The Stopping Place

by Helen Slavin

  Bash and Jeannie relished the time when he began turning up an hour late, using the extra sixty minutes to have a cup of coffee together and breathe easily. Of course, his mother spoilt that with her dastardly plan to drop him off each day. She had the measure of her son, that was clear, and she seemed determined to do something about him. If he was going to be late then he was going to have to be dropped off, like a baby. Jeannie heard them from inside the shed. Her voice was a low bark, angry and stiff as she escorted him, police fashion, onto the premises.

  ‘Like a baby,’ she spat at him again. Jeannie could see him squirming. His face red. ‘Get on with it. Get me? Or it’s end of story.’ Her hand made a definitive slicing gesture. He made no response. She gave a frustrated grunt and with a chinkle of car keys was gone. He caught Jeannie looking through the crack in the shed door. He wouldn’t forgive that.

  Jeannie was in charge that morning, Bash had been summoned to County Hall to talk to Morag, who supervised and managed the Parks and Gardens. Troy was supposed to be laying in newspapers and organic matter in the sweetpea trench.

  ‘Shit shovelling,’ he complained.

  ‘Ready for planting out.’ Jeannie kept her calm and once he’d gone off with the spade and wheelbarrow she manned the till at the plant sales. She thought she’d be five minutes, tops, but the sun was out and had brought people into the park with thoughts of the bald spots and bare patches in their own gardens. Jeannie found it was nearly lunchtime and she was half-starved with the thought of her lunchbox and the piece of Geraldine’s chocolate cake.

  As Jeannie came through the gates of the walled garden she saw the spade abandoned in the trench, slumped over on the banked up earth. Troy was at the padlocked gate trying to pick it open with bent out wire. It was clear to Jeannie that Troy had seen Bash’s vanishing act. Danger. Danger.

  ‘Finished the sweetpeas then?’ Jeannie called to him, her voice firm and hard. He jittered away from the gate, dropping the wire. Then, seeing it was Jeannie, his edges smoothed.

  ‘No. But what you going to do about it?’ he challenged, swaggering towards her.

  ‘Tell your mum,’ Jeannie bit.

  ‘Bitch.’ He spat as he said it, the gob missing its mark. He couldn’t get anything right.

  ‘Me or her?’ Jeannie didn’t look back as she moved towards the potting shed. She didn’t feel hungry then. Didn’t eat the cake until nearly six when Bash got back and she cut it in half so they could share. Three quarters of an hour after Troy’s mum had come to drag him home.

  Troy had said at the start, in a very tiresome way, ‘I knows you,’ although he didn’t have any theories about how. ‘I knows you, I seen you,’ and Jeannie ignored him. But at last he realised where he’d seen her. That first morning, when the knowledge came to him, he was triumphant. On one level Jeannie Gaffney was relieved that he had, after all these weeks, found something to bloody smile about. Not that his smile was any real improvement on his scowl: the taint of nastiness made it look more as though someone had slashed his face open. He had a habit of licking his thin red lips exactly like an animal licking wounds.

  ‘Got your knickers on today then?’ was his opening gambit when she emerged from the potting shed. Jeannie didn’t twig his meaning, was only half listening. The general tone of everything he said was abusive so it didn’t seem anything had shifted. But Troy worried at it. Worried at her. On and on.

  ‘If you go down in the woods today,’ his cracked voice carried across the cold frames. Something about the childishness of the song struck her. Was Troy really singing ‘Teddy Bears Picnic’ as he worked? What was he, one of the seven dwarves? He whistled on. Jeannie felt a thin sliver of unease slice into her. She ignored it. But then he was up close, standing too close over her, legs astride, as she knelt in the border planting out the herbs.

  ‘You go down in the woods then?’

  Jeannie caught the meaning like a slap in the face.

  ‘Bare-arse bitch,’ he spat again and sloped off. Later, heading out on the trailer with Bash, he barged her as he picked up his jacket. ‘Badgerfucker.’

  And Jeannie could see her own face, ringed in the paper that week, that month, that year. Could feel the whited-out newsprint noose hanging about her now.

  He found new digs and jibes until, by the Thursday, he hit upon his masterpiece. ‘Want me to stick a cuckoo in that bushy nest of yours, Badgerbitch?’

