My Friend, Bella

If you remembered something so bizarre like needing to brush your teeth after getting popcorn stuck between them, then wouldn’t you call that a memory? A memory, meaning it happened. Definitely. Bella is a memory.

Bella’s blue ribbons coiled around her braids, weaving with her rainbow strands. Since we were best friends, Bella always matched her outfit to mine.

We sat opposite each other on a small table, sipping from teacups. “How doo yoou doo?” I asked with the poshest accent I could manage for a six-year-old.

Bella grinned, nodded then sipped the invisible tea.

“Would yoou like any cakes or sandwiches?” I pointed to cucumber and cheese sandwiches.

She told me she couldn’t eat them. I put them on her dish anyway.

A few cucumber pieces escaped the bread, pale green cubes scattered loosely around the plate. On an adjacent, tiered serving set, sat cupcakes with rosy beige icing. I lifted the food, stretching over the table, careful not to mess up my bluff dress, finally dropping cakes and sandwiches onto Bella’s violet dish.

There’s something special about the vividness of this memory; it paints my mind. Anyhow, I think Bella told me about her time in her home country, Stringland, a circular island in the middle of the ocean with a singular palm tree sprouting from its centre. Now that I think about it, it sounds like the island from SpongeBob.

“Marigold,” Mum said, leaning against my door jamb. “Time for bed. Put the toys away.”

Mum called me marigold after her favourite flower. It’s golden petals bloom annually, attracting bees and butterflies. “A few more minutes?” I scrunched my lips and crossed my arms. The lacey ruffles of my princess gown brushed against my thighs.

“Bed. Don’t make me get Dad.” Mum’s brow arched. “If the wind changes, your face will get stuck like that.” She always said this.

Frightened, I stood from my chair and lifted my arms above my head. Mum came over, laughing softly. She bunched my dress in her fists and slipped it from my body, leaving me standing in my Wednesday knickers. Maybe they were Thursday?

Mum slid my yellow nightie over my head. Inside the cotton, darkness engulfed me, though pale-orange light gleamed through the fabric. “Where did you go?” Mum asked in a sing-song way.

“I’m stuck!” I flailed my arms.

I could hear Mum’s laughter from inside the tangle of fabric. She wriggled the nightie down over my body. “There you are! I thought I’d lost you.” She kissed my forehead, initiating our night-time ritual.

I pressed my eye to her warm cheek and fluttered my eyelashes. “Butterfly kiss!”

Mum rubbed the tip of her pointy nose against my button one. “Bunny kiss.”

I tucked my chin into Mum’s neck, waddling my torso. “Penguin hug.”

We parted, and I could see the colours in her eyes – one had blue with iridescent pearl flecks, and the other had brown on top of blue. “Get into bed, and I’ll stay with you until you fall asleep. We’re painting tomorrow.” Since I was old enough to hold a paint brush, Mum and I spent many afternoons painting.

At an early age, I was declared a child prodigy with paint, since I had a level of adult expertise in art. I preferred acrylics because its plastic base dried quicker than oil paint did. And who had the patience for oil? Certainly not six-year-old me, that’s for sure.

I nodded, carrying my stuffed puppy from the tea party. I tossed him onto the mattress, then hopped on after him, scaling the bed I just became tall enough to climb into myself. Curling in the corner, I left enough space for Bella; she preferred the side closest to the door.

“Ready?” Mum asked next to me. She waited for my nod then wrapped the duvet up to my chin, slicing her hands down the sides of my body, ticking a sound like a chugging train: “Tucka, tucka, tucka.” She swiped and bound me into the covers like a sausage casing. Puppy remained swaddled under my arm, pressing tightly against my side. Mum lay down next to me.

“Wait!” I said, fluffing some space.

Startled, Mum recoiled from my bed. “What? What is it?”

“That’s Bella’s spot.” I nodded to the place Mum tried to take.

“Oh, is she here?”

“She went to brush her teeth. Too many cheese and cucumber sandwiches. She’s got cucumber skin stuck, again.”

“Mm,” Mum said. “Can I lay here until she comes back?”

I shrugged, jostling the covers away from my face. “I guess.”

Mum sang me her famous lullaby, like she did every night: You are my shooting star. You will go very far, I’m so proud of you. And I love you. By the third verse my eyes gently closed. The world faded away, and Mum’s voice carried me to sleep.

##

I remember waking, screaming what Mum called Bloody Murder. But the rest is tid-bits of what she has recalled to me, repeatedly. You know those stories your parents told you in so much detail that you believe it’s a memory? Well, from what I can tell, this is how it happened …

I was screaming piercing screams. “Mum!” I cried. “Mum!”

The door flung open. In the nude, Mum barged into my room, flicking on the lights. The princesses' faces, whom I painted on my walls the previous year, glared at me, irked at being woken in the middle of the night.

“Mum.” I sobbed. My face creased like a Shar Pei dog with my lip turned over. And I was loud – louder than a fire alarm, shrilling through the house. My lungs locked and loaded with air, ricocheting against cracked mouldings.

“Marigold. It’s okay. Mummy’s here.” She sat at the foot of my bed. “What is it? Did you have a bad dream, my golden flower?”

