No Man's Land

In the middle of London is a patch of ground which the locals call No Man’s Land. It lies between two fifteen-story residential blocks of graphite grey, and dislocated women often wave to the other dislocated women from across the breach, trying in their best of hearts to ignore the urban desolation that despoils their downward gaze.

There is nothing to stop them crossing this land, visiting these other women, and yet there is everything to stop them.

Ashantay, sipping her tea, looks down and wonders what it would be like to have a garden. She remembers the lockdowns when so, so twee breakfast presenters with expensive highlights and maxi dresses told the imprisoned viewers that there was always your garden to retreat to. And here is a marquee you can buy, and a barbecue set, all at the bargain price of a thousand pounds! No regard at all for the sweated millions who didn’t have a garden of their own.

She imagined that ugly space full of greenery and gossiping women, growing okra and fennel and turnips, but that was beyond all dreaming. Someone had bought this land after the war, when a bomb with a personal message from Hitler took out what had once been there. And no one knows how many manicured hands this land has passed between since then, but it is prime, and at some point, like another ticking bomb, they will no doubt demolish these ugly flats and build homes for Russian and Arabic millionaires instead. It is a waiting game, and all the while the game is playing out, the soil lies fallow and all the women can do is wave.

But how nature abhors a vacuum. And so it is filled with gang members, an HQ of sorts, girls and boys, fat, thin, stupid. They have commandeered this space so assuredly that no one can cross it to get to the other side. Men are threatened with a knifing, and women are intimidated and verbally abused: threatened with a good raping, of course, the lingua franca since time began. So how is it, thinks Ashantay, that a bony white woman down below is growing vegetables in a planter? Unmolested. How can this be?

‘How can this be?’ she asks Maria, when her curiosity can take no more and she braves the patch in slippered feet, the black hats too thin on the ground at this time of day to cause more trouble than a hostile stare.

And Maria puts down her trowel and rubs her back. The sunlight is not kind to her, the curse of the white skin, and yet she looks handsome all the same. And she touches Ashantay’s plump arm, a woman she has only waved to through grimy windows.

‘What is the one thing that everyone in the world is frightened of?’ she asks.

‘Rabies.’

‘No. One can always avoid stray dogs.’

‘OK,’ Ashantay says, thinking.

‘Cancer?’ she offers.

‘Well yes,’ Maria concedes. ‘But dying is life. I am talking about what petrifies a person when they are healthy. Try harder.’

And Ashantay, with her hair piled high and her dressing-gown hanging loose, trawls through all conceived fears: drowning, being burned alive, buried alive, finding out your daughter is a serial killer, until eventually she comes up with something that meets with Maria’s approval.

‘Witches!’ she says. ‘Black magic, hoodoo, jinns, the hex …’

‘Now you are there!’ says Maria.

And Ashantay steps back, crossing herself.

‘They think you’re a witch?’

‘I’m a Methodist, Ashantay, but they’re morons.’

‘And what is it you do?’

‘I deploy a Paddington stare and offal from the butchers, but feel free to dip into your own culture. What do you have? Bad juju?’

‘We have all sorts of things,’ says Ashantay. ‘And I am also a Methodist!’

‘And there are Indian women here too, and others with their own witches,’ says Maria, warming to the theme. 'The Eastern Europeans, for instance. And you know, in India, even to this day, thousands of women are killed each year on charges of witchcraft. These unfortunates are called dayans ….’

Unaccountably, Maria’s eyes began to shine with saline tears. It was hard, Ashantay thought, to be a Tower Hamlets witch without a coven. And then Maria said something which acted as an epiphany on Ashantay, there on that poor ground where untold secrets must surely lie buried.

‘If we can’t make them respect women, we should make them fear us instead.’

And Ashantay laughed long and loud, because there was such merit to it.

*****

Ashantay’s husband did not at first agree. All men who love their women wish to protect them, but he cannot protect his own skin and organs against a machete blade. He is not a big man. In fact, he is much smaller than his beloved wife, but still the desire to protect her burns fiercely.

‘But you’re not a witch!,’ he said, slamming his hand on the kitchen table so the daffodils in the vase shuddered primly at the unaccustomed violence.

‘And you are not understanding me, husband!’ she countered. ‘We must fight fire with a bigger fire, man! You are more worried about what the people in our congregation will think. I don’t care what they think! I am beyond caring what anything thinks! I want to be able to visit the women on the other side, and I cannot do that while this evil lies in wait. And the good Lord made me and he made Maria and he made ALL of us, Samuel! He gave us wits, and we must use them. Why can’t you see that?’

And eventually, because Ashantay was bigger than him, he also saw such merit to it.

Ashantay and Marie lived in opposite blocks, which enabled maneouvers. They printed leaflets and heaved their bodies up a series of flights, on account of the lifts rarely working - and if they did work, no one trusted them to deliver. And afterwards, on quiet nights, windows open to the dusty breeze, small, explosive, definitive arguments could be heard between man and wife, and between mothers and children.

It isn’t safe!

But is that not the trouble? Why are we not safe? Who are these nasty children to tell us where to walk?

The owners will stop you!

Who are these owners? Where are they? Dubai? Moscow? What are we doing but planting vegetables and cultivating lost soil? Are we starting World War Three or do we just wish to walk between our buildings? To plant things? To eat the things we have planted?

You are naive, stupid!

And you are a coward!

And so the arguments continued, but by late April, the available surfaces in every flat were growing seedlings of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onions, shallots, potatoes, garlic and artichokes.

Outside, spinach, lettuce and kale was sowed directly into the containers and, where the earth was amenable, directly into the ground.

Spices and herbs grew from the seven continents. Those tender babies from warmer climes were protected under cloches. Some thrived, and others did not, but what is the point of continents if everything thrives the same elsewhere? But Britain, with its oceanic climate, was kind enough to most.

Ashantay joined Maria, and then Ingrid, and then Aadhya, Sajani, Kristín, Axlam, Fatima, Sarah, Meghan, and their daughters. And the men, home from their work, watched from the windows and thought, They are doing this all wrong! They need a man to properly dig the soil, I would not put the Jerusalem artichokes just there, I could make better planters myself ...

And they might have been right, but it wasn’t the point, was it.

Around each patch was a symbol of Baphomet, the Eye of Horus, the heptagram, the hexagram, Icelandic sigils, the inverted cross, the sigil of Lilith, the seal of Solomon, the sigil of Lucifer, Vish Varupa, voodoo dolls, hoodoo dolls and frankly terrifying porcelain dolls in Alice dresses.

And the vegetables grew. And how they grew.

The gang made initial forays, but the industry, visible in the evening hours, made them think twice. They were children of chaos. This was not what they were used to. This was not their comfort zone. They kicked a few planters over, and when the seedlings tumbled to the hard ground beneath their feet, there wasn’t one of them who didn’t feel, perhaps for the very first time, their own inanity. Their very real pointlessness.

And from the windows, where the women were watching, they began to chant and to ululate, meaningless rhymes they had devised amongst themselves. And they fled from it, as Maria always knew they would.

By the end of summer, almost every woman had a plot and a death stare and a sigil of her own, but those slipshod baby-criminals were nowhere to be seen by then.

Ashantay though, she always said they would be back.

At Halloween, when no-man’s land became everyman’s land, where each continent had its own cauldron and each parent of a miscreant hauled them by their ears to sample the flavour of people, real people, who simply wished to cross a derelict patch of earth without threat, she repeated her belief. They would be back - and when the leader of that gang approached her to apologise, savouring a bowl of Dublin Coddle, she passed him a packet of fennel seeds and said ‘Begin here, little boy.’