  Jeannie was filled with poison. No more. She stepped forward, too close to him then.

  ‘You?’ she asked, harsh. He lifted his head back, as if looking down at an angered dog. Found he couldn’t step back because of the boxes of spring bulbs that had been delivered that morning.

  ‘You?’ she nudged closer, her breath pushed back at her from his face. She picked the secateurs from their loop on her belt. Made them glint on his face. White. Flash. Stab. Stab.

  ‘Let’s see it then.’ Glint. Glint. Flash. Stab. Troy’s edges wavered now, his face struggling to hold onto his cocky slashed-skin smile.

  ‘You’re fuckoo cuckoo you are,’ he blarted at her. Jeannie didn’t move. Then all it took was a subtle feint at him, her eyes unblinking. He flinched and inside Jeannie felt trumpets sound. He had flinched. She felt cruel. Wanted to make him do it again.

  ‘Fuckoo,’ he said, spooked, and pushed her out of his way. Jeannie’s balance never faltered. Troy’s foot caught on the edge of the lowest box of bulbs and he stumbled out of the potting shed.

  ‘Fuckoo.’ He thought he’d hit the mother lode with that one.

  So what, she thought. But, dammit, it ravelled into her nights. She dreamed she was running naked through the walled garden under the midnight sky. She was always running towards the locked gate. She shouldered it open and the forest opened deep below her. She always woke as she fell. Well, after all, that’s what everyone does in their dreams.

  Jeannie’s petty revenge was to make Troy do the most boring tasks and to smile with scorn when he showed he couldn’t do them. But her worst revenge, unintentional, was when she asked him to do the labels for the hardwood cuttings they’d just taken in the Italian garden. She thrust the marker pen at him. He did not take it; looked at her, his eyes flaring. With shame? Hatred? And she knew. He couldn’t write.

  Jeannie’s breath was taken away for a moment. She felt the blush burn through her as if she was paper igniting, she hadn’t meant to do this, it was an accident.

  ‘Fuckoo,’ he muttered, throwing down a trowel and clomping out of the shed to have a not-very-sneaky ciggie round the back. Bash had already found him there once or twice before and took a satisfying revenge by switching on the power hose and shouting ‘FIRE!’

  Troy never dared say his pet phrase when Bash was around.

  If Jeannie thought they had reached the lowest point she was sadly mistaken. She came back in the trailer with the prunings from the rose garden to find him, ciggie in mouth, riding around the walled garden on the motor mower. It was clear from the agonised screels that the blades were down, chewing up gravel, and somewhere a cog was trapped; some piston bent and contorted because the machine was screaming with a cold steely fury. The exhaust was billowing black smoke and when he saw her running towards him he cut across the dahlia bed. Jeannie’s pride. Her joy. He hit the scalloped edging at a bad angle and the mower tipped him, motor choking, wheels spinning as if it was scrabbling at the sky, trying to right itself.

  Jeannie was on him, anxious to see he wasn’t damaged. She didn’t want his mother’s face to become any more pinched and taut than Troy had already made it. As she grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, aware that the left side of his face had grazed across at least three feet of gravelled path, that he was dripping blood, she felt him rise beneath her. She didn’t have to lift him, he seemed to launch himself vertically, his face puce with anger.

  ‘FUCK YOU!’ he bellowed, one hand lashing out to grab her by the throat and dangle her in front of him like a rag doll as the other hand freed itself from a tangle
of massacred dahlias to land a punch. Jeannie felt her teeth give in her jaw, saw the black stars supernova. She was moving without walking as Troy hurled her backwards. His foot flew up at her. She turned herself away and still felt the imprint of the sole of his boot as it grazed up her back.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he spat and something fired in Jeannie. Her dangling legs swung upwards to kick against his waist. He was toppling and growling. His hand let go of her neck as his other arm flew up again, carrying another punch. Jeannie’s arm shot up unbidden and their bones cracked together like clubs. She was fighting back, pushing all her weight against the strength of him. Rage boiled and bubbled in both of them but she was losing. She could feel it. He was too big for her, too strong but SO WHAT, FUCK YOU TOO.

