Quicksand Tales

by Keggie Carew

  We didn’t get a gun. Yet all year round the killing went on, from constant mishap to outright murder. It started small. Aphids. But whole cities of them. I patrolled the garden, my fingers flattening their plump, sap-fed bodies as easily as bursting blackcurrant skins. I squished hundreds of them. Thousands. Green juice ran down my hands and now I knew what was really meant by green fingers. Where were my morals now? I was being ordained. It was on one of these aphid raids in the broad-bean patch that I noticed an ant carrying an aphid up a bean stem and depositing it, alive, on the growing tip. And then another. I liked watching ants. Purposeful. Intent. Caviar on legs. Put your finger in front of an ant and quick as lightning it will choose another route. It can rear up like a stallion. And its antennae move expressively, just like in a cartoon. I admired them. I didn’t suspect I’d ever have to do away with them. Until I learnt that the transportation of the aphids was the ants’ farming technique to create sugary feeding zones for themselves. As the aphids sucked the sap, so the ants sucked their sugary secretions. Soon the broad beans stopped growing. Each morning my fingers got greener, but the more aphids I squashed, the faster the ants replaced them. The ants had to go. I knew where various nests were. But I was done with poison. The best method, I decided, would be quick and brutal. I boiled the kettle. Sensitive reader, turn away your eye, skip to the next paragraph. The nest I selected to exterminate was under a strip of black polythene put down to act as a barrier to keep the weeds out. I exposed the tell-tale funnel hole of the ants’ nest and the small hump of fine tilth swarming with soldiers coming and going. I apologised then poured and grimaced as the steam geysered out. Surviving ants at the perimeter tore about the disaster zone collecting their large pale eggs. And then I heard a bashing sound. A sort of slapping against the black polythene. I followed the sound, bash, bash. I unfolded the curled-over polythene. A frog. Oh Jeremy, your lovely long legs, my handsome friend. The steaming water had spilled into a tube in the polythene and collected at the end where the frog was hiding. It made two more vain leaps, its powerful thigh muscles fully extended, its pale lemony belly with the veins showing through, then slumped back into the water that had been its doom. I had boiled a frog. I stared in sick disbelief. I couldn’t garden all day. I buried the frog in the raspberries.

  So I read up about companion planting. Plant marigolds (Tagetes) and nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus) to ward off pests. Pests, the kind of word designed to make you spit it out. To ward off pests? But the nasturtiums were clambering all over the purple sprouting broccoli and they were infested with cabbage white caterpillars, and there were so many whitefly on the beech hedge that if I opened my mouth anywhere nearby they flew in. Marigolds attract hoverflies which predate on aphids. I can buy hoverflies apparently. But how many would I need? And what if I were away when these pest-eating bugs were delivered? They might starve on the doorstep. So instead I ordered some nematodes to eat the slugs, which you mix up with water then pour into the soil. The slugs survived, but the peas died of a nematode infection in the roots and the slugs kept on coming. Small pink pearly ones. Fat black leathery ones, five inches long. The snails I launched gently over the footpath because the whorl of their shells seduced me, but there was no reprieve for slugs. Slugs were collected, their tacky cold bonelessness, their wet weight tickling in my hand, then dispatched. The killing methods varied. Sometimes I stamped on them with a sorry and a yell – not a gleeful yell, a yugh yell, vicious but quick. Sometimes I put salt on them and watched them flay out like a dressed radish, then turn inside out and dissolve (I quickly stopped doing that), sometimes I drowned them – which is not a good way either, they die slowly in a floating ballet limbo, twirling around like chiffon, into a slow percolation of slug broth. Which stinks. Now and again I acted in the manner of a power-crazed despot, and a lucky slug, or a particularly large or beautiful one, would be spared and go flying on the summer’s breeze with the snails into the next-door field. Maybe it was one of these slugs which climbed into our car and dried out, slowly, on the passenger-side floor. I mused over the slim coal-black coral stalactite, thinking it possibly part of an earring dropped by a friend. Until I put my glasses on and saw the exquisite markings, the tell-tale saddle, the chain-mail armour, etched by a miniaturist, its little frill skirt. A perfect slug. Desiccated. Straight. Hard. Beautiful. With a point at one end. I kept it amongst the treasures on the windowsill, with the flint scrapers, meteorites, stone eggs, pipe heads, china chips and teacup handles. I showed it to Ned, my neighbour’s seven-year-old son.

