Terroir (28 page)

Next week he'd return to the Institute from this period of research leave. He'd visit his mother in the home, enquiring after her, holding her hand as she sat in an armchair, puzzled at which son he was and why he was there to see her. Sometimes she knew him, sometimes she didn't. Always he took her gardenias from the same florist who had a roadside stall just near the home. The woman had a gold incisor and a low
-
cut top over tanned, flamboyant breasts. She'd pick and wrap the flowers carefully as the traffic went past. He'd choose a buttonhole as she tied them with a bow of glittering ribbon. He'd tell her to keep the change, even though she'd overcharged him in the first place. Routine was important. He was his mother's youngest son, the son who brought gardenias, the son who had made something of himself in Higher Education, not in politics or business. The son who wore an impeccable suit, a white handkerchief folded into his pocket, a cream carnation pinned to the lapel. He had a slightly swollen lip from his recent research trip, but that was healing now.
The specialist
, she would say, if ever a scrap of memory floated by for her to grasp and hold onto.
My son,
looking up, the skin of her face etched by her long lifetime, the skin of her arms hanging loose,
my son, the specialist.

CHERRY TREE

Yesterday it was the ATM. Whispering to me outside the chemist's as I typed in my PIN and waited for the cash. I had to lean close in to catch the words. The sounds of the machine muttering, those tricky shifts of pitch trickling inside. The screen flashing up messages. Choices to make about what I wanted. Then my card appearing and the bank notes rustling through the flap seemed to drown them out. It's hard not to imagine someone behind there counting the notes and pushing them at the slit. But it's just a machine. It can't feel anything. After the voices it was like the sound of the sea or washing machines. Maybe a dozen washing machines in a launderette. I thought of that young woman with a baby in her arms staring at her washing going round and round. Watching the pink bedspread turn and turn, wondering where her life was taking her. When I came away from the ATM the man behind me was coughing as if I'd been making him wait too long. That baby was Alex, the one in the launderette.

This morning I woke early and put my hair into a plait. There was sunshine after days of rain. It fell against the bedroom blinds and spilled through like golden grain from a silo. The birds have been active for weeks now, as soon as the shortest day passed. They're wonderful mathematicians, waking at first light to patrol the roof. First jackdaws, then chaffinches, thrushes and blackbirds. Soon the collared doves will be back, making those throaty cries that make you want to run from your life. To run and start again. Jake's still away and I have the house to myself: the width of the bed all night and now the breadth of the day, like something you could put your arms round and squeeze. This morning I rinsed some dark bristles from the sink.

After breakfast and the smell of toast, I put the ladder up against the cherry tree and set to work with a bow saw and lops. Like Abe Lincoln, that old story from my school books, though I'm sure he used an axe. I wanted to prune it before the blackbird came back to sing in it, telling us all about love and conquest. I used the folding stepladders and had to climb into the tree with the saw. It's funny how the flesh of the tree is pink as if it has sucked up cherry juice from the soil. It's an intimate pink, like the secret flesh of a woman. There's been a lot in the news about FGM recently. Girls from the Middle East and Africa. The thought of it's hard to bear. A razor blade or a piece of broken glass. The women do it and the men look away. Then, if the girls are British and sent away for a holiday, the government looks away. That's the way a secret grows deeper. The secret's not the
thing
, the mutilation – those tender clitorises thrown to the crows – but the reason it's wrong and we don't say anything. One thing I never wanted was a daughter.

The neighbours were watching at the windows again.
Look, that woman's in the cherry tree. What is she thinking at her age?
I could hear them saying it. I could feel the pressure of water vibrating through the tree, all those capillaries sucking at the earth and singing when you put your ear to the bole. I had to drag the cut branches out of the tree, all tangled with the uncut ones, the ones that would live. Very awkward, balanced on a branch twelve feet up. I used to go rock climbing with my first boy friend. But he was more interested in finding new routes than being with me, unless I was belaying him. Love never happened between us, but I still like that feeling of being high up above the ground, the feeling that things are about to spin. There's a white and ginger cat watching me from the garden wall. Next door, their leylandii's dying off, all brown and stiff on the western side where the wind comes into it. Good. The other trees in that godforsaken garden are a sycamore with the crown cut out of it –
excised
– then an ash tree that's far too close to the house. Ash Dieback's crossing the country like a plague, so it's only a matter of time before it crashes through their roof. That would serve them right in the eyes of God. Well, in my eyes, too. They never said a word to us.

There's a ladybird clinging to one of the branches of the tree as I saw. The branch creaks against the blade as the cut tightens, but I manage it, making damp sawdust sift down to the grass. A pink snowdrift. The way snow is on the hills when the sunset touches it. My arms are aching by then. I take off a few smaller branches with the lops, still balancing. The ladybird's there an hour later when I'm trimming off the small branches to make a bonfire. I ease it onto my hand and put it on the trunk of the rowan.
Fly away home
, I whisper, but it doesn't. Its wing
-
casings are dark red so maybe it's very old. Maybe it's too old to have children or to rescue them.
Rucuse them
. A very different thing and complicated to explain when I checked up on what it meant. There are lots of fragments like that. Words and bits of words that join together when it suits them. Promiscuous words that breed or propagate themselves. I don't know whether they're animal or vegetable, really. A life form that evolves in
-
between everything else. In
-
between music and poetry and the sound of wind and the other little secret sounds that the world makes to itself. But words are sounds that mean things. And things are what we do.

