by Claire Peate
“…and it’s the root bore you have to pay particular attention to. Now, the wife and I planted a bed of potatoes earlier this year and what we now want to know is are we having roast potatoes with our joint of beef this weekend? So, let’s see if our raised beds and egg-shells have done the trick…”
There was a knock at the door.
“Oh … what?”
Neither of us moved. OMG’s potato crop was on the very brink of being harvested, OMG’s wife was hovering in the background, and no one knew if the crop was healthy. The anticipation was killing me. I looked at Robert: he looked just as gripped as I was. Even Fin was watching the insects buzzing on screen.
“I would go and answer it,” Robert said, not taking his eyes off the TV, “but it’s your door. The chances are it’s for you.”
“Damnit. Tell me what happens to the potato crop then.”
“Guy!”
“Hey,” the delectable artist-cum-gardener smouldered in the night, barely more than a shadow leaning against the darkened wall. “Ready to come out and play?”
“I—,” and suddenly he was kissing me, pulling me out into the night and then pushing me up against the wall with his body.
“Was it—? Oh. Yes. It was definitely for you.” I heard Robert behind me and then the sound of the lounge door closing.
“And he is?” Guy pulled back slightly and ran his tongue slowly along my lower lip. “I’m not upsetting any boyfriends am I?”
“My lodger.” I managed to croak.
“A-ha.”
I took advantage of the break in being kissed to ask, “We’re not gardening tonight, are we? I thought it was next week.”
“We’re not,” he ran a hand down the small of my back. “But I’ve got Eust’s 1971 Lincoln Continental parked out the front. And don’t you think it’s just the perfect night for a bombing raid?”
“Eustace lets you borrow this car?” I slid a hand along the length of its body. Even in the dead of night I could make out that the car was perfection itself. The black bodywork was gleaming, the chrome was perfect, as if the forty years since it left the production line hadn’t touched it.
“Oh, he’s an old pussy cat really.” Guy opened the door for me. “He owes me a few favours so … I asked Dad if I could borrow the car and he said yes.”
“He’s not…?”
“No. It was a turn of phrase.”
“OK.”
I climbed in, closed the heavy door shut behind me and was enveloped by the smell of wax polish and engine oil. Guy got into the driver’s side and began fiddling with the old radio until he got a screeching wailing noise. While he tuned, I surreptitiously looked at his shock of springy black hair falling into waves around his shoulders: yes, perhaps Babs had been right, it could do with a wash. But it was so-o cool…
“Ahh, the genius Don Michaels,” Guy paused to listen to the man on the radio. I had thought it was static in between the radio channels but actually when I listened hard I realised that it was actually someone fitting down a saxophone. “The greatest jazz musician of the sixties.”
I sat back in the enormous stitched leather seat and tried to appreciate the noise but, tragically, all I could think was: did Old Mr and Mrs Gardener from the TV have roast potatoes with their Sunday lunch?
“This is the coolest car I have ever been in,” I said during a lull in the cacophony. And as soon as I’d said the words the realisation hit me. Since my parents had died, I’d actually been in very few cars. My aunt and uncle hadn’t owned one. I hadn’t needed one at university. I hadn’t wanted one in London. None of my boyfriends had been well off enough to have owned one … in fact the only car I’d ever really been in was Beth and Jack’s car.
I could feel my heart thundering in my chest. How strange, and also how maddening that the impact of losing my parents still had the ability to floor me. And that after fourteen years I still couldn’t control it. It happened any time. Here I was sitting in the dark beside a drop dead gorgeous artist, in a 1971 Lincoln Continental, and I was on the brink of tears about my dead parents. How could I have no control over this, even now?
“Don Michaels is an amazing man. Simply amazing. Do you know he’s never had a music lesson in his life? What you’re hearing is all completely self-taught.”
“No kidding?” I took a deep breath in and, shooting a glance at my companion, saw he hadn’t noticed my mood change. Good. I hastily rubbed my eyes and put all thoughts of dead parents to the back of my mind. Bombing raid. Artist.
