by Clay, Josie
“That's not kosher, is it?” I said, turning towards the till.
Feeling more than passable on a cocktail of whisky and painkillers, I phoned my friend, Pip. She told me that unlike her, my default setting was to be with someone, hence the parade of lovely but unsuitable partners. This wasn't derogatory, merely a fact. She also maintained I was special and, although obsessive, usually approached situations from a point of sanity – my nature could be construed as thorough in some contexts. I was a rational individual, she insisted, who was simply frustrated by the limitations of others.
And so, galvanised with these garlands and altered by medication and alcohol, I decided it would be a good time to ‘phone Nancy. My confidence deflating incrementally with each ring, just about to hang up when the answer ‘phone kicked in.
'Hi, this is Nancy, please leave a message'.
I slammed the ‘phone down, processing what I hadn't heard...
Broken ribs notwithstanding, Quincy and I were changing the space at the back of a minimalist yet cosy flat in Hackney, for which I'd designed an appropriate garden: a spaced out grid of square, concrete slabs with grass in between, an oak deck and swathes of purple and silver planting.
On our break we sat munching sausage sandwiches, while Quincy read 'Discworld' by Terry Pratchett.
“Quince” I said, “I need to tell you something”. He looked up, good natured and I noticed the deep lines that had appeared of late, scoring his handsome face, the bagginess around his eyes and his smashed up, scaly hands. He scratched his ear like a cat, something he always did when he knew he should pay attention.
“You know, Min” he said, “you're not getting any younger are you?” Notoriously undiplomatic.
“How old are you now?”
“Thirty seven”.
“You've got some fearsome work ethic”.
“So have you” I countered.
“Darlin, I'm just a Methodist” he said, splaying his hands. “You're positively Calvinistic”.
Dear old Quince, instinctively facilitating.
“Quince, I'm tired” I said and with this admission, tears spilled onto my boots. “I don't just mean today, I mean always. What I'm trying to say is that I'm tired of all this”.
“I know darlin” he said, closing his book and adjusting his glasses to better examine a splinter in his thumb. “You should take it easy for a while ...rest yourself”. His kind eyes assuring me it was cool. “Anyway” he continued imperiously, “I've been thinking of applying for a job - would you give me a reference?”
“Of course” I said, getting to my feet. “Come on Quince, let's wind this up”.
The client returned that afternoon and surveyed his new garden, picturing barbecues, no doubt, and ambient evenings.
“It's spot on, Minette”. But his eyebrows accented acute and grave. “But, can't you do one of your things?”
Heart blooming because I knew what he was getting at.
“One of my things?”
“Yes, you know, one of your twists ...your installations, something unique and correct”.
From time to time, I felt a garden wasn't quite finished, it needed crowning. And so, I would interrogate the client, carefully probing their predilections and limitations before presenting them with a proposal, adding dimension to both the garden and themselves. It might be an edifice of breeze blocks, carved into a monolith and rendered in white mortar, or two upright sleepers with a cross member, resembling a Shinto shrine. Or rusty steel 'H' lintels, set at angles and planted with grasses. Never quite knowing what I was going to do, my creations had so far gone down well.
“OK, did you have anything in mind?”
“My dear” he said, “I'll leave it entirely up to you”.
On this occasion, I had a clear concept. The client had confided he had a seven year old son he seldom saw since his ex-wife had moved to France and he missed him greatly. I sent Quincy to the skip to retrieve the plastic toddler pedal car we'd found crouched in the undergrowth. We'd chucked dozens of them over the years.
“It's a bit bashed up” he said.
“All the better” I smiled enigmatically.
“What's the plan, guv?” Quincy asked as we shouldered colossal lumps of wood through the house.
“I'm taking a chance”.
.
Placing the pedal car on the lawn, pacing around it, spraying stars of line-marker at intervals. “Dig here”.
We set ten chunky oak beams upright in the ground in a square around the toy and drilled holes along their length at regular intervals, through which we threaded thick, zinc studding bars until we had formed a huge, glittering, beautiful cage. The pedal car unreachable, so there it waited, poignant, indifferent, the grass around it unmowable – I would scatter annual meadow seeds there.
“I must say” Quincy said, “you've surpassed yourself, Min”.
The client was spellbound, waxing effusively about how it evoked the same feelings he had when he looked at photos of his son, memories locked in squares. How his son was changing, becoming evermore distant, but when he visited, he would see the little pedal car and remember his father's place in his life. He was quite overcome ...bless.
He was also Simon Sweet, the curator of 'White Frame', an important conceptual art gallery in Shoreditch.
I'd worked out I could pay half of my debt to the taxman next year, but even so, I didn't have a penny to my name and still owed a thousand pounds. As I opened the next threatening letter, I knew I was in deep shit. Perhaps it hadn't been such a good idea to throw in the towel at this point ...I still had the teaching job though.
