Saving Septic Cyril: The Illegal Gardener Part II (The Greek Village Collection Book 16)

by Sara Alexi

Together they approach the door in the corner that opens onto a narrow flight of stairs. On the next floor they discover a bathroom, where the radiator is slightly warm, a bedroom with a high English double bed, and a smaller room with a bed that is far too big for Jay and where the radiator is cold.

  ‘She can sleep with us,’ Aaman says, gently trying to push Saabira backward onto the double bed in the larger bedroom.

  ‘We cannot,’ Saabira protests. ‘Jay might wake up.’

  ‘Then we will hear her.’ They fall together onto the soft mattress and Aaman becomes lost. Saabira would like to lose herself too but a part of her is alert, the invisible cord from her heart to her sleeping daughter an ever present safety net.

  Chapter 3

  The baby wriggles and whimpers.

  ‘I must feed her.’ During the night Saabira has found extra blankets in a cupboard, and she pulls these around her and nestles Jay to her breast. Aaman groans and pulls at the covers.

  After a few minutes he heaves himself up. His hair is sticking upright and he has dark circles under his eyes.

  ‘Maybe I did not stoke the stove enough.’ He stands and pads with shuffling steps to the radiator. ‘It’s cold.’ With a blanket from the bed around his shoulders he thumps down the stairs, and Saabira can hear him rattling the grate.

  She wraps her scarf over her head. ‘Today, Jay, I think it is only right that we say hello to our neighbours. We will introduce ourselves, show we are good neighbours.’

  Aaman reappears and shrugs off the blanket, reaching quickly for his shirt. He catches sight of Jay as she unlatches, her soft lashes closed, a look of bliss on her little face. His pupils widen; his movements slow and soften as he takes the infant, his mouth dropping open a fraction. Saabira ruffles his hair but he does not stop staring at the bundle he holds.

  ‘So beautiful,’ he murmurs. ‘Just like her ammi.’ He sits, continuing to rock her. ‘So beautiful.’ He repeats the words but it is as if he does not hear himself, he is so hypnotised.

  ‘I think today we will introduce ourselves to our neighbours. What do you say? It is good manners.’

  But he does not appear to hear her. He is singing softly, staring lovingly.

  ‘And we must get some groceries.’ All they have in the house are some dry wafer biscuits from the plane. Neither of them ate much the day before. The food on the flights had a strange rubbery quality. Aaman shovelled most of his in – his adventures have made him an unfussy eater – but Saabira could not manage to swallow hers.

  The thought of Aaman’s adventures, as they call his time away from home – a term they both know is designed to make light of all he has been through – closes her throat, and she struggles a little for breath and her heart starts pounding.

  ‘Are you alright?’ Aaman looks up and is by her side, one arm holding their child, the other around her shoulders. His touch loosens her tension. ‘Your cheeks are red – are you feeling alright?’

  ‘Yes, I am fine,’ she lies.

  He passes Jay to her and her heartbeat returns to normal. She studies Aaman’s face. Jay’s long eyelashes come from his side. ‘Like kohl,’ she mutters, and Aaman kisses her briefly and continues to put on his shirt, but without looking away.

  ‘So, groceries and then neighbours. But we take it slowly. We are tired from our travels and we have a lifetime.’ He is grinning now, his voice full of energy.

  When they arrived the day before she was so confused by the odd hours she had slept and the strange times she had eaten that she was not sure if she was hungry or tired or both or neither, and in her confusion she did not really take in much about the house.

  It is what the English call a terraced house, one of a row, each butted up against the next. Outside, the light is a dull grey and the wind whips Saabira’s scarf from around her shoulders as she surveys the house. It is crouched low to the ground and the weathered stone of which it is constructed gives it an air of austerity. The squat front door and small window downstairs and the two square windows above have solid stone surrounds. The shallow-pitched slate roof is edged with a bright green moss. Each house has a narrow front garden behind a low stone wall. The lane is made of thousands of rounded blocks of stone.

  ‘Cobbles,’ Saabira whispers to herself, recalling that the Bronté sisters lived in a village with a cobbled street. Where has she read that?