“What is a bombing raid?” I asked, not wanting to sound stupid but also wanting to know what the evening might hold, just in case he was more militant than I thought. Even though it seemed at the moment that I was immersing myself in a life of crime I didn’t want to push it too far.
“Well,” Guy peeled himself away from Don Michaels, “We wind down the windows and we throw seed bombs, or ‘green grenades’ as some people call them, at traffic islands and road sides. In six months’ time there’ll be miniature wildflower meadows all over Brockley. It’s a New York thing: Eust wants us to branch out from straight night gardening.”
He started up the car and it growled into life.
“This car,” I said, as we cruised passed a gang of youths on a street corner who had all stopped to stare, “isn’t it a bit too noticeable for a bombing raid? Wouldn’t you be better running covert ops in something like a Mondeo?”
“I would rather die than drive a Mondeo.”
“Right, yes … there is that.”
Guy pulled up almost as soon as we’d set off. “Just look at that, Edda.” We were outside Mr Iqbal’s Petit Marché.
“I know! It’s just so weird that the Mini Mart has become this French … style … you don’t mean the shop do you?”
“No. This,” Guy pointed out of the opposite window towards the beautifully gardened approach to the station. “Da Notorious Baron has been here.”
“Has he?” I leant across him to see where he was pointing. The wall opposite the site had been graffitid and there it was – my two women stencil. I felt a stab of pride.
“Eust is livid.”
“I can imagine,” I slunk back into my seat and wiped the enormous smile off my face.
“He’s got the painters coming first thing tomorrow before the commuters start. It’s really hacked him off. But, I must say,” Guy leant out of the window to get a better view, “it’s showing a lot more promise than the previous works. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that it was signed by Da Notorious Baron then I’d not attribute it to him. It’s stylised but it’s realistic.”
“It does look very real. So is Eustace still trying to catch this Baron?”
“More than ever.”
“Really? And he’s going to push him through art school still?”
“I don’t know. I think he’s taken this pretty personally,” Guy said, taking off the brake and pulling away. “I mean it takes the shine off the new station garden doesn’t it?”
I bit my lip and said no more.
We slid through the empty South London streets in our giant black Lincoln Continental looking for all the world like bad gangsters, except that we had jazz on the radio and not bangin’ choonz, which would have been far more appropriate. Guy was scoping the road-sides, looking for locations most in need of seed bombs. On his instruction I was doing the same, but mostly I was distracted by the lights in the houses, peering in to the curtainless front rooms to get a snapshot of the lives of South Londoners at ten on a Friday night. Watching TV. Dinner party. Row. Watching TV. Decorating.
And all the time the awful jazz.
From the open roads bordering Nunhead, where the families lived in large semi-detached houses, we circled the narrow terraces of Crofton Park and then moved on to a series of rundown roads in Ladywell. There were a few youths on the streets: boys in baggy jeans and girls in thigh-high skirts screeching at each other and necking cans. All of them stopped as we drove by, whooping or shou
ting: nice ride, man, as if this was LA and not SE4.
And Guy loved it: dismissing them with a sneer or a throwaway comment but I could tell he was eating up their admiration.
It just would have been far cooler with Xfm on the radio.
Half an hour after we’d set off, Guy slid the car into an unlit side road and cut the engine. We were just off Wickham Road, a minute from Beth’s place. Would the lights be on in her flat? What would she be doing now: watching TV? Reading? Talking to Jack or talking to her mother on the phone? Or missing me?
This was obviously a night for melancholy thoughts.
“Right, Edda, I’ve made up seventy five bombs.” Guy reached down into my footwell, brushing my leg with his hand and looking up at me slyly as he bought the box up. “And, having sized-up the surrounding areas, I think we should aim to throw around twenty-five parcels of goodies on the Nunhead-Brockley borders, another twenty-five along the Crofton borders and the rest along the Ladywell border – I’ll point out exactly where when we’re nearer.”
