The Garden of Lost Memories

by Ruby Hummingbird

  Samantha turned a deeper shade of pink as she looked at her toes with their chipped orange nail varnish. ‘Oh, um, yes,’ she mumbled.

  Elsie waited, her level gaze on her. Samantha didn’t offer anything more. Did she have a husband? A partner? Had he left her? Had something befallen him?

  ‘Would you like the rest of my bin?’ Elsie asked Samantha, nodding to the black object.

  Samantha looked up, eyes widening.

  ‘My bin?’ Elsie repeated as if Samantha hadn’t heard her. ‘It looks like you have a lot to throw away and mine is largely empty.’

  ‘Oh, that would be…’ Samantha seemed to relax, her face returning to its washed-out colour, a wider smile showing a neat row of white teeth. ‘I got us a couple of things for the house and it all comes in a lot of packaging. Would you mind? Really?’

  Elsie wasn’t used to compliments, simply waving a hand. ‘Silly not to,’ she said roughly. ‘Go ahead.’ She turned to move back through her own doorway then changed her mind, facing Samantha again. ‘And if I can be of any assistance,’ she said, ‘I am at your service.’

  Samantha wavered next to the bin. ‘Oh. I’ll keep that in mind – thanks.’

  ‘It’s hard bringing up children on your own,’ Elsie said briskly, chin tilted up. ‘Help is here if you so need.’

  ‘I…’ With alarm, Elsie noticed tears filling Samantha’s eyes, her voice growing softer, ‘That is so kind, thank you. I’m sorry, not sure what’s wrong with me at the moment. It’s someone being nice, I think.’ She laughed and swiped a sleeve at her eyes. ‘Thank you, really, and lovely to meet you, Mrs Maple.’

  ‘It’s Elsie,’ she replied, alarmed by the emotion from this almost-stranger. And anyway, she had to get moving or she’d be late sorting through the recycling: she needed to wash out the plastics. ‘And I mean it, any time.’

  ‘Well, thank you ag—’

  Elsie was through her door before Samantha could finish.

  ‘You’d like her, wouldn’t you?’ Elsie said as she moved through the kitchen. ‘You’d say you’d wish someone had offered to help you like that.’

  Only the tick of the kitchen clock replied.

  So, she couldn’t cancel Billy’s visit. If she didn’t babysit the boy, what would Samantha do? She’d lose her job in the restaurant and then what? There wasn’t anyone else. Sometimes that was the case, and there really wasn’t anyone to help. She thought then of the other woman who had been in the same position years before, who had shouldered everything on her own. That thought inevitably triggered other feelings too and she clicked her tongue. ‘Must get on.’

  Chapter Six

  BILLY

  Mum works for a Dick. Literally. She doesn’t like it when I call him that but his name is Richard and that is an actual shortening of his name. And he is a dick anyway so even though she tells me off, she does it in the voice that sort of doesn’t really mean it and her mouth twitches a bit like she might laugh.

  He makes her work all the time and changes the rota at the last minute even though she has told him which shifts are better, the ones when I’m in school, but apparently there are loads of other people that want to work in the restaurant and Mum should be grateful he has given her a job for ‘cash in hand’ and then Mum goes quiet and agrees to do the shift, which is so unfair because then I have to go round to Mrs Maple, which is the worst!

  I have to go after school today and I really don’t want to, but Mum is still pretty cross with me after the whole fake illness thing yesterday so I don’t say anything this time.

  Mrs Maple is old like the grandma we don’t see any more, Dad’s mum who he called a ‘bitch’, which I know is bad but not as bad as the word he used to describe my other grandma. That made Mum cry and then a year later, Grandma died of cancer and Mum said we couldn’t go to her funeral but she was sobbing really hard and I really think she wanted to go to that funeral. That made me sad. I haven’t thought about that day for ages. Dad took me to Laser Quest after it happened and I forgot to ask more because I was too busy shooting lasers at him with the massive plastic gun. My grandma had been nice, even though Dad hated her. She always snuck me these chocolate wafer biscuits and once let me try some of her sherry. It was disgusting, but Liam thought it was so cool I had tasted it.