  ‘Guess what it is?’ I challenged him. I held open my hand, but didn’t let him touch.

  He looked. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Go on. Look closer. I’m not telling you.’

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  I put it in his small boy’s hand. ‘Careful,’ I warned.

  He looked again, holding it very carefully, then looked up and shrugged.

  ‘Look!’ I said again, he was getting fed up. ‘It’s . . . a . . . SLUG!’

  He peered down, his nose almost touching it. A hushed boy’s awe.

  ‘See,’ I pointed out the scallops on its rock-hard armour.

  ‘It’s dead,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Very.’

  Ned became transfixed by the desiccated slug and kept visiting it. I told him it belonged to a class of creatures called gastropods, meaning ‘bellyfoot’. We agreed it was a good name. I suggested a little herd of bellyfoots spaced tastefully along a leather thong would make a lovely necklace. For Mum. Well, unless it were to rain. Would they rehydrate, we wondered, and his eyes popped out. The slug bewitched him and he couldn’t leave it alone. Until the day . . .

  ‘It broke,’ Ned said, white-faced, holding half a snapped slug in each hand.

  ‘Oh, no! How did it break?’ I asked, mortification all over my face.

  Then he began to cry.

  He was only testing it, he said. To see if it would break. Now he was going to make me another. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. I fetched the barn owl pellets I’d been saving, which we could break together, to see what was inside. Mouse claws, voles’ teeth, matted fur – I tempted him – bouquets of ribcages, scapulas and femurs as thin as dried grass. We broke open each dark baked loaf to reveal the detritus of murder. Then, like Mary Shelley, we played God with what we found and made another creature entirely.

  Murder. Unwittingly and wittingly I had joined in. Slugs, aphids, whitefly, mealy cabbage fly, bean weevil, sucking things, scabs and chewing things, things that bit perfect semi circles, things that turned leaves into lace. I brewed up tobacco wash and garlic spray, stewed green potato skins, rhubarb leaves; I draped rank-smelling elder over fruit trees. I was stamping, drowning, squishing, kill-kill-killing all day.

  But not moles. Too furry. Too warm-blooded. Too blind. Too difficult. Then a molehill appeared in the dining room. Were we the only people in Britain to have a molehill in their dining room? A pile of chalky earth and flints and stones had been pushed up through the brick floor (laid straight on the chalk) beside the dogs’ bed. A whole bucketful. I shovelled it out, swept it up and chucked it onto the flower bed. I put badger shit down the run. The next morning – the same amount of soil again. I wheeled a barrow to the back door and shovelled the earth out. The mole had crossed the line. But I didn’t know what to do. I tried filling the tunnel, but every few days, there it would be again – a molehill in the dining room. Jonathan bought a humane trap. The mole avoided it. Then Jonathan bought a normal trap. I am relieved to report that that didn’t catch him either (we couldn’t use it), and eventually the mole went away.

  But the garden was under attack from every angle, from the wasps in the apples to the blackbirds eating the soft fruit; a blazing bullfinch tore off all the apple blossom like Caligula at a Dionysian orgy, while pigeons (rather eatable-looking themselves) stripped the broccoli. Scarers were vetoed for aesthetic reasons – we didn’t want CDs hanging in the garden, or tin foil or, God
forbid, plastic bottles. Instead we jigsawed a couple of sharp-beaked terror-parrots out of marine ply and strung them up on bits of wire. The wire sagged and the stiff parrot-raptors bobbed jerkily, one wing curled up in the sun, the other down. Then the beans climbed all over them, and when I turned round forgetting they were dangling behind me, one almost pecked out my eye.

