by Carys Bray
‘I am deciding what they are saying.’
‘Oh.’
‘Would you like to buy this dog?’ Dagmar asks, her voice gruff and mannish. ‘It is your turn,’ she explains, using her own voice again. ‘You must say what is next.’
‘Oh. Okay. Er . . . no, thank you. A dog is a big commitment.’ Clover doesn’t even attempt to adopt the second man’s voice.
‘It is your turn, still. Your man is talking.’
‘Right . . . I don’t have time to walk it. And dog food is very expensive.’
‘If you do not buy her, my wife is leaving me.’
‘Why?’
‘Shush, it is not your turn. My wife is leaving me because the noise is making her crazy.’
‘But I don’t want a noisy dog, either.’
‘Then I am being alone.’
‘You’ll have your dog,’ Clover says, and the men separate and walk off in different directions.
Dagmar smiles. It’s quick; a twitch of her lips, before her face returns to impassivity. She looks different outside of school. If Clover didn’t have very important plans, this could be interesting. They might find something to say to each other, something that doesn’t involve One Direction or who hasn’t been tagged in Twenty-Five Beautiful Girls on Facebook.
‘Where are you going?’ Dagmar asks.
‘The allotment. It’s this place where you grow stuff. Down there. Just to water things.’
‘I can come?’
Clover likes her time at the allotment: the work and the thinking, the quiet hum of the living things and the feeling of being responsible for it all. If she lets Dagmar come she might end up with less time to visit Grandad and Uncle Jim, and less time to sort through her mother’s things before Dad gets back. But she is curious.
‘All right then.’
Clover walks beside her bike, not minding the quiet. She gets the feeling that Dagmar is comfortable with it and would speak if she wanted to. They turn off Moss Lane and head down the track. Past the beech hedge on one side and the neat rows of the orchard on the other, until they reach the gate.
‘And all this is yours?’
‘Oh, no.’
Clover unlocks the gate and Dagmar follows, the hard wheels of her trolley scratching the ground. They pass a couple of neglected plots that are chock-a-block with thigh-high weeds, brambles and old vegetables gone to seed.
‘Here,’ she says, stopping beside a low wire fence. ‘This is ours. We’ve had it for ages. It used to be my grandad’s, like fifty years ago, or something.’ She leans her bike up against one of the canes that support the fence and then steps over the wire. ‘Come on,’ she says.
Dagmar explores the perimeter, leaning over dividing bits of fence and shrubbery to see into the neighbouring allotments. Clover glances at the enormous apple tree in the overgrown allotment to the left, its limbs piled with ripening fruit; at the tidy rows of Mrs Grindle’s allotment on the right, all topped by wooden frames that have been stapled with chicken wire. She listens to the drone of Mr Ashworth’s bees. Dad says, ‘Bees are the canaries in the mine of climate change’ – he didn’t make it up on his own, he read it somewhere, but it’s a good comparison. Last autumn Mr Ashworth gave them a jar of his honey. It tasted different from the honey from shops; it tasted like flowers. Clover hopes he will do it again this year.
‘You are not having a shed?’ Dagmar calls.
‘No, not here.’
Clover looks at Mr Ashworth’s shed. He used to sit in it with the door open when he needed a rest, making it look like a guardhouse. He wore a Puma baseball cap and drank home-made elderflower cordial. Dad says the old men used to wear flat caps. But since flat caps got fashionable and you can buy them in all the clothes shops, even at the supermarket, the old men have started wearing baseball caps. This is true – even Grandad has got a baseball cap. Mr Ashworth’s wife had a stroke at Christmas, so he can’t come as often as he used to.
When Dagmar has made her way back, Clover walks her down the strip of turf that dissects the plot, naming everything: onions, carrots, cabbages, potatoes, pumpkins, lettuce, broccoli, strawberries, raspberries, runner beans, beetroot and peas. Dagmar nods seriously, like she’s memorising it for a test.
‘Want to try some?’ Clover opens a pea pod and pops the peas into Dagmar’s open hand.
