by Claire Peate
“Nice skip by the way,” Guy indicated over the hedge to my supersized window box opposite. “I see Da Notorious Baron has left his mark on it.”
Did everyone know about the skip? “He has?” I peered over the newly savaged hedge. “Oh!”
It was true: one side of the skip was now sprayed with a stencil of a woman in a bikini and stilettos holding up a giant daisy with the ‘artist’s’ name sprayed beneath. But like all Da Notorious Baron’s work it was completely rubbish: the woman’s legs were buckled and her breasts were freakily huge. Even the daisy didn’t look quite right.
“Is that supposed to be a picture of you?” Guy asked. “Are you a muse for Brockley’s answer to Banksy? Did Da Baron get you to pose mid-gardening?”
I laughed it off and then said, “How can you get a daisy wrong?”
“Well it’s hardly a surprise that Da Notorious Baron can get a daisy wrong: the man could get a straight line wrong. Are you angry at him for defacing your skip garden?”
I thought for a moment. “No. Not really. Actually I’m quite honoured that Da Notorious Baron has come up with a stencil just for me and my skip. Someone’s paid a tribute to what I’ve done.”
“A bad tribute.” Guy considered the artwork, frowning. “I don’t know why the man doesn’t just give up. I mean, it’s downright shameful. Did you see the tiger he sprayed up by the station a few months ago? It was just awful. Mangled.” He turned back to me and my hacked garden. “So what made you do it?”
“Do what?” My train of thought had derailed when Guy had made the comment about me being a muse for Da Baron. Did he really think I looked like that in a bikini and high heels? And had I ever worn a bikini and high heels at the same time?
“What made you garden the skip?” he said.
“Frustration?” I offered.
“Wow.” Guy looked impressed. “The talk of a true artist: driven by frustration and the need to create. You know, I think you and I have a lot in common, Edda. You’re obviously a very hot-blooded woman.” He looked at the ripped and plundered garden and back at me, all sparkling eyes and loaded eyebrows. “Someone who isn’t afraid to let go. Someone, Edda, with a passion. I’m a painter so I live for passion like that – I understand your need to express your inner being.”
“Yes.” What?
“Anyway, back to business,” he perched attractively on a stone bench I’d found under some plants and fixed me again with his green eyes. “You left Eust’s party too soon.”
“I know but my friend’s pregnant. She was tired.” I hovered in front of the bench. Should I sit next to him? He was very flirty with me but it wouldn’t really be on if I was flirty with him would it? Would it? Would it? No – it would be fine. I perched on the bench beside him.
“Your best friend is pregnant? Well, another one bites the dust.” Guy eloquently summed the situation up. “So this would be a perfect time for you to come to one of our gigs and get to know some new people. What do you think?” His eyes shone.
My heart was beating so loudly I was sure he would be able to hear it. “What gig?”
“Eust didn’t tell you?”
“No. Are you in a band?”
“Not that sort of a gig.” He laughed. “I thought Eustace had had the chance to explain who we were at the party. You really did leave early, didn’t you?”
“Who are you then?” I asked. This was all getting a bit Doctor Who. I just knew he was too handsome to be real. I was on the brink of being abducted by gorgeous aliens and taken back to a dying planet of handsomeness.
“Eust told you nothing about us... Nothing at all?”
“No.”
“OK then,” he leant back and took in the weed pile again. “Well … Eust wants you to join our secret society.” He said the words quietly, with an eye towards Babs’ house next door.
Aliens. Space ships. Dying planets. It was all coming true, in my front garden in glamourless South East London. “What sort of secret society?”
“I know. Completely melodramatic isn’t it? We call ourselves,” he leant close in to me, coming over all confidential and covert, “The Brockley Spades.” He looked to see the meaning dawn on me but it failed. “We’re guerrilla gardeners.” He added.
