by Claire Peate
Beth yawned again. “Do you mind? I am outrageously tired all of a sudden. I’m so sorry, Eds. I must be the crappiest friend ever.”
“No,” I said as I hauled her off the sofa. “No, you’re not and you know it. Damn you. I wish you were crappy then I wouldn’t mind half as much that you’re running off to Surrey without me.”
“Oh, you say the sweetest things, honey.”
“I wonder who the good-looking man was?”
“Listen, darling,” Beth put a hand on my shoulder, “you stay here and enjoy yourself. Go meet the Romeo with the dark hair and then call me tomorrow and tell me every single thing that happened. OK?”
“I don’t want to stay without you.” I said. “I’d just wander around the party fretting: I don’t know any people here except for that balding bloke over by the window.”
“Who?”
“That one,” I pointed out Peter Shaw to her as discreetly as I could. “He’s Eustace Fox’s partner and he’s high up in the Council – so I don’t particularly want to talk to the only person I know here, bar Eustace Fox himself. No, come on, let’s go.”
I took her hand and gently pulled her forwards. “Oh thank you, darling,” she said, leaning against me as we slowly left the party. “You have so much spunk, you know that?” She was laughing again, holding her sides. “Oh God, I so have to grow up with baby on the way.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, walking her slowly to the front door, “You can be rude, can’t you? It can’t hear you.”
“Yes but no big laughs and no blue cheese…”
“Pregnant Woman Caught Laughing With Spunky Sidekick Here. Any witnesses call Lewisham Police...”
“Edda! Bloody well stop it!”
Five
Like a true divorcee I was finding the weekends tough. In fact, it was probably worse than divorce because I didn’t have the benefit of a lawyer to focus my anger on. I just had long stretches of time when I felt I ought to be making some sort of effort to be sociable but, actually, doing nothing about it, still clinging to the fantasy that hey everything will just fall back into place with Beth, and the baby is a temporary blip.
But, in the mean time, I was in danger of turning into a modern day Miss Havisham, holed up in my large empty Victorian house with dust bunnies rolling across the landings like tumbleweed. I could see why people living on their own went mad. I could totally understand the Miss Havisham thing: what a rational and misunderstood woman she must have been.
Friendless and alone I was slowly descending into some dark and terrible place: I would end up dressed in faded and rotting Boden loungewear, surveying the boxed remains of KFC family feasts arranged on a long table being nibbled by rats. I hadn’t quite got round to stopping the clocks in the house at the point when Beth had announced her pregnancy, but I hadn’t had the heart to throw out her collection of mouldering pestos from the fridge. She loved pesto and having the jars there made it seem, almost, like she still lived with me. A little bit of our past that still existed in our fridge. Thrived actually. Bloomed…
Over the last couple of weeks Amanda’s suggestion of getting a lodger cropped up more and more in my thoughts: I had just enough perspective to realise that living on my own was not working out too well and besides there was the financial incentive: my bank manager was now entering an almost weekly correspondence with me – like a one man postal blog – about the benefits of coming in for a chat about your finances. So maybe a lodger would address the pressing financial issue as well as my pressing mental issue. Maybe if Miss Havisham had had a lodger she would have felt obliged to clear up the wedding cake and dust down her rats every so often. With the idea of a lodger now in my mind I realised I would have to tackle the house and the garden. No one would want to live in a place like this: even Finley would look disdainfully at our surroundings. Things would have to be done.
And at least I now had plenty of time to do them.
“Gardenin’ is it darlin’?” my elderly neighbour, Babs, shouted across the garden wall. She was sitting on the top step of her raised front door, smoking a cheap fag, and watching the world go by. Between daybreak and dusk it was odds on that Babs would be on the step with a fag in, watching the goings on in South East London. “Lovely day ain’t it? It’s gonna be a good summer, or so they’re sayin’. Although ’ow a warm April means it’s gonna be ’ot in August I don’t know. It’s all bollocks, ain’t it? You all right, Edda, love?” She was eyeing me suspiciously over the rims of her dirty pink glasses.
