The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

by Joanna Cannon

  We stood on the edge of a border, which was marked out with string and pegs in a criss-cross of mysterious organization.

  Eric Lamb folded his arms and nodded into the distance. ‘What’s the most important thing a garden needs?’ he said.

  We folded our arms as well, to help us think.

  ‘Water?’ I said.

  ‘Sunshine?’ Tilly said.

  Eric Lamb smiled and shook his head.

  ‘String?’ I said, in an act of pure desperation.

  When he had finished laughing, he unfolded his arms and said, ‘The most important thing a garden needs is the shadow of a gardener.’

  I decided then that Eric Lamb was very clever, although I hadn’t yet worked out why. There was an ease about him, an unhurried wisdom that stretched like his shadow across the soil. I stared through the garden, and watched white butterflies dance across dahlias and freesias and geraniums. There was a choir of colour, singing for my attention, and it felt as though I was hearing it for the first time. Then I thought about the row of carrots I’d planted last year (carrots which had never lived, because I kept digging them up again to check they were all still alive), and I felt slightly overwhelmed.

  ‘How do you know where to plant things?’ I said. ‘How do you know where they’ll grow?’

  Eric Lamb put his hands on his hips and stared across the garden with us, and then he nodded into the distance. I could see where the soil had eaten into his fingers and made a home within the creases of his flesh.

  ‘You plant like with like,’ he said. ‘There’s no point planting an anemone in a field full of sunflowers, is there?’

  ‘No,’ Tilly and I said at the same time.

  ‘What’s an amenome?’ Tilly whispered.

  ‘I have no idea,’ I whispered back.

  I think Eric Lamb spotted this.

  ‘Because the anemone would die,’ he said, ‘it needs different things. There’s a logical place for everything, and if something is where it should be, then it will flourish.’

  ‘But how do you know,’ Tilly said, ‘how do you know if something is in the right place?’

  ‘Experience.’ He pointed to our silhouettes, which spilled on to the concrete. His, broad and wise, like an oak, and mine and Tilly’s, spindly and slight and uncertain. ‘Keep making shadows,’ he said, ‘if you make enough shadows, there will come a time when you will know all of the answers.’

  And so he gave us trowels and a tin bucket, and sent us to the far edge of the garden to do weeding. We had gloves, too (I had the right and Tilly had the left), but they were big and clumsy and we took them off within minutes. The soil felt soft and quiet between our fingers.

  After a few minutes, Keithie’s head appeared on the other side of the fence, which separated Eric Lamb’s garden from Sheila Dakin’s.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘Weeding.’ I shuffled about on the piece of newspaper Eric Lamb had given us to kneel on.

  ‘And making shadows,’ added Tilly.

  Keithie wrinkled his nose. ‘Why?’ he said.

  ‘Because it’s interesting.’ I saw Keithie look at the bucket, which had begun to fill with a collection of soil and leaves, ‘And it teaches you about life.’

  ‘What’s the point?’ he said.

  ‘What’s the point in bouncing a football around all day?’ I said back.

  ‘I might get discovered. I might get spotted by Brian Clough and signed up.’

  Keithie bounced his football, to make a point.

  ‘Well, if I see Brian Clough walking down Maple Road, I’ll be sure to point him in your direction.’

  I had no idea who Brian Clough was, but I was fairly certain Keithie didn’t realize this, and his head disappeared again. I looked across the garden at Eric Lamb. Even though he had his back to us, I could see his shoulders laughing.

  We continued to weed, Tilly in her sou’wester and me in a trilby Eric Lamb had found at the back of his shed. It was strange how the weeding made your mind feel quiet. I had stopped worrying about God and Mrs Creasy, and how my mother walked out of any room my father walked into, and all I could think about was the soil tickling the spaces between my fingers.

  ‘I like this,’ I said.

  Tilly just nodded and we worked in silence. After a while, she pointed to a plant which was still rooted into the soil.

  ‘Is that a weed as well?’ she said.

