Cherry loved Indira like she had never loved anything before, like they had to organise a council pick-up to carry away the excess. They met one another on a tour through Kew Gardens, both having gotten out of the house for a break from their sedentary stays during the 2023 Christmas holidays. Cherry stood at the back and, for the first half of the tour, was distracted repeatedly by Indira who stood near the front of the group. While Indira listened thoughtfully to the tour guide’s nasal speeches, Cherry stared at her, taking in Indira’s features; her skin the shade of a cloud eclipsing the sun and her eyes, the colour of rich soil, shining through her crimson-rimmed glasses, and her lips plump and inviting. Eventually, Indira caught Cherry in the act and, grinning, made her way over to them. The rest of the tour became the couple’s first date. The picture they took of them together, smiling cheek against cheek in front of a Chilean wine palm, became the first in their shared photo album.
The pair took to knowing each other with excited haste. They spent the last two weeks of their uni holiday with each other almost the entire time. On sunnier days the couple went for walks to cafés where Indira would eruditely sip on her macchiato as she balked at Cherry slurping up their banana smoothie. They met each other’s parents — Cherry’s visit to Indira’s mother, Avani, was particularly challenging, beginning with a conversation over tea that verged between a job interview and a clandestine interrogation and ending with the three of them sipping cocktails and watching Love Island. The couple discovered that they attended the same university on one of their café walks, so when the holidays ended, they met in every shared break, often waiting outside each other’s classes.
‘You’re always smiling when I come out,’ Indira observed one time.
‘Not until you walk out,’ Cherry replied.
By the end of February, the two had met each other’s circle of friends and secured their approval; the best result was Anthony, originally Cherry’s friend, who became an equidistant fixture in the couple’s shared life. Despite the romantic optimism that characterised their connection, the two were still subject to life and, consequently, to disagreements and overblown tiffs. On the most dramatic occasions, when the two were caught in an equally imposed silence, Anthony would mollify them both, ameliorate the situation, patiently chide them both for their immaturity, and then celebrate their solved dissonance with a round of beers at their favourite pub. Before the end of March, Cherry had moved into Indira’s apartment, a cozy abode on a quiet street in Camden, populated mainly by fauna. Cherry had been over many times before, but living in Indira’s apartment, waking up in the same bed and sharing the kitchen, walking around the space together, it was something entirely different and totally wonderful. Cherry, having always been quite diligent, even helped with Indira’s sprawling plant collection. Whenever Indira asked, and eventually before Indira had the opportunity to ask, Cherry would attend to each plant’s need with a maternal endearment. Inevitably, Cherry wouldn’t quite know everything about this orchid or that fern, but they would watch Indira paying each leaf or shoot close attention and they would only become more and more enraptured, and not a little filled with desire.
Indira’s health began to wane that August. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, her childhood was segmented by a litany of lingering illnesses, some of which had left their marks on Indira; chronic pain around her skull and back, an ever-present fatigue, and quite poor vision. Indira was accustomed to sickness, expert in it even, which is why she became quickly aware of the special severity of this new contender. When she consulted her doctor, the worst was confirmed. Grinning ironically when she rejoined Cherry outside of the doctor’s office, Indira told her girlfriend that she blamed the diagnosis on the English football team’s fumbling of the Euros the month before. Cherry smiled, but it was painfully obvious to both that the joke wasn’t enough to clear the air.
Indira progressively shrunk away from her life and the outside world, keeping still most days and binging Love Island to pass the time. Cherry devoted herself to keeping the couple’s apartment alive, even hosting modest shindigs where Anthony would strum his guitar while Indira rested her head on Cherry’s shoulder. Indira severely worsened in late September. Most days she was unable to leave her bed or do anything other than rest her head on the pillow, looking beside the window where her umbrella tree stood, its verdant leaves glowing in the sun. Cherry took on the roles of Indira’s cook, gardener, nurse, and, most importantly, Indira’s girlfriend. Every week, Cherry brought their girlfriend a different bouquet. Before long, every surface in their bedroom housed a vase and the room beamed with a kaleidoscope of floral shades.
At every downturn in Indira’s condition, Cherry didn’t hesitate to give more and more of themself; they deferred their studies, missed several holidays, and let so much of their own wellbeing go that Indira’s parents came to intervene, gently forcing the poor young Cherry to take some time to recuperate their own health. No one could hold them away, though, when Indira was moved into a hospice in December of 2024. Cherry spent days sat in the uncomfortable vinyl chair by Indira’s bed, holding Indira’s hand and telling her all the positive news; a friend who had graduated or another who had found a new apartment and the more general stuff of progressive political wins and cute stories about koalas and capybaras. On Christmas day, Avani managed to bring a TV into Indira’s room so the three could watch The Muppet Christmas Carol; Avani and Cherry sung along to Marley and Marley and Indira, her speech having left her a few days before, happily hummed along.
