Growing Season

by Seni Glaister

  Sam turned to stir her own tea and talked one notch still louder to make sure her words found their mark, realising with a rush that she didn’t need this woman’s interpretation of friendship and that her words would banish any such notion. ‘You know absolutely nothing about me. Has it occurred to you that I might actually be an awful mother? I might not even want children. What on earth gives you the right to assume anything about me? I might have already had a baby, but had it taken away from me because social services had to intervene. My husband might be sterile. We might be celibate Shakers.’ As she said this, Sam felt a trill of passion imbue her words with a quaver that might be mistaken for ecstatic fervour and she wondered, for a second, if she might have just received a calling to a remote religious community that practised non-procreation. She cleared the distracting thought with a shake of her head and returned to her rabid soliloquy with dogged zeal.

  ‘I might, God forbid, not even like children.’ This was the heresy that couldn’t be spoken to a mother and Sam saw Hattie stiffen in horror, colour rising at her throat and travelling swiftly up to her cheeks. Sam turned the volume button one click to the left, softening her tone.

  ‘You’ve made a number of pretty basic suppositions about me already and I just don’t think it’s remotely appropriate to come into my house and just presume to know what I want or to assume that I want what you want.’ Sam thought this finale was quite generous and she was proud of her coherence. In her experience, words that had been stored for later use often spilt out in a far more unruly fashion.

  Hattie, barely able to see the table in front of her through a blur of tears, put her tea down clumsily, catching the edge of the teaspoon and, spilling a bit of liquid on the table. She burst into noisy sobs as though the spilt tea was a final personal assault that had taken her over the edge, and, pushing her chair back and standing up in one clumsy action, she fled the kitchen.

  Sam heard the sound of Hattie’s wail as the front door slammed. She sighed and mopped up the tea. She didn’t chase after her neighbour. Instead she wondered out loud, if these conversations would ever end.

  She climbed the stairs wearily and sat at her desk, her head in her hands. She was cross with herself for letting that interaction escalate so quickly but not surprised. It was all there, bubbling under the surface all the time, waiting to be lanced. Disgusted by what she was about to do, but knowing her actions were inevitable now, she lifted her laptop from the floor and set it in the middle of the desk. She plugged it in and let its rousing lights tell the slow blinking story of its resurrection. She logged on, typing her password with one finger, a feeling of revulsion sweeping over her as she pressed return to confirm it and the computer whirred noisily to life. She hadn’t meant to do this again, she’d hoped to leave it behind her for good, but she’d been wrong to think that escaping to the country would be escape enough.

  Saliva ran high in her mouth, a sensation she associated with all of her bad habits. She typed the URL to a Wordpress blog. She was invited to type in her user name. Rather than her own name, she carefully typed in the name ‘Libby Masters’. She entered Libby’s password and, feeling a rush of adrenalin that gave her a purpose she’d missed, she waited for the page to load.

  Chapter 12

  Sam should have felt wracked with guilt, but she didn’t. Instead she’d written twelve hundred words of impassioned complaint, proofread it carefully, posted it live and then before waiting for the inevitable flood of comments she had logged out. She had taken a few moments to delete her history, checking her desktop for tell-tale signs of her activity before powering off. She’d showered and washed her hair and let any brief thoughts of self-loathing drain away with the soap suds.

  It was a fair exchange, she decided, as she towelled herself dry. She’d been subjected to a crescendo of assaults in her own home and, considering the gravity of this most recent invasion, she believed she had been fairly lenient with her assailant. But she knew from previous experience that she couldn’t trap that feeling of intrusion inside her, allowing it to fester and propagate. Who knew what damage it would cause if it were allowed to advance unchecked? Instead, she had, in a well-practised methodology, cauterised it effortlessly by unleashing some provocative words into the ether. Writing honestly, painfully and self-indulgently had proven to be an excellent outlet for Sam’s inner demons but she knew that there were consequences, too. She’d grown up amongst a whole generation of frail, anxious, broken women who had turned to the internet for solace and instead found a new torture. Sam knew that there would be people who would find her words and use them to fuel their own discontent, perhaps to ill-effect, and still more would find those words and rally an angry rebuttal. She hoped, in desperate delusion, that there might be a few who would find comfort from the words that Libby had written, by sharing some feelings that they might be unable to convey themselves.