  I leaned forward and stared at it. Its leaves were large and jagged, but it didn’t look the same as the others in the bucket. There was no dandelion in the middle, and it didn’t really have much of a weedy air about it.

  ‘I’m not sure.’ I stared at it a little more. ‘Probably.’

  ‘But what if I pull it up and it isn’t? What if I make it die, and it was a flower after all?’ she said. ‘What if I make a mistake?’

  Eric Lamb walked over from the other side of the garden.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ He crouched beside us and we all stared at the plant.

  ‘We can’t decide if this is a weed or not,’ said Tilly, ‘and I don’t want to pull it up if it isn’t.’

  ‘I see,’ he said, but didn’t come up with anything else.

  We waited. My legs started to tingle, and I shifted from the newspaper. When I looked down, the previous week’s headlines were printed back to front on my knee caps.

  ‘So what shall we do?’ said Tilly.

  ‘Well, first of all,’ said Eric Lamb, ‘who decides if it’s a weed or not?’

  ‘People?’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘Which people?’

  ‘The people who are in charge. They decide if something is a weed or not,’ I said.

  ‘And who is in charge at the moment?’ He looked at Tilly, and she squinted back at him in the sunshine. ‘Who is holding the trowel?’ he said.

  Tilly scratched soil on to her nose and squinted a little more. ‘Me?’ she said very quietly.

  ‘You,’ repeated Eric Lamb. ‘So you decide if it’s a weed or not.’

  We all turned and looked at the plant, which awaited its fate.

  ‘The thing about weeds,’ he said, ‘is that it’s very subjective.’

  We looked confused.

  He tried again. ‘It depends very much on whose point of view it is. What’s a weed to one person might be a beautiful flower to another. It depends very much on where they’re growing and whose eyes it is you’re seeing them through.’

  We looked around at the dahlias and the freesias and the geraniums. ‘So the whole of this garden might be full of weeds to someone else?’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. If you loved dandelions, you’d think all of this was a waste of time.’

  ‘And you’d save the dandelions instead,’ Tilly said.

  He nodded.

  ‘So is it a weed or not?’ he said, and we both looked at Tilly.

  Her trowel hovered over the plant. She looked at each of us, and looked back at it. I thought for a second that she was about to dig it up, but then she put the trowel down and wiped her hands on her skirt.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s not a weed.’

  ‘Then we shall let it live,’ said Eric Lamb, ‘and we will go inside and have a glass of lemonade.’

  We pulled ourselves up from the newspapers and brushed down our clothes, and followed him across the garden.

  ‘I wonder if you guessed right,’ I said, as we wiped our feet on the porch mat. ‘I wonder if it really was a weed.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s the point, Gracie. I think the point is, everyone’s allowed to think different things.’

  Sometimes, you just had to humour Tilly. ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ I said.

  She stamped her frown out into the doormat.

  *

  Eric Lamb reached for some glasses out of the top cupboard, and Tilly and I used the time to be curious about his kitchen.

  It was strange how different people’s kitchens could be. Some were shouty and con
fused, like Mrs Dakin’s, and some kitchens, like Eric Lamb’s, hardly made a sound. A clock tick-tocked above the door frame and a fridge whirred and hummed to itself in the corner. Other than that, there was silence, as we ran the taps and stared through the window and washed our hands with Fairy Liquid. Next to the stove were two easy chairs, one crumpled and sagging, the other smooth and unworn. Over the back of each were crocheted blankets, reams of multicoloured yarn, stretched together in a shout of colour, and on the dresser was a photograph of a woman with kind eyes. She watched us dry our hands and take lemonade from Eric Lamb, and I wondered if it had been her patience which had woven together the strands of wool, for a chair she could no longer sit in.

  I decided to jump straight in.

  ‘Do you believe in God?’ I asked him.

  I saw him glance at the photograph, but he didn’t give an answer straight away. Instead, he was so quiet I could hear breath moving in and out of his lungs, until eventually he looked at the photograph again and then at me, and said, ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you believe He keeps us where we belong?’

  ‘Like amenomes?’ said Tilly.