“Oh.” I sat and stared straight ahead, trying to remember what the hell a guerrilla gardener actually was. Some militant branch of the Royal Horticultural Society? Clearly Guy could read my expression because he added, “Guerrilla gardening … as in your skip planting,” he nudged me gently with his shoulder. “It’s at the very heart of what we do. It’s undercover gentrification. We’re a group of like-minded individuals stealing out under cover of darkness planting bulbs and beautifying lost corners of Brockley. Come along and see what it’s all about. A week next Thursday night, at nine, the Working Men’s Club on the Lewisham High Road. What do you think?”
It must have been what Peter Shaw had been alluding to at the office when he invited me to the soirée: the yarnstorming must go hand in hand with the guerrilla gardening. It was all making a vague hazy sense.
“Erm.” I had no idea whether I should accept his offer or not. None whatsoever. On the one hand stealing, working men’s clubs and guerrilla instantly made me think NO but on the other hand, what better offer would I have for a Thursday night? For any night? Ever again in my long and barren life. And the offer itself was put to me by a handsome stranger. Of course I’d do it…
Or would I? Damn. Where was my Beth when I needed her?
“Actually, I’m not sure. I mean I really flipped out when I decided to garden the skip. I’m not really usually quite so … you know … I’m not sure if I really am so like-minded as you think.”
“Come on, Edda, can I expect to see you on Thursday night?”
“You mean can Eustace expect to see me?” I asked, keeping it real. After all he was in my garden because Eustace Fox had asked him to be.
“No. I mean can I expect to see you?”
“Maybe.” I marvelled at how cool I sounded.
“Is that all you’ll commit to? Maybe?”
“It is.” I simply didn’t trust myself to make a sensible decision without a huge amount of thought going into it. Without my Beth on hand to guide me – boss me – I would have to stand on my own two feet and work things out for myself, and that required time. And possibly a pen and an Excel spreadsheet.
Guy stood up from the bench and I followed suit. “I like this.” He made a broad sweep with his arm, taking in the hacked wasteland around us, the hatchet, the shears, the weed pile. “It shows passionate spirit and untamed anger. You’re a fiery woman Edda, with your fine red hair, ‘behold those amber flames that lick the ice white ivory of your neck’. Beneath that cool exterior I think there’s an inferno burning.”
Just in time I remembered to close my mouth and not gape at him as he said the words.
Yes! I was passionate. I was driven. I had an inner fire burning … within me. Without thinking I responded with words straight from the heart, “Oh, right, thanks.”
“I’ll be expecting you a week next Thursday, Edda.” He said my name and my stomach went hot. Strolling to the gate he paused, “I know you won’t disappoint me, Edda Mackenzie.” I wasn’t sure, but he might have winked.
“Oh darling that’s fab!” Beth hugged me tightly and I could feel the unfamiliar press of the emerging baby bump in between us so I pulled back in case I flattened its head. I couldn’t even hug her now.
“The man is beautiful, even in daylight.” I panted, still trying to get my breath back from the sprint I’d just executed between my house and Beth’s flat the minute Guy had walked out of view in the opposite direction. “But I looked like this – can you believe I didn’t even have mascara on? And he still flirted with me. He said I was like an artist! He said something about having an inferno inside me and something else about flames licking my hair.”
“Licking your hair?” Beth looked disgusted.
“No it was nice. Some
thing about auburn locks or something. It might have been poetry, now that I think of it. You know, I reckon he imagines I’m a really passionate spirit because I have red hair and once guerrilla gardened the skip, and then hacked my front garden to pieces.”
“You hacked what?” Beth said.
“Excuse me! Coming through!” Jack was upon us from out of nowhere, staggering down the hallway with an enormous pink inflatable ball.
We stood aside to let him pass. “Are you going somewhere?” I asked as Jack squeezed the ball into the boot of his car.