  While she dried her hair Sam justified her actions to herself quite fully and by the time she was ready to begin the day anew she had let some of the poisonous feelings dissipate completely so it was with a lightness of step that she hurried downstairs, renewing a promise to herself that now she was in the countryside she would commit to finding a healthier habit to replace this destructive one.

  Sam washed up and tidied away the cups, erasing all traces of her visitor. She glanced out of the window at the bare garden and immediately saw what Hattie had seen: a garden pregnant with potential, awaiting the arrival of noisy children and discarded toys. She looked at it intently, until she could see it again as she wished to see it, a place of growth and renewal, a place for her to channel some of the energy she’d been using on her writing into something altogether more positive. Building something out of nothing seemed a fitting metaphor.

  She let herself out of the back door and paced the lawn. The grass was definitely growing so she’d soon have to consider the possibility of mowing it. The flowerbeds, on the other hand, were stubbornly bare. She’d rather hoped that the property developers might have planted some bulbs and that she’d have a season of growth to revel in but there was nothing but a fine dusting of weeds, barely big enough to name but rampant enough for Sam to know no good would come of them.

  She tugged her short skirt down around her thighs and sat in the middle of the grass, the cool of the morning just about reaching her core in a way that made her feel alive. She undid her laces and wriggled her trainers off, and then removed her socks, throwing both shoes in the direction of the house and then, less effectively, both socks. She thought about taking more clothes off. She looked around, assessing any potential risk of onlookers. Nobody would see her. But then she remembered her own moment of snooping on a neighbour’s garden and felt exposed. Country dwellers seemed to thrive on noticing the activities of their community where in London it was quite possible to ignore your neighbours and pretend they didn’t exist. Though she’d never tested the theory, she was quite sure that when in London she could have stripped naked and lain on the pavement at the front of the flat and passersby would have simply stepped over her. For a fleeting moment, Sam glimpsed the solace Danny seemed to find in anonymity amongst a crowd.

  She lay down and looked up at the sky and then flipped over from her back to her front and examined the grass beneath her, paying particular attention to the flattened area that had been crushed under the back of her head. She ruffled the blades with her fingers, encouraging them to spring back and take their place in the lawn again. Tracing the leaves down to the soil, she could see that each grass tuft was its own little multi-leafed plant where she had always assumed that grasses were solitary blades, each fighting their own splendid battle for survival within their regiment. Sam looked more closely still, and saw immediately that at the base of the plants, insects toiled. Ants tumbled over each other in an attempt to investigate the interruption and small flies landed and took off in quick succession. In just a small circumference, she size of the back of her head, a whole universe scrabbled to right itself.
Sam drew herself up to her knees, now aware that her body was probably suppressing a multitude of life that needed her to move away in order to continue its business.

  On her knees, she surveyed the scene. Now she’d been in the woods she could imagine what the grass hoped it might become one day. She supposed that even a lofty beech tree must start as a tiny shoot but look what happened when it was left unchecked. Grass was vigorous, it seemed unlikely that it would bother to grow with such steadfast determination if it didn’t have a greater ambition. Each individual plant had aspirations far loftier than her own and the thought astonished her. Left to its own device, this lawn might be a wild place where not just ants could get lost in its midst but bigger animals too. Sam liked the idea.

  Sam also liked the idea that the growth was happening out of sight, deep beneath the surface. That was where the propulsion was really materialising, in the dark depths below her. There, amongst the damp, warm wormcasts, the core of the plant was thrusting ever upwards in a constant quest for light. What was visible to the eye was never the whole picture.

