by Claire Peate
“What a toss—?”
“Oh come on! He’s just old-fashioned.”
“He sounds like an idiot. He’s seriously expecting you to plant up all those lathy odours or whatever they are?”
“He continues, ‘Also enclosed, dear Edda, is a Farrow and Ball colour chart for your perusal’,” Robert snorted and I paused in the reading to kick him. “‘I note your facias and soffits are showing rather more wear than is strictly necessary and may I be so bold as to suggest French Grey (number 18) for both? I have appended the telephone numbers of two painters and decorators who – as very good friends of mine – will offer you excellent rates that I guarantee you won’t find anywhere else: friends help each other out. Most sincerely yours, Eustace Fox, Esquire’.”
“Esquire!”
“Oh, come on.”
“So will you ask Guy to help you with the planting?” Robert said.
I put the letter down on the table top. “Maybe…”
But the truth was I didn’t think that I would ask Guy. I didn’t want to presume on him in that way: our relationship – if indeed it was a relationship of any sort – was built on something that didn’t feel sufficiently real or substantial to go asking him to help me out with some planting – even though it was for Eustace. Asking Guy to help me out was a shade too close to including him in real life: like asking him to do some plumbing or help me with the weekly shop. Guy was lust and excitement: he wasn’t leaking taps and breakfast cereals.
Robert flicked the colour chart shut. “Do you want me to help you?”
“Would you?”
“Is it fun?”
“Ye-es,” I said and then added: “sort of.”
“It’s hard work isn’t it?”
“It can be.”
“Well,” Robert considered the situation, “you did bring all those amazing cakes home that day you worked at V-2. I do owe you … when do we have to do it? What did the letter say?”
“It just says ‘soon’ ”
“Tomorrow, then? Are you doing anything tomorrow evening?”
“Nope.” I said, ridiculously happy now that my problem was solved and my Friday night occupied. “I’ll dig out the sombreros.”
“The what?”
“Ah wait and see…”
“So this is absolutely necessary for a night of guerrilla gardening, is it?” Robert said before he started another coughing fit. “Eurgh!”
We were sitting in my dimly lit kitchen, steeling ourselves for the night ahead in the only way I knew how.
“You get used to it,” I said. “And actually this stuff is really hard to get hold of: I had to go to the depths of Penge to get this brand of Cava.”
Robert refilled the glasses. “British Bulldog Cava?” he read the label. “BBC Drinks Company Ltd. Product of Erith, Greater London. Cava from South East London? Dear God, Edda, you could remove paint with this stuff. In fact you could probably remove the paint and the wood that was underneath the paint in the first place. This stuff is evil. Couldn’t you have pushed the boat out and just gone for something crap instead?”
“Well it was the only brand that the Mini Mart used to stock, and when Beth and I were gardening the skip I wanted to have something special to celebrate what we were doing.”
“It certainly is special. I suppose Umesh doesn’t stock British Bulldog Cava any more, now the shop’s a Petit Marché. It’s all Tattinger and Krug I expect.”
“Who?”
“Mr Iqbal – Umesh.”
I stared at him across the dimly lit table. “Umesh Iqbal? You know Mr Iqbal’s name? I’ve lived here for five years and I’ve never found out his name. Wow – you really are settling in here aren’t you? You’re becoming quite the South Londoner, too, aren’t you? I bet Babs would like to give you an induction.”
“She’s certainly…” he searched for the right words, “keen.”
“She says you’re a fine specimen.” I laughed. “She told me I’d done well getting a fine specimen of a man for a lodger.”
“And I am.” Robert downed another glass of BBC. “She told me the other day that I was just her sort of man.”
“She told me you had a nice arse!”
“Edda! Don’t tell me that!”
“Babs fancies you! And you must be young enough to be her son.”
“Stranger things have happened.” Robert shot me an enigmatic look and I choked on my drink.
“Would you?” I asked.
“No! Edda! What the hell is wrong with you? I was being ironic.”
“I think you would, you know. Seriously, I think if you had enough of this BBC stuff, and Babs came over, you’d be willing…”
“Shall we start gardening now then?” Robert stood up, clearly keen to put an end to this conversation.
I, on the other hand, spent the next ten minutes laughing and winding him up. Which was surprisingly easy to do.
The first thing we did when we started our night of guerrilla gardening was to walk the length of Geoffrey Road to see how many mini street-light patches we had to plant. Robert then calculated that we had enough stock for four plants per street light with enough netting to wrap around all the lights if we limited the netting to 50cm per light. Clearly teachers made good guerrilla gardeners. We began the night at the top end of the street furthest from Brockley Cross, so that by the time we came to the last street lights it would be super late – or early – and there was less chance of people being around.
“Except for the really hardened gangsters out doing their business,” Robert had helpfully clarified.
We had just got started and Robert had already begun moaning. “The sombreros really get in the way.” He kept pushing his back off his head. “I keep hitting mine against the lamp posts when I’m bending over and digging.”
“But they’re necessary.” I said. “So that no one recognises us. And besides, that’s what we used when Beth and I gardened.”