‘They are different. Crunchy.’
‘Good, aren’t they?’ She collects a strawberry and a few of the raspberries that run along the back fence. ‘Try these, too.’
‘You come here every day?’
What to say? She doesn’t mind Dagmar being here today, but she can’t afford to have regular distractions burning up her summer.
‘Me or my dad.’
She lifts the carpet that covers the empty bed to reveal the watering can, and retrieves the bucket from her bike. They walk to the tap and back, side by side, feet kicking up dust. Dagmar’s black trainers turn grey. She’s a mouth-breather; Clover can hear the air wafting in and out of her, blowing her lips dry. Dagmar lifts a hand to scratch her bare neck and Clover notices her bitten nails and the purply transparency of the skin under her eyes.
‘You are doing this all holiday? The gardening?’
‘Yeah,’ Clover says, thinking that gardening is the wrong verb, but not sure what to suggest as a replacement.
‘You are not going anywhere?’
‘No.’
‘I am not going anywhere, also.’
‘Well, we might go to Blackpool for the day.’
Once they’ve finished the watering, Clover hides the can and they sit side by side on the dusty carpet.
‘This is very nice. I am having a yard. No garden.’
‘Did you have a garden where you came from?’
‘A flat, with balcony. But there is a river. And mountains. And not far away, a castle. In the town it is . . . the colours are different. The buildings are in white and yellow, with red and orange roofs.’
‘It sounds very different.’
‘There is a Tesco.’
Clover catches the small smile again. ‘Are you okay, at school?’ she blurts. A silence follows and she worries she might have overstepped.
‘In stories, people are being horrible because they are sad. My dad says this is not true. People are being horrible because they can. And that is it. The end.’
‘Oh. That’s sad.’
‘It is true.’
‘How was it in your primary school?’
‘I come very late. In Year 6. People are already having friends. And my English is very bad then.’
Clover lies down and shields her eyes from the disc of the sun with the flat of her hand. ‘What’s your favourite time of year?’
‘What is yours?’
‘The summer holidays. Right now.’
‘Why?’
‘Because all the time’s mine. There’s no school, no nothing. Dad doesn’t care if I go to bed a bit late, and I don’t have to do anything, except come here. But I like this, so it doesn’t really count.’ She pauses for a moment, searching for the right words. ‘It’s so warm – I love it when you don’t need a coat or anything. You get that inside-outside feeling. You know? The feeling you get when you can go anywhere without even thinking about it. You don’t have to think, Will my feet get wet? Are my hands going to be cold? Might I need an umbrella? You step out of the front door, and it’s so warm; and the days are longer and time gets all stretchy: that’s the inside-outside feeling.’
Clover can’t see Dagmar’s face, because she is still sitting, arms propping her from behind like tent strings. But she hears the thinky sound she makes as she deliberates.
‘I think . . . I like October. The field is not so muddy, so the boys are not bothering me, they are playing football. I am going to the after-school clubs and when I go home it is dark. And soon it is bedtime.’
‘I like October, too,’ she says, hoping Dagmar is happier at home than she is at school, though her answer sugges
ts otherwise. ‘What’s in your trolley?’
‘My things.’
‘What things?’ Clover waits but Dagmar will not be goaded by silence and in the end it’s up to her to fill it. ‘I’ve got this,’ she says, sitting up as she pulls Latin Words and Phrases for Beginners out of the back pocket of her shorts.
‘What is it?’
‘Latin. I’m learning the words.’
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Because they sound good.’
‘This is what you think?’
‘Yeah. They’re old words. And they remind me of Hogwarts – that’s the school from Harry Potter.’
‘I know this.’
‘Plants have Latin names – they’re called botanical names. They put them on seed packets to tell you stuff like the colour or smell and what kind of shape the leaves will be. Long names – they’re a bit tricky. I like these words better.’
‘What words?’
‘Ad astra.’
‘What is ad astra?’
‘It means “to the stars”. And ad astra per aspera means “to the stars, through difficulties”, which is even better.’
