by Lissa Evans
4. Widen my outside interests
She paused for a moment, crossed the item out, and substituted:
4. Acquire an outside interest
And then, because it looked such a pathetic statement, such a spineless admission of defeat, she scrubbed it out again.
The trouble was there was no time, there was never any time; meeting a friend for lunch, finishing a book, watching a TV programme without being interrupted every thirty seconds were the peaks of her ambition. The window of opportunity which had opened when the boys were at last old enough to be left in the flat by themselves had been slammed shut by her mother’s protracted illness, and then by the amount of time she spent with Dad. She was no longer sure what she was interested in – it was such a long time since she had actively pursued anything other than the dullest necessities. Other women her age went to clubs and wore leather trousers and took drugs. Or had weekend cottages in the country and dogs and au pairs. And husbands.
In just under a year the boys would be off to university and everything would change. Suddenly she’d have spare evenings and Saturdays – vast empty echoing spaces of time to fill with activities not involving laundry or vegetable preparation. The flat would triple in size, and those moments of solitude which – at present – she so relished, would become the norm. She needed to prepare.
The washing machine began the groaning drum-roll which denoted its spin cycle. It was almost as old as the twins and had begun to emit ominous twanging noises on unloading. Clothes were starting to emerge without their buttons, and the machine would subsequently disgorge them in small pieces, like teeth after a fight. Under the thunderous climax of the spin, she could hear the fragments rattling round somewhere deep in the interior. Recently, and for the first time, she had managed to push her savings account over the £300 mark; it was rather depressing to think it would all go again on a new washing machine.
She looked again at the ruined page and decided to use the remaining space to make a list of the things she enjoyed doing most. She had got as far as ‘Going to the library’ and ‘Having a bath’ when Robin emerged.
‘Hi, Mum.’ He gave her a stubbly peck on the cheek. He was both more affectionate and more gloomy than Tom.
‘Happy birthday.’
‘Ta.’ He lowered himself into a chair. ‘I’m getting old. Eighteen’s old.’
‘Robin, what do I enjoy doing?’
‘What?’
‘If someone asked you what I was interested in, what would you say?’
‘What you’re interested in?’
‘Yes.’
He wiped his nose and sat in a stupor indicative of deep thought. Almost thirty seconds went by.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, closing the address book with a snap. ‘Bacon sandwich?’
5
The trampled vegetable patch had made an incomplete recovery. When all was safely gathered in, the harvest comprised four pounds of plums (too high for Porky to reach), a wizened pumpkin imprinted with a trotter-mark and a small bucket of root vegetables. Of the five carrots which had survived, four were deformed.
Fran allowed a junior school party to feed the latter to Porky, in the interests of recycling, and cut the remaining one into twenty-eight pieces so that everyone in the class could have a bite.
‘I don’t like things what aren’t cooked.’
‘I can’t eat this, I’m allergic.’
‘Lee’s spat his bit out, Miss.’
‘Miss, my mum said I shouldn’t eat things off the ground.’
Pieces were dropped, thrown, trampled in the mud and offered to the ducks. The teacher, a weary-looking woman in her forties with a wool suit and a laissez-faire attitude, rolled her eyes at Fran. ‘I think it’s delicious,’ she announced, crunching her own portion, ‘and it’s very kind of this lady to give her carrot to us, isn’t it?’
There was a low drone of ‘yesses’ from most of the class and a soft but distinct ‘This garden smells of shit,’ from a very small boy in a red woolly hat. When the wave of thrilled giggles had died away, Fran made the most of the opportunity.
‘There’s a very good reason why it smells like that. Anyone know why?’
‘Cos it’s your toilet,’ said the same boy.
‘It’s not my toilet,’ said Fran, when the class had finished shrieking, ‘but when Porky the Pig goes to the toilet, we scoop up the poo and we dig it into the earth here.’
‘Uuuuuuuuur’
‘Because animal poo helps plants to grow.’
‘Uuuuuuuuur’
‘That’s disgusting, Miss.’