  Mrs Maple seems to be busy all the time but she doesn’t have a job. ‘Come in, come in,’ she says. ‘You’re later than I was expecting, I thought three thirty, you must have dawdled, so I’ve had to make a start.’

  I wasn’t sure what start she had made and she seemed to always be ‘running late’ or ‘rushed’ or ‘hard pushed’. I couldn’t understand it. She tutted because I forgot to remove my school shoes and had to go back to leave them by the doormat in a neat row next to hers.

  She has deep lines between her eyebrows, probably because she spends the whole time frowning at me. It’s not like I want to be at her stupid house with its flowery wallpaper and its faded velvet cushions and the sofa that smells of musty cat – and she doesn’t even have a cat. She has about a billion china figurines – ballerinas, shepherd girls in weird hats lying with a hook and a lamb, a goose with a daisy, loads of bunnies, a soldier in a red uniform – and she dusts them when I’m there sometimes and then ticks her little chalkboard when she’s finished.

  The board is in the kitchen, next to the shelf with the whole family of china chicken eggcups that she also dusts. It’s split into two columns. One has got all these timings on it and capital letters by it and she ticks them off. And the other column has a sun at the top and says things like ‘Thinning’ and ‘Scarifying’. It doesn’t make any sense.

  She has straight grey hair that I think used to be brown because I saw an old photo where she was stood next to another lady, but the lady wasn’t her, and that lady had brown hair too. Although the lady who I thought was Mrs Maple had a really lovely smile and sparkling eyes – which made me stare extra hard at the picture – so I’m not sure it’s her after all.

  Today, she ignored me for a whole ten minutes. I know because I had to wait on this strange high wicker stool in the kitchen that is way too small for me and so uncomfortable, some of the wicker bits poking into my bottom, so I just stared at the clock praying it would go faster. She was cleaning the oven, which looked so clean already. She was wearing yellow gloves and she tutted as she worked, then sometimes said things out loud but I wasn’t sure she was talking to me: ‘You always hated a dirty oven…’; ‘Ship shape’; ‘I’m taking care of things.’

  Sometimes I replied and once she’d nearly hit her head on the grill, looking round, her lips almost disappearing as if I was a nasty stain she would soon be cleaning too.

  It was so boring. I wanted to be busy because I kept replaying Daniel calling me a tramp as I had left school and I had wanted to turn around and use the bad word that Dad called Grandma but instead I just stuck my hands in my pockets and walked off. I didn’t need more trouble and who would I have told anyway?

  The clock finally reached the right time, four o’clock, and Mrs Maple snapped off the gloves, made the ‘tick’ on her board – ‘Clean Oven’ – and then returned with a tray: two glasses of pear squash and two plates with two custard creams. The most gross biscuits.

  I forced them down because she would always wait for me to finish and I couldn’t seem to tell her I really didn’t like them and basically it was a relief to do anything, even eat biscuits I hate, because if my mouth was full, I couldn’t say anything silly that would make her forehead crease and I couldn’t ask her questions because I never had anything to ask, like: do you like the goose and the daisy best, or the weird shepherd girl lying down?

  ‘Right,’ she said, another look at the clock, another ‘tick’, ‘Tea and Biscuits’, as she removed the polka-dot teapot to wash it.

  ‘Do you want me to do that?’ I asked. Mum always told me I needed to offer to help.

  ‘No,’ she said briskly, ‘there’s a crack in the lid.’ She said it in a funny vo
ice, like she thought I put the crack in, but I’ve never touched the ugly pot anyway.

  ‘You could get a new one?’ I suggested. ‘There’s that shop next to the hairdresser that sells them.’

  I’d seen one in the window when Mum had gone in to buy a photo frame because she’d left all of ours in London. It had made her cry so she spent her first week’s tips from the restaurant on two silver frames and sent off for two photos of us, but not Dad, which made me a bit angry, and she’d looked at me like I was the mad one and that made me angrier still.

  Elsie stopped still at the sink. ‘I don’t want a new one.’ She frowned again. I knew I should have stayed chewing on the last custard cream.

