Small Holdings. Nicola Barker
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didn’t like this kind of talk. ‘He’s only left his wife,’ I said calmly. ‘That’s all.’
Ray remained undaunted. ‘He’s talking to himself.’
‘I do that too, sometimes, when I’m not thinking clearly.’
‘You’re like royalty. You talk to your plants. Doug’s just talking. All the time.’
‘He’s got a lot on his mind. There’s the meeting with the council to re-assert our tender on Friday. That won’t be much fun. It won’t be easy. And Doug’s the man to pull it off.’
Ray nodded his assent. ‘Doug’s the man, yes, but he hasn’t done a stroke of work in weeks now.’
I shrugged. I said, ‘He’s keeping busy.’
Ray scowled. ‘He’s up to something,’ he said. ‘He’s tipping the scales . . .’
Ray made a strange, scale-tipping gesture with his two arms. ‘And I don’t know,’ he added, ‘what that actually means for the rest of us, and for this place.’
He looked around him, at his spade, the mud, the grass, the fence.
I cleared my throat. I said, ‘Things are chugging over, just like they’ve always done.’
Ray shrugged, yanked up his spade and returned to his digging. ‘Someone,’ he said, grunting out every syllable with each cut of the soil, ‘Someone is going to have to do something.’ And after he’d finished speaking, the slice of his spade added a further five syllables: And it won’t be me.
I watched Ray digging for a moment. If only, I thought, Doug’d opened up gently, like a flower.
I had a thorough understanding of how flowers worked.
How big is it? Christ knows. An average size. Not a grand park. Not your Victoria, your Hyde, your Hampstead Heath. It seems small because of its unpretentiousness. Even so, it has pretensions. Used to have a Tudor museum - black, white, criss-crossed beams - stuck wham-bam in the middle of it, facing the water, reflected in the water; three little lakes and a round ornamental pond over to the right where kids paddle - contravening the park regulations - in the summer.
The museum was burned down, years ago now, but its black, burnt-out shell remains, and Saleem, its curator, well, more about her later. We used to have a proper athletics track: red, official, fenced off, very impressive, but we grew it over a while back. Athletes go down to Tottenham or up to Enfield now.
The tennis courts - six of them, slightly overgrown, but in working order - stand adjacent to the greenhouses. There’s also a wild section, which is purposefully unkempt, circled by silver birch, where the squirrels dart. A bandstand, Doug’s pride and joy, recently built at his instigation out of raw, dark-stained, splinter-pushing pine. An adventure playground that any park would be proud of.
To the north is the hill which is grass, mainly, where people come to picnic. We have public toilets - Ladies, Gents - and behind these are the private areas, staff-only places, which consist of a barn - a lovely barn - and the house where Saleem squats, where Doug is skulking, now he’s left his wife. Now he’s opened up and gone crackers.
It was three o’clock that same Wednesday afternoon and I was planting geraniums over by the bandstand. I had twenty plants in all and wasn’t particularly optimistic about the contribution these would make to the display as a whole which was scruffy and sparse and relatively shambolic. This was Doug’s patch, supposedly.
I was deciding whether to plant them in a half-moon, close to the border, or whether to distribute them more freely among the spider plants - this display’s main constituent. The spider plants had been Ray’s idea. His reasoning was that they grew quickly, reproduced easily, and that they were, most importantly, green. I doubted whether they’d last the winter out, but they’d cost us nothing which, as we’re broke, was all that really mattered.
Nancy had promised to drive over a new, cheap assortment of annuals from Southend at some point. She’d arranged to get them on credit. She has the gift of the gab, and it’s a useful gift. I wish I had it.
I dug a hole with my trowel near to the front of the bed. Behind me, as I worked, I could hear the gravel shift and scuffle, and another familiar noise, a plunging, a sucking-plucking. One-legged Saleem. I could see her from the corner of my eye, swinging over, staggering over. I pretended to be engrossed.
‘Phil,’ she said, ‘what’s up?’ She drew very close. ‘Planting pansies, eh?’
‘Geraniums.’ I popped one in and pressed the soil firm around its roots.
‘Yeah? What’s a geranium do?’ She poked her stick out, automatically, and pushed it into the soft soil to the right of the new plant. ‘How’s that?’
‘Thanks.’
I widened the hole with the trowel and placed the new plant.
‘What’s it do? I love knowing what they do. You’re clever like that.’
‘You could dry the root. It’s astringent. A kind of tonic. You could take it internally for diarrhoea or use it as a gargle. It’s a good gargle.’
‘Who’d’ve thought it?’ She bounced a step back and made a further hole. I moved over and planted the next one. ‘Who’d’ve thought it, eh?’
I grimaced. She stared at me closely, ‘Are you busy, Phil? Are you working too hard? Are you hot? Catching the sun, maybe? You’ve got bright little flames in both cheeks.’
I tried to distract her, to evade her questions, to drag her eyes away from my skin which always ripens at her approach, always reddens. ‘You’re getting mud on your stick.’
‘Huh?’ She inspected it, ‘Nah, Soil’s dry. Needs a water.’
‘It’s moist for August.’
‘It’s moist for August*.’
She guffawed and threw herself down on to the grass verge. I glanced at her for a moment and then turned my back and carried on planting.
Saleem has long, black hair and a lean face. Skin the colour of caramel. Half dark Hindu, half Greek. A curious hybrid. She looks like a cobra in a wig. She speaks with a forked tongue. She hates me. I don’t know why.
‘Can we talk, Phil?’
‘I’m working.’
‘While you work, then.’
I smell her hate, always, and it’s a hot-hate, has a hot smell which makes me shrivel, inside, outside. And she loves to stare, to invade, to gouge. She lives for it.
‘While you work, then,’ she repeated.
I said nothing.
‘Am I irritating you or something?’
‘No. ‘
She prodded the base of my back with the tip of her stick.
‘Stop that.’
I swatted her stick with my arm but didn’t turn.
‘You’re just too sensitive,’ Saleem said, and by the sound of her voice she had a smile on her lips. ‘And usually,’ she added, I wouldn’t care, but lately, well, things are coming to a head and I’m looking to you for some kind of decisive action.’
I didn’t respond to this, didn’t rise to her, and she, in turn, was silent for a minute, sitting up straight, viper-still, her amputated leg jutting out in front of her like the short butt of a cigar.
‘You know, sometimes, Phil, your natural reserve comes across like a kind of hostility. Turn and look at me, Phil,’ she added, almost whispering. ‘Turn and look, go on. Go on, Phil. Turn and face me. Look at me. Go on.’
‘I’m busy.’
My head