Garden

After a particularly dreary bout of arranging bundles of reeds in a big shipping warehouse up North a friend offered me the opportunity of watering his slightly precarious selection of tropical plants in exchange for a room while he was away on business. Orchids and flamingo flowers and a bird of paradise. Some ferns. His pride and joy being this avocado tree he’d grown straight from the seed, beginning first by piercing its skin with two toothpicks and storing it in a little jam jar and over time decanting it to larger and larger receptacles until when I arrived it stood quite proudly over the entire living room with very wide and very clean leaves. My job was to water the plants each morning and in the afternoon empty particular sachets of brown and green nutrients into specific pots, arranging for them an optimum environment that would allow each of them to flourish or at the very least maintain themselves until he returned home. There were also a number of cats that needed feeding, though because I never actually saw them they don’t persist all that much in my memory and the only reason I knew they were there at all was that by the evening their bowls would always be empty. I felt frankly beyond my element living there. Due to the delicate nature of the task I was very reluctant leaving the house lest some awful calamity happen to the vegetation in my absence, and so mostly I gawked at passers-by from the garden, smoking honestly rather a lot of cigarettes even though I could never get my fingers to work the livelier task of folding the paper into itself properly, meaning the result was often loose and crumpled and simultaneously overstuffed so I’d have to be very careful else the tobacco would just fall out the end. I liked it out there in the garden. I liked to think of myself imitating some remarkably moneyed and flourishing life dwelling in that florid and

floral fantasy complete with stone statues of angels and a pond where one could quite easily suppose all the little fishes were swimming this way and that beneath the water; perhaps a larger fish swishing its way up and down the banks, nervously resting just below the surface ready to pounce at a mosquito just coming down to drink. I had to presume the pond was artificial. It seems awfully unlikely that such a spot could have existed without great big mechanical diggers cleaving clumps out of the earth. I couldn’t tell you how long it had been there; it had an air of false permanency that suggested it had most likely been around long before my friend moved in. Once done with the plants I’d go down to it and see the fish daintily zigzagging atop one another just below the algae, each of them seeming to embody a very relaxed sort of tomfoolery that I found rather charming. Are they goldfish, I asked my friend. And a pike, he said, though he’s very shy. A pike, I said. He’s imported, he said, they all are. I buy them from Spain and Italy and a truck comes and dumps them all in the water, he said. Why would you do that, I said. The fish from around here die, he said. Are you sure, I said. Because honestly I found the idea of local fish not being made of stern enough stuff to survive in a pond rather distressing, and it turned out it had something to do with the chemicals they had in the water, different average levels of chemicals in different countries’ waters. There is, it seems, a dauntlessness to these foreign fish that means they are less bothered by the whole business of pesticides and as such can persist quite happily almost anywhere. Around the pond were wet bushes and pools of mud. It was the beginning of winter. One could usually see one’s breath beating itself into the cold air. After a while it would seem as if everything had become awfully still so that only your own body and perhaps a few ripples from fish tails contained the capacity for movement. It would be very nice to lose that capacity, I thought. On a previous occasion I’d come to this garden for a party and I recall fishing beer cans out of the water because I’d lost sight of the girl and didn’t have the wherewithal to talk to anyone else. I had awful trouble reaching the stick into the centre of the pond, standing on one foot and angling my body so that the tip of the wood just grazed the shiny aluminium of the can that floated there. It had been summer then, I think, but it had rained and I was worried that the hem of my skirt was swallowing up the mud in the bank. I’m fairly sure my friend still owned his dog at the time too and I imagine it was there also, this rather too-big Shih Tzu which I was not particularly fond of and which seemed to pant in near perfect synchronicity with my breathing as I placed the empty cans into a