I peered into the box and pulled out a seed bomb. “They’re condoms!”
Guy laughed. “Ah, so you haven’t led a completely sheltered life then.”
“I’ll have you know that before my friend left me for her baby we were the life and soul of this city. There aren’t many bars between here and Highgate we haven’t stumbled or fallen out of.”
“Very good,” he said absentmindedly and reached into the box of condoms. “Now watch this.”
He showed me how to untie the ends, being careful not to spill the seeds in the car and then he demonstrated a flinging technique. “Up,” he said, “up with a flick of the wrist.” He lobbed a seed bomb past me and through my open window. In the orange street light I could see the tiny seeds scattering onto the ground.
“So what happens to the condoms? We just leave them?”
“Yup. Eust has contacts at the Council and the litter patrol will pick them up in the next few days. I just have to list where we bombed and Eust will pass the info on. It’s far more acceptable to see an official litter patrol in action during daylight, than guerrilla gardeners risking life and limb on road sides at dusk. In a few weeks the waste grounds surrounding Brockley will be covered in poppies and cornflowers and entire wild flower meadows. So – are you ready?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then let’s go.”
“There is one thing,” I said, putting a hand on his knee and stopping him reversing.
“And that is?” He looked over at me, saucily.
“Well, it’s something that’s been bugging me for a while. And … well… ”
“Sounds ominous.”
I took a deep breath. There was never going to be a good time to bring this up, but I did want to ask. “Well … it’s about the youth that was found wrapped around one of the broken oaks on the A-2.”
“Ahh.” Guy killed the engine. “What about him?”
“Did Eustace do it?”
He laughed. “Christ no! Do you know, even in the dark your hair is flame red? Quite incredible.”
Any other time and I would have melted, but right now I’d summoned up the courage to ask and I wanted an answer. “But even if you say Eustace didn’t do it, it’s connected to the tree planting isn’t it? It’s something to do with Eustace?”
Guy let my hair run through his fingers. “Yes,” he said. “Eustace ordered one of his acquaintances to ‘teach the lad a lesson’: his words. But don’t you worry about it: the vandal only got a slap on the hand, nothing more. It was more about the humiliation from what I can make out from Eust, to send out a signal: we’ve gone to all this effort with the tree planting, so don’t do it again.”
“But don’t you think it’s a bad thing? To have beaten up someone and left them unconscious wrapped around a tree.” I looked at him, trying to read his expression in the dim light. How could he think it was acceptable to go around doing that to people?
“Eustace doesn’t think it’s acceptable. Not at all. And he had a word with the bloke who he asked to help him out. All Eust was after was humiliation: the uniform and the acorns, tied up to one of the tree stumps that he damaged. But according to Eust’s bloke the youth tried to fight back, there was self-defence involved and the youth ended up with a black eye because Eust’s bloke had to knock him out. He didn’t want to and Eust specifically said that wasn’t what was wanted. It got out of hand. But then it’s likely to when you’re dealing with lowlifes, isn’t it?” Guy put a hand on my shoulder. “Seriously, my Highland Beauty, don’t spend any more time fretting about it. It wasn’t how things were supposed to be. Eustace was as shocked as you are and I know that it won’t happen again.”
What could I say to argue against that? It was perfectly reasonable. Of course Eustace wasn’t in the business of ordering hits on people. Why on earth would a middle-aged, loud-trouser-wearing man with a reputation to keep up do a thing like that? OK, so there was also the case of the hoarded police signs… No. I would have to let it go.
“And…” I said, “there is one more thing.”
I leant across him and over to the dashboard.
“Wh— Edda what are you – you can’t do that! What is that?”
“It’s Xfm.”
“But I was enjoying the jazz.”
“And I wasn’t. So, can we try something new, please?”
Guy looked genuinely thunderstruck. “Well. I suppose so. And what is this Xfm?” he asked, and then a moment later, “Oh dear God, Edda! Really? This is really better? But it’s just noise!”
“No it’s Kasabian. Now drive! Drive! I need to fling!”
