8

It’s been a while since he visited Broadhursts. He used to come here with Mum when he was a boy, and he came a few times with Clover to collect the free World Book Day books and to spend the tokens Edna used to give at Christmas and birthdays. He’d forgotten how nice it is. The walls are wrapped in bookcases and glass-fronted cabinets, and the air is warm with the grassy smell of paper and leather. A book-packing station with a string dispenser and sheets of brown paper sits below an antique sign: Pleasant Books for the Children. The place feels old and trusty and a little bit magical.

He glances around, hoping he won’t have to ask, but he doesn’t know the author’s name. Perhaps he should have ordered the book online, but he practically passes the shop on his way home from Lord Street; he’d be daft not to do it while it’s on his mind. He tilts his head and inspects the spines of the books in the nearest case. It’s such a small shop; he won’t get away with browsing for long before someone –

‘Hmm,’ the girl says. And as she purses her lips thoughtfully, he notices a book just behind her, front-facing: Vagina. Oh God. What if she thinks he wants that book? – it’s practically bellowing, I’m a book about women!

‘Something about how to do it. How to be a woman, I mean,’ he adds, quickly.

‘Ah, I know.’ The girl lifts a green paperback from a shelf just behind him. ‘This’ll be the one,’ she says, holding it up for his inspection.

There’s a picture of a woman on the cover. She has long black hair with a white streak, like Morticia. Her expression is one of mild amusement, but her raised eyebrow says, Mess with me at your peril.

‘I am a feminist!’ the girl cries, toasting him with an imaginary glass. ‘Would you like it wrapped?’

And before he can respond she is folding brown paper around Morticia’s face and the quote on the book’s cover – ‘The book EVERY woman should read’ – disappears under creases and a criss-cross of string.

He hurries home in the early evening sunshine, clasping the wrapped book. In its pages lies the promise of certainty. He feels better already, comforted by the anchoring assurance of another solid object.

The runner beans have grown dark and wild, overwhelming the bamboo frame he built. Several of the thickened knotty pods have dried in the sun. He tears them away from the plants and opens them up. The seeds inside are speckled purple and black, smooth and shiny like pebbles. He empties them into the palm of one hand and slips them into a ziplock bag. He will plant them next spring and they will begin their lives in the kitchen, on the windowsill and the worktop, where it’s warm and light. One day he’ll get a greenhouse. One day.

The mozzies are out. He can hear them whining past his ears. Bastards. He windmills his arms and jumps on the spot, sending the seeds spinning around the bag. There weren’t mosquitoes like this when he came here as a boy. Of course, it was a different world – God, he sounds ancient, like Dad, but it was – when you missed something on the telly or forgot to set the video recorder, that was that; if you finished your book you had to wait until the shops or the library opened, you couldn’t download another one or pop to a twenty-four-hour supermarket. On light evenings, when he was small, and he’d finished watching Inspector Gadget or Bananaman, he happily helped Dad with the growing; it wasn’t as if there was much else to do. And he enjoyed it. Just the two of them, Bob Quinn & Son, growing things in the back garden, tending them until they were big enough to be lifted into the boot of the car and transported to the allotment.

When Dad stepped into the back garden, he turned into someone different: Grandmaster of the Greenhouse, conjurer of life in yogurt pots, seed trays and margarine tubs. Years before Darren was born, when Dad lived in the house alone, he had laid a stepping-stone path down the middle of the lawn. It pointed like a suggestion to the bottom of the garden where the greenhouse lived. The greenhouse had an aluminium frame. It was shaped like the kind of house you draw when you’re a kid, with a pitched roof, a little door bang in the middle of its front, and fruit trees on either side. When the door opened, warm air steamed out, thick with the peppery smell of generations of tomato plants. In addition to the growing things, the shelves that lined its perimeter were filled with treasures: balls of string, wooden clothes pegs, a tub of slug pellets, twine, leather gloves, pot brushes, insect catchers, a folding pruning saw and a pocket knife. Bags of compost and fertiliser slouched on the floor alongside watering cans and bubble-wrap rolls. There were cobwebs and all manner of pupa – some fat and occupied, others derelict, dried-up husks. And spiders: hairy beasts with legs like pipe-cleaners that waited out the winter under the shelves and inside the empty pots.