  The scalloped edging saved her from the killer punch, and sent her sprawling backwards into a fountained batch of cardoon. By which time Bash was there, his hand clutching the scruff of Troy’s neck, wrestling him off her, manhandling Troy along the side path into a small redundant outhouse and locking the door. Troy spat and battered like a trapped cat as Bash picked Jeannie out of the undergrowth.

  Patched her up. The leather of his hands. The bitter aroma of the antiseptic from the first aid box, bandages gone mouldy from too long in a damp, weatherbeaten shed. Not a word. Even when, as he leaned in to pick some bark from her eye their faces almost touched. As he leaned forward to reach back into the tin for the tin of plasters his body close against hers. Just the smell of him, the sweat and soap smell of him, made her feel better.

  Troy’s mother took him away in the back of her big car. Put him into the hatchback boot separated from the rest of the car by a dog fence. He almost protested. Hot faced, tantrummed out from his stop in the outhouse. But she pushed at his middle and he folded like paper, folded onto the hair-strewn dog blanket. Jeannie noticed that there were so many hairs it seemed as if the dog had been there only moments before and had suddenly vanished. Popped, perhaps.

  They drove off. Jeannie and Bash aware of Troy’s mother’s stinging tears. She had been trying so hard to hold on to her dignity. Had managed a severe nod before moving to the driver’s side, fumbling her keys from her pocket.

  Bash stood looking over the trail of destruction, the chewed-up beds, the broken cold frames. He lit up a cigarette. After a couple of drags he pulled a face as if it tasted bitter and dimped it out with his fingers before putting it back in his pocket.

  ‘Bugger this. We’re off down the boating lake,’ he said.

  They were heading to the island in the middle of the boating lake to root out some ground elder that was taking hold. For this they were supposed to be able to use the little motor boat that the boat-hire supervisor, Micky, used to fetch in errant boats, but there was an engine problem. Micky had been ‘keeping up the maintenance’ and had stripped it down. There had been ‘a problem’.

  ‘Problem is you haven’t got the map of putting it back, have you?’ Bash laughed. Micky drank deeply from a mug of tea, standing amongst the three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle of engine parts and oily mysteries.

  ‘Row out,’ Micky suggested with a knowing smile. ‘Lazy arse.’

  Bash gave a scornful laugh and then looked at the bright weather. The blue sky. The sun-sparkle on the water.

  As he loaded the kit he handed her an oar.

  ‘I’ll steer. You row.’

  Jeannie looked at him, uncertain. Confessed she’d never been in a rowing boat.

  ‘That’s buggered your plans.’ Micky held the boat against the dock.

  ‘Never?’ Bash said, looking as if this was a serious gap in her education. As if rowing a boat was something that should be on the curriculum, like past participles or quadratic equations.

  ‘Never. Don’t know how.’

  Bash was open mouthed. Then decisive. ‘Time you learned then eh?’

  ‘Ingenious.’ Micky laughed, shaking his head as Bash moved into the stern of the boat. He settled her on the bench, showed her how it was done and then they pushed off. He was the harshest of taskmasters.

  ‘For fuck’s sake Gaffney. Don’t be such a bloody girl about it.’ He leaned forward from his seat and took the oars, put his current cigarette into the corner of his mouth as he rowed and instructed. They moved the opposite way now. She watched his arms working, saw the indian-ink blue of his tattoo, the words old and blurred. Watched the flex and twang of sinews, of strength, of effort.

  ‘You’ve got to put your back into it. Forward and pull, forward and pull.’ He handed the oars back, gestured at her to get on with it. Busy untangling himself from the rudder strings, he had one intent eye on her technique. ‘Lean into it and pull back. That’s it. That’s the way, girlie. Use your strength.’

  And then he was surprised by her strength, rolled a fresh cigarette and gave her a round of applause. ‘You’ll do Gaffney. Knew you could.’

  Steering them round the lake, Jeannie losing herself in the physical effort, the sound and smell and cool of the water. Bash humming a tune that had been on the radio that morning.

  ‘This is the life eh? Getting in your stride now. Rowlocks to it, take us round again,’ and she rowed around and around the boating lake as the day grew humid and cloudy. They landed on the weed-choked island at last, Jeannie’s arms buzzing with the effort. There were more muscles to pull wrestling the ground elder, digging and stabbing and hacking and chopping. And then, of course, as the sky started to pink, she was rowing them back. They locked up the tools, set the prunings and rubbish ready for burning. Bash took the matches from the potting shed. Jeannie brewed coffee while they watched it burn into the evening.