  When it wasn’t all death, it was obsession. I flicked through the gardening books, but learnt not to believe them. Monty, you just can’t trim the hedge, dig, double dig, mulch, mow the lawn, prune the roses, prune the fruit trees, spray with copper, tie back, support, cut down, raise the beds, blowtorch the weeds in the brick paths, sow seeds, prick out, plant out, mulch again, add plenty of compost, mow the compost(!), take hardwood cuttings, take softwood cuttings, take leaf cuttings, have a plastic bag ready in your pocket, collect seeds, remove all infected leaves, shell peas, pick raspberries, lift dahlias, separate, divide, replant, manure, dead-head, weed, burn all infected parts!

  You just can’t. You’d need an army. And these are just jobs that need to be done, apparently. Weed. As far as weeds are concerned, the word weedy should mean strong, rampant, fecund. When do we ever get to sit in the garden? There is no loitering here. No daydreaming ferment. No counting bloody foxglove freckles.

  Gardening is counter-Darwinian. It is the enabling of the survival of the weakest. It is against Nature. It is months of travail for a blossom that might last a day. No, there is no lazing in the garden, but on a clear night when the winterbourne stream is a thin moon thread, I can sit on the swing, lean right back and stare into the blue-black velvet and think of spiral galaxies, and pulsars, and red giants, and oort clouds, and try to picture the largest volcano on Mars, which is called Olympus Mons (bad name), which is 370 miles across the base, and sixteen miles above the surrounding terrain.

  I don’t know how one can garden without getting blood on one’s hands. Red blood, green blood, cold blood, hot blood. And tragic blood. A baby hedgehog died tangled up in the soft fruit netting. A terrified young fox cub, the bottom of his jaw shot off by the gamekeeper, came to hide behind our garden shed where he died of starvation. A faun on the footpath had its back broken by a pet lurcher and its mother wouldn’t leave it. When the wildlife rescue man came, it died from a heart attack in his arms in the ensuing terror of being taken away from its mother. The man wasn’t taking it to the vet to mend it, but because he said it had to be put down. He refused to leave the dead faun for the mother, but took it away to cremate. Our ‘humane’ madnesses. The mother remained at the spot for three days. Crazed and confused and waiting.

  Our bird table was also the sparrowhawk’s bird table. And with two dogs there was rabbit death (with screaming) on a regular basis. The dogs didn’t seem to bite their prey, it just fell dead in their mouths, or not – I can still see the oceanic stare of the pheasant looking at me as they chewed upon its wing.

  After more than a decade I have and have not become hardened to life and death in the garden. I know that, like the books about it, the garden is a place of deception. That green beans hide. That one mouse can dig up every pea that you plant, and every snowdrop bulb. That slug supply is endless. That Nature is one up on you. The garden is an Old Testament kind of a place, in all its gory glory. There will always be disaster, a baby grass snake will drown in the pond, a blue tit will fly into the window, a sparrowhawk will set its sights on your favourite dove. I march in front of Jonathan with his (rationed) strimmer, prodding at the long grass with a stick to herd any frogs or mice or slowworms out of the way. I’ve learnt that to interfere less is the most effective way of killing less. Arbours, espaliered avenues, foxtail lilies and herb knots are yesterday’s dream. The poisonous days of ‘lawn-grooming’ are over. Flowers that bloom for a week or a fortnight have to look after themselves. The dynamic spectacle of the action-packed critter world is the focus of our garden now. Places they can nest. Things they can eat. What could be more joyous than seeing a cloud of long-tail tit babies landing in the elder on their first fledge? Or the blossomiest living blossom of the fiery red bullfinch bobbing around in the apple tree – he is welcome, we will have enough apples. Feather blossoms can last all year, and are less work than flowerbeds.

  But then, on a summer’s day, go round a table holding the very first sweet pea bloom of the year and tell your friends to sniff, and watch their shoulders drop, their heads tilt back, and swoon . . . They want more. I have it. Elusive. Beguiling.

  Painted Lady, sweet pea, see Lathyrus Odoratus.