“I’m fine,” I said, coming nearer to the wall so that I didn’t have to shout my part of the conversation to all of Brockley.
“Yer don’t look it. Yer look ill.”
Great: I was divorced, I was becoming Miss Havisham, I was looking ill. I ticked all the boxes.
“I haven’t got much sleep the last few weeks.” I rubbed a hand across my face.
“Shaggin’ was yer?”
“No I was not!” Babs never failed to horrify me.
“What then?” she continued, refusing to be put off.
“My best friend’s having a baby.”
“Ahh … a little baby! One of them long labours?”
“She wasn’t in labour. I only found out she was pregnant a month ago.”
“An’ that’s it? So wotchu losin’ sleep over your best friend being up the duff for, then?”
I shrugged. “It’s been a shock. That’s all. I didn’t think we were ready for a baby.”
Babs gave a loud phlegmy snort. “You sound like the bleedin’ father of it! Not ready for it aren’t yer? You ain’t got a lot of choice my darlin’, ’cause it’s comin’ whether you wants it or not.”
“I know. Anyway … how are you?” If in doubt, with Babs, change the subject.
“Can’t complain.” She took a long drag of her fag. “Helluva week for old Reg at the launderette, though.”
“Why?”
“He ’ad a sheet in last week what ’ad gun shot holes in it, an’ blood all over it.”
“And someone wanted it cleaned?” I stared at her.
“You’d be surprised,” Babs said nonchalantly. “Anyhow, them police came in an’ questioned Reg for hours about why he cleaned it, why he got rid o’ evidence from the scene of a crime an’ that. Got into big trouble for just doin’ his job. How’d ’e know the bloke with the laundry was a triple murderer?”
“Exactly. Who would know?” I tried to sound as reasonable and unshocked as possible.
Beth was so wrong about my neighbour Babs: the woman was great. Since Beth had moved out, and increasingly now, with so much time on my hands, I was getting to know Babs a lot more, swapping brunch at V-2 with Beth for a cuppa on the front step with Babs. And I enjoyed our conversations very much. Beth was always horrified that I even talked to the woman – she lives in the gutter Eds! – but Babs gave me a real and mostly terrifying insight into the ‘other’ Brockley. The authentic South London place it was before all the gentrification and the Guardian readers started moving in and making everything ‘nice’. Babs’ world was filled with gin-soaked criminals and infamous rogues, a world with a direct line back to Dickens’ criminal world. Yes, sometimes I came away from talking to Babs in fear for my life and not wanting to ever leave the house again, but mostly I just enjoyed the vicarious thrill of knowing what the criminal underclass were up to in and around SE4.
Fella got shot right outside our Tyrone’s on Tuesday. Bullet missed me by inches.
Found a rock of heroin in the street when I was on me way to bingo that was as big as me fist.
The owner of The Greasy Finger Café tried to hang ’imself last week by ’is wife’s bra…
“Babs…?” I’d walked a few steps down the garden path but stopped and faced my neighbour again, “You know everything about everyone in Brockley…”
“I can’t deny it,” Babs drew on her cheap fag. “The stories I could tell you…”
“You do tell me Babs.”
“No
t some of ’em,” she laughed and broke into a filterless fag coughing fit. “Yer as dainty as a doily, Edda, an’ there are some things that ain’t for your fine ears.”
“Right. Well. I’m sure. But I was going to ask – what do you know about Fox Estates, just around the corner, and the man who owns it – Eustace Fox?” Since the party I’d been thinking about him and his sign-hoarding. Who was the man who had wanted to have me at his party because I’d gardened the skip? What sort of man wears such loud trousers and keeps a stuffed bear in the hallway?
Babs scratched beneath her wig and thought for a moment, looking down the street in the direction of the estate agency. “Been open a couple of years, ain’t it? Posh place. Bay trees outside. Bay trees in South East London, I bloody ask yer! It’s a dirty place South East London, no matter ’ow them estate agents try to dress it up with their fancy trees. It ain’t no Blackheath Borders or Greenwich Envy Rons round ’ere. Round ’ere it’s the arse end of the Old Kent Road and yer can’t change that. Bay trees! Good job ’e’s chained the last lot of ’em down, otherwise they’d be down Catford Market inside an hour if ’e didn’t. You get a good price for ’em.” She pointed her fag at me to make her point. “I’d imagine.”