  Eric Lamb looked through the glass and into his garden. ‘I think He allows us to grow,’ he said. ‘We just have to find the best soil. Every plant can flourish, it just needs to find the right place, and sometimes, the right place isn’t always where you think it is.’

  ‘I wonder if goats and sheep can grow in the same soil,’ said Tilly.

  Eric Lamb looked at her and frowned, so we told him about the goats and the sheep, and about how God is everywhere, and we waved our arms about and drank our lemonade.

  ‘Who is the lady in the photograph?’ said Tilly.

  We all turned to look at her, and she looked back.

  ‘That was my wife,’ he said. ‘I took care of her until she died.’

  ‘And now she’s gone, you take care of your garden instead,’ said Tilly.

  He took her empty glass. ‘I have a feeling you have made far more shadows than I had originally thought,’ he said.

  And he smiled.

  *

  We had just closed the front gate, when Tilly grabbed my arm. ‘We didn’t talk about Mrs Creasy,’ she said.

  I opened the bag Eric Lamb had given us. It was filled with baby tomatoes, and the smell of summer escaped from the twists of brown paper.

  ‘Of course we did.’ I put one in my mouth and felt it burst between my teeth. ‘We talked about very little else.’

  Tilly reached into the bag. ‘Did we?’

  ‘Tilly Albert,’ I said, ‘what would you do without me?’

  She burst a tomato in her mouth and smiled back.

  By mid-afternoon, the bag was empty. They were as sweet as sugar.

  Number Three, Rowan Tree Croft

  15 July 1976

  ‘Mummy will be getting the tea ready for six o’clock tonight, Remington, so let’s hope people have the good manners to be home in time to eat it.’

  ‘If people had good manners to start with, Remington, they’d realize that the only reason we have tea on the table in the first place is because some of us go out to work.’

  My parents had begun arguing through the dog.

  He had been reinvented as an instrument of communication, although he still lay under the kitchen table as usual and didn’t seem especially aware of his new role. He probably just thought he had suddenly become very popular and interesting.

  The only time my parents spoke directly to each other was when someone else was there, or when they wanted to have an advanced argument, which involved shouting and banging cupboard doors and marching up and down the stairs. My mother had stopped asking my father questions about Mrs Creasy, and had moved on to other topics, such as why we’re not going on holiday this year and whether my father would like to take a lilo to the office and just bloody well live there permanently.

  Tilly and I had escaped to Mrs Morton’s, where it was softer and quieter, and no one ever marched anywhere.

  Mrs Morton was bottoming the pantry, and Tilly and I sat at the kitchen table.

  Tilly was playing clock patience, but every time she found a King, she just put it back at the bottom of a pile.

  ‘That’s not what you do,’ I said. ‘It’s cheating.’

  ‘There’s only me playing.’

  ‘But they’re the rules.’

  ‘They’re not my rules, though,’ said Tilly. She hid another King as I was watching. ‘I think people should be allowed to have their own.’

  ‘That’s the whole point of rules,’ I said. ‘They’re there to make sure everyone does the same thing.’

  ‘That’s a bit boring, though, isn’t it?’ she said.

  Tilly was the kind of person who sent a Christmas card in July, because she thought you might like the picture on the front. Sometimes, you just had to make allowances for her.

  Mrs Morton walked past with three boxes of marshmallow teacakes.

  ‘Do you believe in rules, Mrs Morton?’ I said.

  Mrs Morton and the marshmallow teacakes stopped right in front of my face. ‘Some rules are important,’ she said. ‘Other rules, I think, are just there to make people feel as though they’re all on the same side.’

  I nodded at Tilly and took a King out from the bottom of the pile.

  ‘It doesn’t work, though, does it?’ said Tilly. ‘Mr and Mrs Forbes never seem to be on the same side, Mr Creasy doesn’t have anyone on his side now, and I’m not sure whose side Mrs Dakin is on.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I looked at the King. ‘I don’t suppose it always works.’

  ‘You mum and dad definitely aren’t on the same side,’ Tilly said.

  Mrs Morton coughed and took her marshmallows back into the pantry.