  She continued to idly brush the grass back and forth, loving its pliability. ‘This I can do,’ she thought. ‘It’s not much, but I can do it.’ The words repeated in her head, a mantra to keep her rooted to the lawn and its busy knot of life rather than racing back to the study to read the comments that she knew would be flooding in.

  As Sam was dwelling on this new beginning, and convincing herself of the rightness of her actions from start to finish, she heard a car door slam. Jumping to her feet she walked down the path at the side of her house, to find Anne walking towards her, her face already set in a familiar look of consolation.

  ‘Gosh, you’re keen. Can’t wait to recruit me?’ Sam joked, as lightly as she could.

  ‘My dear, I’ve come to apologise.’ Sam drew back a bit, surprised.

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Yes, you must think I am terribly insensitive, trying to press-gang you into working in the hospice. Had I known of your condition, I would not have had the discourtesy to mention it.’

  ‘My condition?’

  ‘Hattie Jacobs told me. You’re…’ here, she dropped her voice to spare the neighbours, ‘you’re barren.’

  Sam nearly laughed out loud. Hattie had described her as barren? Sam rubbed her forehead absent-mindedly, as if trying to coax the right words out.

  ‘Anne, for medical reasons I’ve had a complete hysterectomy. But I don’t like to be described as barren, it makes me sound empty. And I’m not empty.’ Sam swallowed heavily, submerging the emotions that were fighting to erupt as words.

  Anne leant in further, conspiratorially. ‘Of course you’re not, dear. You’re a survivor. Which is why you must have thought me terribly insensitive offering you volunteer work at the hospice.’

  Sam was starting to shift her weight from foot to foot as her fight or flight reflexes coursed through her veins, vying for supremacy. She said quietly, patiently and with as much polite curiosity as she could muster, ‘I’m actually really struggling to follow your train of thought.’

  Anne had pulled a cotton handkerchief from her handbag and was now using it to excavate her not inconsiderable nostrils. Sam waited while her visitor completed her ablutions, eventually tucking her handkerchief into the cuff of her shirt. ‘Well,’ she said, oozing sympathy, ‘that’s the very last place you’d want to work, I imagine. You’d be better off volunteering for something that puts you in touch with the young, I’d think. There are plenty of worthwhile programmes I can introduce you to, we’re a very inclusive community.’

  Sam’s shoulders hunched involuntarily, the weight of this new assault settling on her and pressing down relentlessly. She sighed heavily. ‘I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about and why any of it is remotely relevant to me. I feel like I’ve just been sacked from a job I haven’t yet applied for. I don’t need this. I really don’t need it. If I want to volunteer, I’ll find something that suits me. If I don’t want to volunteer and God knows why I would, quite frankly, then I won’t. Is that fine with you and Hattie, do you think?’

  Anne took Sam’s hand in her own and squeezed it gently before dropping it. She shook her head slowly, the seep of compassion threatening to drown them both. ‘My dear, I can understand what a difficult time you must be having, with your whole life destroyed at such a tender age. And your poor, poor husband. It must be even worse for him.’

  Despite knowing she would sound deranged, Sam allowed a small laugh to escape. Tears were battling to form just out of sight and Sam desperately didn’t want them to find an escape route. She wished she had allowed Anne to ring the doorbell. That way she could have opened the door to her and then, when she’d heard enough, she could have slammed the door in her face. But instead, they were standing in front of the garage, and Sam found herself completely incapable of ejecting her visitor, who was now peering at her closely, as if she might find traces of cancer, infertility or loss etched amongst her freckles.

  Desperately, Sam seized upon the word ‘husband’ grabbing at it like a drowning woman grasping a lifebuoy. ‘I’m very sorry, Anne,’ she said carefully, ‘but I’m right in the middle of preparing supper for my husband. You know what these men are like.’

  ‘Oh my, don’t let me get between a man and his supper. Cheerio and, you know…’ here, she squeezed Sam’s unresponsive hand once more, ‘well done.’ Anne turned to leave, already snapping open her handbag to retrieve her car keys.

