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

by Sara Alexi

  Coco whines when he does not let her out of the back gate with him. Up the hill at the back of the houses, just by the stream that only flows in winter, is where the heather is at its best, marked by a line of cotton grass. He picks several stiff stalks of the flower. It cuts into the creases of his bent fingers as he pulls. One sprig comes out whole, its earth-encrusted roots dancing. He twists them off, bunches what he has picked and returns to the house where it only takes a second to locate an egg cup under the sink for a vase.

  The heather is too heavy and falls sideways out of the egg cup as he lets go. After tearing off the label from a half-eaten can of dog food on the side of the sink, he scrunches it up and uses it to jam the stalks of heather into the egg cup. It works; it stays upright. He is surveying his handiwork when Saabira returns with the tea.

  ‘Oh, how lovely.’ She notices the heather immediately. Cyril thinks he will tell her that it is for her, but then finds he doesn’t.

  Over a mug of tea each they look at all that there is to be sorted out.

  ‘What is this?’ Saabira points to the jumble of planks and varnished wooden pieces that are piled over the sofa.

  ‘Beds, bunk beds.’

  ‘Oh, really? It is all there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay, so, if you are happy to let this go there is a colleague of my husband who is looking for big beds for his twins. He might find bunk beds acceptable, and if he does he may even pay you something. How much would you want for it?’ Saabira is lifting up one end of the top piece to look at all the underneath pieces.

  What should he say? Is it fair to take money for it when he got it for free? Nev and Helen, who live at one of the houses built at right angles across the top of the road, were just throwing it away, taking it to the rubbish dump. He rescued it for nothing, to save it being dumped in a hole in the earth. No, he doesn’t want money, but maybe he could swap it?

  ‘A tin of dog food,’ he says.

  ‘Oh, I think they would manage a sack of dog biscuits at the least.’ She laughs but it does not feel like she is laughing at him. ‘Shall we put it outside our house and then Aaman can arrange for the man to come and look at it without us disturbing you?’

  Saabira takes two pieces and Cyril piles as many as he can in his arms, mostly to make her think that he is big and strong but also because he is quite enjoying the idea of the room becoming emptier. He can imagine sitting at the table, maybe even with the fire lit, drinking tea with Saabira, maybe even eating there, together. In his thoughts Aaman is also there but he isn’t sure why, as he doesn’t know him.

  Saabira fluffs up the cushions on the sofa and dust fogs the air.

  ‘Oh, dear me!’ she says and takes them outside where she bangs them against the low wall, and the breeze from the moors blows the dust towards Mr Brocklethwaite’s house. Cyril chuckles.

  When she comes back in they start to look through other piles of things. The blankets are declared unsalvageable but Saabira assures him that as they are wool they will rot to nothing if they put them in the skip. ‘Tell me about Archie,’ she says.

  The sudden mention of Archie’s name makes his head spin. Archie’s waxy skin and staring eyes fill the blank back of the bureau he is trying to move. Rubbing his eyes makes colours swirl on the inside of his eyelids but when he opens then the image of Archie is gone and Saabira is handing him his tea.

  ‘Matron Jan in the hospital, she said I should not have been there. She said I was fine, just in grief and shock. All I needed was stability and love, she said. But there was nowhere else that would take me.’ That was odd – the question he answered wasn’t the one Saabira had asked. His mouth opens again. ‘I overheard her one day when there was an argument in her office. Matron Jan was shouting at a man in a dark suit.’

  She looked so angry that he felt scared. But he also wanted to tell the man to go away, so he stayed outside the door listening, in case he was needed.

  ‘If you lock a young boy in a place like this, and this is all he knows for twelve years, then what do you expect?’

  ‘We’re not a charity. He’s eighteen now.’ The man in the suit said, with no emotion.

  ‘So you want to just kick him out onto the street?’

  Cyril’s blood ran cold. Tears stung at his eyes and he slithered down the wall to sit on the floor.

