Ivy Lane: Spring: (4 page)

‘To a chartered accountant,’ added Nigel gloomily, ‘but I didn’t find that out until she had made me the treasurer. Anyway, how can I help?’

I repeated my plan to hire the rotavator and managed to drop in ‘fine tilth’ again. Nigel made a note in the official equipment-hire diary and we arranged that I would collect it on Saturday, weather permitting.

‘I can help you with that,’ said Charlie, materializing at my side.

‘Thank you,’ I said, feeling my cheeks get hot. ‘But you’ve done enough already.’

A sturdy woman with a double chin and a crooked nose elbowed her way into the conversation. ‘We women can manage on our own, Charlie. Not everyone is a damsel in distress, are they, Tilly?’

The rest of us watched as she tipped her tea into the saucer, blew on it and slurped it up through pursed lips. I was reminded of the time James and I were in Egypt on camels and his suddenly knelt down for a drink, nearly flinging him out of the saddle.

‘Have you met Shazza?’ asked Gemma, trying to keep a straight face. ‘She’s on the plot next to ours.’

Peter’s wife, then. And presumably into the exotic too.

‘Hi, Shazza.’ It came out as a squeak and a second wave of heat tinged my cheeks.

‘She’d love some help, Charlie,’ said Gemma. ‘I’d help myself, but I’ve got masseuse’s shoulder at the moment.’ She winced and rotated her shoulder to demonstrate. Shazza rolled her eyes in disgust.

I really did want to protest, but what was the point? I did need help. But as soon as the plot was dug over and I had soil the texture of breadcrumbs, I wanted to be left to my own devices. Easier said than done in this place, I thought, looking round at the sea of curious faces.

‘Mum, time to go!’ yelled Mia from the doorway.

‘Oh, Mikey’s here.’ Gemma pulled a tin of Vaseline from her jeans pocket, dabbed a bit on her lips and fluffed up her hair. ‘My husband. He’s a car mechanic, so don’t be surprised if his hands look a bit grubby. Come and meet him.’ She took my arm and steered me towards the door before I had chance to refuse.

Mia, although still scowling, had put her phone away and I was able to take in her features for the first time. Brown eyes and cappuccino-coloured skin, topped off with a cloud of tiny curls. Her skin-tight shiny leggings and trainers made her long legs look like golf clubs and as we got closer I noticed how much taller than Gemma she was. The only thing that she seemed to have inherited from her mother was the luscious long eyelashes. At a guess I’d say her dad was Afro-Caribbean. And very tall. Unlike the diminutive, ginger-haired Austin Powers lookalike standing next to Mia, jingling his car keys.

Five pounds says there was an interesting tale there.

I was introduced, kissed, hugged, glared at (Mia) and then they were gone.

Nobody was paying me any attention and it was the perfect time to slip away. I left the building without making eye contact and collected my bike. A sixth sense told me that someone was calling my name, but it was late and I’d had quite enough social contact for one day.

Cycling back through the dark streets I tried to make sense of the evening. I’d sorted out the equipment hire, made friends with Charlie again and managed to navigate the conversation without revealing too much about myself. All in all, a successful night. But why was it that despite my attempts to remain aloof, I felt as if this tight little community was pulling me in?

As I walked through the gates of Ivy Lane allotments the following Saturday, I was treated to a sight of bums in the air, all shapes and sizes, as people bent over to tend their plots. It was a cloudy but mild day and without exception each and every one of them straightened up and gave me a cheery wave or called ‘Good morning’ as I passed by and then continued with their work – alone.

I wasn’t sure where I was going wrong.

So far, allotment gardening (not that I had actually touched any soil yet) seemed anything but a solitary affair. And much as I was grateful for Charlie’s offer of help, I couldn’t help looking forward to today being over. I hadn’t had so much as a minute to indulge in a bit of quiet contemplation, and that, after all, was what had attracted me to it in the first place. But surely once all the hard labour was done and my novelty value as the newbie had died down, everyone would leave me to my own devices? I could live in hope, I thought with a small sigh.

My bicycle was at home today on account of the fact that I had brought my rake with me and hadn’t fancied cycling with a potentially lethal weapon dangling over my shoulder. I had also packed a bag with a flask of tea and a flask of coffee, a tin of biscuits and a tub of jelly babies. What I lacked in useful gardening tools, I hoped to make up for in superior elevenses.

