Caves

Abstract

Each year I easily found a student to housesit the birds and fish when I went off somewhere for the summer. Back in the sixties, one September when I got back I found that the student who had stayed there had painted some delicate psychedelic arabesques on the blue wall of the small upstairs bedroom. The following September when I got back I saw that the students who had stayed in the house had added to them. The next September there were more and different patterns on the wall. The September after that when I got back I went first to look: the designs had spread further. Then the next September I was cheesed off to find that the bloke who had stayed there had got blue house paint and repainted the bedroom. I waited and hoped that next year the mural would begin again. But the sixties were over and students now wore blue jeans and T-shirts with beer logos on them. The years passed and each September when I got back I went into that bedroom and sighed. Then one spring, as I was showing the house to a student who wanted to stay there the summer, I learned that she was an art history student, and in that blue bedroom I told her of the lost mural. It was cheating, of course, but nostalgia for the sixties had surged. When I got back in September, I found that she had covered all four walls of the blue bedroom with drawings. I stood in the room and contemplated them, and sighed: they’re awful.