“So what do you know about Eustace Fox?” I tried to refocus my neighbour.
There followed a short silence and I realised, shocked, that Babs was actually exercising caution before speaking. The queen of gossip and dirt-dishing was chewing her lip and frowning, clearly not sure what she should or shouldn’t tell me about this man. I was shocked to my core. This was the first time she’d ever, in the five years I’d been her neighbour, and the last few weeks I’d really got to know her, felt unable to instantly dish the gossip.
To say I was intrigued was an understatement. What could she possibly know about Eustace Fox that she couldn’t speak to me about?
“Lives over Tresillian Road, don’t he? Why’d’you ask?”
“Oh. I just wondered…” I said, playing it cool and picking up my hatchet. I turned to survey the rambling wasteland that was my neglected front garden.
“Don’t know much about ’im,” she muttered. “Anyway, I’ll leave yer to it, darlin’.” And off she went inside.
Odd. Very odd. But Babs was someone who lived for gossip and I was pretty sure I’d hear more about Eustace Fox from her very soon.
So … the garden. Here was a place I could take out all my pent-up rage and anger.
There was an inner fire burning … inside me. An anger at my empty weekend, my Bethless abandonment. Anger that I had been made into a victim.
The hatchet felt good in my hands. It was heavy, sharp and – once I’d cleaned the reddish brown marks from it – it glinted dangerously in the sunshine. I’d found the hatchet in the skip when Beth and I had spent the night gardening and I knew I’d find a use for it.
“Right then,” I said, and then I set to work.
“Feelin’ better now, are yer?”
“Hello again, Babs.” I’d smelt her fags on the air, so it was no surprise to see my neighbour hanging over the garden again. Panting slightly I put down my hatchet and joined her at the wall. Wiping my hair off my wet forehead I stood back to admire my day’s work for the first time.
Oh.
“Got carried away did yer, darlin’?” Babs broke into my long stunned silence.
“Erm.” I said, looking out over a wasteland of devastation. “I might have done.”
From the house right up to the hedge bordering the pavement there was bare, savaged earth, hacked and mutilated plants in disarray and the most epic weed mountain that even the keenest gardener at Kew would not have been able to top.
“Well, I can’t say it didn’t need it.” Babs continued. “Shame about them stocks though. I would’a had ’em off you. Beautiful they were – late white flowers an’ a fancy smell to ’em.”
“Oh.” I turned back to my weed mountain that stretched up towards the first floor window. “So they might not all be weeds in the weed pile, then?”
“Bloody ’ell, Edda. Didn’t yer mum an’ dad never tell yer about gardenin’?”
“Not very much,” I said. Because my parents are dead! Yes it was impossible for me to ever slip that fact into a conversation. Maybe if I’d had proper counselling at the time, then I would have learnt how to calmly and rationally express their deceasification. But instead all I’d been given was a plump lady, with a moustache and a powerful baritone voice, who nodded a lot and said, “Do you cry? It’s good to cry,” every ten minutes.
“Well, by my reckonin’ you’ve got strawberry trees, fuchsia, stocks and some lovely forsythia in there.” Babs pointed to the towering pile.
“Ri-ight.”
“An’ parsley, rosemary, chive, sage, a whole bush full o’ mint an’ some lavender an’ all.”
“Oh.” That explained the pot pourri period of gardening nearer the house.
“Not to worry though darlin’, it’s good to have a clear out ain’t it?” She blew a smoke ring up into the air. “And you did rip out one or two nettles an’ all.”
“Yes, well, I feel like I’ve really achieved something today,” I said, “Even if it is devastation. At least it’s a start.”
“So, what are yer gonna do with it now?”
I looked back to my new bleak wilderness. “I hadn’t really thought that far ahead. I’ve got some gardening books, so now that I’ve cleared everything away I can draw up some plans for my new garden.”