plastic bag. I doubt there were fish in the pond then. I certainly didn’t see any sign of them. Along with the plants and the cats my final responsibility was to drop handfuls of red and blue pellets into the water which I believe in the end became my favourite job merely I think because unlike those other activities there was a mensurable element to the action, watching those little foreign creatures rising up from the depths to gorge themselves on compressed squid and earthworms and spirulina. One felt very important–like some ancient leader bestowing gifts upon their subjects. Hola little fish, I said. Eat up. Frankly I found myself becoming unreservedly absorbed and consumed by the charming, almost tedious domesticity of the house. The throws languishing on the grey sofa. The less abrasively abstract portraits. The rather bilious fact of the ice-cream tub filled with eggshells and coffee filters and garlic skins and bits of chicken etc just below the sink, the smell of which was admittedly awful. Like death, I thought. There is a surprisingly large amount of death just where I am dousing bowls with Fairy Liquid. There was an amiable simplicity to that house which could result in me absentmindedly humming as I retrieved goat’s cheese and cherry tomatoes, the less etiolated of the spinach leaves that hadn’t been left soaking too long in their bag out of the fridge. I imagine honestly that I will always be pining for that sort of atmosphere, anything that can assuage the general air of to-ing and fro-ing with a concrete stillness, a benign and comforting boredom that could allow you to wake each morning knowing precisely that everything has been preordained and generally taken care of–I hate that these sorts of places now seem relegated to abstracted elsewheres. After two weeks of living like that you could suppose that you could almost drop out of reality entirely, but there came a point when my friend informed me that I’d have to start leaving the house. Isn’t there anyone you want to see, he said. You should go and see them. The truth of the matter was that I didn’t have anyone to see, nor did I have much desire to explore the sights of the city which from a brochure I’d picked up from the coach station seemed to me particularly insipid, limited to bland churches and a few less discerning art galleries. Nevertheless he had a tone that suggested he wasn’t so much asking but informing me of a decision that had already been made, and so the following morning once the usual day-to-day bustle had been completed I ventured into the town proper. Everyone was very unattractive, I recall thinking–I’m not entirely sure why I’m mentioning this because it hardly portrays me in a becoming manner. But it was something I noticed as soon as I sat down on the bus, though I tried not to think too much about it or to acknowledge it in any meaningful fashion. It

swiftly became a fairly intractable fact in my mind and looking around at all the vacillations seemed to confirm it. They’re all quite horrible, I said, though I don’t believe anybody heard me. I had a pint in a pub, and then a couple more, and then after that I called the girl. Or perhaps even I called her on one of the later trips to the pub. I knew imprecisely that she was living in the same city and I decided that enough time had passed that it was worth us talking again. God knows why I did, but there was a reason because I rang her several times before she picked up, out in the pub garden just as it began to rain, and when she did finally answer she was very concerned hearing my voice but tried to make out that us talking was the most natural thing in the world. Where are you, she said, and I did consider lying, I considered intimating that I was in fact in some very far off and very interesting place, but I didn’t have it in me by this point to be so overly opaque. I’ll come find you, she said. There’s really no need, I said. I won’t be in the city much longer. All the more reason, she said. And by the end of the evening I was in her flat, somewhere honestly not at all far away from where I was staying, and I recall that it was much larger than I had expected, with tall and vaguely overbearing ceilings, and almost as soon as we arrived she began spraying Febreze about the place to placate the worst of the effluvial dampness inside the walls. She was she informed me currently working in a gallery and nominally was here to continue her study on paintings, mostly those big, heady and extremely masculine abstract expressionists, and as such she had a great many books on de Kooning and Pollock and Kline lining her shelves even though she readily admitted that she’d very much become sick of that sort of thing and was just running out her time with them until she finished her degree. I had decided almost immediately that it had been a mistake me coming. We were both I think feeling nervous about our meeting and it did not take very long at all for us to become very drunk, drinking maybe a bottle and a half of wine sitting on her lovely shag carpet. Her hair was blonder than I’d imagined it would be, the sun of the city bleaching out its more auburn edges, and she looked to me for all the world like some lost and forgotten Dorothea Tanning painting complete with this slightly surreal edge, as if a number of different tethers were suddenly comingling into a mixture of sunflowers and headless women and doors which lead to other doors which lead to other doors and so on and so forth. Not surprisingly there was a stifling edge to the atmosphere that made me feel somewhat obdurate and distant as I prattled on at her about fish and plants and she talked about the vegetables she was growing and the men she was meeting and the classes she was taking and God and God knows

