The grey light shone on the plastic wrapped around the new spade, leaning on the piano, and made a veil of it and then a berg of clean ice. It had been a tough day. What with one thing. And then another.
He had been sitting in the easy chair for some time now. Tired and trying to relax. Yesterday he had rubbed his eye, and there must have been a splinter, something almost transparent, like a fish bone, which was impossible, tiny, near the knuckle of his index finger, and he had scratched the surface of his eye-ball with that. His eye was a little sore now, and it watered. Probably a minor infection that he could fight off if only he could get some sleep. He squinted. He couldn’t see this splinter, just the point of a thorn perhaps, but he could feel it now and then.
He was looking at the sky through the highest and smallest window that gave onto the garden. It had an effect of blue, very pale, so pale in fact that when he isolated a particular patch, there was no blue there at all, only white, but overall, the blue was not lost. The room exerted some fascination upon him but an unsatisfactory one. The air in it was tangible, dense. To walk across it, which he could not quite bring himself to do at the moment, he would have to push that air out of his way wade though it.
He watched the sunbeams stream through the French windows, their weave directed unknowingly by wind and cloud miles away, thick with their millions of motes of dust. Dirt, another person would have called it. He reflected that he might be looking at them for the last time, yet they seemed so solid for a light of no color. He wondered if the new owners would ever notice these unownable things.
The property supplements do not recommend that hopeful vendors keep spades in the living room. That would not strike prospective purchasers as homely. They recommend baking bread. He had not baked bread, but he had ground coffee, which he never drank, and of that, he was now a little ashamed.
He did not play the piano. Could not. He knew why it was that he had one, but he did not wish to think about it. He really needed to get out of this house. To put an end to this idle and useless existence.
His hands were now coated with a not-so-thin layer of clay and some concrete mix. It was like wearing granular gloves of sand, skin tight. This would not wash off so readily. He was concerned not to fill the drain from his sink with concrete.
These could be gravedigger’s hands, he thought.
He held his glass without ever putting it down and could not feel how cold it was except when he drank from it. He clinked the ice. If only more things were made of ice. Temporary. Instead of all this stuff that lasts forever.
There were some lovely things in his room still. Vases, clocks, lamps, an hourglass. They did not now strike him as harmless. Calamitous more likely. Malicious snares, perhaps. His reverie was a troubled one. There was something he would look at only out of the corner of his stinging eye, a serpent in the garden, as always.
He stretched his weary limbs and took a last long pull at his drink. He plucked a smooth pebble of ice from it and crushed it between his teeth. A mower droned angrily in the distance, perhaps the first of the season. The cry of a child, tired and upset. A barrel-chested dog gave a vicious cough, choked off short at the end of its chain as though the animal had been ashamed to give itself away. The soft swish of traffic was even-tempered at this time. The squeal of a locomotive brought to a sudden halt, just penetrated the walnut trees at the top of the garden. He needed to get away from this place. It was getting dark already. The sun was sinking. There was a knock at his door.
Arthur stared impatiently at the stranger on his doorstep, not quite listening to him, simply waiting for the right moment to tell him to go away. Arthur was a large man and could feel that he was filling his doorway nicely. He knew he was imposing. He did not pretend bonhomie. Could not. He could see a little tube of plastic on the steps behind this unwelcome man, perhaps dropped by him, the sort of tube that held filters for roll-up cigarettes. He would tell him to pick that up.
There is a scheme, the man was saying. Should we find Japanese knotweed, then you can claim compensation from the local council to help pay for its eradication.
The man was showing him laminated photographs of Japanese knotweed printed on blue cards and obviously copied from the internet. One of the photographs even had the name of the photographer stenciled across it in pale grey lettering. To prevent illegitimate reproduction. This was a scheme, alright. The man was speaking too quickly. He was not a good cheat and slightly more likable for that.
There is no Japanese knotweed in my garden.
Well, you know, you would have to be something of a botanist, a plant-lover, to be sure of that.
