Dancing in the Dark (5 page)

Now, I'm working at the zoning plan of the site. I've already drawn up my survey, checked the orientation, soil quality, condition of those elements already in place, such as the silver birch set to one side of the rectangular space. I've made a rough list of background plants, and another of perennials and evergreens intended to provide something of the sylvan atmosphere which Regis wants. It will be great when it's finished, even if not precisely as she imagines it. I've provisionally rebooked my construction crew for early next month; once they've started work, she won't be able to change her mind so drastically. Everybody but Regis is ready to go.

But I'm not giving this project a hundred per cent of my attention. I keep remembering my eleven-year-old self, the hopes and expectations I had then, and the way my mother so abruptly opted out of my life. And suddenly my face is crumpling, there is an almost intolerable weight in my chest; I am crying and I don't know why.

The doorbell rings.

I stay where I am, hot tears falling on to my drawing board, my heart throbbing like an abscessed tooth. After a while, the bell rings again. Dammit! Why can't people take a hint? Grabbing a paper tissue from the box in my drawer, I scrub at my face. The bell rings yet again as I go through the sitting room to open the door.

‘What do you want?' I say, aggressively.

‘Hi.' A pinched-faced waif, barely five feet high, stands on the doorstep, dressed from head to toe in rusty crone-black garments, as though she'd just finished playing the First Witch in
Macbeth.

I pull myself together. Blue dreadlocks, metal-studded face. ‘It's . . . uh . . . Trina, isn't it?'

‘That's right. I was spending the night with my Auntie Sheila, down the road, and I thought, if I was going to, like, do work experience with you, it'd be a good time to drop by, just on the off-chance.'

‘Off-chance of what?'

She looks faintly disconcerted. ‘I dunno. Catching you in, I s'pose.'

‘I don't like people dropping by,' I say.

She frowned. ‘OK then, I'll just bugger off out of it, shall I?'

‘Don't be silly. I'm just saying that I prefer to have advance warning.'

‘I'm like that, too,' she says. The elaborate hair is blue, but it is also clean, and the piercings – eight round the edge of her ear, two in her eyebrows and a stud under her lower lip – while fairly grotesque, aren't entirely unattractive.

I am aware of my own unbrushed hair and red-rimmed eyes. ‘I haven't really had much time to think about your work experience yet.'

‘You been crying?' she asks.

‘Um, well, yes, as a matter of fact, I have.'

‘Boyfriend trouble?'

‘Something like that.'

‘Bastards, the lot of them, that's what my auntie says.'

‘Does she indeed?' Since Trina obviously isn't going to go away any time soon, I open the door wider. ‘You'd better come on in, and we can talk things over.'

‘Just a sec.' She bends down and picks up an old enamel washing-up bowl by her feet. ‘I brought this to show you.'

I look down and gasp. ‘My goodness! That's simply beautiful.'

‘Thought you'd like it.' She grins and steps inside the house. I smell cigarette smoke on her clothes.

I lead the way to the kitchen. ‘Want a coffee?'

‘No, thanks. Water will do. I don't touch stimulants – unless you count boys.' She gives a horrible raucous laugh, full of the kind of knowledge someone so young oughtn't to possess. She makes me feel terribly prim.

I look down at the bowl which she has set on the table, feeling a stir of excitement. She's filled it with earth and then created a miniature garden on top of it. Beds full of tiny flowers, a patch of lawn, a diminutive birdbath. OK, so it's a pseudo-Theo Cairns garden, but it has some lovely individual touches. For instance, there is a tree at one end, with a Lilliputian tree-house skilfully put together from twigs and bits of bark. In the middle, a pebble pathway leads between flowering shrubs to a sandpit and a paddling pool, all in perfect proportion.

‘See the nest?' she says. ‘Took me ages, that did.' She points to a little beech hedge where a nest of twigs and moss, containing three minuscule eggs, snuggles among the leaves.

‘This is really amazing.' I bend down to look at it more closely.

‘It's for my little brother,' she explains. ‘He turns five next week.' She lifts one shoulder, as if she couldn't care less, but her blue eyes – the exact same colour as her hair – watch me intently. ‘So . . . what do you think?'

