The Stopping Place

by Helen Slavin

  Only to be expected I suppose, after all those afternoons in the forest.

  Amaranthus hybridus

  green amaranth

  healing and invisibility

  * * *

  When she wasn’t at the college double digging beds for the stern tutor, Mr Mathieson, Jeannie Gaffney was heaving a sigh of relief in the nursery at Cromwell Park. Her first day there it felt as if she was taking a deep breath, sloughing off skin, and the feeling intensified as she walked from the park gates up the tarmac road, Park Hall in view, perched at the top of the hill.

  Then the curving right onto the gravelled carpark towards the wall. The heavy brown shed, doors slung open on hooks, a verandah filled with greenhouse staging and whatever perennials, evergreens and bulbs were for sale; above them the pokerworked sign, Cromwell Park Plant Sales. Beyond that the wall stretched long and high. Stone, with a wooden gate cut into it. No Admittance, it said, but Jeannie Gaffney pushed it open anyway. She had to put her shoulder to it, the gate was old and swollen.

  Inside it was another world. A long stretch of greenhouses along the top wall to the right of the gate. Below that, beds and terraces and cold frames. Now they would call it a micro-climate but then Jeannie wanted to call it home. She felt shaky suddenly, as if she’d sucked in too much air.

  ‘You all right?’ hissed a voice, through an inward breath of cigarette smoke. ‘You look a bit peaky.’

  Jeannie’s first view of Col Bash, he was standing in the doorway to a pent-roofed potting shed, his hands claggy with soil, his fingers pinching delicately at a newly lit roll-up. He wiped at his nose with his sleeve, keeping his muddied hands out of the way. Jeannie saw him speckled all over with tiny black dots, falling inward like stars. Don’t faint, she told herself, take a deep breath. So she took in a deep breath of coffee and dirt and tomato stalks.

  ‘Yes. Thanks. I’m Jeannie Gaffney.’ She could hear the uncertainty in her voice, as if she was asking him to confirm it—I am her, aren’t I? He nodded his head toward the shed.

  ‘You can help me finish up in here. I’ve coffee brewed.’

  He offered his hand then. Muddy as it was. ‘Col Bash.’

  Jeannie looked into his face, saw a last tiny black star imploding by his eyes and didn’t hesitate to grasp his hand. Shake firmly. And a smile stretched catlike across his dirty face.

  ‘You’ll do, Gaffney.’

  Inside the long potting shed there was a two-ring stove with the pot of coffee almost always on the go. It was one of those metallic cone pots and that first day Bash showed her how to fill it with water and coffee grounds and put it to boil. He brushed the worst of the dirt off his hands before reaching down two large thick mugs. Blew dead woodlice out of one.

  Jeannie Gaffney potted up cuttings as instructed. Later they dug out a couple of beds together, Bash watching her carefully, making the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. But he was watching how she worked, Jeannie could see. And she wanted to do well. No more kerfuffle for me, she thought. And if Col Bash thought she looked a bit familiar and hadn’t he seen her somewhere before, he didn’t say so.

  Later, standing amongst rhubarb forcing pots in the back end of the largest of the cold frames, he gave her a long thoughtful stare.

  ‘I’ve seen you, you know. You’re not Bill Holdway’s youngest are you?’

  Jeannie shook her head and as she did she saw the light dawn in Col Bash’s eyes. She waited for him to start on about the forest chick story that he’d probably read over and read over each time he had to wait in the Golden Monkey Chinese Takeaway. Jeannie braced herself and he saw it. But the light flashed electrically bright and burned out. Then he reached into his pocket for his cigarettes again, with his lopsided smile.

  ‘Nah. Forget it. My mistake.’

  They got on well. Bash seemed to forget she was female. There was nothing he didn’t deem her capable of or trust her with. They put up sheds, they dug out beds, they hacked and sawed and trimmed and mowed. Jeannie loved to ride the motor mower, starting her stretch down by the boat hire sheds at the lake and mowing her way across the wide open sward of parkland heading back up towards Park Hall, buzzing and clipping as she went.