  She looks around. Being in England after Pakistan is like seeing a film at the cinema in Sialkot and then watching the cricket on a cousin’s black-and-white in the village. The light is so dull it is as if the colour has been leeched out of everything. Except the trees, like the one behind the wall opposite their house, which glows greener than the deepest emeralds and towers over them, rustling in the wind. Above it the sky is mostly grey with only patches of blue, and it is cold. She pulls her shawl around her and her baby. She is not sure she will ever get used to the cold.

  ‘Oh my goodness, what is that smell!’ Aaman wrinkles his nose and looks around him.

  ‘What is it like?’ Saabira asks.

  ‘Oh, it is disgusting! Worse than Jay’s nappies, acrid like burnt oil smoke.’

  Saabira is glad she cannot smell it, but she is aware that all smells are particulate and she draws her shawl over Jay’s face and her own nose.

  She turns first one way, then the other. The hairs on the back of her neck rise. It is as if someone is watching her.

  The house adjoining theirs looks even darker than her own. The single downstairs window is black as if something is against it inside, and there is so much dirt on the outside that the glass does not shine. Where the door should be stands a wooden structure, like a closet, with double doors that are open just a crack and a tiny key in the lock. Near the bottom, in patches, the wood shines as if it was once polished, but near the top it is black and strips of veneer are peeling off. At home it would have gone white, bleached by the sun. Everything is so different. She shivers.

  The feeling that she is being watched subsides but she pulls her daughter in closer all the same. The direction of the wind changes and Aaman takes his hand from over his nose and mouth, his brow smoothing. He had appeared almost in pain.

  Up the street the cobbles only extend a little past the house with the strange front door. At the top of the road is a short terrace of houses – no more than two or three - built at right angles to the street. Opposite her own gate, a high wall runs from the corner of these houses back down the street. Halfway along, there is a break in the stone, with a grand pillar either side. The cobbles continue through this entrance, almost as if it is public, but somehow not. Further along, the wall ends and another terrace of houses leads the eye down the slight slope that ends at the bottom where the main road cuts across. Past this, over a rough stone wall, are the moors, as far as Saabira can see. Yesterday the bus dropped them in the next village, and it was a thirty-minute walk up this lonely, isolated road, with nothing but moors on either side. ‘There’s no bus stop in Little Lotherton,’ the driver had said, eyeing their bags and frowning. ‘But it’ll not rain before you get there,’ he had added.

  Chapter 4

  Cyril watches the couple leave through a crack in the door. The woman is wearing pale-grey trousers today, which are nipped in around her ankles with a stiff pink hem that touches the shiny gold of her sandals. She doesn’t have a coat on; instead, she has wrapped a magnificent purple shawl around her.

  ‘Like a queen would wear,’ he whispers to Coco. Shifting his stance allows him to observe the man too. They turn and look back at the houses, his house, and then turn again, and the woman points to something in the tree. Cyril follows the line of her finger. Often there is an owl sitting in that tree but it is not there now.

  Her sandals click as she walks down the cobbles and the man walks with a light step, at one point even hopping round to face her to say something, and walking backward for a step or two. They talk and laugh.

  At the bottom of the lane they turn onto the road that leads to Gre
ater Lotherton, and to Keighley and Bradford beyond that. It seems strange that such a small town should have such a grand name. Mrs Pringle from number two, who always says, ‘Call me Christine, duck,’ comes out to her gate, her shapeless grey jumper merging with the dark stonework of her house and a pink hairnet over her white hair in sharp contrast. A cigarette dangles from her thin colourless lip as she shouts, ‘Spike!’ She is holding a tin, banging it with a fork. A small black-and-white cat runs out from the old mill house opposite, its tail high, whiskers forward. Mrs Pringle turns and goes back inside, and the cat follows her. It’s Saturday today, so it’s quite likely that no one else will come or go now until later when Mr Dent from number seven comes out and knocks on the door of number five, and the two of them will wander into the village to play darts in the Black Horse. If Cyril passes the Black Horse at the weekend he can see them inside the window, playing darts or sitting on one of the old wooden captain’s chairs, ankles crossed on the stretcher of the table, resting the bottoms of their pint glasses on the curves of their bellies.