‘How long did it take you to make the tree house?'

‘Ages. Bit of a bother, that was. Holding it together till the glue dried. The nest was much easier.'

‘I'm really impressed.'

She shrugs again. ‘Keeps me out of mischief.'

‘So what would you hope to get out of working with me?'

‘Dunno, really.' She twists one of her locks. ‘The garden project at school . . . that's been really good fun – I mean, I really, really liked it. So I thought if I could tell my mum that I was working for you, someone off the telly and everything,
she might let me find a job at a commercial nursery, instead of down the supermarket or hairdressing or something.'

‘Why doesn't she want you to get a job with a nursery?'

‘'Cos the pay's shitty.' She starts patting herself, and brings out a packet of cigarettes.

‘If you're going to smoke – and it's extremely bad for you, in case you didn't know – you'll have to do it outside,' I say. ‘
And
clear the butts up afterwards.'

‘Fair enough.' She puts the packet away again.

‘When do you leave school?'

‘I already did, end of the term.'

‘What about your GCSEs?'

‘I done that,' she says. ‘Got ten of them, didn't I?'

‘Ten?' Mick Haigh said I'd find her surprising. ‘That's pretty good. Shouldn't you stay on, think about going to university?'

‘My mum wouldn't go for that. And anyway, my boyfriend wants us to get married—'

‘But you're only sixteen!'

‘Seventeen next week, but that's what
I
say. There's a lot of things I want to do before I start settling down and having kids.'

‘What sort of things?'

‘Travel. Earn some money, real money. I got a nest egg already, but nobody knows about that, not even me mum.'

‘Where do you want to travel to?'

‘All over. Egypt – I'd really like to see the pyramids. And the Great Barrier Reef, all them sea creatures and coral and stuff, we did that in geography. I want to go round the world, get some memories stored up, because if my mum's anything to go by, it's all downhill after the first baby.'

‘It doesn't have to be.'

‘Not for people like you,' she says. Again the defensive shrug. ‘People like me . . . well . . .'

‘What kind of people is that?'

‘You know . . . Nothing much going for them.'

‘Where did you pick up such defeatist ideas?'

‘You try living with my older brothers. You'd be defeatist, too.'

‘You've got
everything
going for you. You can be anything you like.' I feel like one of the self-help manuals which fill my bookcases.
Anyone Can Do Anything
.
10 Steps to Personal Fulfilment. Moving Forward.
‘You don't have to live up – or down – to anyone else's expectations of you. Do your own thing.' I take her by the shoulders. ‘Trina, you're sixteen years old—'

‘Almost seventeen.'

‘And your whole life is in front of you. Do what
you
want to do. And though I haven't got any myself, plenty of my friends have children.
They
don't see it as a downhill step at all.'

‘No, well, it's different for them, innit? They probably got money, for a start. Look, about this work experience . . . are you going to take me on or what?'

‘To be honest, I don't want to.'

‘OK, suit yourself.'

I can see by the intensely nonchalant look on her face how much it means to her. There is a neediness to her which I can't ignore because I recognize it. I guess that, like me, she sees a garden as a sanctuary, the secret enclosed space, the
hortus conclusus
where nothing can get at you, where the wild beasts can raven outside all they like but aren't able to break in, where silver unicorns lay their gentle heads in your lap.

‘OK,' I say reluctantly, wondering what on earth I'm doing. ‘Why don't we give it a month's trial, see how we go?'

‘You mean it?' Her thin face lights up.

‘I rarely say things I don't mean,' I say. ‘I'll pay you, too.'

‘You don't have to, you know. It's supposed to be work experience.'

‘If you're doing a job, you should get paid for it. I'll also cover your expenses. Bus fares and so on. You'll have to bring your own lunch. I eat mine on the run, or alone at my desk, when I'm here. I'm not going to sit around gossiping over coffee.'

‘Suits me,' she says.

‘And you'll have to work bloody hard.'

‘Not a problem.'

‘I'm talking about shifting earth about and carrying gravel, digging in compost, lifting stones. You might be a bit small for that kind of thing.'