  With her protective earmuffs on, all sound was dulled and Jeannie Gaffney vanished into her own world. She could hear music some days. It would be some Schubert impromptu that she loved, or the Elgar they’d all been playing the night before. Her father and his small ensemble, together in the college rehearsal rooms, fellow lecturer Geraldine on the cello, Jeannie at the piano, their students on violins and violas, a clarinet, a flute. The evening bending and stretching around them; Jeannie transported. The smells of the college seeped into her skin. The wood polish. A leatherish smell she could never quite place. The rotted smell of old flowers in a vase on a far table at the back. The dust of the tall brick red curtains. Rosin. The soured oniony scent of that blonde girl’s armpits as her elbow sawed up and down, back and forth. All of this weaving through the music. The wrong notes, the repetition, the going back, the skipping forward.

  Nothing like the stone cold of the agricultural college, where Mr Mathieson disliked her and Jeannie ignored it as far as she dared. The stone cold lecture rooms where she breathed in must and mould, where she found she was photosynthesising the knowledge in spite of him. The bright cold spring in the nursery fields behind the College, where she worked in the soil and longed for the moment she’d be released back into the wild, to go home. To the walled garden.

  In the walled garden everything they had sown was beginning to grow. They were asked to help with a vegetable growing project for local schoolchildren.

  ‘Bloody hate kids. You do it, Gaffney,’ Bash said one morning, snapping the last biscuit in half for them to share. ‘You’re a woman. That’s your territory.’ And Jeannie helped them plant courgettes and tiny carrots while Bash disappeared out through the back gate, wandered off down the overgrown path with a wheelbarrow and a rake. As the school parties arrived in their neat uniforms and began watering and pinching out and sitting cross-legged to draw the new shoots and label all the parts of the plants, Jeannie found herself looking towards that back gate and wondering where it led. It was overgrown and the padlock was rusted. She knew because yesterday, when Bash had been out on the motor mower she’d checked it out. The gate peeled its paint. She could peer through a tiny slit where the planks of the door had started to warp away from each other. There was a dirt path. Just. It looked like a badger run.

  But she did not ask. She did not say. Bash was older, nearly forty, and he was keeping her secret. She would let him have his.

  But his vanishing act started to throw her. She’d have been busy all morning in the rose garden and she’d come back to the walled garden and the shed and find no coffee brewed and no sign of Bash. There’d just be a spade upright in the earth. And her eye was always drawn to the back gate. She thought she could smell the damp earth under the brambles and hawthorn, could smell the green edge to the leaves that sheltered the way. Could smell the coffee and soap scent of Bash on the breeze.

  If she worked in the beds or frames at these times she made certain she had her back to the gate. She didn’t want to see him arrive back. He would suddenly appear behind her with a mug of coffee and a set of instructions about tying up the pear trees on the south-facing wall, or what they might do about the bindweed that was strangling everything in the borders by the boating lake. Jeannie looked into his face and could only think of the word ‘secrets’. As though it was written on his face.

  * * *

  It was nearly Easter and she was potting up daffodils and narcissi for sale at the EasterFest in the Park. They’d got hundreds of them to prettify in terracotta pots with yellow ribbon. The man blocked out the light in the doorway. His shoulders made a sagging square in the soft leather of his well-worn, well-kept jacket. He had clipped hair, a beard and moustache so expertly groomed they might have been barbered with a set square. These were the bare outlines she c
ould see from his silhouette, the details of his face were obscured by the sunlight behind him.

  ‘Bash around?’ was all he said, and she directed him out to the bottom rank of cold frames. He didn’t stay long. Five or ten minutes later she looked up as he walked past the door again on his way to the gates. She heard an engine gun and tyres screeching on gravel.

  Later when a muscular roll of ten pound notes fell out of Bash’s pocket and landed at her feet she picked it up, handed it back. There was just a moment as she looked into his face. It was important for both of them. Jeannie felt the secret unearth itself. I know. You know. Nothing more needed to be said. Jeannie turned back to tying the ribbons.

  She was deep in the maze walk, busy putting up the last of the new bird boxes. Jeannie was thinking about the blue tits and finches that visited, hoping that they’d be back this year, that they’d enjoy their new homes. Bash seemed to pop up out of the earth.