“But you don’t wear them when you go on the proper digs do you?”
“No. But perhaps we should do tonight.”
“I think I might take mine off if you don’t mind.”
Robert dug, I tapped out the plants from their pots and pushed them into the bared earth and covered them up while Robert lugged the water from the shopping trolley we’d commandeered.
“How long did that take?” Robert asked when the first of the sweet peas were in, the netting fixed to the first street light and the tallest sweet peas fixed to it with twine.
I checked my watch. “Twenty minutes.”
He did a quick calculation. “Great. So by the time we finish up at Brockley Cross it should be nearly five in the morning.”
“No-o…”
“Or we could speed up?”
“It’s a plan!”
We worked rapidly, breaking only for the occasional and much needed beer.
“Why didn’t you tell Eustace to sod off?” Robert asked when we had just celebrated the half way post. “I mean you shouldn’t be doing solitary guerrilla gardening should you? The others probably don’t and you already take part in the gardening for him, so why do all this extra stuff? You should have marched into Fox Estates and said no!”
“Well, firstly,” I said, “because he gave me a knot garden with a sundial.”
Robert considered the argument: “That’s fair enough. And secondly?”
“Because I’d be afraid to, I suppose. I think Eustace Fox likes to be in control and he wouldn’t take very kindly to someone messing with that. You need to keep on the right side of a man like Eustace Fox, I should think.”
“Sounds ominous.”
“Oh he’s fine. Honestly.”
“Babs doesn’t think so,” Robert said, draining the last of his beer.
“You and Babs! Are you two an item or something?”
“You’re jealous,” he said, returning to the hole he’d dug beside the street light.
“Yeah I’m jealous, that’s it. So does your
girlfriend know about Babs?”
“Plants please!”
It was half past three in the morning by the time we’d dug in our last much hated sweet pea and tied up the last despised tendril. We’d seen no one, thankfully, no muggers, rapists, gangsters, arsonists, bag snatchers and not even Babs. The minute the twine was tied on the last lamp post an exhausted Robert pushed the trolley back to the house while I collected up the remaining empty pots and followed him. Already the sky to the east was starting to lighten.
“Hey, Edda, take a look at this,” Robert pushed the trolley to the old coal shed by the side of the house while I closed the garden gate behind me. “What is it?” I whispered.
He pointed to the front steps where the sweet peas had been and I walked up to investigate, still only half-able to see in the dim light. When I got nearer I could make out that there were two large cans of paint – Farrow and Ball Exterior Eggshell – with a card fixed to the top of the nearest one. “With thanks. E.”
“Is the paint Farrow & Ball French Grey, by any chance?” I said.
“Do you need to even ask?” Robert looked at me. “Your friend really does like to be in control doesn’t he? You weren’t joking.”
“Well, I think it’s sweet.”
“Sweet that he tells you to paint your woodwork?” Robert looked at me with what I could just make out as an incredulous expression. “Sweet that he tells you what colour to paint your woodwork? Or sweet that he gives you the paint just in case you show any free will whatsoever and disobey orders?”
“No?”
“So you mean it’s sweet that he knows you did the guerrilla gardening tonight, that his spies were out there watching us and reporting back to him, or the big man himself was keeping an eye on you?”
“Are you trying to freak me out?”
“No. He does it all himself. I’m going to bed Edda. Goodnight.” He headed up the stairs with Finley hugging his ankles as he went.
Nineteen
“I know it’s, like, so amazing and everything!” Amanda was jiggling on my desk, but far from being a pantfest her presence was happily free from underwear thanks to a trouser suit bought on our joint shopping trip. It was actually quite odd to be talking to her and have no idea whatsoever what pants she was wearing. “I am just so completely excited!” she squeaked.
I sat on my beige Lewisham Council Posture Chair, torn between happiness for my friend but devastation at her news: Amanda had handed her notice in. Amanda was leaving. Me.
It was hard not to see this as another abandonment. Another person realising the dream and leaving me behind to trudge along, regardless. But I was really trying not to think solely how it affected me but to look outside myself and take pleasure in what others were feeling. Red magazine, February.
“So, I play this woman who has sex for money.” Amanda was saying.
“You play a prostitute.”
“Well, yeah. If you want to label it. But Max said she’s not, like, a real prostitute because she’s got seven children to feed so she’s been forced into it. Anyway it’s set like, a hundred and fifty years ago and I wear this really huge dress – like a tent or something – and I just lie there.”
“You lie there?”
“’cause I’m dead.”
“You play a dead prostitute.”
“In a film!” Amanda looked at me incredulously. “In a film. With Matt Damon! He’s like this man who’s killed my pimp and he’s also the father of my seventh child. Anyway, my role in the film is to lie there and Matt Damon cradles my head all sad and he cries and I lie there. And they’re paying me, like, nine months’ salary! For lying there dead and having Matt Damon hold my head! I mean, like – hello – how cool is that?”
“Well … that’s great.” I enthused, happy for her but, deep inside, also feeling the familiar selfish pain about how it was going to affect me. It looked like it was going to be Edda-no-mates all over again.