With a chuckle, as if the man felt sorry for anyone who might believe that it was possible for a mere amateur to identify a wildflower.
I am something of a botanist, insisted Arthur.
It is a significant pest. It would be in your very best interest to get rid of it and that requires expert attention. You can get a grant.
I like flowers.
Well, you wouldn’t like this one. Not if you are trying to sell your house.
He had seen the sign round the front. He was obviously so pleased to have someone to be high-handed with. He would be divorced, Arthur thought, so he no longer had a wife to push around. Well, out of that. Poor woman.
Arthur stared at the man’s name badge, laminated like his photos and clipped to the lapel of his horrible suit.
Your name can’t be Sherwood Anderson.
The man was flummoxed. Off his script.
No, it’s not. My name is Anthony Sherwood. Anderson is the name of the company.
Arthur looked into the man’s anxious face. What a desperate character. He was too old for this. Door to door at nearly six o’clock with his grubby cards and his creased suit. On commission. He had seen better days, no doubt: company car, modest expense account, maybe even a shared secretary. But he had lost all of that, knocked down and robbed of it, and now wouldn’t, or couldn’t, lie flat on the deck. He wouldn’t take a hand-out, even if that did mean sleeping in the Fiesta now and then. He would work for a living, show them he could still do it, still sell, still make it, doing the job he had started out at thirty-five years ago. Arthur examined his almost-bald-man’s grey-cropped hair, looked into his frightened blue eyes, and liked him. He had a hurt face. He bet the young chaps in the office gave him Hell. He was just one more disappointment from cracking. His name tag should have been a label with Hopeless printed on it. Except he didn’t need that. Everyone could tell. He was cold. His suit was too thin for so early in the spring.
If I could have a very quick look over your garden I could set everyone’s mind at rest. A grant is available.
Have you found knotweed in anyone’s garden?
Yours is the first house I’ve tried on this street. But they’ve found loads in Wherstead. On the Strand. It can travel along the embankment and into gardens that way.
Arthur had no doubt that the whole thing was a scam, or almost so. This fellow made out he was offering a public service. But it was quite interesting, and he felt sorry for him. He knew what it might be like to be him. Not that he could hope to find knotweed just to help him out. That would be terrible. In fact, a disaster.
Alright, Sherwood. Let’s have a look then.
Arthur was ashamed of the house. It was sold now, more or less, and he had let it slide back towards the ramshackle condition it had been in before he made an effort to persuade the buyers. It had taken two years and thousands off the original asking price to find them. He would have liked to have made his house a recognizably habitable space where a recognizably ordinary man might have lived, but he had failed to do this. If only he could have made the place normal, he might have been normal in it.
He thought of apologizing for the cobwebs that he only now noticed, but Sherwood was too pathetic to merit that. What was he even doing walking into the house of a man who was clearly drunk?
Something smells good, said Sherwood. Among all of the things, smelling not so good.
Arthur was cooking. A sort of chicken casserole but in a tomato-based sauce. The kitchen did smell of oregano and basil. He always cooked twice or even four times the amount and then stacked frozen portions in his huge chest freezer. But then he didn’t like to eat his supplies, to diminish his store, as though he might be besieged. He didn’t really need to cook again for weeks. The freezer was almost full to the brim now. He hadn’t seen the bottom of it for a long time.
Sherwood was back on his script,
The Environment Agency says Japanese knotweed is indisputably the UK’s most aggressive, destructive and invasive plant. It will destroy concrete foundations can damage flood defences and archaeological sites. It can regrow from even a tiny fragment of its root. You don’t have to report its presence on your land, but if it causes a nuisance, there may be a civil liability. Research from the University of Exeter says that poor advice from local councils may result in gardeners unwittingly spreading the plant instead of destroying it. That’s why you need a specialist like Anderson to see if you have it.
I’d better not have it, Arthur said, grimly steering Sherwood around the spade and the piano.
He opened the back door and the doves flew up in a grey flurry from the mess under the bird-table. It was colder out the back. Almost freezing.
This is quite a garden. I had no idea.