  Sam ground her teeth into a smile. Once Anne had driven off, hesitantly, whilst checking her rear-view mirror repeatedly before slowly pulling out into the quiet country lane, Sam went back into the house and wearily trudged up to the office. Instead of allowing the tears to fall, she turned to her laptop with the quiet despair and inevitable submission of a seasoned addict.

  Chapter 13

  While Sam was learning that it would take more than a new home to reinvent herself, Danny was learning that a tight rein on his environment did not necessarily extend to his feelings.

  He had secured his favoured seat, he had nodded at some familiar faces and the damp, grey day stretched ahead of him with reassuring predictability. And yet here he was, fiddling with his cuffs, adjusting his shirt collar and bristling with dissatisfaction. Danny had left for work feeling guilty and he wasn’t enjoying the sensation. He was looking at his laptop but found himself quite unable to focus on the spreadsheet in front of him, nor could he lose himself in the view from the window. It was a small thing that had triggered this discontent; an observation that now wriggled between him and his focus like a bit of dust caught in his mind’s eye.

  As he left the house he’d noticed Sam’s wellington boots, paired neatly by the door and as he’d reached down to pick up a lump of clay that had dried and dislodged from the boot’s sole it had struck him that he had a wife who walked in the muddy fields each day and that this daily activity was a life quite separate from his own.

  He would not walk with her, he could not immerse himself in the vagaries of nature in the way she seemed to enjoy and they knew this about each other. But there was something about the angle of the wellington boots that seemed to hint at an absence. Perhaps there should be another larger pair, his, next to hers. Or perhaps there should be a couple of pairs in miniature, scattered haphazardly for him to right impatiently.

  The memory of the dried clay between his fingers nagged at him. He wiped his hands carefully with sanitiser, hoping to erase the feeling the introspection evoked.

  He should, he admitted to himself as he looked at the fields from the train, allow her to have a dog. This was where the guilt came from. A dog would be the answer. A lead hanging on the hook above the wellington boots would complete the tableau, negate the absence.

  No. He scolded himself. He should confess to Sam that there were no allergies that would prevent them from having a dog. This was where the guilt came from.

  But that admission would be too great. It would not
be the admission of a small betrayal, it would be the disclosure of his cavernous frailty, and with that acknowledgement, everything he had built might crumble. The truth he dare not share was that he could not have a dog because he could not bear to lose a dog. A dog’s life was pitifully short as it was. And how would he avoid losing his heart to a dog? He would love it, of that he was certain, he would not be able to avoid that love. But the dog’s potential death would feel imminent every day he loved it. And then it would die. He would not cope.

  His capacity to love was already stretched taut with his love for Sam. And she had already tested it, pulling at it beyond all elasticity. And when she had been so ill he thought it would snap, or she would snap, or he would snap, but then they had been given their reprieve, a chance for her to live, for the two of them to continue loving as they were. And he couldn’t risk any more of his heart. All he had was already used up fully.

  So, no, he couldn’t have a dog. And he’d reasoned himself into a sensible solution. Allergies were non-negotiable and Sam respected his ways. And in his own way, he was allergic to dogs. He was allergic to the thought of a losing a dog. The idea made him feel ill. He ran a finger around the front of his collar to loosen his shirt where he felt strangled. See? He felt ill now, just contemplating that loss.

  He was allergic to dogs. He needn’t over-complicate things.

  Chapter 14

  Sam had spent the rest of the morning responding to a couple of hundred comments on her blog, the lawn forgotten. Whether the readers agreed with her or were vehemently opposed to her, the comments were visceral in their anger and the vitriol had nourished her. Her rage was further inflamed by the abhorrence she felt for finding herself back in this cycle again but more than this she was seething with blame for Hattie and Anne, for sending her back there. Actually, she reasoned, she was furious with all the Hatties of the world, the judgemental women and men who firmly believed that their choices were the only choices and that anyone that didn’t endorse and subscribe to their pattern for living was in some way impoverished.