  Coco nudges him.

  ‘Alright, Coco. I have some scraps.’ He leaves his hiding place and stumbles over his own doorstep into the cluttered room. The bulb has gone but it doesn’t occur to Cyril to replace it. Bulbs cost money – almost as much as a tin of dog food – and use electricity. Besides, he only passes through the downstairs room when he goes in or out of the house, or when he feeds the dogs in the kitchen area by the back door. Even though, or perhaps because, he does not use this space, over the years the room has become filled with useful pieces of furniture. People are so wasteful; it is amazing what they throw away. The light from the single window at the front of the house is blocked by a bookcase that leans against it. In the gloom, with his back against the front door, Cyril can still recall how the room used to be. Archie’s dining table on the left is still there, in amongst everything else. Now it has a child’s crib perched on top. There is also a set of matching pottery jars with cork lids he found. The baby’s bed is held in position by a corner cupboard that is jammed up next to it. Behind that, against the wall, is a bureau with a chest of drawers on top. This is where, if he can reach over, he puts the smaller things he has found: dummies, bottles for recycling, newspapers that he might look at one day. On the right of the room, balanced on the sofa, are the pieces of the collapsible bunk bed that someone at the bottom of the street threw away. He took it to use as firewood but it seemed such a waste to burn something that was still functional. Maybe, one day, someone will want it. Then there is a matching pair of tall wooden plant stands, one by the sofa and the other by the long-disused fireplace. He still considers that it was very sensible of him to leave a clear walkway from his front door through to the back door. The kitchen area is only differentiated from the sitting room area by the change in floor covering. Here the carpet ends abruptly and the lino begins.

  As he passes the bureau, a rogue nail, one of many that are holding the back panel on, catches his sleeve. He yanks his arm away, and the nail tears at his shirt. He inspects the damage in the dim light. Coco whimpers.

  ‘Alright, alright.’ It feels sticky underfoot as he makes his way to the oven. The latch mechanism of the oven door does not work perfectly. It’s an old model with legs, and the back ones are on the wooden floor while the front ones are elevated on several layers of lino that have been laid in the kitchen, tipping the whole cooker back at an odd angle. It might be this slant that has made the latch stick. He has not cooked in the oven for years, but it is a good place to keep scraps for the dogs. As he pulls it open, Coco’s whimpering gets louder. Zaza jumps down from her place under the bunk bed wood on the sofa, and the new, as yet unnamed dog crawls out from behind the bureau. Blackie Boo slinks from somewhere near the front window. Multicoloured Teddy Tail’s nails can be heard clicking as she trots down the wooden stairs from the bedroom. Gorilla Head, with her stripy markings, bounds out of the shadows formed by a stack of brooms, mops and shovels by the back door, and Mr Perfect, whose coat is nearly orange, comes out from the cupboard under the stairs. Blackie Boo hangs back. The new dog tries to befriend Coco but Coco snarls.

  As Cyril turns his back to divide the scraps into the dishes, one of the mongrels snaps at another and there is a tussle in the shadows.

  Ignoring the fight for dominance, Cyril opens the back door for light, just a crack, and jams it with a brick he keeps there for the purpose. When the dishes are full he turns to the dogs, who take their lead from Coco and sit. The new one hesitates, looks at the others, and copies them. Cyril puts a bowl in front of each. Coco, who is the best behaved, has to wait until last. Once she is served, Cyril gives the command and the dogs descend on their food.

  Within seconds the dishes are clean, and he gathers them up and uses each in turn to scoop dog biscuits from a big sack behind the back door. When he has finished, he folds over the top of the sack and weights it with more bricks.

  The dogs snort and chomp into their dishes, leaving Cyril free to go out into his overcrowded backyard.

  Outside, his home-made cages are stacked one above the other, from back door to the moor gate. There are six in total. Between the end cage and the low stone wall that keeps the moorland plants from growing all the way up to his house is a stack of wooden boards. There are also wire trays from an old fridge, baking racks from an oven, bits of hardboard and a roll of chicken wire, as well as a saw and a bag of nails. He proudly surveys his handiwork. Last week he tacked a plastic rubble sack onto the end cages to protect them from the rain and the hard driving winds of the winter to come. The cardboard boxes he once put inside the cages as sleeping quarters have long since been eaten away. And a fox perhaps, or one of his dogs, has chewed at the edge of the roof of one of the top cages.