  ‘You’re saying nothing then?’ he was edgy. She had never seen him edgy before. It was as if he’d found something he might deem her not capable of at last; something he might not be able to trust her with. Jeannie looked at him for a moment, his hair slicked back as usual, striped through on just one side with grey.

  ‘About what?’

  He hesitated. His eyes didn’t dart around, they held hers, intent. Jeannie turned away first, reached for the last of the nest boxes from the back of the trailer. Bash held the ladder, handed her the hammer. ‘If I tell you, you can get me into trouble.’

  Jeannie felt challenged. This was not what she wanted to happen. She wanted the balance, the equilibrium. And it came to her. ‘If you tell me, you could get me into trouble.’

  She looked at him as she took the hammer, squinted in the pockled sunlight through the trees. Bash grinned, broad and clever. He ruffled her hair, as if she was an apprenticed lad. ‘Fuckin’ hell, someone screwed your head on right. You’ll do Gaffney.’

  Jeannie thought she would do. She would do very nicely thank you. Things were straight now. There was not knowledge but there was awareness. All she knew was that since starting work at the walled garden she slept deeply and well. In the mornings, winter or summer she was itching to pull on her shoes and her jacket and head out. Whatever Bash got up to was outside the wall. Let him get on with it. She did not want to tip the balance.

  * * *

  Jeannie thought Mr Mathieson was standing just a centimetre too close. He was almost having to squint down his nose to focus on her. He was wearing his clean wellies, the wellies he hosed off at the standpipe near the old stable. He was wearing his checked shirt and his jumper and over that his waxed waistcoat pitted with pockets, some that poppered and some that zipped. But Jeannie always seemed to see him with a riding crop. A crop that he snapped at her. A crop that didn’t exist but seemed to catch her on the side of the face whenever he spoke with her.

  Jeannie was afraid of him. Mr Mathieson didn’t think there was a place for women in horticulture. Floristry, yes. He seemed to vent this prejudice only on Jeannie Gaffney. There were two other women on the course, Abbie and Tanya, but Mr Mathieson couldn’t reach them. They were very far away in a little pink universe of their own, as Mr Mathieson put it. Not that Tanya and Abbie cared about the abuse or the scorn. They were oblivious. But Jeannie did care. So he punished her.

  She was doing very well in spite of him. Other tutors were supportive and helpful, coaching her further, recognising that she had a talent, that it came naturally. Not Mr Mathieson. He marked her as harshly as he dared.

  Then he missed a session because he was in a meeting with the course manager, Alan. After that he marked her less harshly but more grudgingly. Generally he marked in green ballpoint. He wrote her grades and markings in red. They have made me do this. You are still worthless, the red ink seemed to say.

  Alan called at the house one evening. Ted let him in, showed him into the garden where Jeannie was filling beer traps in Geraldine’s new herb garden.

  ‘I wanted to offer you a sideways move,’ Alan began. Jeannie could barely hear him above her heartbeat, her blood turned to Niagara Falls. She felt thick and light in the same instant.

  ‘Oh?’ Her voice came out very quiet, very small.

  ‘Thought you might be interested in joining Amy Fitz’s tutor group. For your final term. What do you think?’

  Jeannie felt sick. Panicked. What had she done? This was to do with Mr Mathieson.

  ‘Have I…is something wrong?’ She was tentative, imagining she was maybe moments from being asked to leave college. Asked to leave her placement at Parks and Gardens.

  ‘No. No, god’s sake no Jeannie…Look, I can be honest with you. It’s felt, that is all the course staff, we feel that it would be better if you left Mr Mathieson’s tutor group.’

  She couldn’t control her face as the blood drained out of it. The vomit of panic lurched up into her throat like a dog at a gate.

  Alan said quickly, ‘For your benefit. Don’t misunderstand…You are not the problem. I can only apologise Jeannie, for not having dealt with this sooner.’

  ‘No. That’s fine.’ Jeannie heard the words coming out of her mouth.

  ‘Seriously Jeannie. Amy would love to have you. She’s been impressed with your work on the foundation module on garden design you’ve been doing. This isn’t a problem. This is a solution.’