I stopped to allow a scruffy-haired man to cross the road in front of me with his wheelbarrow. He was wearing a holey jumper and a papoose containing a sleeping baby with spiky black hair. We smiled at each other, he whispered something that sounded like ‘rhubarb rhubarb’ and I watched him as he went on his wobbly way.

No sooner had I resumed my wander along the road when a stout man with grizzly white hair and quiff-like eyebrows jumped out in front of me from behind a water butt. I gasped and reeled under the weight of my heavy bag and narrowly avoided knocking his block off with the rake.

‘Sorry!’ I yelped.

He scanned the road from left to right, keeping his body bent double like an elderly international spy. He gripped four cans of lager tightly under one arm.

‘You never saw me,’ he muttered, leaning close, one finger pressed to his lips. And then spouted a whole load of nonsense from which I managed to decipher ‘heresy’, ‘chaser’ and ‘the King’. Before I had chance to retreat from his beery fumes, he’d scuttled off and disappeared between the pavilion and the toilet block.

The poor soul. Obviously delusional. I dithered between turning the requested blind eye and reporting him to the powers that be.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Charlie, Gemma, Christine and Nigel awaiting me on plot 16B.

Nigel was pointing out things to Charlie on the rotavator, Christine was picking up stones from the earth and throwing them into the trees beyond and Gemma was applying hand cream. For once I was glad of the crowd.

‘Has anyone seen an alcoholic round here?’ I said, propping my rake up against Gemma’s tree next to an assortment of implements.

‘Why, love, have you lost one?’ Christine tittered at her own joke. She stood up, nudged her bobble hat out of her eyes and plonked her hands on her hips. Her cheeks were red with exertion, or possibly wire wool, and she was breathless.

‘Bushy eyebrows?’ asked Gemma, slipping on a pair of white cotton gloves. Today her hair was clipped to one side with a giant diamanté spider.

I nodded, wondering anew how she managed to stay so pristine in this environment.

‘Thick Northern Irish accent?’

That might explain why I couldn’t understand him. ‘Possibly,’ I said.

Gemma rolled her eyes. ‘That’s my dad, Roy.’

‘Oh no, he promised me he’d paint the outside lav at home today.’ Christine grunted with exasperation. ‘And I hid his Hennessy whisky on purpose till he’d finished it.’

That explained the heresy.

‘Now he’ll be sitting in Dougie King’s shed drinking beer with whisky chasers all day. I’ll kill him,’ she muttered, sending a large stone whistling through the air with venom.

And that explained the rest. Good job I didn’t call the police.

Nigel cleared his throat. ‘It should be returned clean, undamaged and refuelled. That’ll be ten pounds, please.’ He held out his hand. ‘I would stay and help but I’m rotating my compost bins today.’

Ten pounds for a perfect weed-free rectangle? Bargain. I handed over the cash willingly.

‘And leave me at the mercy of three women?’ said Charlie with a grin, not looking unhappy at the prospect.

‘Four!’ came a voice from Gemma’s shed.

‘Mia,’ Gemma answered my questioning eyebrows. ‘She’s grounded.’

Charlie saluted at Nigel’s retreating form.

In my head, this morning would run as follows: Charlie would operate the rotavator; I would perhaps have a little go, to show willing and because it looked fun; we would collect any big weeds and put them in my compost bin (goodness knows what Nigel’s rotating one was, but I imagine it was a great deal fancier than my broken effort); then if I had any time and energy left, I would start turning the soil over with a fork. Oh yes, I was getting the hang of this gardening jargon.

‘Right, the worst of the stones are out,’ said Christine, handing me a garden fork. ‘Gemma, get yours, love, and you, son. We need to get the big boys out by hand first.’

Gemma looked as horrified as I felt and Charlie gazed at his rotavator longingly.

‘We can’t just go mad with that machine,’ tutted Christine, ‘or all we’ll be doing is chopping the roots of the weeds up into tiny pieces. In six weeks this plot will be ten times worse than it is now.’

There was no use arguing.

An hour later, my legs had seized up, my bum was aching and my wellies were well and truly christened.

‘Tea break!’ I announced, praying that Christine wouldn’t overrule me.

‘Thanks for all your help, everyone,’ I said, settling down onto a plastic bag next to Charlie on the damp grass after finding us all a receptacle for a drink. Even Mia came out to join us and perched in the apple tree with the tub of jelly babies.

‘I think I would have given up by now,’ I admitted. ‘It’s quite daunting, tackling something like this on your own.’

It was true, I realized. It was one thing to potter amongst the vegetable beds sowing a few seeds and quite another to bring an overgrown plot back to life.