I could barely breathe; I was crying so hard. “No. Not me.” I looked to the other side of my bed. Between sobs I said, “Bella. Bella had a nightmare.”

Mum just sighed and stroked my head, clearing wet hair strands from my sticky face.

##

As a child, when Dad worked, Mum and I painted. The splintered chair glued against my legs. My shorts were too short, but Mum wouldn’t let me paint in anything else. Acrylic paint was impossible to clean from clothes. The plastic base became embedded in fabric, growing tentacles to capture any dye. Once, I tried to pick the paint stain off, but it just tore a hole in my jeans. Mum told me to use the same clothes to paint in. Nothing else. When I chose these shorts, it was colder out. However, this day was summer, and my skin stuck to the chair, so I peeled my thighs from the wood like an orange.

I bent over the canvas, staring until an image came to me. I was tired of drawing animals and plants. But Mum always painted yellow marigolds.

“I’m painting Bella.” I turned to Bella, watching her nose quiver as she crimped her lips toward her eyes. Her rainbow hair waved, rippling over the bumps of her shoulders and chest. Where did I start? Her eyes were so blue with flecks of gold, oh I think I used glitter for that. Ever be so confident that you’re unsure about a memory? Could I have used watercolours?

“Bella, can I paint you?” I asked. I laughed at her response.

“What did she say?” Mum asked.

“She said, I can’t paint on her, but I can paint her on the canvas.” I might be adding this, I sometimes do this, to make my memories funnier.

Well, Bella chuckled with me.

Finally, I mixed white with orange, swirling my palette knife to combine them. I started with a base coat, shaping her face, shoulders and the tops of her arms. I hated painting ears, so I decided to brush her hair over them. Then I mixed my black colour – never using pure black; every artist knew to create their own black with Burnt Umber and Cobalt Blue – and I set it off to the side. I diluted Burnt Sienna for Bella’s warm shadows and Raw Umber for the harsher lines around the nose. I painted her lips pressed together, because like ears, I hated painting teeth. I blended most colours, avoiding pure pigments from tubes and bottles. In life, colour reflected light and each person discerned it differently. Mum’s paintings always differed from mine. Perception decided what I would see, not the other way around. Kind of like memories.

I finished the portrait with the hair, straying rainbow strands against Bella’s cheeks and across her neck. Her icy eyes stared at me as I squeezed gold glitter into the lines of her irises.

“I’m done,” I said, carrying my paint brush to the sink. I stepped onto the helper stool, squirted dish soap onto the brush – since that is the most efficient way to remove paint – and streamed hot water over the fanned bristles.

“Marigold,” Mum said. Her voice trembled. “Marigold, who is this?” Mum’s face faded paler than white against her paint-stained smock.

“What?” I asked. “Is it bad?” I scurried to the painting, and I pointed at Bella, who sat opposite me at the table. I pulled my gaze from her to her portrait. It was Bella!

Mum pulled the chair next to mine, and we both sat. “You know I can’t actually see Bella,” she said. She always told me Bella wasn’t real, but how come I remember Bella so vividly? I was six. Nothing sticks when you’re six, but Bella did.

Tears stung behind my eyes. “Why not? She’s there!” My voice grew louder, cracking a bit.

“I can’t see her because she’s imaginary to you.”

“This is what she looks like. See?” I pointed even harder like my finger could magically make Mum see.

Mum sidled closer to me as I wrinkled my face. “Honey, have you ever seen a picture of my grade-school friend, Louisa?”

“Was she imaginary?”

“No,” Mum said, lightly laughing but her eyes didn’t reciprocate. She didn’t remove her gaze from Bella’s crystalised-sea eyes. “She died when I was fourteen.”

I tilted my face towards Mum’s. Tears streamed down her face, sparkling as they landed onto my hair. “That’s sad.”

“It was.” Mum traced her fingers around Bella’s jawline, which – because it was acrylic – had already dried. “Are you sure you’ve never seen a picture of her … of Louisa?”

I shook my head, folding my paint-stained hands into my lap. “Why?” My voice was small. I hated when Mum cried. I never understood what to do when she did that.

“Marigold. You sure?” she asked. “And you say this is Bella?”

I nodded fiercely, twirling my fingers and anxiously bouncing my knee. “Yes. That’s Bella. I painted her. She sits over there,” I said it again. Like when you repeat something, it’ll make it truer.

Mum breathed, inhaling and exhaling with caution. “Darling, it’s a wonderful painting.”

“Then why do you look upset?” I asked. Or I think I asked. I must’ve asked.

“It’s just … Bella looks a lot like Louisa.”

##

I’ll never forget Bella, my regular painting day and the ghostly look on Mum’s face. This didn’t happen word for word; it couldn’t have. Over the years, Mum filled gaps of the memory, but never disclosed the last piece of the puzzle. For some reason, when I recall memories of Bella, I can never hear her voice. Nevertheless, her colours are emblazoned in my mind, but could they too be configured from experience and knowledge merged with my memory?

I never thought anything of having an imaginary friend, but as I got older and heard stories about children seeing ghosts … maybe I remembered it wrong. Oh well … I guess, I’ll never really know.

What do you think?