In the early spring he and Dad lined up the pots and trays. They filled them with compost and labelled them with plant sticks, a task Darren was allowed to perform as soon as he was able to shrink his bloated, quivering letters small enough. Dad kept the seeds in a long box, separated by alphabetised index cards: bean (broad), bean (green), beetroot, broccoli, cabbage, carrot, celery, chives, cucumber, and so on. He’d written notes on the cards, in capitals:

START INDOORS

SOW AFTER DANGER OF FROST HAS PASSED.

PLANT 2 INCHES APART.

SOAK SEEDS 24 HOURS BEFORE SOWING.

One year, when he can’t have been more than five, Darren sneaked into the greenhouse before Dad got home from his job at the Philips factory, with the intention of doing him a great kindness. He filled the biggest watering can using the outside tap – once, twice, three times – and he watered everything. There was nothing much to see at that stage: they had only recently buried the seeds under the compost. Perhaps he had hoped to hurry them up; he can’t remember his precise thoughts, but he remembers heaving the can with both hands, swamping the yogurt pots of peas (garden), submerging the trays of lettuce (round) and sopping the tubs of beans (green). Not content with soaking all the growing things that were concealed under compost, he refilled the can and saturated the onion sets. Then he sluffed the seed potatoes. And finally, he opened the long, indexed seed box and filled that with water, too.

When Dad got home they had tea and then they went outside together as usual, Darren carrying the battery-operated radio, tuned to John Dunn’s Radio 2 drivetime show. Dad opened the greenhouse door and froze. He didn’t shout. He waited for a few moments before turning and heading back down the stepping-stone path and into the kitchen.

Dad inclined his head and she stepped into the garden in her slippers. Again, Darren followed, radio at the ready.

They stopped at the greenhouse door. It looked like there’d been a storm. Water dripped from the shelves: plop, plop, plop.

Mum put her hand on Dad’s shoulder. ‘Oh, love. I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I really am.’

‘He’ll have done it to be helpful. You were trying to help, weren’t you, Darren? He didn’t understand what he was doing, did you?’

Darren realised they weren’t going to thank him. And that he might be in trouble. So he hurried back into the house, put the radio on the side where it belonged and crept up to bed.

‘It wasn’t the best idea you’ve ever had,’ Dad observed, the following morning.

Over the subsequent evenings they restored order. Dad tied lines of string to the greenhouse ceiling and pegged the index cards out to dry. It looked like bunting and while it was up, whenever they walked down the garden, it felt they were on their way to a party. Some of the seeds from the box were salvageable because the envelopes were waxy, pretty much waterproof. Where the soil and seeds had been washed out of pots and trays, they replanted. They put the onions in the earth earlier than planned in case of mould. The potatoes were fine. It was all right in the end. Dad never shouted at him. Not when he doused the greenhouse. Not ever. Perhaps his patience was a product of his age.

His mum and dad were older than other parents, something that dawned on Darren during his first sports day, when he experienced an unexpected flare of panic at the announcement of a dads’ race. He looked at Dad, who had taken the afternoon off work specially, and realised that, compared to the other men, he was slow, deliberate. Darren didn’t mind this. In fact, he felt a great wave of tenderness for him, an overwhelming feeling that it would be the worst possible thing in the world for him to feel obliged to enter the race and come last or, worse still, fall and hurt himself in front of everyone. So while his mates dragged their half-laughing, half-posturing dads to the starting line, Darren studied the band of elastic on the front of his plimsolls.

There was a tremendous thudding on the grass as the dads ran. They were like animals, a herd of strapping chaps. Darren felt the stomp of their feet in his chest and he cheered and laughed with everyone else, but afterwards, during the walk home, he held Dad’s hand extra tight. I might have cheered for them, his hand was saying, but don’t worry, I like you the best.

Darren grabs the watering can from under the carpet and jogs down the path to the tap. The peas are struggling. Clover’s daytime watering isn’t doing the trick. Still, it’s better than nothing and at least she’s not being eaten alive. He drops the can and whacks a mozzie on his forearm. Splat – ha!