‘So Porky eats vegetables, and Porky’s poo helps new vegetables to grow.’
‘Uuuuuuuuur’
‘I ain’t never going to eat a carrot in my life no more,’ said a horrified girl.
‘And something which helps plants to grow is called a fer-til-ize-er.’
‘Who can remember that word?’ asked the teacher, with little hope in her voice.
As the class was shepherded away towards the hen house where Spike, the farm’s animal expert, would take them through the basics of embryology, Fran started to prise the bits of carrot from the mud.
‘That was really superb.’
She spun round, startled, and trod on Barry’s foot. ‘What?’ she asked, irritated. He had taken to standing directly behind her during teaching sessions and she always forgot he was there.
‘How you took the reaction of those children and turned it into something they’d never forget. It was superb.’
‘Yeah, well, thanks.’
‘I mean it.’ He looked at her earnestly.
‘OK. Well, thanks.’
‘I learn so much just by watching you.’
He seemed to be standing closer to her than was strictly necessary.
‘Like using the word “poo” a lot with the under tens?’ she asked facetiously, trying to break the atmosphere.
‘Your whole rapport with them. It’s wonderful to watch.’
‘Good. Well, that’s… good.’ Hoping the conversation was at an end, she bent to retrieve another piece of carrot; Barry dived simultaneously and they avoided cracking heads by a millimetre. He shot up again, knocking her with his shoulder and causing her to stagger a couple of feet and drop all the bits she’d already picked up.
‘Bloody hell, Barry!’
‘Sorry sorry. Let me do it.’ He fell to his knees and scrabbled in the mire at her feet and she shifted awkwardly, feeling like Marie Antoinette with a serf.
‘Here.’ Still kneeling, he proffered a muddy handful and then scrambled up, looking anxious, poised for the next task. Fran wondered how to get rid of him. ‘Tell you what, I’m going to give these to Porky. Can you carry on with seed-head collection in the meadow?’
He practically jumped in his eagerness to obey.
Up at the pigpen, now reinforced with stakes sunk deep into the ground and steel-mesh fencing, she took a little rest and scratched Porky’s scaly back as he snuffled at the trough. She bore him no ill-will for the destruction he’d caused: he was a pig and had done what pigs do; their motivation was always so blissfully transparent. Porky rechecked the corners of the trough for unnoticed shreds of carrot, sniffed hopefully in Fran’s direction and then with a curiously slow-motion action, toppled sideways into a puddle and lay there flapping his ears.
This was the first clear morning after days of constant rain, and the normal jobs of the farm had been sidelined by the necessity of holding back the mud. The area was naturally boggy and only the constant application of chopped bark, builders’ rubble (broken down with sledgehammers), shredded hay and home-made duckboards kept the paths from reverting to their primeval state. The staff, of course, wore wellies; their visitors, on the other hand, wore their most treasured possessions, and it had been known for a child to refuse to get out of the school coach because of the danger of dirtying his trainers.
From her vantage point by the sty, Fran could see her colleague
s labouring in the swamp: Barry, in a bright red jumper, crouched in the sodden grass with a supply of plastic bags and a pair of scissors; Claud, bald head shining in the sun, wheeling a barrow full of rubble past the classroom; Spike, by the chicken coop, inverting an indignant hen for the edification of the junior school class; Mick scooping dead leaves out of the pond with a fishing net, watched by a group of restless fourteen-year-olds; and Costas, a volunteer in his sixties, laying duckboards with rigorous perfection, as if tiling a patio.
Costas’s council flat overlooked the farm, with the result that he viewed it as his own back garden and spent a great deal of time making sure it looked nice for the neighbours. He also owned an allotment, on which he grew vast vegetables with the aid of as many chemicals as were legally available. Sometimes Fran would turn round from forking-in her carefully sieved compost to find Costas watching her with a mystified expression. ‘How you expect your potatoes get big like this?’ he’d asked contemptuously last week, gesturing at her with a King Edward the size of a rugby ball.