I pile the cherry branches on top of our cast
-
off Christmas tree on the heap at the bottom of the garden where we make bonfires. It overlooks open fields with Holsteins grazing. They're huge cattle, bred for milk alone. Milk and procreation. Every summer they take the calves away one night in July and the cows moan for them, heavy with milk. You can understand why that Christmas carol says
the cattle are lowing,
as if their voices are rising out of the earth. In the early morning, when the light catches them on the field grazing under the thorn trees, they have this epic quality, like beasts from an ancient myth. The needles on the Christmas tree have turned brown. I reckon it'll go up like a torch and take the cherry tree with it. Once you've got a core of heat, a fire will burn green wood. It'll burn any young growth to ash. Then the wind takes the ash and scatters it. Last year I stood on the decking at the end of the garden with a candle and waved it so the cows could see. They came to me through the dark fields, dragging their bellies, pawing the ground with cloven hoofs, their eyes circling me, drooling, moaning in bovine sorrow for all their lost children.

Who knows what it is they know or feel? They feel the loss but have no words for it. They feel the dark music of abandonment in their mouths, dripping from their jaws. I was still there when Jake came to get me with a blanket. A blanket and a cup of tea, his cheeks stubbly and wet. He was trying to look upset for me.
Barbara, sweetheart, you can't go on like this, come on in.
I took the blanket and draped it like a priestess.
Let it lie, Barb, for God's sake let it lie.
He calls me
Barb
, like the old days. I would like to be that cursed dart. I can't cry any more and I can't love him now. It was him who wanted Alex to go for a soldier. I poured the cup of tea slowly into the field and it steamed like entrails, a libation, watching Jake walk back to the house, his shoulders stooped under the load of me, the burden of me.

It's one o'clock before I even get near a sandwich. I've got half a dozen decent sized boles to saw into logs for the winter stove. I've got a pile of brushwood ready to feed the bonfire. I start that by trimming off branches with the lops and piling them to make a dense core. I've got petrol in the shed for the mower. That'll start it. Dangerous, I know. But I'm always really careful. You'd just got to remember that vapour is invisible. Alex told me that when he was at school, the way they come home full of knowledge, full of things to say, the world amazing to them with its chemistry and biology and physics. Suddenly they want to know
how
things work. They want to know
why
.

After a quick lunch I tidy the tools away into the shed. I decide to wait before trying to start the fire. Some of the neighbours have washing out and I don't want them complaining. I check the compost bins for rats, but they look OK. Just recently they'd been getting into the plastic containers. Leptospirosis can be serious, so I'm always fastidious with the kitchen waste. This is a rural area and I came across a few cases when I was a practice nurse and the farmers came in. Some of them used to take the drugs the vet prescribed for their stock. That's not as daft as it sounds. They were stoic breed, taking illness as it came. Watching death with a steady eye. Yet the seasons turn in them when the peewits return and the curlews and oystercatchers and new lambs run under the hawthorns or play king of the castle on the river bluffs. They turn like something immense and slow and nothing is said or needs to be. That's a kind of joy, a kind of heaven on earth.

There are a couple of suspicious
-
looking holes in the base of the garden wall, so I take a lump hammer and tap some stones in there to block them up. Jake's hammer. Thor's hammer. The vengeance of God just to keep a few rats in PJ's garden. A nice feeling. Their house is a holiday cottage, so they're only there a few weekends of the year. He emailed me to say they had
unwelcome visitors
and could I check? He couldn't bring himself to use the word
rats
like the rest of us. That was a cheek. It's nice to think of them breaking into his house, shitting on the kitchen floor, pissing on the working tops, gnawing at the skirting boards and wiring. Finding tubs of humus or guacamole or stray bacon rind or scraps of leftover bread. PJ and his wife never hang any washing out, which is weird. She looks like butter wouldn't melt, all dimples and softly permed hair. But just try parking outside their house and she'll cut you to pieces in a few words with that sabre of a tongue.

I told Jake I'd put some poison down for the
rats rats rats rats rats
, which I did, but not enough to slaughter the entire population. RATS! We used to say that to our first Jack Russell, Maisie and she'd go crazy pawing at the back door. Just enough poison to keep Jake happy and PJ on the hook. Blue pellets in a plastic tray. I pushed them under the garden shed like some mad emperor poisoning the guests at a feast.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Once Alex set up a rat sniper post at the bedroom window with an air rifle. He had no shirt on and it was summer. He was doing his basic training and he'd lost weight. His hair was very short, like spikes of ice or glass. He looked like a little god up there with the airgun Jake had got him when he was sixteen. He never actually shot anything apart from a target pinned to the mountain ash. He hadn't the heart. When I put the ladybird down I tried not to look at the pellets that were still stuck in the bark.

We've got a little conservatory made of PVC that opens out onto a patio. In the afternoon I get into one of the cane armchairs and listen to the Archers, then the afternoon play. Shula's kicking off about something. The play's about some kids in London who steal a car and find a baby strapped into the back. It's a comedy. But it isn't funny for the baby or the baby's mum. That's the trouble with comedy, it's funny sometimes because it's being cruel or forgetting one side of the story, or pretending that people don't feel everything that happens to them. That's how we get by. I like the old
-
fashioned comedians who could twist words open like party crackers. That one about being on the Underground and missing the stop in the blackout:
I say, is this Cockfosters? I can't tell whose it is, it's dark in here.
Pure innuendo. That old joke with a straight face from the Blitz when my granddad was in London doing fire duty on St Pauls. Putting out incendiaries with a bucket of sand. All for the sake of the house of God. That's about three Gods already. Maybe it should be gods. With the old comedians it was all in the way they said things, just a little more weight from the tongue here rather than there. That's the beauty of radio, it makes them work harder to get things across. Pure sound, with all the pictures in your head. Where they can multiply if you're not careful.