  THE BAD MATCHMAKER

  I could hardly contain myself once I’d thought of it. It was so perfect. It was meant to be. Roland. Yes, my friend, Roland, an artist who made curious films of snakeskin cowboy boots walking down suburban Croydon streets, with names like Shooters Row; who put soundtracks to films of starlings flying from power lines as if taking off from a musical score; Roland, funny, articulate, off-beat, deep-voiced; Roland, whom all the girls had secretly fallen for at one time or another; Roland, whose ideas charged out in a runaway stampede, who read Pepys in bed, whose notebook was hippopotamus fat and as promising as a birthing sow, who always left everything behind, and who, yes, Oh yes!, who spoke Spanish.

  And Conchita. Of course. Con chi-chi-chi-chita. Mexican Chita. Whom I’d met dancing on a large flat roof in Barcelona so many years ago. Whose 500-kilowatt smile shot out across the warm summer night’s terrace brighter than all the swags of fairy lights strung across it. I thought maybe she was stoned, but she was just one of those warm-hearted people who can just let go. Her blue-black hair knotted in a loose fist down her back swinging as she danced and danced and danced.

  Of course. Roland, and Chita.

  In our last few months of living in Barcelona, before we moved to London, Jonathan and I saw a lot of Chita. She was in the process of breaking up with her Italian husband, whom she’d married when she was eighteen. She was exuberant and dazzling, her creativity all in its raw state – romantic, unleashed, the energy flicking out in sparks. We’d kept in touch, off and on, over the years. The last time I saw her she told me to find her a man. She went for silent brooding types or spiritual gurus who meditated all day, or artists with self-obsessions and quick tempers or writers with short moments of fleeting genius and long moments of self-doubt. All the nice men had been taken, she told me. Her email address said it all: FloraFuego@. . . Yes, Mexican Chita, spontaneous Chita, yes, yes. Roland and Chita couldn’t be better matched. Hmmm, I hummed knowingly.

  ‘Er, ye-es . . .’ agreed my agreeable husband. ‘Unless . . .’

  ‘Unless what?’

  Jonathan’s brow knitted. ‘You don’t think they might both be a bit . . . disaster-prone?’

  A doubt flew in, then straight out again. ‘So? They will understand each other. And Chita would be sweet with Robinson,’ I clucked. ‘They could visit each other and have a wonderful long-distance other life.’

  Robinson was Roland’s son. He was fifteen. He could not talk but he had his own language. He had long beautiful hands and a long beautiful face. Robinson needed full-time care, so when Roland wasn’t working he was looking after Robinson. When he wasn’t looking after Robinson, he was working. Which meant that Roland had very little downtime for himself. Which was why, I thought, he needed it.

  I pulled out the postcard Conchita had recently sent. A black-and-white interior of a large empty old stone house over which she had superimposed a strange Lorca-esque stage-set in blood-red nail varnish and glued-on petals. PHANTOMS OF LIFE IN THE EMPTY HOUSE, she’d written. Across the two cultures and the two languages, it was hard to gauge how much was lost (and gained) in the translation, but her missives always made me grin. Her English was so extravagant, so Chita. The drawing or collage or poem or whatever it was would have been dashed off spontaneously, in seconds.

  How good to stop, near the border. Everything is in itself, without a significance, as myself. How good to feel the changes it provokes in a day and a night and a day and a ni
ght. Not belonging to any incumstance. No memories. No future. No anguish. No man yet! Not even a clin d’oeil with a man. I dream to let free my wish. A sign, a whisper, someone who spends his time in writing, a voice through the telephone, in the distance, not so far now? A brief contact to tell you, Feliz Año Nuevo! START WITH GOOD FOOT. I am changing address. I wish I could change the skin. Who knows. Sometimes things that you wish come true! (what a danger).

  Chita

  The grand plan took hold in my head when I discovered that from Bournemouth, forty minutes from our home, you could fly direct to Valencia, where Chita now lived. I emailed her to suggest a visit. The reply came swiftly.

  It’s hyper great to hear of you and I’d like very very much to see you. Hummm. Did I tell you that I am studying cultural project design? I continue my tries with a lot of determination to find a way of living that adds some pepper and joy. I really would like to visit you, your dogs, your garden and your eating. Just tell me when. You are like an angel right now. I wait for your answer and to look at possibilities.