Grow
Page 26
‘You fucking bitch! You traitor slut!’ He re-balances the iron rod, bouncing it his palm. Overhead, the roar of rotor blades. Someone shouts through a loudhailer.
Dana is almost in front of the well when Carl launches at her. She runs back on herself, wrong-footing Carl for the split second that I need. With all my strength, I hurl my body against Carl’s side, driving into him just below his shoulder. He takes two, three steps sideways and I keep pushing, my vision split and pulsing from the pain in my arm. Through the snowdrops, leaving smears of mud on their bowed heads, into the red-leafed bush he goes, trying to get a foothold. I stop, falling to my knees, my body beginning to shut down.
To steady himself, Carl takes one more step backwards, into the bush. Watching me fall at his feet, his eyes narrow again, and he raises the rod ready to finish me off.
There’s a wet crunch. The boards on top of the old well must have crumbled like dust.
Then, three things happen at once.
Two policemen appear on top of the wall and drop heavily into the garden.
Dana throws her arms around my neck and we fall, panting, to the wet grass.
Carl’s eyes widen, then, along with the rest of him, disappear into the ground.
The bush leaves resettle themselves above where Carl stood. A hollow clang echoes up a second later as the iron rod hits the bottom of the well.
Even against the blast of the rotor blades, for a second or two I hear only my own heartbeat fast in my ears. Then there’s a shout from the bush.
Their tasers raised as they peel back the foliage, the policemen discover that Carl hasn’t fallen completely down the well; he’s wedged in the top, his arm crooked over the brickwork. One policeman, kneeling down, holds Carl under the shoulder. He screams.
‘He’s popped his shoulder. Maybe his collarbone too. We’ll need help here,’ says the policeman to his colleague, who radios to the helicopter overhead. It pitches to one side and flies off.
The first policeman, returning his attention to Carl, tells him it’s going to be a bit of a wait. Carl screams again as the policeman’s grip tightens. ‘Get comfy,’ is the policeman’s stoic reply.
The second policeman turns to us, gingerly lifting my arm to check my elbow. The sparks and white lights come back each time he touches it, bringing my arm delicately across my chest. He tells me to hold it there and, taking off his jacket, gets Dana to help him slip it underneath me.
‘You OK, Miss? Not hurt all?’
Dana shakes her head, then turns to me, ‘It’s over. It’ll be OK, Josh. I promise. It’s over.’
I smile, or try to.
Dana’s smiling too. ‘Look.’
I turn my head. Beneath the wall, beyond the remains of the crocuses scuffed and scattered by the policemen’s heavy boots, a broken row of short, green spears are poking up out of the ground. At the top of each is a swell of papery skin and, from one or two, a waxy, yellow flower is emerging with a brilliant gold trumpet at the centre. They haven’t all come up – I probably put some of the bulbs in too deep, or too shallow – but in a weak ray of sunshine that’s coming through the gap in the wooden hoarding, the daffodils that I planted are dancing.
SIXTY SEVEN
There’s explaining to do, after my arm is X-rayed and examined and put into a plaster cast. Sargant Prangle sits awkwardly in a plastic chair next to my hospital bed, her notepad on her knee, and asks question after question about the chase, about Carl hitting me, about how he fell down the well. Those are the words she uses again and again – ‘he fell down the well’, never ‘you pushed him.’
Mum sits on the other side, holding my good hand, stroking and squeezing it. She only speaks to agree with Sargant Prangle about how we should have stayed home and called the police. It was Mum who did that, in the first few seconds after Dana and I left. And she was right.
‘Thanks, Mum.’
She smiles a little, but won’t meet my eye.
Dana is quiet as well, leaning against the opposite wall of the hospital room. When she arrived in A&E, Mum had hugged her first, patting her shoulders and down her arms as if to check she wasn’t broken. Then she had thanked the two paramedics who had brought us in, then she looked to me strapped to the gurney.
She had looked sad, exhausted and drained. Her grey face is only just now starting to regain some colour as I try to reassure her, again, that I’m fine.
I suppose it’ll be a while before she believes me.
*
The next day, what happened is on the news. It’s not the headline, but after a couple of more urgent stories the reporter turns to our sleepy town, and there’s a police photo of Carl, then shots of Mr Walters being led from his house in handcuffs and manhandled into the back of a police car. He’s ranting about freedom of speech and is cut off by the reporter’s voice again and a helicopter view of the garden – our garden – from above. They’ve put a square, white tent over the well. Dana gasps when she sees that they’ve pulled the bush up to get to it; its branches and red leaves are lying on their side against the wrong wall. Then there’s Sargant Prangle talking in front of a bunch of flashing bulbs and microphones. She says that a violent and divisive hate crime has been avoided. Dana and I aren’t mentioned – Sargant Prangle’s idea.
*
Going back to school is a bit strange, especially how I explain my arm. Alan and Vince vanish overnight. Apparently, they found a bunch of alt-right and racist content on their school accounts. I didn’t think they were that stupid, but I have some idea of who might have put it there. And when the substitute Biology teacher is still there after the Easter holidays, it feels like she always has been, and that Mr Walters never really existed. Besides, we’ve got exams to focus on.
I have sessions with a counsellor in a nearby town. I can’t get out of them, but after the strangeness of the first one I quite enjoy going. They’re a mixture of talking about Dad, about how I remember him, and about letting go of blame, of pain, of guilt. It’s weird to say it, but after each one I feel like I’m getting better, like things are starting to happen inside me again, like something is growing. I’m not sure what it will grow into, but it’s exciting.
I’m crossing the car park with Mum on the way to one session, and I think I see Vince coming out of the main entrance. I don’t really recognise him, his hair’s a little longer, and before I can get close enough he’s gone the other way around the building. I’d like to think it’s him, and that he too is getting a little better, one day at a time.