It was good. Really good. The music was thumping, I’d lower the windows as we cruised by and fling, one wildflower meadow here, fling, another wildflower meadow there. I was a seed-filled-condom God of Creation. In Ladywell, we circled a run-down traffic island two, three, four times as I bombed it repeatedly, covering it with seeds and a meadow for the future, but leaving the more immediate impression that some sort of orgiastic romp had taken place in the middle of the Ladywell traffic system.
“Five left in the box!” I shouted above the music as the old Lincoln Continental pulled out of Ladywell.
“Lewisham, then.” Guy screeched the car down the hill towards the town, slowing to merge in with other traffic. “You’ll have to be careful, here, that you don’t get caught throwing the green grenades. Look behind you before you throw.”
“Head for the station, there’s derelict land near there!” I shouted over the Chemical Brothers. The Lincoln Continental veered off towards St John’s and Lewisham station.
“Police!” Guy was looking in his mirror. “I’ll circle the roundabouts to let them pass.”
Seed bombing in Lewisham was impossible. It was midnight, but there were people on the streets and cars and buses and bikes on the roads. It felt as if the whole of London had come to Lewisham that evening. “Now!” Guy lowered my window and I hurled out a bomb at a barren traffic island, quickly undoing the next bomb so that I was ready.
“Now!”
I was loving it but terrified of getting caught, knowing there were cars behind us and pedestrians beside us who must have seen me, but these were the last of the bombs and I didn’t care. I hurled them across the carriageways and watched the tiny seeds scatter in a slow arc and the condom fall half emptied to the ground.
“Done!” I laughed, brushing my seed-covered hands out of the window and then I raised it, turning to look at Guy, who had been laughing too, caught up in the thrill of driving this beast of a car and the fear of getting caught throwing loaded condoms.
In a squeal of tyres we sped out of Lewisham up the Blackheath road, leaving the main route and taking a series of smaller and smaller roads until we pulled up on a rough track near the Heath behind a line of trees.
I still had the box on my knee, empty except for a scattering of seeds and, found at the bottom, three still-packeted condoms. I held them in the palm
of my hand and looked up at my partner in crime.
“You haven’t used these,” I said.
“Not yet.” Guy wrenched on the handbrake. “Onto the back seat with you.”
I couldn’t call Beth again could I?
Could I?
I looked at the phone on the table.
No. I couldn’t.
I could!
I dialled her number. Her mobile was ringing without going through to voicemail and I’d already left messages on her home phone.
Oh my God, Beth, it was amazing. Guy had me – had me in the back of a 1971 Lincoln Continental. OK, never mind the car, actually. Guy had me, he had me and it was amazing, call me, call me, call me, because I really need to— BEEP
OK, Beth, it’s me again. What I was going to say was I went on this bombing raid around Brockley and it was awesome and I threw a green grenade into your garden so there’ll be a wildflower meadow in six months, but you’ll be gone anyway, but— BEEP
God, Beth, get your answerphone sorted out it keeps cutting out after a few seconds. Just call me, OK, I really, really want to talk to someone about Guy. Actually I need to talk to you, honey, oh please answer the goddamn phone will you? It was so amazing. OK, I’m going before the stupid— BEEP
Urgh. What was the good of it all if I had no one to talk to about it? Where was Beth when I needed her? She’d love to know about this: it was exactly the sort of thing we’d spend all day Saturday at V-2 talking about. Except this was so much more exciting than anything we had ever talked about at V-2 on a Saturday morning.
A door shut upstairs and I leapt off the bar stool, clutching my chest. And then I remembered: Robert! I’d completely forgotten that I’d got a lodger. How loud had my voice been when I’d left the messages for Beth? What had Robert heard?
“Hi,” he padded down the stairs with Fin draped over his shoulder. “Have fun last night?”
“Yes!” I said, alarming him with the force of my response. “Yes,” I added more calmly.
“Great. Look, I’m off to the supermarket. Do you need anything?”