  ‘It isn’t quite like that,’ the man said, not sounding quite so cross now.

  ‘He is put into a children’s home with no one-on-one support, having suffered the trauma of his mother’s suicide when he was five. He doesn’t get on in the children’s home because of this trauma so they focus on his shortcomings and label them mental disorders so they can dump him in here. He stays here for twelve years surrounded by people who are not functioning well out in the real world and these are his peers, these are the people he learns to interact with as he grows, and then aged eighteen you want to kick him out into the real world!’

  Matron Jan sounded really angry now, and the man must have thought so too, because he didn’t answer that.

  ‘Look, he needs sleep medication, he is still having sessions with the psychologist every week, he comes in and sits and talks to me every day. He’s just not ready for the outside world. He’s had very little exposure to it. He’s just not ready.’ She stopped shouting then, her voice calm, explanatory. ‘We can start a programme, he can go out with a nurse, to the shops in the towns, a visit to the cinema, that sort of thing, but it has to be done gradually. If we overexpose him it could well push him back. It certainly won’t help him to move forward.’

  ‘Go on,’ Saabira encourages.

  ‘Well… I knew her for years and then she was dead. No one would tell me where she was and then one day a new nurse told me. She got in trouble for telling me but I don’t know why. Matron Jan had a heart attack. She said her job was very stressful. It wasn’t the patients that were the problem, she said, it was the nurses and doctors. So many of them where not interested, she said.’

  ‘I don’t know why they start their training,’ Matron Jan said to him one day when he went into her office to sit with her. ‘They know that psychiatric nursing is one of the modules that they have to do, yet when they get here they are just so unengaged. I have to motivate them, encourage them, sort out their bickering, keep track of medicines, and you just would not believe the way the doctors carry on. They’re just as bad – worse probably. Especially Dr Scalebor – what an arrogant sod he is.’

  He didn’t understood what she meant, but as usual the whole of her speech had lodged in his head. It was useful to remember things this way because as he got older he could understand more and more of the things he didn’t understand at the time.

  ‘I think they were not meant to tell me because they thought my mum dying was too difficult for me. Matron Jan was my friend.’

  ‘And Archie?’

  Chapter 25

  Oh yes, she had asked him about Archie.

  ‘Archie was my friend too. He died too but there was no one to hide that from me. I think it was bad of them to hide Matron Jan being dead from me, because if you don’t know where someone is you worry about them but if you know they are dead that sort of works through your head, comes out of your eyes like water for ages, then it’s sad and then it’s not so bad.’

  It is his anger that makes him grab a box of things without looking through it. He takes it out through the wardrobe porch and throws it over the low wall into the skip. The box bursts, spilling colour in the form of broken toys he saved from the house next door before the family moved out and Saabira came. The children would break their toys and the mother would throw them away. When she saw him picking them out of her rubbish one day she started putting any new broken toys on top of the dividing wall between the houses. Later, she moved to the house further down the road, which used to be two houses but the builders came and made it into one. She had to move because she kept having more children and they needed more space. She is still there but he
doesn’t see her very often now. He has seen her in the bakery shop in Greater Lotherton wearing a white apron and blue plastic gloves and a white paper hat, and sometimes she waves to him but that is all. He used to repair the toys and leave them on the wall for the children to take back. What is left, now in the skip, is all the parts that could not be used or repaired. They will be crushed to the size of a marble and the earth will swallow them up. Is the clearing out of his house more important than the earth? He uses his finger and thumb to measure a space the size of a marble, then frowns and turns to go back into the house.

  Back inside, Saabira continues the conversation as if there has been no break.

  ‘When Aaman was away I did nothing but worry all the time. Sometimes I even used to say to myself, if I knew he was dead at least I could stop worrying.’ Saabira sounds sad.

  ‘I worried about Archie when he started to cough so hard he was in pain. Then he didn’t get out of his chair.’ Cyril turns around and looks at the unlit fireplace.

  ‘Where did he used to sit?’ Saabira asks.