Once the watering is done, he banks a line of emerging potatoes and weeds between the older plants. It’d be good if he could drag Dad down here. He saw a little wooden sign not long ago, when he was in Lidl, doing the shopping. What was it? – TO PLANT A GARDEN IS TO BELIEVE IN TOMORROW. Dad won’t get involved in any material plans for tomorrow. All he wants is to stay at home and shop from his armchair. He orders everything: groceries, clothes, the latest technology – he’s got wireless headphones, chargers that don’t need to be plugged in, all sorts of shit. He’d rather watch telly and look stuff up on YouTube than go outside and do something. He’s on to Shakespeare now, Clover says. There are thirty-seven plays – Darren checked, to see how long it will last: clear through until September. And what’s the point? What’ll Dad have to show for it in the end? He should do one of those adult courses at the college if he wants to learn stuff. Otherwise, what’s the difference between him and other people who never leave their houses, the ones who sit in bed all day eating, only to shit it out the next morning?

Some people are all right by themselves – Darren is absolutely fine. Dad says he is fine too, but Darren can’t help wondering whether his mother would have managed better on her own. She had friends. A whole group of them. They worked at Kwik Save together, before he was born. When he was small they came round for coffee and chats and card games. He liked their paraphernalia: scarves and bags, hats and coats, gloves and cardigans. He liked the way they filled the room with their soft things, and soft noises, the sympathetic hmms they made, the similar sounds that meant a variety of things: no, yes, really? Never! They fussed and petted him. Sometimes he’d get to climb on a comfy knee and listen to his favourite Ladybird books: The Enormous Turnip and The Little Red Hen. When he’d had enough of their attentions he would sit on the rug with his colouring book while they smoked and laughed and called, ‘Last card!’ In between rubbers they talked about men he didn’t know: Alan, Steve, Ian, Paul. Later, after he started school, it troubled him to know that Mum’s friends were meeting without him. He knew when they’d been, because the house smelled of their bodies: of talc, extra cigarette smoke and instant coffee.

One day after they’d been – he was a little older, definitely school-aged, so perhaps it was during the holidays – Mum got a picture out of the dresser drawer.

‘Before I met your dad, I was married to Paul. He died. And I was very sad. But then I met your dad and had you. And now I’m very happy.’

She showed him a picture of a wedding. It was her, his mum, in a floaty white dress, head wrapped in a piece of material that looked like a net curtain, getting married to someone who wasn’t his dad.

He looked at the photo of the man who wasn’t Dad, the man with the brown suit, the thick moustache and the bleeding brain, and he was glad that the man was dead.

Mum laughed. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Why would you think – no! There’s only you. You’re my only boy.’

Dad never had friends round. He spoke warmly of people at work and occasionally went to the pub on a Friday, but more often than not he stayed in, content with Mum’s company. On a Friday or a Saturday, she would have a glass of wine after tea. And sometimes she would rehearse the story of how they met at Kwik Save. It was like a performance. She said her lines while Dad played supporting actor and Darren took the part of the audience.

‘He used to come to my till, even if there was a queue. And we always had a little chat.’

‘So one day, after he’d bagged all his shopping and it was time to pay, he said, “I’ve got a special offer.” And I said, “Oh, what’s that, then?” “Tickets to the cinema,” he said. “Buy one, get one free: I’ve bought one and you can have this one for free.” ’

Dad would smile and shake his head, a mild, unspoken mode of disagreement, undertaken with a courtesy he’d struggle to muster nowadays.

Darren attended to these performances, but he felt very little curiosity about his parents’ beginnings. Later, when he learned in biology that a woman is born with all the ova she’ll ever produce, it may have briefly occurred to him that this story, and all Mum’s stories, were in some ways his – that the egg of him was present at that supermarket checkout, and at the wedding to the man who wasn’t Dad – but he didn’t give it very much thought. There were odd occasions, as he grew older, when he slipped the picture of his mum and Paul out of the drawer and wondered about fate. Although Mum was a great believer in it (she was also a great believer in the royal family and a five-thread overlock hem), Darren remained unconvinced. The photograph did not make him feel as if his existence was fixed and fated. It made it seem as if he’d arrived on the planet by a hair’s breadth, by a whisker. And he felt lucky.