  If he could just get the number of rabbits down a little, free up at least one cage, he could repair it and then move them all around and repair the next. But they breed so fast!

  The rabbits watch him, noses twitching. Flop, the big rabbit with a cage to himself, lifts his head. That is about all he does these days; he’s so fat he can hardly move. The rest of the rabbits are born and released so fast he no longer takes the time to name them.

  He lifts the lid off the dustbin in which he stores the rabbit food. It is almost empty. Coco is scratching at the inside of the door. The dogs all need walking but he must feed the rabbits first. It is Saturday so he does not have to go to work today, leaving him plenty of time to walk them all.

  As he sets out with Coco, Zaza, the new dog and Blackie Boo, the wind picks up and the heat that has been stored deep in the peat underneath the moors all summer gives off its warm and comforting smell. The lapwings sing out their lonely, haunting call and as the sun breaks through the cloud Cyril unzips his jacket. This takes him a moment or two, as the pull is long gone and the zipper head keeps getting stuck. The edge of the material against the zip, where his fingers have passed on so many occasions, is shiny with use.

  He does not linger today and, on his second outing, this time with Teddy Tail, Gorilla Head and Mr Perfect, he follows the Pennine Way. This narrow trail of bare peat through the heather cuts across another, stonier path after some minutes of hiking. This is a good place to double back. There is a sign here, an upright stone that has carved into it The Pennine Way. 286 miles. The spine of England.

  Ever since first reading this sign, Cyril has visualised the countryside with a spine. And why not? He has one, the dogs have one, why not the hills?

  As he is about to turn for home Gorilla Head finds an area of bog and, with open mouth, tongue hanging and her tail wagging, she lies on her back and, wriggling, covers herself with mud.

  ‘No!’ Cyril makes a dash to grasp her collar, but she twists and leaps away, leaving him overbalanced with one soaking foot and a muddy jacket. On the way home he encourages her to roll in a stream, which gets off the worst of the mud.

  At home there is no choice but to resort to taking a bath, not something he does
very often. As the water drains away, sucking and swirling down the plughole, the colour of it is startling.

  He pulls at the thread on the ‘s’ of Highroyds Hospital, embroidered onto the pocket of his dressing gown, where the stitching has started to unravel. He could try to sew it, or maybe he could glue it. For now he wets his finger and presses the thread into the towelling loops of the material. With the curtains closed and the light outside fading, it is not easy to see if this has made a difference. Maybe it is not as bad as it seems. Laughter floats up from the street, and Cyril tentatively pulls back a corner of the curtain to peer out. The man and woman who have moved in next door are returning. The man no longer has a bounce in his step but he is still smiling. His rucksack sags, pulling on the shoulder straps, and he carries distorted shopping bags in each hand, things poking out of the top, ready to fall. The woman has a shopping bag in one hand, and the other supports her baby. The man puts his bags down outside the house next door and fishes in his pockets.

  ‘Hurry up, Aaman, it is cold,’ the woman says in English. In the half-light the cuffs at the bottom of her trousers appear black, but her sandals glint under the single street light, the one outside the gates of Mill House.

  Their front door is opened to more laughter and then they quietly close it behind them and the street is silent. No wind moves the tree opposite, and the houses could be a drawing. The emptiness makes Cyril feel lonely and his mouth pulls down at the corners. Coco puts her nose into his hand but it brings him no comfort. Pushing her away, he throws himself onto the narrow bed, pulls the covers over his head and tries to block the world out. The present can be shut off, but it is the past that he struggles with.

  Chapter 5

  In the dark under the covers, he can picture the colour of her mustard tunic and then her pale-grey trousers with the pink cuffs; the intense purple shawl and all these colours spin in the pink of his eyelids. He rolls his head from side to side as the colours intensify. Mauves and soft reds, pale reds and rich warm yellows… Others come to join them – lime greens and oranges, swirling and spinning in his mind.