  ‘On that chair, but the chair was over there then.’

  ‘Does that chair remind you of him in a good way?’

  ‘No.’ A lump has filled his throat. His eyes are stinging. He hates the chair. Every time he looks at the chair Archie is there and it makes him sad.

  ‘Perhaps it would be good to get rid of it?’

  ‘Yes.’ The chair is one thing he would be very glad was gone. But his limbs will not move.

  ‘Shall I get Aaman to do it?’

  He cannot speak so he nods. Saabira touches him on the shoulder as she leaves and is not gone a minute before she is back, with her baby in her arms, and Aaman following.

  His silent, gloomy, cramped room is suddenly full of life. His initial reaction is to get them to leave, to maintain what he has known for so long, but as this thought forms so does another one – an image of a clear and tidy room into which he can invite them with no shame.

  ‘Hello, my friend.’ Aaman says. He is wearing a T-shirt and not a shirt today, and he probably has no work because it is a bank holiday. No one has ever explained why everyone gets a holiday on a bank holiday or why it is always on a Monday. Aaman is also wearing one of Saabira’s scarves. He has wound it across his nose and mouth. The lump in Cyril’s throat grows and his cheeks burn. The scarf is because of the smell of his house, the smell that keeps everyone else away. He can barely meet Aaman’s eye. How on earth has he let his house, his life, get to this point?

  ‘How can I help you?’ Aaman asks, his voice slightly muffled by the bandaging.

  Tears threaten to spill, and Cyril tries to rub his hand nonchalantly over his eyes in a way that he hopes looks like he is thinking. The embarrassment he feels because Aaman needs the scarf is mixed with his gratitude that Aaman is pretending nothing is wrong and not mentioning it.

  He kicks at the table leg. He thinks that it might help the mix of emotions that are filling him, but it doesn’t. In a way, it is Saabira’s fault. Ever since he first met her he has noticed that he is getting cross with all the things inside his home. So if Aaman really wants to help he could just make his house nicer inside. Just make everything disappear so he doesn’t have to deal with this, the smell, the humiliation. He should have thrown away the first carpet after all the accidents Coco had when she first arrived, but where would he have thrown it? A second carpet over the top seemed like a good solution at the time, and at first it didn’t really smell bad, and it got worse slowly, so that he pretended to himself that it wasn’t really that bad and somehow got used to it. Somehow it is as if that quick decision, to lay a second carpet on top, has defined how he has lived ever since.

  Saabira jumps as Mr Perfect comes out from under the sofa. Cyril loves his dogs but he is concerned that they make her jump every time one of them comes out of their nest. Maybe he does have too many dogs, like he had too many rabbits. But he cannot put them over the wall like he did with the rabbits.

  Aaman is waiting for an answer but Cyril is not sure what to say. Asking him to do something might sound like he is ordering him about, as if he is a child. How do people ask other people to do things for them without it sounding rude?

  ‘Hello, Mr Aaman.’ He tries to sound respectful.

  ‘It is just Aaman.’ Saabira’s husband replies. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘We were going to throw away Archie’s chair,’ Saabira says, and Cyril feels grateful that she has saved him the embarrassment and taken the focus away from him. ‘Archie does not need it any more, and it is a sad reminder.’

  ‘Which is the chair?’ Aaman asks. He sounds jolly.

  Both Cyril and Saabira point. Aaman looks at the chair and the path it has to travel to go out of the front door. Cyril would like to help but he has not touched the chair since that day.

  ‘He didn’t go up to bed in the last weeks,’ he says to Saabira. Her baby has fallen asleep over her shoulder, and a thin line of dribble is making a dark-orange river in the mustard sea of her tunic.

  ‘He stayed in the chair?’ she asks, stroking the baby’s back.

  ‘I rang the number he gave me on a piece of paper but the person at the other end said they did not do house calls any more. When I told Archie he said, ‘Bloody civilised country.’ He looks at Saabira quickly to make sure she is not upset that he used a bad word.