  The silence went on and I wished Mum didn’t work in the restaurant and that I was back in our old London home with Kayleigh who had let me watch TV after school and let me have crisps instead of the carrots and pasta Mum told her to give me. How had I ended up in this grumpy old lady’s house? I hoped she wouldn’t make me carry on with that stupid jigsaw. It was like a million pieces and she’d done, like, twenty-five of them and they were all blue.

  ‘I don’t have gloves for you,’ Mrs Maple said. ‘You’ll be fine, I’m sure, it’s not that long a time.’

  I frowned, not completely sure she was talking to me. Was this one of those times when I should keep quiet?

  She dried the teapot, returning it to its spot on the big wooden thing that she called the ‘dresser’. In London we didn’t have one, just kitchen counters like normal people, not a massive sort of wardrobe thing. She turned, like she was waiting for me to say something, a grey eyebrow raised.

  ‘OK…’ I said, not sure at all what I was agreeing to.

  She smoothed her hair, as if she was a bit nervous. ‘Well, come on then,’ she replied, moving across to a set of hooks that lined the wall down to the back door.

  Following her, I watched as she brought down a funny-looking apron dress thing that she tied over her clothes. ‘Will your mother be cross if you get your school clothes dirty?’

  I looked down in amazement, my sweatshirt covered in ink stains and juice I’d spilt at lunch and my grey shorts flecked with paint. ‘She wouldn’t notice,’ I replied, realising as I said it that Mum would be embarrassed. ‘I mean, she wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Well, best wear this anyway,’ Mrs Maple said, handing me an apron thing, edged with flowers and leaves.

  I took a step back. ‘I’m alright, thanks.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, it’s just an old one, overalls to stop us getting soiled.’

  What did this old lady think I wanted to look like? It was a girl’s apron. My toes curled in embarrassment. What if someone saw me in it? It was bad enough being teased for my accent, but this would make it so much worse. A million years ago it had been pink.

  ‘I’m really…’

  ‘Come on.’ Mrs Maple’s lines deepened between her eyebrows as she shook it in front of me, ‘Stop dawdling.’

  But, oh God, I…

  I took the girl’s apron thing and Mrs Maple had to fuss and show me where to put my arms, which was all wrong, like putting on a coat backwards. She tied it too tightly at my waist, but I was too miserable to say anything. It came down below my shorts so I was stood there basically wearing a pink flowered dress, bad hair, the taste of custard creams still on my tongue, no friends in the world, hanging out with an old lady in a dark, narrow corridor full of old boots. I just wanted to tear off the stupid thing and run straight out of there and back to my old life.

  ‘That should do it,’ she said in a satisfied voice as if I looked fine, which I did not. ‘Well, come on then.’ She paused at the back door, fumbling with the key to the lock at first. ‘No time, must push on,’ she said aloud.

  Why was she faffing around? She had dressed me in the pink thing and now she was wasting time just staring out of the small panes of glass. What was out there? Some rubbish tiny patch of outdoor space she would make me clean? A shed full of more figurines to dust? A tank of actual newts? My heart sank as I ran through the options.

  ‘It’s OK, it’s fine. He’ll be careful.’

  She was talking to herself again. It was well odd and before I could ask who she was speaking to, she had taken a breath and had opened the back door. Her body blocked out my view as I followed her out, and as she stepped to one side, for a second the sunlight blinded me. Then, as my eyes got used to it and I looked around at what I could see, I couldn’t help but let out the most enormous gasp.

  The house was small but the garden was massive. Huge. Although it was only as wide as the house it went on for miles. There was a glass shed at the bottom of it and that seemed like half a football field away. And the whole strip of bright green grass was lined with flower beds bursting with different colours: it was like a normal film that suddenly turned into a bright cartoon.

  Gaping, I moved onto the patio, some weeds poking between the paving stones and as I looked closer, I could see other things that were a little bit wrong: the tilted fence panel, a broken stone pot that needed moving, a ladder resting on its side, a panel missing in the roof of the glass shed.

  Mrs Maple was fussing over a set of pots nearby, bursting with thin green strands topped with purple flower heads. They gave off a really strong scent, familiar but I couldn’t name it.

  ‘Lavender,’ she told me as I approached.

  ‘Oh right, it’s nice,’ I said, surprised to see her face move into a totally different expression than her usual one. She was smiling, her eyes crinkling with the compliment.