Claud completed the last few yards up to the sty at a run, dropped the barrow with a thud and leaned over, hands on knees, to catch his breath.
‘Where d’you want this unloaded?’ asked Fran. He waved his arm at the patch of ground beside the tool shed. It was rampant with ragwort during the summer and much enjoyed by the hens, although Fran had caught Costas lurking there a couple of times, obviously dreaming of Weedol. She started to throw the lumps of rubble into a heap.
‘I’m glad I caught you,’ said Claud, when he’d got his breath back and had helped her sling the last few pieces onto the pile.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, cautiously. The last time Claud had used that phrase, she’d ended up agreeing to be press liaison officer, resulting in an article in the local paper entitled ‘Farmer Fran’ and illustrated by a photo of her bending over to pick up a shovel, making her arse look the size of Porky’s.
‘Just wanted to say that you’ve done a fantastic job with Barry, I mean he’s… he’s –’ they both turned automatically to look at the distant figure, bent humbly to his task ‘– he’s now a fully contributing member of the team. It’s really a very impressive achievement.’ He nodded affably at her and wiped the sweat off his forehead with a grubby hand, leaving a long smear where he’d once had a hairline. Fran felt a bit awkward.
‘I didn’t actually do anything, Claud.’
‘No, no, I think it’s terribly important in these sort of cases to give credit where it’s due. After all, I mean, directly following the… the…’ he fumbled for a non-inflammatory phrase, ‘incident, I have to admit that I thought we might have to have a… a…’ his lips hesitated over the letter p (punch up? wondered Fran, prayer meeting?), ‘plenary session.’
‘Oh right.’ Well, thank God they’d avoided that option. She’d attended one last year, purportedly to discuss local residents’ complaints about noise pollution – specifically a very loud cockerel – but with Claud’s boneless arm at the tiller they’d drifted right off the subject and spent nearly an hour deciding what to call the twin lambs they’d just acquired.
‘But we’ve all seen how much time you’ve been… er… putting in with Barry.’
‘Seriously – all I did was shout at him. And then I took him a cup of tea. You saw, you were there.’
‘But since then it’s pretty obvious that you’ve more than made up for –’
‘Since then I haven’t done anything. He follows me round. I can’t shake him off.’
Claud smiled knowingly and gave her a stagy little thumbs-up. ‘Good work anyway. In this sort of situation, I think it’s always important to –’
She gave up the struggle. ‘Thanks.’
Claud smiled rather sweetly and trundled his barrow away for the next load, skirting the pen where Delboy and Rodney stood bleating incessantly, impatient for their lunch.
On the day of the pig escape, Barry had apologized to her so many times that she’d eventually told him to shut up and forget about it. She thought she could date his transformation into a human dynamo from that second. He arrived at the farm before Fran, ate his lunchtime sandwich on the move, and was still at work when she left at 5.30, usually somewhere in her own domain where he seemed to regard every gap in the vegetation as a knife to the heart. She had once come across him pathetically staking individual stalks of barley with tiny bamboo canes. ‘It might work,’ he’d said, looking at her with the kind of expression that Bullseye reserved for Bill Sykes.
At the morning meetings, he not only listened but actually wrote down the day’s tasks in a specially bought spiral-bound notebook. He washed up mugs, he volunteered to buy biscuits and he’d spent the whole of a weekend drawing a poster for the autumn open day (it showed Hagwood as a sort of Noah’s Ark in a sea of concrete, the assembled animals welcoming the visitors with outstretched trotters and wings). It was neatly done and much, much better than Claud’s prototype design: a piece of paper with the words ‘Please come to day of community fun and action at Hagwood Farm’ written on it in black felt tip.
There remained a significant gap between Barry’s enthusiasm and his competence; what he most resembled was one of the brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, lacking in any marked skill or initiative, but able to apply himself endlessly to a single task until redirected. ‘You can stop doing that now, Barry’ was a phrase never far from her lips these days.