Jamie keeps nagging at me, talking about how he’s nearly done with the physio on his leg, and how we made a great team, so once my arm comes out of the cast I start playing football again in the spring. Ahmed does too, and gets a few games starting in goal. We talk a bit, but not much. Almost as if the weight of what we could say to each other is too heavy for the first words to make their way out. Like they’re something stuck at the bottom of a well, maybe.
And then, in the late spring, Mum asks how I’d feel about moving away. Somewhere nearer Nanna and Grandad’s house, she says. She thinks that, if they’re closer, she won’t need to lean on them as much. And it’d be a fresh start. New pastures. I get it, and I agree.
But it means moving away from Dana.
We’ve been together every day since it happened. Once the investigation finished, the garden returned to being just another ignored corner of land on the edge of the building site, which moves slowly closer to being a new housing estate. We go back as often as we can, and Dana shows me the new plants as they come up, or the old ones as they bud and come into leaf all over again. We try replanting the bush over the well, which was filled in properly when the police finished – no sign of my laptop though, Sargant Prangle had said. The replanting seems to work, and we watch the scarlet shoots slowly growing every day. And so we try, with what time we have between all the exam revision, to put things back to normal. But it doesn’t feel like her place anymore, Dana says. And that’s OK, she says. S
he doesn’t feel like she needs it as much. Not anymore.
Dana’s back at her mum’s house. There’s a social worker who she doesn’t talk about much, and she’s been going to school every day, and going to every lesson. And she’s doing pretty well, considering. Even Miss Amber has told her so. If she gets her English and Maths, which she will because she’s brilliant, she’s going to go to the sixth-form college in a different town. Which is one town closer to where I’ll be. I’ve got the brochure for the college at home. Alongside A Levels in biology, they do courses in horticulture, and plant sciences. So who knows, maybe we’ll keep on growing together after all.
As spring moves towards summer, just before the exams start, with butterflies starting to gather around the huge cones of purple flowers on the buddleia bush, we close the door on the garden for the last time. We spent one last, long, sunny evening lying on the grass, looking up, the shouts of men from the building site drifting across the top of the walls from behind the repaired wooden hoarding. Now the roofs are all finished, you can actually see their ridgeline if you sit with your back on the opposite wall. Soon, they’ll probably pull down the wooden hoarding and replace it with a proper fence. People will be able to see in. I hope they like it.
There’s a heavy quiet over us both as the lock, which Dana fitted, clicks shut for the last time. Taking the key from her keyring, Dana pulls one of her shoelaces out of her shoe and threads the key onto it. She ties the key to a low branch of the bush we stand beneath, and we watch it for a while, swinging under the premature twilight of the canopy. Someone will find it, perhaps, one day.
Or maybe they won’t.
We weave between the nettles on the way back to the main road, stepping clear of the undergrowth as the streetlights shimmer into life, a faint shadow drawing itself beneath the brambles, thistles and shrubs at the roadside, and a few early and heavy-headed poppies loll and nod to each other. The headlights from passing cars start to turn on as we cross the road.
Looking back, you can barely see the gap we’ve come through. A single, green frond has fallen away from the rest, and hangs across the path. We watch its dip and rise, buffeted in the wake of the passing traffic.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book began its long journey into being in 2015, as a series of conversations with students about race, immigration, Brexit and the movement of peoples. I’d like to thank you, first and foremost, for your honesty, candidness and for always pushing me to know more, to think more and to expect more of the world we are all living in, together. I hope this is the impression you left with, too.
Secondly, to my family, my brilliant wife and daughters, my mum and dad, without whom this book would never have gotten finished, for spurring me on, and for leaving me in the shed for hours on end when I needed to be left.
To my colleagues, Katherine for a vital and perceptive early read, and to Will, who never shied away from a difficult conversation when I was stepping deeper into this book, for occupying that space, even when it felt uncomfortable, and for your integrity throughout.
To Jane, my agent, for believing in Josh from the start, even when I didn’t, for finding no reason to turn this manuscript away and for all your support since.
To Penny and all the team at Firefly Press for taking this raw material and turning it into an actual book that takes up space in the world, that I can hold in my hand and marvel at – you guys work magic.
To Dereen, and readers from Inclusive Minds and HOPE not Hate, for your honest feedback and advice along the road that this story has taken, without which this book would be less than it is.
To those who work tirelessly and hopefully towards a better society, one in which the hatred in these pages is a thing of the past, who have educated and continue to educate me in so, so many ways, who shouldn’t need to keep fighting and pushing for all of us to be better human beings but who do, because the alternative is unthinkable.
And, finally, to Josh, who has lived in my head for so many years now, and will no doubt reside there in perpetuity. May you continue, always, to grow.
To all of you, my deepest and most heartfelt thanks.
For a downloadable resource pack on Grow,
please go to www.fireflypress.co.uk
CLIMATE EMERGENCY
At Firefly we care very much about the environment and our responsibility to it. Many of our stories, such as this one, involve the natural world, our place in it and what we can all do to help it, and us, survive the challenges of the climate emergency. Go to our website www.fireflypress.co.uk
to find more of our great stories that focus on the environment, like The Territory, Aubrey and the Terrible Ladybirds and My Name is River.
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First published in 2021
by Firefly Press
25 Gabalfa Road, Llandaff North, Cardiff, CF14 2JJ
www.fireflypress.co.uk
Copyright © Luke Palmer 2021
The author asserts his moral right to be identified as author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form, binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from
the British Library.
print ISBN 978-1-913102-39-5
ebook ISBN 978-1-913102-40-1
This book has been published with the support of
the Welsh Books Council.