He tucks the watering can back under the carpet. Next year he’ll put the peas here. There’s a notebook in the garden shed containing diagram after diagram of the plot, one for every year since Dad signed up. Crop rotation reduces the chances of soil deficiencies and keeps things balanced, healthy. If only you could do the same with people. Determine their requirements, identify their problems and pests, group them in the right families and keep moving them away from trouble.

He pulls an empty carrier bag out of his pocket and begins to fill it with raspberries. They’re fat and juicy, the kind you pay extra for in the supermarket. He should probably save them up, stick them on trays and freeze and bag them, like Mum did. He could make jam or something. He remembers the things Mum used to make with the raspberries: cheesecakes, trifles, tarts, fools and mousses. They could have a go, him and Clover, she’d like that. He has had these ideas before but it’s a struggle to make them materialise; by the time he gets home there will be something else to occupy his thoughts – the detached radiator, the hall walls, the worry that there may be something else she needs. But time is passing and he knows it won’t be long before she’ll have better things to do.

He pauses to eat some of the fruit, and pictures Mum, apron strings wrapped twice around her waist, sleeves rolled past her elbows, writing RASPBERRY JAM and the date on a roll of sticky labels. He remembers the hot smell of boiling sugar and raspberry juice in the kitchen. ‘I wonder what’ll have happened by the time we eat this,’ she’d say. She used to say something similar each time they put the Christmas decorations back in the loft: ‘I wonder what fate has in store for us in the next twelve months.’

He can’t decide whether Mum’s belief in fate was stupid or stoical, a means of conciliation or consolation. Fate’s all right if everything’s going well. Makes you feel all important. Deserving. Like your happiness is meant. But when things are shit, you’re trapped by it, helpless, like those myths where the gods muck about with humans, for a laugh.

He much preferred the idea of luck. It seemed different from fate. Better. A skin-of-the-teeth, relieved feeling; the way you feel when you’re playing dodgeball in PE and the air beside you whooshes, but you don’t get hit. Luck’s not so set as fate. Even when things are shit, you might get better luck, it could be just around the corner. Course, he grew up eventually and realised life’s a crapshoot and most things, good or bad, happen by chance and accident.

His and Colin’s was an accidental friendship. They didn’t live on the same street and they didn’t sit next to each other at school; they didn’t even share the same table. Although Miss Richardson never said which of the tables was top, everyone knew it was the Lions. Darren was on the Tigers, which was second, but Colin had to sit with the Hippos. Darren assumed this was a mistake or a temporary measure. Some kind of punishment perhaps, because Colin was funny and clever and quick – sometimes he shouted out the answer before Miss Richardson had finished a question.

When it was their class’s turn to do a school assembly, Colin had a really small part. During rehearsals he mucked about. After he took his shoes off, smelled his feet and pretended to die of asphyxiation, Miss Richardson moved him.

‘Go and sit next to Darren,’ she said. ‘He’s sensible, let’s see if it’s contagious.’

Colin folded the paper and put it in his pocket. When it was his turn to speak he stood up and said his line without it, which proved Darren right: Colin was clever and definitely didn’t belong with the Hippos.

‘Do you want to play Dukes of Hazzard?’ Colin asked at break time. ‘I’ll be Luke. You can be Bo.’

Darren was up for that. The next day it was British Bulldog, the day after it was World of Sport wrestling.

It was easy to be the announcer – Darren watched the wrestling on Saturday afternoons with Mum and Dad. ‘On my left, in the red corner, at six foot eleven, is the Masked Emperor,’ he said in a special announcing voice. ‘And his opponent, on my right, at twenty-four and a half stone, is Bi-i-g Daddy! Two submissions or a knockout decides the winner. Ding-ding!’

Colin balled his jumper and stuffed it up his shirt. The other lads ran into him and he fended them off with belly blocks, just like Big Daddy.

