The pleasures of found glass When I was a girl of ten my father showed me a kind of sample case, made, he said, of the best wood, lacquered, embossed with gold initials, hinged and fastened with brass. When you undid the clip and lifted the lid an inner shelf levered into view. On the shelf were beautiful bottles each with a glued-on label, handwritten in ink script, and sealed with glass stoppers. One bottle had a thick sludge at the bottom, like tar. Idly, I picked it up, extracted the top (which was stiff and unyielding) and put the end of the stopper to my nose, as you would with perfume. My father snatched it from my hand and said ` Never, never do that. You could die.' The sample case had arrived in a carton delivered to our house a week after my father's stepfather passed away. The strange thing was, nothing inside the package had belonged to the stepfather; it was what was left of the belongings of my father's real father, and for some reason had been hoarded, probably forgotten, until the relatives tidied up and wanted to be rid of them. We laid the other things out on a table: two leather suitcases from the 1920s, a collar box, a tie box, calling cards, a smoking jacket, a silver-handled walking cane and a small bundle of photographs. Looking at them seemed to give my father no pleasure at all. `What's in the bottles?' I asked. `Rubbish,' said Dad. `Bad stuff, poison.' Hearing this, my mother ordered the bottles out of the house. I asked if I could keep the sample case but my father had made his decision. The next day he took it to work and buried it in the footings of a house. He put the other things back in the carton and put the carton in the shed where it sat for another twenty-five years, undisturbed. * * * My father worked on building sites for years and one of his pleasures was to uncover old bottles and bring them home. Clear ones with glass marbles in the neck, slender green ones that looked like schoolgirls, early Coca-Cola models that might be worth something one day. He lined them up on a shelf in his workshop where the sun caught their colours and threw them onto the walls. He showed me how to hold glass so its weight sagged in the cradle of my hand and warmed to blood temperature. Sometimes the delicate ones felt like little live things. Often we cleaned them together, scrubbing at the clay with old toothbrushes and pliable pointed sticks my father had whittled to suit the work. Years later I started bringing home my own glass: old tincture bottles, mortars, pestles, ampoules of sealed liquid, measuring cylinders, beakers, hollow tubing that could be melted and moulded on a Bunsen flame; all saved from the rubbish bins of pharmacies that were rushing into the 1970s without a backward glance. Not once, in all those years of bottle collecting, have my father and I spoken about those bottles in the wooden sample case. He would say, if I asked him, that he couldn't remember which house he buried it under, wouldn't know if it's in concrete or fill, couldn't hazard a guess as to the possibility of excavation. We've gone on appreciating the pleasures of found glass in this denying but comfortable togetherness that, for him at least, confirms his opinion that some things are best left buried. When he retired from work he gave me the best of his bottle collection and sold or gave the rest away. He was done with dust collectors, he said. I still line up the ones I like best - the green ones - on sunny ledges. Chapter Two Ingredients for a hell-broth Decades later, sitting at my desk, I try to trick my memory into retrieving the names on those labels. My mind wants to see Tinct. Nux Vomica in light upward and heavy downward ink strokes centred on gummed paper with a gold leaf border. I want a small brown bottle of unusual shape labelled Strychnine - Poison , with a skull-and-crossbones warning symbol, and a crust of powder at the rim. The recall exercise, however, doesn't work. Recall demands some debt from the moment, some investment in future remembering that my younger self neglected to fund. To think, I say to myself, the evidence was once in front of me, preserved and unassailable. If I were to come on the hoard now, if the house that sits on the sample box were torn down and a shovel should catch its brass handle with a treasure-finder's ding , I would pounce on those bottles like an Egyptologist on a funerary mask. In a flash I would know what sort of conjuring trade my grandfather practised, how far his experiments with formulation had taken him, how far from formal training he'd strayed. To my father the names on the bottles were inconsequential details; he wanted no part of this confounding, unsolicited legacy. A piece of the past had lurched out at him like some sort of cellar beast that had to be fought back into its vault. Historical interest didn't come into it, neither did curiosity or sentiment. I was ten, he was thirty-three. We stood in exact relation to the ages of himself and his mother when she died, and her death, not his father's, marked the boundary of his stake in the past. * * * By inclination and training I've spent many years thinking about the bad stuff, poison, and its companions: secrecy; death and storytelling. The obvious things about poison - what its many forms look like, what happens when it mixes with body chemistry, who used it, who died, who lived - are part of the meditation because it couldn't exist without them; but the longer I think my way into poison's secrets the more I retrieve the buried shapes of other things - ghostly suggestions of poison as an annihilator, a molecule rearranger, a test of defences, a harsh father, a wise mother. As a death-bringer, poison can be merciful (if it arrives in the company of surprise, swiftly and cleanly on the point of an arrow), but for the most part, poison works slowly; under the cover of the body's regular failures of health, and there is no charity in its hidden agency. Thinking and reading about toxicity is - at one level - an outgrowth of the work I do; at another more compromising level it's a way of meditating on the man who owned the wooden sample case, my grandfather, William Macbeth, chemist and poisoner. The story of my grandfather comes from the out-of-bounds territory of our family lore: the dead zone of secrets, severity and things withheld. It was passed to me when I was a young woman finished with study and curious about connections to the past, and, in the way we did things, I was meant to read the warning label and put the story away somewhere out of reach. William Macbeth was the grandfather who died before I was born, the one we never spoke about. To have him unexpectedly break into the present moment of a life and shape a space where there had been none before brought me to what became, in time, a persistent intrusive interest in the way poison stories are told. William was not so much a skeleton in the family cupboard as a walled-in ghost pacing his few square feet of cellar floor. His poison was strychnine, the bitter seed of a nut that grows in tall trees. He mixed strychnine tincture into cordials to mask its sharpness and gave it to two small boys, his sons, who died the awful, convulsing, diaphragm-contracting death of a paralytic poison. The story was talked into its final shape by Williams sister-in-law, Rose, and left to lie, unexamined, in the occasional thoughts of future generations. The unexamined version became the definitive version because no other existed. Two kinds of truths seem to emerge from the large canon of poison stories. The historical truth, the one that's constructed after the event using science (and, more recently, psychology) to arrive at a resolution that fits the evidence; and the narrative truth, a literary telling which is contiguous with the crime, precedes it, survives it, and lives on afterwards in a sort of background (Continues...) Excerpted from Poison by Gail Bell Copyright © 2001 by Gail Bell Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
