt wholly revengeful. This intense feeling was driving her to get on with the plans.
Charlotte believed the task ahead to be an excellent one that would upset Paul immensely. She retrieved his expensive clock from the bedroom and removed the battery. All the parts she needed for this construction and the other tasks ahead she had gathered earlier from old shed and secreted under the sink, along with the finished spud gun. She was finally going to put her experiments to work and began to feel a pang of excitement. She connected the two terminals with the ends of two lengths of copper wire and twisted the opposite ends around the large flat heads of two galvanised nails. With caution she pushed the nails separately into two more of the green potatoes. Paul had always forbidden her to touch the timepiece, a birthday gift from Ellen of course. He would be furious when he saw what she had done. She shrieked with delight as the clock started to tick. She had successfully produced a ‘Redox Reaction’. Charlotte adjusted the time, set the alarm and sat the potato powered clock close to the potato model and the soggy note.
Her final offering to Paul was to cut one more of the green potatoes in half, revealing a flat waxy surface. Using a felt pen, she outlined the shape of a small penis and scrotumon it. Then, with a sharp knife she sliced around the drawing to leave the shape stiffly standing in the raised section. With the moist carving in her hot hand and some leftover red gloss, Charlotte wandered around the cottage bedroom, dipping the potato into the paint and smashing the shape into the magnolia décor. Countless times she performed this action and each time was reminded of Paul, impatiently trying to slam into her after attempting an erection with that inane, repulsive pump.
Exhausted, but proud of the transformation, Charlotte knew it was time to leave. Paul would be arriving home soon. She envisaged he would read the note see the clock, then, seething with fury, he would begin to look for her. If it all went to plan he would storm down to the old shed and pull open the door, ready to erupt. Whatever happened, he would eat the potato dish sometime during the evening whether he discovered she had left for good or not!
Charlotte wanted Paul to experience a pain as insufferable as the one tearing out her heart. She slammed the Madras Potatoes into the oven, grabbed the zipped suitcase, the spud gun, the sunspecs and the bucket of useless potatoes and headed for the back lane behind the old shed. As she strode, she tunefully sang out,
‘One potato, two potatoes, green potatoes, four.’ She smiled amiably, ‘I will miss you my old shed,’ she whispered. ‘I wish I could take you with me’.
She kissed the tired wood, crooked the bucket in her arm and started to scale the side.
She placed the part full plastic bucket so it was precariously sitting along the edge of the worn grey roof felt. She had knotted a length of the orange twine to the handle and looped the frayed thread over a nail already knocked into the splintered wood of the door. Opening the door would tighten the string and tip the bucket, she hoped. Feeling satisfied with her effort she slid down the side of the rickety structure and gracefully jumped the small distance to the rain slicked clay pathway.
She landed in a crouching position similar to that of an athlete anticipating in the starting blocks. She stretched her head, and was pleased to see she had a good view of the small lane ahead. With cold, paint stained fingers, she quickly felt around her body for some reassurance. She grasped at the wet pocket of her waterproof. Relief swept over her face when she felt the large outline of the potato her back up ammunition. She palmed the tuber for a moment and squeezed it tightly to feel the hardness, she was satisfied that this would suffice for the purpose if needed. She glanced to the right to check for the spud gun and sunspecs. They were lying on top of the zipped suitcase right where she had left them a few minutes earlier. If she met Paul on her journey she would run away and simply shoot at him if he followed to stall and stop him from questioning her, the pump gun was powerful enough she hoped. She pushed the large sunglasses on her face and pulled tightly on the cord of the nylon hood. She was disguised, she was ready for action.
She gulped; her body shook with thudding anxiety. She grabbed the gun and the suitcase and started the dreaded sprint along the narrow path. Her nylon jacket sleeve dragged against the Blackthorn hedge and gave out a scream. Time was ahead, encouraging her to run faster and catch it up, but her heart was bouncing off her ribs. All she had to do was turn left at the grassy crossroads before he turned into the lane from the right. Charlotte slowed at the grassy crossroads; she inhaled and glanced right then turned left towards the train station.
‘Yum! I can smell chips frying’, she mumbled breathlessly.