School was very different in my day, the only physical contact from our teachers a ruler across the knuckles or a board rubber cuffed to the head.
The children swarmed around me, taking my hands and hugging my waist as if I were Princess Anne on a royal visit to Tuvalu.
“Minette” Noor said, “can we harvest our radishes yet?”
“Well, let's see if they're ready”. Squatting with a trowel, incredulous gasps as I prised up the pink jewels. Noor hastily gathered them up and washed them under the tap.
“Sweet”, she said, tentatively grazing the flesh over her new incisors and then, taking a proper bite. “Hot!”
All hesitantly offered the radishes up to their mouths with mixed results.
“Yuck!” said Christopher, spitting a morsel into the dirt. There followed peas (eaten instantly), mini carrots held aloft in small fists and little gem lettuce, quickly bundled into carrier bags. Vegetables became currency, as a complex bartering system evolved until each child had a full complement of produce, except Christopher, whose 'plumpkins' weren't yet ready. He ended up with a bag of baffling beetroot.
Setting out their harvest as if they each had a stall, they held lollo rosso above their heads, wig-like, pulling camp faces as I took photos for myself.
I'd forgotten quite how gratifying children could be ...plus, how easy it was to blow their minds.
The trend, once again, for children to have long hair, just like in the 70s, when my curly fancy must have hatched. As a child, I'd listen fascinated to my mother's accounts about how she'd tried to kill me. My conception an accident, my parents preferred their own company, like their drink, undiluted. But the Catholic hotchpotch of ignorance, superstition and cruelty to which my terrifying grandmother subscribed, forbade abortion in the civilised way, forcing my mother to hurl herself from tables, punch her own stomach and guzzle plenty of gin, a habit that stuck.
Despite her best efforts, I arrived punctually. My development and transit, according to Mum, ruining her body forever. Flawless, except for a heart-shaped birthmark on my thigh. “The Queen of Hearts, the nurses called you” my mum snorted scornfully.
So there I was, pink, large and almost perfect, with an embarrassment of golden hair, which she promptly cut off in case people thought me older than I was and therefore, in her words, retarded.
Throughout my childhood, G
randma implied long hair encouraged sluttish tendencies, and so I was always close cropped, as if I had nits. Gamine, kind people said. Sometimes, it would be allowed to grow out into an unflattering Norman conquest-style pudding basin. Other children’s, flowing manes streamed across the playground when we played 'Black Beauty'. Even scabby kneed British Bulldog boys rippled with luxuriant curls, tails, flicks, fringes, afros. Just as well really, otherwise I might have thought I was one. When Grandma died, my mother danced.
Chapter 8
For some reason compelled to open the thick, vellum envelope with a knife ...unfolding the creamy paper respectfully. It exuded peppery bergamot, like Earl Grey tea.
'Dear Minette,
I do hope this finds you well. I cannot convey to you how much pleasure the garden continues to give me. I knew at the start when you first presented your designs that I was in safe hands and also, in the presence of an artist. Therefore, I would be honoured if you were to accept my humble request to join me for supper (nothing fancy), so that we may enjoy the garden before the summer dwindles altogether. Does Thursday, 15th suit?
I understand you are busy, but my invitation is heartfelt and I would very much like to discuss your thinking behind the marvellous construct and would be most interested to learn of any future projects you have planned.
Yours,
Simon Sweet
'Oh Lordy' I thought.
A dress or at least a skirt was required for a date such as this. For that's what it was, a date. I didn’t own either. Then there was the issue of footwear; I owned only boots and slippers, as if I had just two modes.
He should take me as I am I thought. Hopefully it would put him off.
Wearing my usual arrangement of jeans, a checked shirt over a white t-shirt and my Blundstones, I drove down Kingsland Road in Fritz, for he was Fritz again, having eradicated the furious bitch-mobile myself with a fresh coat of pea green, or 'summer parsley' as the colour chart would have it.
“Welcome, Minette” he beamed, arms spread wide as if to embrace me.
“Hi” I said, offering a bottle of Australian Shiraz from Costcutters. No class.
He steered me into the garden where we settled into antique steamer chairs with batik cushions and he filled my flute with Bollinger. Having previously only seen him in a suit, I was surprised to see him in the coolest t-shirt ever; pistachio green, emblazoned with 'Suffragette City' in magenta, Princeton type.
“I love that” I said, eyeing it covetously.
A small man, shorter than me, his balding head shaved, but sizeable sideburns added an ironic, caddish twist. He fed me salmon with samphire, followed by a subtle syllabub, while we investigated common ground and then ventured into the more challenging territory of art and literature. Attentive and kind, enduring my half-baked concepts and crackpot theories with patient amusement. He talked about his childhood ...sublime, and he quizzed me about my art degree . He found it fascinating I'd financed myself, holding down four jobs, my parents long since out of the picture.