  Jeannie couldn’t do it. She knew. It would be running away. He would have won.

  ‘No. That’s all right. Thanks. But it’s just a couple of months. I’ll…’ She hesitated; what would she do? ‘I’ll stay where I am.’

  Alan looked fazed. Jeannie could feel her smile wobbling. She was willing him to go. Go away. Leave me to it. She had had no wish to get Mr Mathieson into trouble. It was her problem. She could cope with it.

  When August came, she passed her examinations in spite of Mr Mathieson. The day she came into college for the results she left it until the last minute. Finished her day at Cromwell Park first and walked up instead of catching the shuttle bus, but Mr Mathieson had waited her out. Standing sentinel in the common room, her envelope in his hand instead of placed alphabetically on the desk. She would have to take it from him. She had done exceptionally well and she saw that it galled him.

  What she didn’t see was that he felt beaten; he had not driven her away or made her give up. That last day, he should have been out at the golf course with an old school friend and instead he belittled himself waiting and waiting for her and in the end he did not get a reaction. She did not smirk or rant or rail or have any parting shot at all. She didn’t know she had won.

  A celebration for the outcome. Champagne. Dad laughing in the garden with Geraldine. His face scrumpled up. The laugh loud and uproarious, the soft fall of his fringe as his head threw back, the slap of his hand on the garden chair. The wheezing amusement and Geraldine, still in the middle of her story, reaching across her hand, touching his arm, her eyes looking at him with love and brightness.

  ‘Hang on Ted, that’s not it…that’s not it…wait…listen…’ and her own mirth, hardly able to speak. And Jeannie drying the pots in the kitchen, hearing the sounds reflected off the open kitchen window and thinking that she couldn’t remember the last time that Dad had laughed that hard. Couldn’t get out of her head the picture of Geraldine’s neat and freckled hand, the garnet dress ring on the fourth finger, like a ripe blackberry. The tenderness of that gesture. The way they fitted. The way the lights had come on inside her dad.

  That was when Jeannie walked past the garden flat in the row of redbrick Victorian villas on the road running alongside the park boundary. To Let. And Jeannie found herself in the estate agent’s asking about looking around. Saw the view through the bedroom window to the garden. Saw the view through the French doors in the tiny living room, out to the garden. Beyond, the green of the park. Liked the way the light fell through the skylight in the kitchen extension. Found herself thinking about sitting in that garden to have breakfast.

&
nbsp; For those were the days when Geraldine came round in the evenings and Jeannie felt squeezed out of the old kitchen at home. Felt squeezed out of the house because it wasn’t hers. Felt she’d squeezed her dad into a different life. Maybe it was time for them both to spread wings.

  So she put down the deposit and the first month’s rent and Geraldine bought her a box of kitchen utensils. They shared a look over the serving spoons and spatulas, Jeannie aware of the significance of the present. Geraldine didn’t fudge it, she laughed. As she did the light caught in the flecks of grey amongst the deep auburn of her hair. The grey strands flashed like spun steel. Jeannie knew then that someone else was thinking about what was good for Dad.

  Dad was sleepless. Jeannie came down to the kitchen because she could smell the coffee and was thinking about Bash, dreaming of him unlocking the back gate, of him turning and looking at her. In the kitchen she made toast and said simply to Dad, ‘It’s a rite of passage.’ And was completely understood.

  * * *

  Then it all got turned on its head when some idiot at the council sent the lad for work experience.

  Lazy. Moaning. Losing every bit of kit that wasn’t nailed down or pegged up. Troy was his name, and he was the bane of their life. No more coffee because it pained them both to have to sit in the shed with the whining, sour youth. He couldn’t do anything unsupervised and so their lives became a rota of babysitting. Every task he was set seemed to take four hours longer than it should, because it had to be done and redone and done over.

  Jeannie found herself one bright May day wanting to take the spade he was bitching over and whack him around the head with it. They could dig a trench and bury him and see what hideous weeds grew out of him. It would be something rampant and full of thorns with sap that would raise welts on your skin. Troybane, Jeannie called it in her head.