Then came late January, the end of the time Indira’s doctors had predicted for her. She slept most of the time, Avani and Cherry hung over her and busied themselves with the straightness of her blanket. Sometimes they would talk, but their subjects were always something else, something far from the room in which they stood. When Indira was awake, her girlfriend and mother would bring her into the conversations, and she would communicate by moving her head or humming. When Cherry would half-heartedly throw out a joke, Indira would flash her grin back until that too became prohibitively painful. Eventually, on the wintry morning of the last day of January, Indira’s eyes went still and her body, now vacant, slumped back into the bed. Avani delicately closed her daughter’s eyelids and embraced Cherry who had frozen still.
“Sorry,” Cherry breathed.
“Don’t be,” Avani whispered back.
The hospice allowed the family to hold the wake there. Friends and relatives came to pay their respects; Cherry stood with the family, accepting the condolences and lingering hugs. After the cremation, one of Indira’s brothers came to the couple’s apartment to bring the flowers and take the rest of Indira’s things, besides her plants and the couple’s photo album. Cherry thanked Anthony for watching the place during the last two months.
“Would you like me to stay a while?” He asked.
“No,” Cherry said, “I’d like to be alone.”
They got that privilege, but their zeal for maintaining their apartment had evaporated. The place degenerated over the next few weeks, grease built up in the kitchen and dust proliferated everywhere else. Cherry kept to their bed most days, dining on fast food deliveries and packets of ramen. Their skin went bony white after the first couple of weeks, though their eyes were often red and puffy and they had peeled the skin from their lips for something to do, leaving them crimson-spotted and puffy. Their friends and family called them, but they rejected all the calls, having lost their voice or at least the will to use it. Then they texted, but Cherry’s replies were clipped and brusque, rejecting visits and presents and condolences and whatever else during the days they spent bedbound and festering. Anthony visited occasionally until Cherry’s demeanour left no doubt that he was unwelcome.
Of Indira’s collection, the flowers were the first to wilt. In their petals falling onto the cold floorboards, browning and liquefying, Cherry deciphered a message, “She’s gone for good.” The needier plants were to follow sometime in early March, despite Cherry building up the will to water them at least every few days; nature spurred on their demise, most days were overcast, absent of sun or rain. The air hung still, the clouds amassed like bystanders, even the birds shut their beaks for once. Cherry viewed March like a timelapse, the leaves and vines wasted away with alacrity, brown and eventually black conquered green, the organics bin feasted on the waste. When they looked around their apartment, Cherry felt as if they were living in a carcass. They were one corpse wrapped within another.
Over time Cherry grew back into themself. It was not an explosive reemergence, instead it was rather a modest recovery. It began with an impulse to open the curtains by their bedside one day in April. They were greeted by the sun shining gently onto them; it was like welcoming an old friend. It was difficult for Cherry to separate their own regrowth from the entrance of an unremittingly positive spring. They began to sing in the shower one day, mumbling a catchy tune they heard on the radio. They went for walks to the local park and bought croissants from the local café. They invited Anthony to hang and later he brought more friends. The apartment, and Cherry themself, was coming back to life.
A new mission enlivened them: to preserve Indira. The pictures in the couple’s album weren’t enough, in each photo the life seemed to have been pressed out of them. For a while, Cherry launched a desperate campaign to save every remaining plant. Some showed promise in their recovery, but one by one they kept failing. The green bin was still bursting with the waste.
Ultimately, all but one died. The remaining plant, sitting innocuously in the corner by Cherry’s bedside window, was the umbrella tree. In appearance indistinguishable to the rest, but unlike them it had remained, even shining in a resurrected splendour. Cherry trained an eye on it, keeping Indira’s watering can on the bedside table and waiting for the thing to suddenly unravel like the rest of them. But it didn’t. It thrived; proudly, it seemed.
Once they had some confidence in the little plant, Cherry began to bestow it with Indira’s memory. They hung some of Indira’s necklaces over the twigs, placed Indira’s glasses on the soil bed, and, as a final touch when Cherry was fully certain the thing was determined to live, perched the couple’s first photo in Kew Gardens, all those months ago, on top of a leaf that rested against the main shoot. Cherry greeted the plant every morning, even as she returned to university and picked up a job. Every morning, she would kneel beside the plant and smile at Indira who, in the picture, smiled back.