  ‘So he knew he was ill.’

  ‘He was coughing a lot, and he’d been in hospital before I moved here but he said it wasn’t nice and he would never go again. I said I had just come from a hospital and it was very nice, but he said that was different.’ He has never talked about Archie, and it feels odd. After Archie died there was no one to talk to, so who would he talk to about Archie? ‘The day he died there was a woodpecker in the tree opposite. It was tapping away. I saw it. Spike was on the wall, all flat, thinking that he couldn’t be seen. I thought he was going to get the bird so I called Archie. He always knew what to do. But Archie didn’t answer. I banged on the window but Spike just kept creeping up to the woodpecker. Then the woodpecker stopped pecking and was still. Then Spike wiggled his bottom, you know, ready to pounce, and the bird just flew away. I never saw the woodpecker again.’ He blows air out through his lips and pushes his glasses up with one finger.

  ‘And Archie?’ Saabira is watching Aaman, who is now struggling by the front door with the chair.

  ‘I came down happy for the bird and I wanted to tell Archie all about it. I told Archie about everything. He even knew where the hawk’s nest was that I found. He was sitting there.’ He points to an empty space and then looks around for the chair. It is beside the bookcase that blocks the light from the window. Aaman is inside the wardrobe porch looking at the opening.

  ‘He was sitting in the chair and his blankets had fallen from his knees to the floor. The moths have eaten them now…’ He looks at the empty place where the blankets used to be before continuing. ‘So I picked them up and I was telling him off. He sometimes let me do that. Not seriously, just for fun. I was never very good at telling Archie off but when I tried it made him laugh. This time he didn’t laugh. He was staring straight ahead at the wall.’ His gaze wanders to the line of single shoes on a board over the radiator on the wall.

  ‘His face was all waxy and slightly shiny and he smelt like he had made a bad mess in his trousers.’ He looks Saabira in the eye. ‘He was dead, you see, and I knew he was dead because I remember my mother.’

  ‘Yes, he is dead, so is she,’ Saabira says.

  With no warning at all the tears spring to his eyes and he loses control of his lips. They are quivering out of his control and the shuddering in his chest makes everything worse, and then he cries like he does not remember crying since seeing his mum’s bloated face. He cries for his mum and for Matron Jan, and for the little mouse in the cage behind the bushes at the hospital. He cries for Archie and for Archie’s dog, and for the rabbits and his whole sorry-looking house. Saabira, still holding her daug
hter, puts her free arm around his shoulder. Then strong arms are round him, leading him to a chair. The arms do not release him. They are firm and sure, and his head is tucked against Aaman’s chest and he can smell his aftershave and he cries even more. The arms do not hurry him, they do not pull away, they hold him and it feels so safe.

  His sobbing quietens, the tears flow less quickly, and it is he who pulls away first, the strong arms releasing him.

  ‘Everything is fine,’ Aaman says. It is a simple thing to say but it feels like the words are exactly right. ‘Although, I think we might have to take your porch off to get the chair out.’

  Cyril draws in his chin and looks up sharply to see Aaman smiling. He is not laughing at him; he is suggesting that Cyril should laugh with him. Through all the sadness, this invitation carries such an attractive promise that it makes him want to laugh to see what it would feel like to do so through his tears, and so he does. It starts in his chest like an excitement and then it builds as his stomach tightens; his mouth opens and he laughs so loud and so strongly he has to hold on to the table edge for fear of rocking off the stool. Aaman is still laughing and Saabira, who is rocking the baby, chuckles along with them, her eyes shining as she looks at them both.

  Chapter 26

  Aaman does not dismantle the porch. He examines it and shows Saabira where it is screwed to the wall, and how it is altogether sturdier than it looks. Cyril’s laughter, which seemed to be endless, eventually fades and when he faces the room he looks lifeless. Saabira suddenly realises how tired she is; Cyril must be tired too.

  ‘I think the next step is for another day,’ she announces. Cyril looks relieved.