  ‘It’s because of God,’ I said. ‘If we could just find God, then Mrs Creasy would come home and everything else would sort itself out.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s never coming home, Gracie. Perhaps we were right in the first place. Perhaps Mr and Mrs Forbes have murdered her and buried her under the patio.’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Forbes don’t have a patio,’ said Mrs Morton from the back of the pantry.

  ‘No, I’m sure that if we find Him, then Mrs Creasy will come back,’ I said. ‘We just need to keep looking.’

  ‘You said that he wasn’t at Eric Lamb’s house because God couldn’t ever be in a place where someone is so sad, and we’ve looked everywhere else.’

  I picked at the edge of the playing card with my nail.

  ‘Gracie?’

  ‘We haven’t quite looked everywhere else,’ I said.

  Tilly stared at me, and I watched the idea find her face.

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘We can’t!’

  I took Tilly’s arm and led her out into the garden. It’s amazing how much you can hear from the back of a pantry.

  *

  ‘We agreed we weren’t going to visit number eleven,’ she said. ‘We agreed it wasn’t safe.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘you did that agreeing all by yourself.’

  We sat on two giant plant pots at the back of Mr Morton’s shed. You couldn’t really call it Mrs Morton’s shed, because even after a person has disappeared, there are still some places left in the world which will always belong to them.

  ‘Mrs Morton said we’re not to go near Walter Bishop.’ Tilly shifted on her plant pot.

  ‘Do you always do what Mrs Morton tells you?’

  ‘Mostly,’ she said.

  ‘You said you didn’t believe in rules. You said they make life too boring.’

  Tilly wrapped her arms around her knees and made herself very small. ‘This is different, though,’ she said. ‘This is a rule I think we need to keep.’

  ‘God has to be there, Tilly. He just has to be. He isn’t in any of the other houses, and number eleven is our last hope.’

  ‘Can’t we just imagine He’s there, and not actually look?’

  ‘No, we have to check. If we don’
t, Mrs Creasy will never come back, and any one of us could disappear next. We need to make sure we have a shepherd.’

  The weight of the day pressed into my head. There was no shade behind Mr Morton’s shed and the heat was angry and fierce. Its cruelty seemed to spread, reddening my skin with its temper, crawling into my hair and pulling at my flesh with a quiet, persistent rage.

  ‘I don’t really want to, Gracie.’

  Tilly looked into my eyes. She never looked into my eyes.

  ‘Well, then,’ I said. ‘I can do it by myself.’ I tried to bury my fear in shouting. ‘If you won’t go with me, I’ll go on my own.’

  ‘You can’t! You mustn’t!’

  ‘Then I’m going to ask someone else to go with me.’ I stood up. The heat seemed even worse. I could feel it, streaming from the walls of the shed and the dusty bricks of Mrs Morton’s garden wall. ‘I’m going to ask Lisa Dakin.’

  I still hadn’t learned the power of words. How, once they have left your mouth, they have a breath and a life of their own. I had yet to realize that you no longer own them. I hadn’t learned that, once you have let them go, the words can then, in fact, become the owner of you.

  I looked down at Tilly. She was smaller and paler than I had ever seen her before, but the sun had begun to catch her face, and the red of its heat crept into the end of her nose.

  ‘Why would you do that?’ she said. ‘I thought we were best friends. I thought we were the ones looking for God?’

  ‘You can have more than one best friend.’ My hair felt hot and bad-tempered, and I pushed it out of my face. ‘And if you won’t come with me, then I’m going to have to rethink the whole thing.’

  Tilly didn’t speak.

  I made myself keep looking at her face. ‘So what is it to be?’ I said. ‘Are you coming with me or shall I go and ask Lisa Dakin?’

  She pulled at a thread on one of her buttons. ‘In that case, I suppose I’ll have to,’ she said.

  We waited in silence, Tilly, me and the argument. It didn’t feel like one of my parents’ arguments, where everyone stamped and slammed, and made a lot of noise. This argument was cautious and well behaved, and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with it next.