  ‘Is there nothing you can’t do then Missus?’ he puffed cigarette smoke into the air between them. Winked.

  * * *

  Bash had been edgy the following week. He’d sneaked more cigarettes than usual, disgusted with himself each time, pinching out the cigarette after a few desperate puffs. Jeannie had a feeling it was the same cigarette, it just got shorter by tiny degrees.

  One afternoon she walked back from the tea rooms by the boating lake where she had taken her lunch. She was moving towards the greenhouses, ready to start pricking out the sunflower seedlings. There were big plans for an Arts Week event later in the summer, tying in with the art gallery and the museum. All the parks were going to participate. They’d drawn a Van Gogh theme. But as she turned she heard the gates creak, saw that Bash was locking them up.

  ‘You. Now,’ he said, moving past her. Businesslike. He was reaching deep into the sagging pocket of his jeans, pulling out a small key.

  The path had an earthen smell baked by the speckling of sunlight that tried to poke its way through the thick canopy of elderflower and hawthorn. There was a soft heat in the air as she followed Bash down the incline. It turned slightly and for a moment he was lost to her sight. By the time she rounded the curve she could see he was at the door to another shed, turning another key in another padlock. But he waited for her by the door, didn’t open it.

  ‘Going to show you something. Something important.’ His eyebrows raised up, earnest. He looked right into her face; then a brief glance over her shoulder as if he was anxious they might have been followed.

  The heat inside the shed was sultry. The light was Mediterranean sunlight hot. Made you want to stretch naked. He’d got the lamps rigged up and wired into the connector that they used for the Christmas lights in the stone grotto behind the shed. The hothouse heaters kept the forest of marijuana in a state of lush greenness. Bash showed her what he was doing, how to tend the plants.

  ‘Why are you showing me this, Bash?’ Jeannie was uneasy. She didn’t want to be part of a secret.

  ‘’Cause I reckon they’re onto me on account of that gobby little shite.’

  Jeannie felt a pang of guilt. It was her fault. For getting under Troy’s skin. This was Troy’s revenge. She’d tipped the balance again. Clumsy. Stupid.

  ‘And ’cause I trust you. Which, believe me, is saying something,’
he added. Jeannie said nothing, felt the spit dry in the back of her throat and knew it was nothing to do with the heat and the lamps and the claggy smell of the shed. I don’t trust me, she thought.

  Later Bash took a small paper bag from his inside pocket, rolled and lit a spliff and offered it to her. Jeannie didn’t smoke, never had. It didn’t smell appealing. It smelled fuggy and acrid. In the confines of the shed it began to make her head ache. The only effect it seemed to have on Bash was to make him smile like a dog dreaming. She felt so muzzy-headed later that Jeannie Gaffney hardly knew how she got home to the flat, only woke up, late in the night, as if she’d been asleep since she was seventeen and the forest and That Bloody Ryan Boy and Bash in the walled garden and the Secret Spliff Shed had all been a dream.

  A month later. Jeannie was in the greenhouse deciding that she hadn’t the heart to abandon the weaker sunflower seedlings. Bash had said she was to pick out the feeble and spindly ones and toss them onto the compost heap, but she just couldn’t. All the seedlings had made the effort even if some were more energetic than others. She couldn’t do it to them, not after all that hard work pushing up through the earth. Jeannie was going to plant the lot in the prepared bed they’d cut into the boring lawn that sprawled before Park Hall. She was loading the first few trays into the back of the trailer. She went back into the greenhouse for the next batch.

  When she turned there was a man standing in the doorway. Not the neat-haired marijuana man of old. No. This man wore a suit under a sludgy green raincoat. A white shirt. This man had expertly shaved hair to disguise approaching baldness.

  ‘Morning,’ he said, authoritative. ‘I’m looking for Colin Bash.’ His voice rumbling, crisp and enunciated.

  Like a Roman senator, perhaps. Or God.

  Rosmarinus officinalis

  rosemary

  for remembrance

  * * *