Andrew
Garrington. It was like a small seed stuck in his teeth, grit in his shoe. He ignored it for long enough.
They made love, the first time since it had happened. The familiarity, the physicality, the release were a reassurance. Val slept afterwards. He lay and watched her. So busy in her waking life, so active and energetic, when she slept she was still. Would lie in one position all night long. He saw she had lost weight, her face thinner, almost gaunt. He felt a crush of fear that she might get ill, that he might lose her too, and promised himself that he would help her.
In the becalmed weekend after the funeral, waiting for life to resume, he and Val found tasks to occupy their time. A blitz on the garden: clearing up the last of the leaves now the snow had melted and bagging them for compost; tidying the borders, the straggly spikes of lavender and the desiccated remains of Michaelmas daisies and asters.
He sorted out the polytunnel, repaired a small tear near the back, checked over the cabbages and leeks and dug up some of the potatoes. There were a couple of squally showers on the Sunday, and as the rain drummed on the plastic, he closed his eyes and took himself back to camping holidays: the three of them, and later just him and Jason. The smell of earth and wet wool and wood smoke. The murmured conversations that they held, rolled side by side in sleeping bags, the delicious hooting of an owl in the night, and dawn waking them as light seeped through the canvas. Showering in whitewashed sheds, littered with moths, and Jason reluctant even to use the toilets.
The past was solace, but the future stretched ahead barren, hopeless, hostile. A place of thorns and bones and sinking sands. Andrew decided the trick was not to think about it, not to look ahead, beyond. Not to imagine.
They had lost a date palm. The brutal frost left it scorched and black.
‘We should get rid of it,’ Val said. ‘It looks awful.’
Andrew tested it with the saw. The dead wood was fibrous but not too tough. He began to cut it into sections, and Val put the perished leaves in the recycling bin and hauled the pieces of trunk over to the drive – they’d go to the tip.
Garrington. Still there as he drove the saw to and fro, the pungent smell of sap in the air and a burning in his shoulder, still a little tender from falling when he’d chased after them.
Val brought out tea and he took a break. Sat beside her and gulped hot mouthfuls, his fingers smearing the mug with dirt.
‘Nearly done.’ She nodded at the stump.
‘The roots’ll be the worst bit, spade and fork job.’ He thought of their ragtag procession for Jason. The coffin and the tree, the spade and the watering can.
‘I’m going back in on Tuesday,’ Val said.
He nodded. He’d already decided for himself that he’d start back then, but Val had spare holiday left that she could have taken.
The phone went. He’d reconnected it eventually, and they hadn’t been pestered by the press since. He groaned as he got up, his muscles stiffening already.
‘I’ll get it,’ Val offered.
‘No,’ he said, moving towards the house. ‘It’ll be my mother, or Colin.’ They rang every day. ‘They said they’d do a meal tomorrow.’
‘Hello?’
‘Hi. Is Jason there, please?’
Andrew went dizzy; he felt as though he’d been kicked in the skull.
‘Hello?’ A woman’s voice, young, an unfamiliar accent.
‘I’m sorry, there’s been…’ His words were thin and dry. ‘I’ve, erm…’ He faltered.
‘I can’t get him on his mobile.’
‘I’ve some very bad news,’ Andrew said. ‘Jason died on the seventeenth of December.’
‘Died?’
‘Yes.’
‘But… Oh God!’
‘He was attacked when he tried to stop a fight; he was…’ Andrew didn’t want to say killed. ‘There was a knife.’