Porky heaved himself up and nudged her in the back with his snout, grunting enquiringly. She showed him her empty hands before dusting the dried mud from them and starting back down the hill. As she neared the meadow, she could see that Barry had inadvertently dropped three of the plastic bags; one of them had already blown into the pond and the other two had been caught by a breeze and were cartwheeling across the grass like giant dandelion puffs. She called to him and gestured, and watched with a mixture of irritation and amusement as he lolloped after them.
‘Maybe I can take some credit,’ she said to Peter that evening. ‘Shouting at him was obviously the nudge he needed.’
Peter, a screw between his teeth, held out a hand and she snapped a red plastic rawlplug off a chain of twenty and placed it in his palm. He was replacing a bathroom shelf – one of the original fittings, much lauded in the estate agent’s description – which had collapsed under the weight of a new bottle of shampoo, hosing the linoleum with toiletries and taking a picture down with it.
‘What do you think?’
He tapped in the rawlplug carefully, and removed the screw from his mouth.
‘I’m not sure shouting is ever worth it.’
‘Aren’t you? We’re not supposed to, obviously; it’s not a recognized teaching practice these days, but I can’t help feeling it did him good. Gave him a metaphorical kick up the arse.’ Her brother was silent. ‘The only trouble is, I think he’s imprinted me – you know, when orphaned baby ducks think the farmer’s their mother and follow him round the entire time.’ She sat on the edge of the bath as Peter screwed the brackets onto the shelf, carrying out the procedure with his usual slow thoroughness. If the profession of Health and Safety Officer hadn’t existed he would have had to invent it, the job fitted him like an insulated glove with special grips on the palm. He looked up at her only when he’d put away the spare screws, and counted those remaining to check that he hadn’t left any rolling dangerously around the bathroom floor.
‘Have you tried asking him?’
‘Asking him what? Whether he thinks I’m his mother?’
‘Whether he thinks it did him good for you to shout at him.’
‘Oh.’ Fran paused. ‘No,’ she said, reluctantly.
‘Perhaps it would be a good idea if you did.’ There was an edge of reproof in his voice.
‘All right, all right. God, you’re such a head boy sometimes.’ He looked slightly hurt, and she added, ‘Only joking,’ although she wasn’t. The serious figure who – without raising his voice – had single-handedly eliminated smoking in
the bogs during his reign at Rose Everett Comprehensive, had changed only minimally. The gravitas, the deeply felt but plonkingly expressed morality which had set him apart from his contemporaries, were still present. His advice on a given subject was never given lightly, but considered, weighed and carefully prescribed. If followed correctly, the outcome was usually good. There was just something about the way it was proffered that made it terribly hard to take.
‘Yeah, well I might give it a try,’ said Fran, after a while. She wasn’t sure that she really wanted to know what Barry thought.
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ said Peter as he replaced the tools in the box he’d received from their stepfather last Christmas.
‘What?’
He hesitated a moment, apparently trying to work out whether the twelve-inch Philips screwdriver went in to the left or the right upper storage tray and eventually fitting it in with the precision of a watchmaker. His face was so heavy in thought that Fran wondered if something serious had happened. It was a fear of hers that she’d scoff once too often at his hypochondria, and end up apologizing to him in intensive care.
‘What?’ she asked again.
‘I’ve met someone.’
For a moment, she didn’t catch his meaning and then he smiled a little shyly, looking suddenly five years younger.
‘What, a girlfriend?’
‘Well, we’ve just started seeing each other,’ he said with his usual caution.
Fran laughed in exasperation. ‘I thought you had bad news. I was just about to make you some hot sweet tea.’
‘That’s no longer the recommended treatment for shock.’
‘I know.’ They grinned at each other for what felt like the first time in ages.
‘So, tell me about her,’ she prodded. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Sylvie.’
‘And what’s she do?’
‘She’s a music therapist.’
‘And where did you meet her?’
‘At choir. She’s our new accompanist.’ Peter had a thin but tuneful baritone and claimed that regular singing helped free up his sinuses.