“Well, I don’t blame yer for leavin’ the garden for a bit. You got better things to do than dig ’aven’t yer? All that clubbin’ an’ shaggin’ you kids get up to these days. You ain’t got time for gardens.”
“That’s what it is,” I said, trying to block out the image in my head. There were always inappropriate noises wafting down from Babs’ open bedroom window at night.
“An’ yer got some gardenin’ practice when you ’ad a good go at that skip didn’t yer?” Babs broke into my thoughts.
I leant in to the wall in shock. “You know it was me? You saw me?”
“Course I bleedin’ did, Edda! You an’ that mate o’ yours were making enough noise to wake the dead in Nunhead Cemetery.”
“Really? I thought we’d been pretty discreet.”
Babs snorted and took a long drag of her fag.
“Anyway,” I went for the distraction tactic again, “I have to tidy up the place – I’m thinking of getting a lodger in.”
“Makes sense darlin’. Big old ’ouses like ours need fillin’. That friend, the one in the skip, didn’t she used to live with yer a while back? I seem to remember seein’ a lot of ’er. Not that she ever spoke to me.”
“She moved out two years ago.”
“Two years ago? Well ’ow time flies. It only seems like yesterday that she was forever dashin’ up and down yer garden path without so much as a hello. No time for folks round ’ere I reckon. So she’s gone an’ she left you all alone ’as she?”
“Sort of. She’s having a baby. And now she and her fiancé are moving to Surrey.”
“They all go to Surrey…” Babs nodded sagely, staring wistfully at my weed pile. “To be honest with yer, darlin’, she looked the type. Couldn’t see ’er livin’ in South East London for long. A girl like that belongs in Surrey. Friends, eh? Some say that friends is the family you choose yerself, but I say that’s a big pile of shit ’cause friends are no more than people yer meet what stick around.”
“She was my family.” I sighed, now in danger of unloading my heartache on Babs. But I did want to talk about it to someone…
“That your boyfriend, is it?” Babs cut into my thoughts, nodding in the direction of the road and I turned to see the black-haired artist from Eustace Fox’s soirée, standing at my gate.
POW!
There were fireworks exploding in all sorts of places. I managed to control myself and affect some kind of composure.
“No,” I wobbled, “he’s not my boyfriend. I
don’t even know his name.”
But Babs had gone, sensing that she wasn’t needed now that Milk Tray man had arrived. I turned to the gate and my handsome visitor.
“I love what you’ve done here,” he enthused in a voice that was pure chocolate. He strode into my front garden, surveyed the wreckage and then looked up and held me in a green-eyed grip.
I bit my lip. “Hi.”
“Guy. Guy Newhouse. I saw you at Eust’s party the other week.”
Did he? Did he see me? I shook the outstretched hand. Even his handshake was handsome.
“Hi.”
Handsome Guy Newhouse, Milk Tray man, looked around at the devastation again. “Are you doing some sort of archaeological excavation here? Are you going back to the pre-Roman?”
I laughed. “No. I’m going minimalist on the planting.”
“I’d say barren is a better description.”
“Well it’s got potential.” I said, loving the fact he was standing before me, hating the fact I was sans-make-up and sweaty and still carrying a hatchet.
“You sound like Eustace in full Estate Agent mode when you talk about potential,” Guy clapped a hand on his head, squashing the bouncy black curls. “Talking of whom, I have come on business.”
It took a moment for his words to register with me. And when they did my heart dropped. “You’re here on business from Eustace Fox?”
“The man himself,” Guy was inspecting the weed mountain. “You know these aren’t all—”
“I know.”
He strode around the mound. “I was going to ask to take some of these for my garden – they’re expensive plants – but they’re hacked to pieces. What the hell happened here? Did you have some kind of fit?”
“Sort of.” There had been a frenzied element to the last three hours but Babs had been right – it was cathartic. Beth could walk down the road right now, married, with four screaming children in tow and I wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow in a Roger-Moore style. I was at one. I was relaxed. I had soothed my inner anger.