That was how they became friends. And they remained so, their roots forever connected by that early meshing. Colin was cheeky and often in trouble. He remained with the Hippos that year and graced the bottom sets in every subject except maths throughout his time at school. Eventually, Darren noticed his difficulty reading. Sometimes he helped him with his homework. And he chose to work with him when they had to read in pairs. But he never felt sorry for him. Colin was funny and he had a largesse that other kids lacked; he shared everything – sweets, toys, football stickers – with a casual optimism, confident that life would bestow more sweets, more toys and more football stickers. When it was bring-a-toy day he let Darren have a go on his Major Morgan. The hand-held electric organ was the first instrument Darren had ever touched. He matched the symbols and colours on the push-in cards and played the whatsit out of it. In return he lent his Rubik’s Cube to Colin, who got fed up when he couldn’t solve it and peeled off some of the stickers to complete the red face. This pretty much wrecked it, but Darren didn’t mind. Not a lot, anyway. They were friends, after all.

Colin’s dad had a Kawasaki bike and, according to Dad, a bad attitude. Darren had seen him shove Colin into a corner and attack him with his index finger: ‘You.’ Jab. ‘Little.’ Jab. ‘Git.’ Jab. Colin said it hadn’t hurt at all, but Darren wasn’t convinced. Colin’s mum was small and skinny with peroxide hair and a smile which she propped up with tense, bony shoulders. Colin’s parents were young. They’d been born on the cusp of the sixties. Dad was born just as Europe geared up for the Second World War, and Mum was born right at the end of it. The years between Mum and Dad and Colin’s parents, between war babies and the start of Generation X, made a world of difference. Dad remembered rationing. He didn’t talk about it often, but when he did it connected him to the war and gave him a past that seemed, to Darren, to have been shot in black and white, and slow-motion frames.

Colin didn’t come round very often. It was always a bit awkward when he did. Mum fussed in the kitchen, cigarette lolling between her lips as she checked the microwave seal with her radiation counter, before pureeing the zapped vegetables in the Magimix. She called Colin ‘love’ and repeatedly asked whether he was enjoying himself. Every time she said ‘love’, Colin flinched.

The soundtrack to tea was the scrape of knives and forks against china. In Colin’s house it was the telly. Dad didn’t make small talk at the table. Darren was used to this, but when witnessed by another person his silence seemed rude, as if he was cross with everyone or too ancient to have anything interesting to say. Of course, he wasn’t that old but, once noted, the differences between him and Colin’s parents stacked up: the way Dad’s skin bagged slightly, the rooty veins on the backs of his hands, the puff of his knuckles, his stiff-collared shirts, his paisley ties and his utter lack of strut.

Once, Colin came round for tea in the early spring. In Darren’s imagination, the two of them were going to have a great time afterwards, helping Dad in the greenhouse. They helped, but it didn’t go well. Darren found himself stuck between Colin and Dad, uncertain how to accommodate them both. They trooped down the stepping stones and stood in that hot little space together while Darren bestowed kindness and condescension on Dad, speaking on his behalf and providing Colin with a running commentary of greenhouse-related information. When his helpfulness went unacknowledged and unremarked upon, he felt resentful. There he was, being kind to Dad because he wasn’t quite the same as the other dads, and Dad didn’t even have the good grace to notice either the kindness or the difference. Eventually, he ran out of things to say and Colin, who approached silences like swimming pools, dive-bombed the conversation with jokes. Darren had to laugh extra loud to make up for Dad’s silence.

‘Why did the one-handed man cross the road? To get to the second-hand shop!’

Afterwards, he and Colin sat on the pink and grey sofa in the lounge, drinking ginger beer and listening to Mum’s time-worn Beatles singles on the record player, a novelty for Colin, who only had a portable ghetto blaster at home. While Darren changed the records, Colin made up silly songs.

‘Old Bob Qu-inn had a greenhouse, e-i-e-i-o.

And in that greenhouse were some seeds, e-i-e-i-o.

With a yawn, yawn here and a snore, snore there,

Here a flower, there a plant, everywhere a frigging branch.

Old Bob Qu-inn had a greenhouse, e-i-e-i-o.’

And, of course, Dad was standing in the doorway, wasn’t he? He didn’t even look cross. He just cleared his throat and disappeared down the hall.

The following evening, when it was time to go outside, Dad said, ‘It’s all right, you sit down. I expect you’ve got better things to do.’