“What do you think about installing a light within the pedal car structure?” he asked, “so that I can see it at night from my window?”
“Simon, there's a fine line between haunting and just plain creepy”.
This prompted him to slap his knee with mirth.
“You're extraordinary” he said.
We gazed at the garden in silence, a smile playing around his lips as his eyes fell to my boots.
“I'd very much like those boots of yours” he said. “May I see one?”
“They've almost had it” I said, prising one off and handing it over. He examined it as if it were a vintage Chateau Margaux.
“These boots encapsulate you” he said.
“Yeah ...knackered”.
He batted the comment away.
“They speak of hard work and integrity, they possess much character. This is art; in the right context, I could sell them for a fortune”.
“I tell you what, Simon, when I can afford to buy a new pair, you can have them”.
“Do you promise?”
“I promise”.
“I would like you to have this, Minette”, slipping an envelope into my hand. I'd held enough of these to know it contained a serious amount of notes. When I protested, he became impatient and reasoned when he had done a good job, he received a bonus and that my work merited reward. His cheek, seemingly smooth, prickled my skin as we kissed goodbye.
Cross legged on the floor in my bed/living room, one thousand pounds in twenties stacked before me, beside the necromancy of numerals and crowns.
That night, I dreamed I was in the carpeted claustrophobia of a conference room. I was meant to speak on something I knew nothing about – I felt scared and a fraud. Gradually though, I realised no one, no matter how corporate and professional, knew what they were doing either; the whole affair based on bluff and bluster. It was as if the rules of some complex game had been revealed to me.
This segued into that landscape where everything was out of kilter, as through a fish-eye lens. Sea soaring higher than the land, shimmering like a tsunami on pause and people pluckily swimming up to its quivering vertices. A small hand crept into mine and looking down, there was Sasha, her curls bouncing as she led me doggedly towards an ersatz Belle Époque hotel, where in the darkness, Nancy enfolded me in a purple, beaded quilt. We tumbled to the floor, turning like a top, the tightening material squeezing our bodies together. My ribs cracked as the silk swaddling bound us ever closer, forcing our hot breath into each others' faces, our very cheekbones knitting together like fossils fused under eons of compression. We resonated through a fabric of galaxies, achieving critical mass. I shuddered to consciousness on the crest of a rolling orgasm. For a split second, snatching at the tail of the dream as it receded, I understood everything in the cosmos and kept the fragment in the fist of my mind.
The buzzer summoned me down the wobbly ladder to the communal front door where I took delivery of a brand new pair of Blundstone 500s, stout brown, size 7. An envelope – 'Remember our deal? Simon x'. Plus the freshly laundered pistachio green t-shirt with the magenta Suffragette City motif ...it was a red letter day.
Children and parents sauntered from the playground in ethnic groups, consolidated by vegetables. Those with Caribbean roots toted bags of calaloo and Scotch bonnet; the Chinese , pak choi and spring onions; the Indians, coriander and green chilli; while the Arabs favoured courgettes and beans.
I could hardly wait for next year and my fresh batch of kids as I gathered mini forks and pint-sized spades and hung them in the shed, which although I'd built it only two years ago, had the inspirational reek of ancient earthy moss.
“Knock, knock”. Mrs Matthews' hand waved round the door.
“Who's there?” I said playfully.
“It's me, Claire Matthews” she said, missing the point.
Mrs Matthews, the Head Teacher, had gained many plaudits for this project.
“Minette, I wanted to thank you for all your marvellous work” she said . “The children have really taken to you”.
“Thanks” I said, looping a yellow hose between hand and elbow. Sniffing a catch though, I squinted suspiciously like a yokel.
“I wondered what your plans for next term might be?”
“Well, there won't be much to do over the winter, we'll just put the plots to bed for this year”.
“I see” she said. “It's just that one of the mothers, you may know her, Helen – Cosmo's mum, has volunteered to run the session next year”.
I knew Helen. She knew jack-shit about growing stuff and focused all her attention on Cosmo.
“And with our budgets the way they are...” she added.
(Fuck, fuck, fuck).
“I understand” I said.
She came towards me, clutching my arm, raptor-like. “I'll give you a glowing reference, of course, should you need it”.
Barely able to contain any more shit, I managed to make room for a little
more.
“Thank you” I said.
Driving home, I repeated the word cunt twenty times as I assessed my financial situation ...it was desperate. All I had now was the vestiges of a maintenance round, which wasn't even beer money, plus there was nothing for Nancy.
Sunday morning, up at five. I loaded Fritz and drove to Enfield where I sold my power tools and some of my paintings at a car boot sale. The things that defined me raised £187.32.
It's because you saw my fragility, isn't it? You thought I was a robust, rakish sort of boy. But I'm only a girl, not enough for you, or perhaps too much. One day, I'll meet you on equal terms, when I've evolved, when I am better, altered. In the meantime, the light doesn't die, Nancy.