Arthur’s garden was surprisingly long given the modest size of his late Victorian terrace. This was because the railway line ran along the back of these houses, gradually diverging from them so that the further you lived from the railway station, the longer your garden was. Arthur’s house was the furthest in the street from the station.
The garden was in a state, naturally squalid, like the house. It was guarded by tall untrimmed hedges from the neighbors on both sides (one neighbor was a Kwik-Fit Tyre Garage) and where it wasn’t overgrown with brambles, nettles, alkanet, and cow parsley, it was full of rubbish, unfinished projects, bags of cement, broken and rusted tools, pliers, saws and spanners, reels and nets of wire, the ashen stains of several long-extinguished fires, shears crooked open like the beak of a bird, a pyramid of wet sand, lengths of cable inexpertly braided around cracked wooden spools, plastic bags full of recyclable glass and rainwater, more than one overturned, wheel-free wheelbarrow.
I’ve even got a pill box. Right at the top. Built to cover the railway line.
Keep the Germans at bay.
But perhaps not the Japanese.
The garden was a tough place. Full of nails and stones. Arthur was not embarrassed by it as he was by his house.
Sherwood was still going on about knotweed as he made his way gingerly forward, hopefully threading himself through the wreckage of Arthur’s nonsense.
It will live forever, said Arthur. The immortal flower.
The flower that no one cares for that thrives despite all hostility. Arthur admired it, but he hoped they wouldn’t find any. It was getting dark. He squinted at Sherwood and picked up a length of blue nylon rope from by the woodpile. He picked up the frosty axe, too and weighed it, appraising its edge. He struck it into a log with a sudden snap. Sherwood turned round, startled.
I don’t like to leave it lying in the grass.
So early in the year, but the growth was still lush. A jungle of barbs and blades.
You had to follow the path. The ground was sticky and slippery underfoot with years of fallen fruit. There might be snakes. Torpid still in this weather. To be bitten by a poisonous snake is like being struck on the hand with a hammer, he had read. Either of them might have made that joke about Japanese soldiers who do not know the war is over. Both of these men, pottering in this improbable place, looking so like somewhere that men had once been very busy and important but which had been abandoned as no good anymore, long ago. They kept picking up things they thought interesting and dropping them again when they found they were not. A locomotive screeched.
Freight, I expect, said Arthur. All hours.
Sherwood nodded amicably. A smell of woodsmoke drifted over as though from another century. The lights fizzed to life over the line. Dark clouds were gathering in a bad mood and thinking about rain.
Mind out for the pond. You can’t really see it.
Sherwood admired the pill box. Arthur kept the ivy off it, and it was clean enough inside. He offered to light Sherwood into it, but he wasn’t keen. There were cobwebs, as in the house, but with fatter, nastier prey. The pill box might have been an animal’s lair.
Arthur started to feel he wanted to get rid of Sherwood now. There was no need for him to be so persistent. The stakes were high. How did you get rid of knotweed inspectors? Even the half-baked ones take some shifting. Arthur suspected this one didn’t want to move on just to have another ten doors shut in his face. Arthur was also afraid that they might find something that would finally snap the line, tying his reluctant buyers to this unattractive bargain. He was starting to feel thirsty. Gin helped him think.
Sherwood was crouched over, scrambling at the sodden leaves around him in the failing light, careless of the thorns. Scattering the leaves more and more excitedly. Arthur stared at him blurrily, one-eyed and cleared his throat. Sherwood was looking at his cards.
Bad news, I think.
He turned to Arthur with the triumphant grin, revisiting his stupid fat face for the first time in more than a decade.
Several corms of Japanese knotweed, Fallopia japonica. If it’s here, it won’t be the only place.
He rummaged in his bag, looking for his camera. The light would be tricky. He had forgotten about the cold now. Sherwood had never seen Japanese knotweed before in the wild and he was childish enough to admit as much.