Darren ties the handles of the raspberry-stuffed carrier bag in a knot and places it on the carpet. He picks up the shears and crouches to trim the grass pathways that dissect the beds. It’s not long before his biceps and pecs are burning. It’s almost as good as going to the gym; perhaps he’ll wake up in the morning with guns like Colin – ha! Once he’s finished trimming the pathways he straddles the back fence; he’ll do Mr Ashworth’s too, it’ll be a nice surprise for him when he next manages to come.

Colin was wrong – it wasn’t boring helping Dad and it’s not boring here. The sun and the soil are reliable, they do their jobs and he does his: if things look dry he gives them more water, if the potatoes get blight he cuts off the tops to stop it getting into the tuber. He knows where he is, here. Knows why Dad enjoyed it.

After the incident with Colin’s song he still helped Dad sometimes. But he felt like he was imposing. He’d lost his share in the greenhouse. It couldn’t have been more obvious if there’d been an actual sign saying ‘Bob Quinn & Son’ and Dad had crossed through the ‘& Son’. It didn’t matter too much, because not long after Dad got his first cuckoo clock and they shared that, instead. Mum bought it for his birthday. It came all the way from Austria, where a friend of hers had been on holiday. Dad had to discover how it worked, and then he wanted another, and another, until there was a line of them in the hall: tick-tock, tick-tock, cuckoo, cuckoo; measuring out the seconds and the minutes, segmenting the hours into halves and quarters.

Time passed. Unlike Colin, who couldn’t get out of bed in the mornings once he started puberty, so weighed down was he by his new carpet of body hair and the voice that had dived into his boots where it sat like concrete, Darren remained an early riser. As soon as he was thirteen he started doing a paper round. He loved his daybreak circumnavigation of the neighbourhood, Now 20 playing on his Walkman as he cycled on the empty pavements. Initially, his mind was occupied by memorising the route, then he graduated to imagining how he was going to spend his wages, but after a while he started to notice things: the waxing and waning of the moon; the different types of clouds; the wind direction and the warning of red skies, heralding wet and windy weather.

Mum waited by the front door at 7.30 each morning to receive his coat as he returned. ‘Ta,’ he’d say and hurry upstairs. Each weekday when he got back, his bed was made and his school uniform was laid out on it in the shape of him. Like Flat Stanley – ha! He’d dash to the bathroom, shuck off his Air Jordans, his trackies and his baggy T-shirt and step into the shower. Two minutes was all he needed. He flung his uniform on and hurried downstairs where breakfast awaited him: milky tea with white-bread toast that Mum cut into triangles and slotted into a rack. The toast was served with Marmite, marmalade or home-made raspberry jam, while TV-am played on the portable telly in the kitchen and he admired Ulrika Jonsson.

That was life. It consisted of the daily orbit of his paper round, six hours of school, a quick trip to Colin’s for a turn on his Sega Megadrive, tea with Mum and Dad – something home-made or Findus Crispy Pancakes for a treat – followed by Coronation Street, while Mum did her knitting and Dad read from one of the encyclopaedias or replaced the bellow top flaps on a clock. Afterwards, there might be a documentary that Dad had spotted and circled in the Radio Times, something about extreme weather or space, and then it was time for bed. Darren got glimpses of other lives and was aware that some people’s existences weren’t quite like his; some people were lonely, others were unhappy at home. But as far as he could see, things generally turned out for the best – it was less about fate and more about goodness, he decided. Good people, on balance, experienced good luck. One day, Colin’s dad climbed on his motorbike and never came back. See? Things turned out.

Back then everything was predictable, linear. He would follow a predetermined path: school, college and university. It was the way to get on, Dad reckoned – it’s what he would have done, had he been given the chance. And after college and university, Darren would be rewarded with a life not entirely dissimilar from that of his parents, only better: a bigger house, a nicer car and a more exciting place of work than the Philips factory.

Like the potted seeds in the greenhouse, he grew into his surroundings, warm and fed and watered. And all the time he was growing up he anticipated the day when he would be too big, too important for his container, when a transfer would be necessary and he would be uprooted and transplanted to somewhere better, a place where he could grow without restraint. In the meantime, life was ordinary, unremarkable and occasionally boring. It was, looking back, wonderful.