“Antenatal classes.” Beth said, checking her watch. I noticed with a stab of joy that she still wore the A-Ha watch that I bought her for her seventeenth birthday. “Crap. We’re late. We couldn’t find the goddamn ball but then I remembered we’d put it in the shed at the bottom of the garden. Jack’s totally angry with me, but then he can’t really blame me: it’s all baby’s fault, isn’t it my tiny little darling?” she stroked her stomach. “I’ve gone completely ditzy you know, with the pregnancy. Look, sorry Eds, we really have to dash.” She pulled the front door closed behind her and I was left with nothing else to do but follow her as she walked down her path to the waiting car.
“It’s great that the artist thinks you’re hot!” she said.
“But do you think I’m selling him a puppy?”
“No! Eds you’re—”
“I mean,” I continued, trying to ignore Jack’s impatient tapping of the steering wheel, “do you think that he’ll realise that I’m not a passionate militant gardener sort and then be completely disappointed that I’m just … me. Someone with red hair that once gardened a skip. And hacked her front garden to pieces.”
“Darling!” through the open window Beth put a hand on my hand, “He’ll be totally smitten with you just as you are.”
“We are very, VERY late.” Jack said through gritted teeth.
“I’ll call you shall I? We’re in Guildford at Jack’s parents until Sunday but maybe the night after? Will you be in?”
“Yes.” I said in a small voice. I was always in. “But Beth, before you go, do you think I should go to this secret society meeting?”
Jack laughed. “Of course you should go!” He turned the key in the ignition. “Sounds amazing. Bye, Edda!”
“I think you should go as well,” Beth said as the car began to reverse away. “But then it’s your decision.”
“I know. I know.” I clung to the car door. “He said I had an inner fire! He said he thought I was a passionate woman!”
“I’m sorry, honey, we really do have to get going right now.”
“Of course, of course.” I stood back and waved them off, watching as they disappeared down Manor Avenue and onto the High Road. Off and away to baby classes.
How quickly euphoria could turn into wretchedness. My inner fire had been extinguished: I was nothing more than an abandoned, sweaty, soil-covered red-head. Without having the benefit of a sombrero for cover, I kept my head down as I trudged back to my house so that Babs sitting splay-legged on her front step wouldn’t be able to see the tears. My hands were clenched into fists at my side, my chin trembling but set in resolve: I would move on from this. I would do something with my life. I would not let this get me down.
Six
“What the heck is this?” I put down the free ads paper I had been scanning through and picked up the copy of Mature Woman that was lying on my desk at work when I got in. The magazine for women who still have that get up and go! There was a picture of just such a woman in her sixties on the front cover, holding a skipping rope and laughing.
What was making her so freakily happy?
Had she just carried out an assisted suicide on her not-so-active husband?
“I think Amanda bought you that.” My boss looked up briefly from her PC.
“Really?” I shifted from being insulted to being moved at the thought of Amanda leafing through magazines and picking one out for me: touched that she’d thought of me.
Someone had thought of me.
Someone had cared enough to spend – I flipped back to the front cover – one pound seventy on me.
I was perilously close to needing my sombrero again. Instead, I pulled myself together and focused on the fact that it was Mature Woman – for God’s sake – and then flicked through it, eventually reading an article: “Why women in their sixties are having more sex than ever before.” How much of a kick in the teeth was that?
Well, at least I had all my own teeth…
“Hey there!” In bounced Amanda, a shimmying display of short white skirt, black high heels and long bare legs. “Like the mag?”
“Yes. Thank you Amanda. I’m touched.”
“Well it had an article on loneliness: look…” She rifled through its denture-packed pages. “Loneliness: discover the new you in solitude.” It’s all about learning to be confident with who you are and how to meet people when you do want company.”
“So … great. Thank you.”
She perched on a clutter-free corner of my desk.
It was a yellow pants day. Lovely.
“What’s this?” She picked up the free ads paper I’d just bought. “Are you looking for love? Oh my God you know like murderers and rapists and stuff lure their prey by advertising in papers like this? You could be totally in trouble with lonely hearts columns.”
“Well, actually I thought I’d give the lodger idea a go.” I repositioned myself so as to minimise my exposure to Amanda’s underwear.