Arthur could see the plant sticking up like stakes of bloody bamboo. Punji sticks. His language was blistering, but he kept it quiet. His first thought was that he could run away. He didn’t need the money. He had got talking to a bloke in Moorgate once, who lived in a one-man tent in one of the busiest streets in the capital. He had made little shelves in there and had rows of plastic bottles. A cardboard door when he slept. He hardly deserved to be called homeless. So snug.
Arthur was suddenly very tired. He felt a purpose loosen, uncoil inside him.
What had been unclear was lucid now. He knew what he had to do, and he wanted to do it. Scales fell away and left a certainty that was cool and crisp. Untangled.
What a pleasure it is to perceive a simple truth, a light in a dark place. The obvious can be lovely.
Sherwood was scuttling around with treacherous glee on his haunches, like a crab, trying to get in the right light to take a picture. He was too excited to stand up. It was as he moved around that he saw Arthur with the nylon rope pulled tight between his angry fists. Clouds of concrete dust puffed out of his clay hands. He was just standing there looking at this chubby little man in his silly clothes and thinking about what he might do, but Sherwood could guess one of the options he was considering.
You can get a grant.
Don’t take a picture. Or do. It doesn’t matter.
Arthur twanged the rope, testing its super-human strength and Sherwood, like the fool and the coward that he was, that most men are, started to talk Arthur into it.
I will be missed. Anderson knows where I am. We always do that. It’s procedure.
This gave Arthur too much to think about and cut a too-easy channel for his thought.
No one knows you are here. No one in this street will say that they have seen you, because they haven’t. You’ve parked in the supermarket car park like everyone does, everyone on the whole estate. You haven’t told Anderson or anyone that you are here. Pretty female estate agents do that, not sad men like you. Desperate cases.
I’ll cry for help.
Go ahead. I’ve done that hundreds of times. No one will come.
We don’t have to report it. I’ll say I never saw it. No one will know. You can trust me.
I can’t trust you. But I can make sure no one knows. I’ll bury you under the pill box. With my wife.
Sherwood turned his back, the worst thing he could have done, and began to walk away, still on his knees, still without the sense to stand up.
Arthur was taken aback by his own conjuring of his wife. He had no wife. He had never been married. He had never spoken of this fictitious woman out loud before and was himself amazed to see her glimmer into life, only to be immediately buried beneath this WWII relic. He looked at the plants Sherwood, weeping now, had uncovered.
Equistema. Horse-tail. Not Japanese knotweed. Not even a flower, strictly speaking.
One of the last survivors of the prehistoric world that had existed even before the evolution of insects. He could see how Sherwood had gone wrong, seeing what he wanted to see and being an idiot for a start. He watched him kneeling away through the mulch. Making for the pill box.
Arthur thought, Oh no. I’ll never get him out of there. And opened his mouth to say something.
[Editor’s note:You will see that proper formatting for dialog has not been used here. Normally, we would have required a change; however, as it stands, it does not detract from the story and, instead, offers a slightly interesting way of presenting it. What do you think?]
ABOUTTHEAUTHOR
Robert Stone was born in Wolverhampton, UK. He works in a press-cuttings agency in London. Before that, he was a teacher and foreman of a London Underground station. He has two children and lives with his partner in Ipswich. He has had stories published in Stand, Panurge, 3:AM, The Write Launch,
Eclectica, Confingo, Here Comes Everyone, Book of Matches, Punt Volat, The Decadent Review, The Cabinet of Heed, Heirlock, The Main Street Rag, The Clackamas Literary Review, The Pearl River Quarterly, Angel Rust, Lunate, Blue Stem and Wraparound South. He has had three stories published in Nicholas Royle’s Nightjar chapbook series. Micro stories have been published by Sledgehammer, Third Wednesday, Palm-Sized Press, 5×5, Star 82, The Ocotillo Review, deathcap, The Westchester Review, and Clover & White. A story appeared in Salt’s Best British Stories 2020 volume. He tweets mostly about stories here at @RobertJStone2. Website: https://robertjstone.weebly.com
Email: robertjstonexxx@gmail.com
About the Author