The realisation that everyone was doing great things with their lives and I wasn’t was not easily ignored. No doubt Babs was on the verge of finding a cure for cancer and emigrating to the States to cash in on her discovery. And Robert would move out so that he could shack up with the pretty blonde thing and make beautiful children. And I would be back in the dusty dining room with the cobwebbed boxes of KFC and the rats…
“Max says it’s the start of a really big thing for me.” Amanda giggled, and launched into why that was the case. I would miss her. I needed her. She was airy and silly and spoke like a twelve year old West Coast American but she was great. Now all I was going to have for company was my racy-novel-reading boss and the admin staff of the third floor of Lewisham Borough Council, none of whom would win a ‘most interesting person’ contest, so far as I could tell. One man from Accounts wore a bow tie to work last year and it was the talk of the office for over a month.
“You know,” she leant in to me, “I am so grateful to you. For having me help you choose a lodger. If you hadn’t, then I would never have met Max and I would never have made it as an actress. I’d be trudging along in this dead-end place with these dead-end people for the rest of my life. I really owe you, Edda.”
“O-oh,” I managed. Amanda would have no problem in the theatre with the way her voice carried to the furthest walls. I could see the people in Housing Benefit, bristling at the dead-end people comment.
“And you know that Guy bloke you’re seeing,” she began.
“Well, it’s not proper dating as you—”
“Yeah, like, exactly,” she said. “So you’re not like tied in or anything. Well, Max says that Robert really likes you. I mean like really likes you…”
“He does? Really?”
“Really.” Amanda slid off the desk. “Really, really.” She sauntered off, singing. Really, it was disgusting how happy she was.
For the rest of the day I checked out the Spades website, blogged reservedly, Saw a tramp looking comfortable on my bench in Hilly Fields last week: job done! But mostly let my thoughts wander in a Robert-style direction.
Robert liked me. Robert really, really liked me.
I toyed with the scrap of paper on the kitchen counter.
“Greta & I gone to theatre – dad again! – C U Saturday. Good luck gardening. Rob.”
Greta? Greta?
Of course: Greta was the French teacher at Robert’s school. The ‘friend of a friend’.
Greta was the blonde thing on the stairs in Robert’s pyjamas. I’d heard about the kooky French teacher more than once and, now, I realised they were one and the same person.
The kooky French teacher had sat on my stairs.
The kooky French teacher had slept with my lodger in my house.
I scrunched up the paper and in a moment of drama hurled it across the room. It was fine. It was all fine. And anyway, didn’t I have a gardening appointment to prepare for and a commercially successful and prominent artist to see? My Friday night beckoned.
Stupidly, ridiculously, I didn’t know whether or not to go up to Guy when I arrived on site for the dig. He was deep in conversation with Neil’s wife, Anja, who had obviously returned from her escape to Pembrokeshire. Why not go up to him? I’d spent the night at his place. We’d been around the borough of Lewisham seed-bombing: we were practically dating … so why hover around on the sidelines until he noticed me? Where was that going to get me? If I wanted to be his girlfriend I should act like his girlfriend (Cosmo, July).
I strode up to them and only when it was too late to turn back did I catch the tone of the conversation between Guy and Anja and realise that, actually, if I’d have been able to make out their expressions then I would have seen that they needed to be left alone.
“…he’s not going to be happy about it,” Guy was saying.
“To be honest,” Anja cut in sharply, “I don’t think he gives a shit if Eust’s happy or not. I think Neil’s had enough. We both have.”
“You told Eust you could do it. That was the deal.
Come on, Anja, make Neil see sense.” They both turned to me, me having rocked up right beside them.
“Hi...” I was now at the point of having to say something, so I said it and they both looked at me with what looked like relief. Clearly neither wanted the conversation to continue.
“Hey, Edda, how’s it going?” Guy grabbed me savagely round the waist and kissed me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Anja peel away, arms crossed and scowling.
“I’ve missed my little Scottish skip gardener,” he said, taking me round the corner out of sight to show me just how much he’d missed me, doing things which I would imagine never happened to Miss Havisham, before or after the clocks stopped.
The dig got underway. We were spread out across a long stretch of verge that bordered the Lewisham High Road on the Brockley side. Below us the smart dolls’ house terraces of St John’s stretched down the hill towards Deptford and the moneyed lights of Canary Wharf blinked and glimmered.
We set to work clearing the dog mess and the litter and the weeds. We filled the rubbish bags and Jake the muscle silently dumped them all into the van. It was the worst stage of any guerrilla event, the stage before getting warmed up and really into the actual gardening. The tension caused by potentially being caught was still with me, and I didn’t have the satisfaction of creating anything up to that point. I was just tidying.
“Hey, Edda…”
“Guy!”
I’d been crouched over a clump of weeds and had been so engrossed in the wrenching of the bloody things that I hadn’t heard him approach. He stood close above me, obscenely close, the top of his thigh millimetres from my face. He looked down at me and winked.
“Is there something you want, Guy?”
“Of course there is.” He crouched down beside me and kissed me. “But before that, Edda, would you mind helping out on the houses. I’ll explain what’s needed when we get there.”