Charlie smacked his lips appreciatively and reached for another biscuit. ‘No worries, that’s what friends are for.’

My cheeks burned. Charlie and I were not friends; we knew nothing about each other, which was just the way I wanted to keep it. Try telling that to Gemma, though. I didn’t meet her eye, but I could sense her nudging her mother and winking.

I jumped to my feet. ‘Let’s fire the rotavator up.’

Charlie was right behind me. ‘One end to the other first, according to Nigel, then side to side.’

Gemma returned to her half of the plot with Christine and the two of them were soon tangled up in bamboo canes and string. Mia disappeared back into the shed, moaning about her homework and lack of wifi.

Charlie was soon into his stride and I flittered about, feeling a bit superfluous, moving weeds and kicking clods of earth off the path. Eventually, Charlie took a breather.

‘You have to keep on top of weeds,’ said Charlie, wiping his arm across his brow. ‘I learned that the hard way.’

‘Dig them out, you mean?’ I said, noticing two men with their arms around each other’s necks weaving unsteadily towards us like a geriatric version of The Monkees. One of them was the man with the eyebrows I’d seen earlier, the other a West Indian man with a wizened face, bandy legs, grey dreadlocks, and a nautical-style cap.

Charlie lowered his voice. ‘That’s Roy and Dougie. The Belfast meets Montego Bay Two Man Piss-up Club. This should be interesting.’ And then more loudly, ‘Hoeing is better, less disruption to the roots.’

I’d have to go invest in some new tools; the trusty rake alone wouldn’t cut it. So far my shopping list consisted of spade and fork, which I kept referring to as spoon and fork accidentally, and now a hoe. I glanced across to see if Christine had spotted the return of her husband: steely glare, braced feet and crossed arms . . . I was guessing she had.

‘Er, what about weedkiller, am I allowed to use that here?’

Charlie and I were making conversation to delay the eruption, which, judging by the metaphorical steam pumping from Christine’s nostrils, was mere seconds away. He knew it. I knew it.

‘Well, strictly speaking—’

‘Yeah, Man, I use it all de time. Anytink for an eeeeasy life,’ crooned Dougie in a lilting Caribbean accent. He waved one hand in front of him making gun fingers. ‘Den I say “Die, ya bastard” and I fire. Dem weeds don’t stand a chance.’

Charlie sucked in his breath, a low prehistoric moan emanated from Christine, and Gemma descended on Dougie like a small tornado.

She jabbed him in the chest. ‘Irresponsible dot com.’

I pressed my lips together, trying not to laugh. We hadn’t had a dot com explosion so far this morning and I’d forgotten how much fun it was.

‘Don’t you use that language around my daughter,’ Gemma snapped, stamping on his toe with her pink wellingtons. ‘She’s at an impressionable age.’

Dougie cried out and hopped up and down whilst simultaneously squinting at me, looking confused.

Roy, who until this point had only muttered unintelligibly at the ground, let out an almighty belch, earning a prod in the backside with a bamboo cane from his wife.

‘I know what a bastard is, Mum, we did it in history,’ shouted Mia, poking her head out from the shed. ‘It’s when the mummy and the daddy aren’t married and they have an ickle baby.’ This said in an ickle-baby voice. ‘And that,’ she announced authoritatively, ‘is how you get bastard hair.’

‘Heir,’ called Charlie, getting in there before me. ‘The H is silent.’

Mia gave him a look that could have withered tomatoes on the vine and held up her ponytail for inspection. ‘Mum’s blonde curls mixed with my gay dad’s afro? I think you’ll find I was right first time.’ And with a smirk she shut herself back in the shed.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Charlie quietly to me.

Gay dad?

Christine took another swipe at Roy for some reason, meanwhile Gemma gasped, her face as red as her mother’s.

Dougie seemed to find Mia’s comment hilarious and let go of Roy to hold onto his sides as he doubled up with laughter, leaving Roy to fall headlong into my ramshackle compost heap.

‘Woah, steady on!’ said Charlie. He hauled Roy back to his feet and with Gemma’s help installed him on my rickety wrought-iron bench. Dougie used the commotion to retreat and moved off, seemingly to a Reggae beat that only he could hear.

‘Turn the rotavator back on,’ I whispered to Charlie. He obliged, leaving Gemma and her family to recover from that particular load of publicly aired dirty laundry. Well, the women anyway; Roy was snoring raucously, mouth open, hands clasped across his beer belly. Gemma stomped off to the shed; I had the feeling Mia would be getting an extension to her grounding.