  ‘Isn’t it? Such a wonderful scent.’

  ‘So…’ I carried on, looking at her, forgetting for a moment the pink dress and Daniel and Dad being miles away from home, just noticing the sun on my face, the bright colours around me. ‘What are we doing?’

  ‘Well, today is weeding. I’ll show you what to pull up and we can make a start. You don’t have gloves so perhaps you should stick to the ones here,’ she said, waving an arm to the patio. ‘Pull up any of them that you see in between the cracks and don’t leave any of the roots behind, that’s the key.’

  ‘OK, I can do that,’ I replied, staring round. I could already see loads.

  ‘Excellent.’ She smiled again! This was getting so weird.

  Kneeling on the stones, I moved around, carefully tugging on the ones I could see. Some were stubborn and broke off in my hands, others were pulled out easily. It felt really good, feeling them come out whole, thin, white roots waving in the breeze. My pile started to grow as I chucked one on top of the other, carefully moving to the next stone and the next, enjoying doing something easy, without thinking too much, on a nice warm day. It finally felt like summer would be here soon.

  Mrs Maple was bent over a flower bed. She took a long time pulling each weed up, rubbing her knuckles when she thought I wasn’t looking. I wondered if I should offer to do it for her. She was bent over again now, one hand on her lower back. Then she gasped, loudly, and I jumped up, a frown on my face: that hadn’t sounded good.

  ‘Are you alright?’

  She held a finger up, nodding slowly. ‘Fi— Ow!’

  As I went over, I noticed tears in her eyes, the blue brighter because of them. I didn’t know what to say. I hated it when Mum cried, it made me feel like my tongue couldn’t fit in my mouth.

  Mrs Maple winced, ‘F-fine, thank you, Billy,’ she said stiffly, rubbing at her back again. ‘I just get the odd twinge.’

  That hadn’t looked like a twinge to me. I sort of stayed next to her, looking around her enormous garden, at the number of flower beds, the number of plants, the amount of work she would be doing, and frowned. Poor woman, it was a lot. ‘Can I get you a glass of water or something?’

  ‘No, no, stop fussing.’ She was back to her normal voice, one that had me rushing over to the patio to carry on my weeding.

  We worked together like that for a while. I cleared the patio, my hands dirty, soil under my nails. Mrs Maple looked delighted, beaming.


  ‘You did that so quickly!’ she said, placing a hand on my shoulder. ‘You are a wonder!’

  I bit my lip, embarrassed to be so happy with the compliment. Something about Mrs Maple had changed in this garden, as if it contained a bit of magic.

  ‘Let me fetch you a trowel from the greenhouse and you can help me with the beds. We don’t have much time.’

  ‘What’s a trowel?’

  Mrs Maple laughed then, the first laugh I had ever heard from her. My eyes went wide at the noise: a soft chuckle, deep from her stomach. It made me grin.

  ‘It’s a small spade, good for digging out the weeds.’

  ‘Right!’ I smiled. ‘Well, I can get it,’ I offered, realising she was pointing to the glass shed right at the bottom of the long garden. Mrs Maple looked exhausted. Did she do all this on her own every day?

  ‘Lovely,’ she smiled back and something small shifted between us. ‘I’ll make a start on your dinner: I bought sausages.’

  ‘Sick.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ She froze. ‘Is that bad?’

  She never really looked worried about what I thought about things so I laughed at her face. ‘No, no, sick is good, you’re alright…’

  ‘Sick,’ she repeated, smiling as she said it, ‘how strange.’ Then she laughed again. I couldn’t help my eyes get all big: who was this woman?

  Stomach rumbling at the thought of the sausages, I set off, the shadows really long now as I headed over the grass towards the greenhouse. We’d been out in the garden for ages. Mum was going to be back from her shift soon and for the first time I didn’t mind if she was late. Normally I was staring at that clock in Mrs Maple’s kitchen but being in the garden felt different. As I moved past the flower beds I admired all the different colours and shapes. A fence panel with ivy clinging, a small treetop heavy with dark green leaves, funny cone-like pink flowers. The garden was so busy with plants, trees, pots, bees buzzing.