what else. Everything felt just incredibly snuffed out and I drank another full glass of wine and went very close to her and she said I looked beautiful. Like a heron, she said. And I smiled because it had been a long time since anyone had called me beautiful and the girl had always had a very distinct way of speaking that implied she knew precisely what she was talking about. I’m not sure how long I was there for, doubtless I somewhat outstayed my welcome. Gone are the days when I worry much as to whether people are honest as to whether it’s time for me to leave–I’ve decided it is far better to wait for someone to state their intentions than ever go to the whole trouble of divining their inner lives from however many delicate actions they may exhibit. Naturally this does occasionally lead to conflicts, but for the most part it seems hosts are fairly amenable regarding this particular social strategy. We had dinner. She came out of the kitchen after procuring a quiche from the oven incredibly rosy and good-natured. She laid the quiche between us on the carpet and we set upon it with forks. Gouging at the custardy innards. The forks seeming very distinctive if I remember–with little engraved flowers and dragonflies. They’ll probably go everywhere with you, I thought, holding mine up to the light with a dim wedge of ham impaled on two of the prongs. Probably they will be used to horse down I can’t imagine what in all sorts of dinner parties where people will stay far too late and in the morning you will have to sweep discarded olives and crumbs out of the carpet. No doubt when the forks are finally crammed into sagging and wilted brown boxes to be forgotten about in an attic somewhere this will be no major thing and no doubt by then you will have a much nicer selection of cutlery to replace them with but these are still lovely forks. That’s right I became very enraptured by them. And I believe afterwards I used mine to scrape the last of the quiche into a black plastic bag while the girl acquired something else from the fridge. A cheese board. Coquettishly arranging stilton and camembert and a small bunch of grapes complete with fanned out selections of square and circular crackers peppered with sesame seeds and salt crystals. I’m not sure if I can convey precisely how that particular image affected me; truth is it was only much later while in my friend’s garden that I could confidently admit that what I had initially considered to be simply a stupid wooden chopping board filled with varieties of crumbling crackers and cheeses was indeed no small thing at all. In fact years later when I briefly obtained a position as a visiting lecturer at a university near the sea I recall purchasing a similar board that I very daintily placed cheeses upon in the front room of the shared house I was living in, subsequently using a knife to split open the buttery edges. It felt

very proper to own a thing like that. There are even similar cheeses in my fridge now, come to think of it–some of which I haven’t touched in weeks.

If you must know later on one of my friend’s plants died. An orchid. Though it should be said that it was one of his older flowers and looked to be on its way out anyway, and indeed when I told him about it he assured me that I shouldn’t be overly troubled or exasperated by the event. These things happen, he said. Still, it was distressing throwing the dead leaves into the compost and seeing them there with the squashed-up and too-wet remains of vegetables and scraps from individually packaged plastic instant meals. From what I remember the orchid had been intensely white, though it’s possible I only really ascribed such particularities in its absence. With speckles of yellow around its stigma and its stem reaching down into a blue pot. Nothing like a vagina, I don’t think. No it seems that to equate such a thing with a vagina is to subtract from the idea of flowers and vaginas in equal measure and that really one could get into a lot of trouble when one tries to find false equivalences between anything. Besides, despite what O’Keeffe might want you to believe I’ve always found that a vagina is far fleshier and more complex and honestly far likelier to elicit a misreading than any orchid; in truth I’ve always found the idea of things having to be different things and not themselves abominable. The first time I got back to the house after the plant’s death I did not like to look at where it had previously been situated on the shelf, and just like I knew I would I sat and watched a truly terrible film while it rained and rained and all my knickers and dresses and jumpers became soaked through on the line. The smell of them when I did bring them in the following morning was mildewed and disastrous, and I didn’t bother putting them through the wash again. As a rule of thumb I try these days not to become so engrossed by this sort of benign melancholia but at the time I wasn’t as concerned by such things, so I admit that I put on a pair of those wet knickers and wet tights–and of course when they are in such a state they cling to your skin like you wouldn’t believe so I shimmied them very slowly up my thighs. One crumpled and sagging move after another. All of it very wet mind you. All of it tightly squelching up your leg. And I dried them by wandering around the house. I wanted to explain this to the girl when I met up with her; we were due to see each other in a small café near the seaside because at the time I feel there were a lot of seaside cafés almost everywhere and it seemed like a very fashionable thing to do to go to one and order something from the dessert display, these little glass shelves with caramel and apply pie and red velvet cheesecake and salted caramel brownies