‘I have this.’ Dagmar pulls a sketchbook out of her shopping trolley.
Clover takes it from her hand and leafs through the pages. There are pencil drawings of trees and flowers and arrangements of objects like fruit and ornaments. Some of them are crossed out, scribbled over, the perspective is wrong or the shading too dark; others are really good.
A pheasant screeches, the noise accompanied by a drubbing of wings so loud that it almost sounds like the coughing start of a motorbike. Dagmar jumps and Clover laughs and stands up.
They do a bit of picking before heading back up Moss Lane, carrier bags of fruit and vegetables sitting in the bucket.
‘What are you doing now?’ Dagmar asks as they arrive back where they started, outside the corner shop.
‘I’m going to see my grandad.’
‘And you will see your grandmother, too?’
‘No, she died before I was born.’
‘You have another grandmother?’
‘Yes, but I don’t see her very often. She lives in Portsmouth.’
‘And that is very far?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And she has no car?’
‘She doesn’t drive.’
‘And there are no trains?’
Of course there are trains. Every so often Dad talks himself into inviting Nanna Maureen. She won’t stay overnight. Up and down in a day, that’s how she does it. The idea of Nanna Maureen is always better than the reality. She is like those lemon sherbet sweets: when you haven’t had one for a while, it’s easy to forget that they are hard and sour, and burn the skin off the roof of your mouth.
‘I need to go now,’ Clover says, rather than explain herself.
‘I can come?’
‘Oh. My grandad’s old. And you can’t just –’
‘I wait, outside.’
‘He hasn’t got a garden.’
‘I wait on the pavement.’
‘It’s a while away. By the Marine Lake.’
‘It is not far,’ she says.
Despite Dagmar’s protestations, Clover locks her bike to the railings outside Grandad’s flat.
‘You might get tired of waiting,’ she says.
She presses the intercom, announces herself and the main door jerks open. Once upstairs she walks straight into the flat; Grandad must have unlatched the door and shuffled back to his armchair.
‘I’ve brought some stuff from the allotment,’ she calls as she steps down the hall, past the cuckoo clocks and the photograph of Dad with Grandad and the nanna who died before she was born.
‘Put it in the sink, love.’
The smell in the kitchen reminds her of Year 3, when they had a class pet, Harvey the hamster. She dumps the carrier bags in the sink and joins Grandad in the lounge. He is wearing shorts with a proper buttoned-up shirt. It’s as if his bottom half is complaining about the heat, but his top half is saying, ‘Don’t be silly.’
‘How are you, Grandad?’
‘Old and disappointed. Now park yourself. And shush. I want to see what happens.’ He’s watching Jeremy Kyle. A woman has taken a lie detector test and Jeremy is kneeling beside her, hissing nasty things in her face so she’ll shout at him and he can tell her off for being rude. ‘We’re about to find out if her boyfriend is the baby’s father,’ Grandad says. ‘I reckon she’s at it.’
The results are handed to Jeremy. He holds the card up, starts reading, and the woman’s protestations begin.
‘I knew it.’ Grandad lifts the remote and fires it at the telly. ‘What a load of rubbish. Who watches it?’
Clover grins.
‘I’m not watching it,’ he says. ‘It’s just on, for company. What’ve you brought me?’
‘Beans and peas, a lettuce, some strawberries and raspberries and an onion.’
‘Good girl. You all right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Well, that’s good.’
Grandad runs out of things to say if you don’t help him. Last summer’s book club was epic because every time he got stuck he read a discussion question: ‘Why was it so important for Anne to have a dress with puffed sleeves?’ ‘Would you prefer to be called Anne with an “e” or Ann without an “e”?’ ‘Why did Anne want a kindred spirit or a, um, a . . . bosom friend?’
Clover glances at the laptop resting on the floor beside his chair. ‘What are you doing on your computer at the moment?’
