Another Garden Book

We pay our gardener a fixed amount to trim the lawn, prune and tame

the little place (A Small Place)

we occupy. I remember

when I was little, my grandma paid me a pound to do

something or other long and laborious in her slightly smaller garden place, planting bulbs, digging up bulbs? She said I had green fingers anyway.

I was sick of being told

‘small pleasures’

- like jamming your hand into the bare earth and crumpling it in and out of place. The death count is god knows what now but I still see older people crimping the soil and bringing various petals to bear out of it on the neighbourhood and passing joggers. They

poke out of their front gardens from carefully maintained borders

- so determined to live, drooping over said miniature fences in a kind of protest.

We were supposed to go on a zip wire this time last year. He cancelled it because I was scared. Refunded instead of facing, like a man, the inevitable cruelty of the instructor, both of us with the same brush- like an old married man would have done for a rapidly aging wife with a bucket list of desires.

The heat waned and hissed from the tower block,

the concrete visibly stretched in an attempt to accommodate

it. Chained up bikes were dulled by the sun, like old paintings.

And for less than a second I considered the lives behind the

laundry lines, the clothes horses on balconies before I took

my handbag from my shoulder and placed it carefully on

my backside with the same level of care with which the

washing was pegged.

Our garden succumbed to the weight of the sun, flashing back and forth between the fences to create an oppressive box. The lawn, short and wilted, collapsed into a dead yellow under the stress of the heat. Next door’s tree leaned into the little place, testing the border between ours and theirs. I looked forward to the garden room (under construction) in the far corner of the garden. Upon its completion, that was when I would read the Rushdie I’d been carting under my arm indefinitely. Fireworks- are his, one tutor had said, in comparison to the domesticity of my other favourites that rippled with fury

almost imperceptibly.

Lark

Not looking at each other but at ‘us’ through various filters. Mayfair, Sierra and gingham.

An extension of myself for a third, similarly disingenuous persons. When the prose reach

their crescendo, shatter into verse, crack explode are channelled into something more ethereal

accidental carved deliberate.

He tells me more than once not to be ‘so’ materialistic. From this I took, ‘a bit’ to be a

concession from him, to be desired. A cupcake slice of that trait makes the reckless abandon,

the hotel rooms and five-pound sauvignon a bearable kind of sordid. He has a personal flare

for trainers which impress upon me that he’s really just a spoilt child.

Aesthetic apparitions of histories crowd the bookshelves I imagined for him. Then I heard Trump has a similar thing; Chesnutt’s blue vein society and the empty covers prevails in my memory. I crave the aesthetic brutality of Danish interior design but I come from clutter and cluttered lives. The syntactical discipline, the efficiency of Kincaid- cannot be born from endless Staffordshire dogs and painted, purely decorative, tea pots. It was quite a long-winded story I passed off to every passing psychiatrist. Bentham’s panopticon and why I couldn’t possibly sleep. I organised my books, lined them stood up by the door, so they would tumble into each other like dominos when they came to get me. The healthcare assistant smiled as she said to her colleague- ‘Too Pretty’. Isn’t that an African slight against privileged whites or is that something I imagined based on a single one of Adichie’s women?

Little patronisations it was difficult to divide from kindness. At the Benefit counter I’d tried out a mascara. When I explained I was staying at the priory, that time, the girl- woman said "Don’t let any one judge you". I must have been comforted for lack of a more sophisticated emotion being able to mature, flourish under the influence of new and equally damning

prescription druggery.

The degradation of this evening we’ll forget as he plays thoughtfully with the rings on my fingers. Imaginarily, he dwells on the actual finger, allowing wax to drip on his. I was too afraid to run my own through the flicker protruding from the old Jack Daniel’s bottle that seemed so affected. Invented hatreds, crude summaries of lofty subjects, amateur stabs atmake-believe. His eyes as intense as daggers but he flits them about candidly as if it doesn’t matter.

Homeland is good, if you can ignore the casual racism that underlies the entire story line

- ‘I do in life’

I said I liked sushi- she said, repeated her neat little witticism, ‘But let’s be honest, it’s so b-ou-jee’

Let us get falafel then. In Berlin- It’s all I ate, every day. The bourgeoisie now breeds in Peckham apparently.