with strawberries and chocolate and orange cake and Victoria sponge, each of them costing £3.80 a slice except for the brownies which were 30p cheaper. I sat across from her in the café with a great deal of dampness around where I wish a vagina would be, and as of course I was extremely conscious of not spending too much money so I had a singular black coffee accompanied by a number of cigarettes which I’d diligently pre-rolled beforehand so they at least had a good semblance of respectability. It was very near the end of my stay in the city and nominally the lunch was meant to commemorate my visit, though I’ll say that before I had a chance to settle myself and properly relay my whole compendium of perilous anecdotes regarding washing and dead plants–none of which she seemed to be listening to, by the way–it quickly transpired that the true purpose of our meeting wasn’t so much to memorialise our reacquaintance but instead to offer me some advice vis-à-vis my current vaguely wayward position. Well doubtless I was rather put out by this sudden change in tone and I found it rather difficult focusing on the conversation. It was very disappointing actually and I chain smoked through all my cigarettes while she said, rather obliquely if you ask me, whether I felt comfortable with the direction our talk was going in. I said I wasn’t too sure, maybe I didn’t like her butting into things, it would depend honestly on a great many factors. I tried to sound like I was teasing, naturally, it was my hope to appear unfussed and generally blasé, but almost certainly she would have deduced that there was an element of seriousness in my tone. From time to time she made an effort to bring some levity into the discussion, adding a few snide jokes between if I’m honest what appeared to be fairly editorialised and detailed opinions centring mainly on my seeming inability to persist in any one location for any significant duration, implying if I do say so some wildly accusatory assumptions about the nature of my psyche and what underlying collection of traumas had led me to this undervalued façade of an existence that she, outside observer that she was, had deemed to be most inadequate–anyhow, I can’t claim to recall precisely what she said, but I found it exceedingly haughty and patronising, and I know for a fact that I felt a sudden want to be very childish. Just choke on your brioche, I thought. When the waiter came round with the bill the girl asked whether it would be possible for me to actually pay my share which just finished me off completely. I placed my purse down on the table and got her the money out in a very uncharacteristic manner, pushing the coins over to her while keeping my eyes fixed firmly on the wooden slats. Truthfully I hadn’t

checked how much money I was giving her and it was only when I was on the bus and routing through the bric-a-brac of my purse that I became aware that I’d given her the wrong amount. That evening was spent scrubbing at counters and reordering the cupboards, emptying the litter tray and so on– actions which in themselves can hardly be considered anything other than expected but should be mentioned here merely because I imbued them with a real and severe significance. Then that night, though perhaps it wasn’t that night, perhaps it was a different one, and to be frank I cannot reliably tell you how long I stayed at my friend’s house after that rather disastrous lunch, but certainly near the end, I remember some telesales person calling me up just while I was getting into bed. He seemed a relatively affable chap and honestly extremely apologetic for calling me at the hour he was, saying that really he would be off as soon as possible if only I would listen for a moment. I didn’t mind. If anything I approved of him taking up so much of my time and I listened quite attentively for the twenty minutes or so it took for him to run through his pre-scripted spiel involving car insurance or homeowning opportunities or the word of God or whatever else it may have been. Certainly I kept him on the phone for far longer than he would have wished, especially since I didn’t want anything he was selling.