‘Shakespeare.’ He reaches for the laptop, lifts the lid and logs in. ‘I’ve finished Mars – if you want to know anything about it, I’m your man. I’ve got Hamlet this afternoon. See, all ready, on the right page. The BBC one with Derek Jacobi. I’m going in alphabetical order. All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It – right through to The Winter’s Tale. Sometimes I can only find a radio version. It’s hard to stay awake without pictures.’
‘And what’s next?’
‘Haven’t decided yet. It’ll take another month to get through this lot.’
‘Seen any good cat videos this week?’
‘Too busy. Want a biscuit?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Get me one while you’re at it, love. And a cup of hot water. Use the beaker by the sink. Two hundred and fifty mil.’
Grandad has written measurements on the plastic beaker in black permanent marker. She fills it up to 250ml with warm water from the kettle. Today he’s got ginger nuts in his tin. She takes two and slips a third into the front pocket of her shorts. Ginger nuts are really hard, it shouldn’t break.
‘Thank you muchly,’ he says when she gives him the cup. He sips like it’s tea or something nice.
One of the clocks in the hall calls the half hour. A few seconds later, the others announce it.
‘You know, you should get your dad to unpack the clocks. You could help him. It’d be fun. Tell him I said so. Are you having a good summer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, why wouldn’t you be, at your age? So . . .’ He closes the laptop and nods at the telly. ‘Want to watch the rest of that bun fight?’
‘All right,’ she says, and he switches it back on.
Dagmar is waiting by the doors. ‘You are a long time,’ she says.
‘You didn’t have to wait.’
‘I am doing nothing else.’
‘Won’t your mum be worried?’
‘She is working.’
‘What does she do?’
‘She is deputy hotel manager.’
Clover hands Dagmar the warm ginger nut before unfastening her bike from the railings.
‘Thank you. Where are you going?’
‘To see my Uncle Jim.’
‘Where is he living?’
‘By Asda.’
Dagmar clasps the handle of her trolley. ‘I can come?’
Clover wonders whether there’s a polite
way to deter her and, on a scale of one to ten, how upset she’d be if she said she didn’t want her to come.
‘Come on,’ Dagmar says, and it’s too late to do anything else.
There’s nowhere to fasten her bike at Uncle Jim’s. Dagmar offers to watch it.
‘I might be a while,’ Clover says, opting to wheel it past the parked cars and hide it behind an enormous wheelie bin.
The main door is open, so she steps into the building and heads down the tiled corridor. Uncle Jim’s door is open, too. When he is not himself he finds closed doors more frightening than burglars. He is sitting on the floor in front of the sofa, legs crossed, elbows on his knees, head resting in his hands. She knocks on the edge of the door to let him know she’s there, but he doesn’t look up. The TV is muted and the room is a mess.
‘It’s me. I’ve come to say hello. Are you all right?’
‘Got-toothache,’ he mumbles.
Clover hears the trundle of wheels in the corridor behind her and makes a shooing motion with one hand.
‘Can I do something?’ she asks scanning the empties and the dirty clothes, the jigsaw pieces and the cigarette butts. Where would he keep painkillers – the kitchenette, or the bathroom, perhaps? ‘Have you got any medicine? Shall I come in and have a look?’
‘S’all-right,’ he says, still cradling his head. ‘Had-something. You-get-off-home. Come-and-see-me-when-I’m-better.’ The words waddle fatly into each other on their way out of his mouth.
‘Are you sure?’ she asks, nudging Dagmar away from the open door with the point of her elbow.
‘Hmmm.’
‘Can I get you anything?’
‘Uh-uh.’
‘Shall I . . . would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Uh-uh.’
Sitting there, he almost looks like a little boy in a school assembly, about to recite the Lord’s Prayer, and she is struck by the thought that one or more of the children who sat, legs crossed, in her own school assemblies might one day find themselves sitting on the floor of a dirty bedsit in that same, cross-legged position.
‘Well . . . I’ll just go then,’ she says. ‘But I’ll definitely come back another day.’
‘Hmm.’
As she turns she bumps, half on purpose, into a goggle-eyed Dagmar and forces her back down the corridor, hard, so the trolley bumps the skirting and they almost trip over it.