‘Less is more,' she says. Maybe she reads self-help manuals, too. ‘Trust me. I know all about hard work.'

‘Four weeks only, is that clear?'

‘As crystal.'

‘We'll review the situation after that. And you'll have to lose the piercings. Change the hair. I have clients coming here all the time, and you aren't exactly the kind of front-woman they expect to see.' I'm wondering what Marnie will say when she meets this new addition to the work force.

‘Front-woman? You mean I'd have to meet people and stuff?'

‘Of course.'

‘I thought I'd just be watering the flowers and putting in plants, shifting stones like you said, seeing how you start designing a garden.'

‘Not much point learning about garden planning if you're not going to have any clients,' I say briskly. ‘And looking like that, trust me, you won't.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because people who hire garden designers are people with money. And people with money . . .'

‘OK, boss. But I'm not going to start licking anybody's bum, just because they're rich.'

‘And I'm not going to start asking you to.'

She sighs heavily. ‘My boyfriend really likes this blue.'

‘What do
you
like?'

‘I liked it better green.' She grins at me.

‘You can't live your life according to someone else's dictates,' I repeat firmly. ‘Believe me, I've tried it and it doesn't work.' I touch the tree house in her bowl-garden. ‘This is really good, Trina.'

‘I read your new book,' she says. ‘Borrowed it from the library.
ReDecorations
. It started me thinking about the things you could do. Gave me all sorts of ideas.'

‘Let's go and look at what I'm doing in the big gardens. And I'll show you some of the long-term preparations needed for the miniatures. After that . . . we can work out what your duties will be.'

‘Duties! Great.' She looks about her. ‘You got some nice things.'

‘Too much clutter.' I don't really mean it. I wouldn't say I was a shopaholic exactly; in fact, I hate spending money when I don't have to. But I do like
things
. Possessions. Growing up with nothing that couldn't be packed into a suitcase at a moment's notice, my Mughal miniature, the Limoges jardinière, the lamps, cushions, dishes from France, jugs from Portugal, all emphasize the permanence I've achieved. I never forget how, when I was a child, the sight of our bags being pulled from under Luna's bed could reduce me to tears, signalling as it did that we were once more on the move. Objects reassure me.

‘It's ever so tidy,' Trina says. ‘Don't suppose I'll ever have enough money to live in a place like this.'

‘I don't see why not. I started out with nothing, built the business up entirely on my own,' I say. ‘If I can do it, so can you.'

Before she leaves, we arrange that she will start work the following week. ‘Here's an assignment for you to work on at home,' I say.

‘Thought I'd finished with homework.'

‘Think again,' I say firmly. ‘In October, I've got to make a tabletop garden for a girl who's confined to a wheelchair. It's her twenty-first birthday. I want you to think about what kind of a miniature garden . . .' An idea strikes me. ‘Or any garden, for that matter, that would be suitable for her.'

When she's gone, I pick up a hand-mirror with a heavily chased silver frame and run my fingers over strategic vine leaves, rounded buttocks, dimpled knees. Lifting it, I stare dispassionately into the bevelled oval, and see my face floating below the surface of the glass – strong black hair, a full mouth, strange grey eyes surrounded by thick lashes and haunted by fear of the past.

Theo Cairns. Gardener. Woman. Daughter. As always when I look at myself, I see my mother.

I'm blending my bog-garden into an au naturel wildwood planting: huge dramatic growths of giant hogweed, tangles of cow parsley, gorgeous blue-grey thistles, thick hedges of rambling rose and trails of old man's beard, euphorbias, fatsia, verbascum, feather-duster plumes of astilbes. I've planted thickets of bamboo, rheums and more hostas. Azaleas, too – I much prefer them to the more pushy rhododendrons.

I'm currently building a pathway through this carefully planned wilderness, using stone flags and edging them with bricks recycled from the rubble that used to clog up the spring. It's sweaty work; those flags weigh a ton and I'm grunting and cursing as I transfer the rectangles of limestone from the wheelbarrow to the sandy bed I've prepared for them.