“Hey, that’s what I said you should do! You’re thinking about moving on! How cool is that? So have you had any calls about the room yet?”
“Loads!” I groaned and opened a note pad full of scrawled names and times for interviews.
Amanda took it and scanned down the list of names. “Girls and boys! How many people have you booked in to see it?”
“Thirty-six.”
“Thirty-six? You’re going to interview thirty six people for just one room?”
“I know; that’s too many isn’t it?” I looked back at the long, long list. “But I didn’t want to turn anyone away. What if the thirty-sixth person was the person and I turned them away because I thought I had too many to interview already?”
“Couldn’t you have, like, checked them on the phone? Didn’t some sound too weird so you just said the room was, like, gone or something?”
I tried to remember. “Only one person. He said God told him to call me about the room and that he knew the room was his by divine right. So I did tell him that the room had gone.”
“Like wow! And what did he say to you when you said that?”
“He said that God moved in mysterious ways and he’d have to move to Vauxhall instead. But apart from that … I’m not very good at vetting. Actually, I’m not very good on the phone.”
“Are you any good at interviewing?”
“Probably not, no.” I had a sudden flash back to Guy the artist in my garden admiring my passion and my red hair and what the person he thought I was might do in this circumstance. Should I be trying to act more passionate and red-headed?
“When are you interviewing?” Amanda asked.
“Next weekend.”
“Do you want help?”
“You’d help? You’d really come over?” I felt the beginnings of a lump in the back of my throat – wasn’t it true that in a time of need friends came out of the woodwork? Didn’t one of Amanda’s other magazines say something about that in an article on karma?
“Of course I’ll help! I, like, totally love this sort of thing: who stays, who goes. Like, oh my God, the power! You know? It’s, like, so my destiny to be a celebrity talent-show judge. I could come to yours for practice, for when I get well famous. Can I?”
I was lost for words but Amanda quite happily ploughed on. “I read that it’s, like, really important that once you’ve been dumped, you—”
“Can we not use the word dumped.”
“Fine then. Once you’ve be
en…” she looked to me expectantly, “The victim of a friend’s pregnancy…”
“Better.”
“OK, so once you’ve been a victim,” she said, “you deal with it right there and then. And this article, I think it was in Marie Claire or something, it said you should look at all aspects of your life, not just one, and reassess them or something. You know? And it’s, like, you’re totally doing that. You’re, like, being committed to moving on.”
“And that’s not all of it—” I began, buoyed up with her image of me, and before I had time to think it through I was telling her about the skip. When I saw her look impressed, I told her about the party that I’d been to with the stuffed bear and the police signs. And then, caught up in my eagerness to impress her I found myself blurting out about Guy (You go girl. You are, like, so over that divorce and everything.) and the invitation to the secret society in the basement of the Working Men’s Club.
“Bugger.”
“What?” Amanda said. “It sounds great! I’d, like, so give my Mac make-up collection to spend an evening with a handsome artist. Even if it is in a working men’s club on the Lewisham High Road. Is your secret society thing this Thursday?”
“Next Thursday. Amanda, you must not say anything.” I overcame the urge to grip her by the arm as I implored her. “Please. I forgot it was a secret. I shouldn’t have told anyone. I got carried away with all the excitement.”
“Oh my God, don’t worry about me or anything!” Amanda jumped off the table in a flash of lemon yellow. “You see Magda, from Lifelong Learning, over the other side of the office?” She pointed to the heavy-set woman with the permanent frown. “The things she told me about her and her husband’s sex life. I mean, like, oh my God, you would not believe! So your secret is safe with me.”
“That’s great Amanda, because you haven’t disclosed Magda’s secret to me in any way.”
“Exactly!” A stranger to irony Amanda tapped the side of her nose. “Your secret is, like, so safe. Anyway it’s about gardening – I mean how exciting is that? Unless you’re middle-aged or something. Who wants to hear a secret about gardening?”Ch 7
