Bamboo

I didn’t consider spring when I planted my garden. In September it is glorious, but in the early months it is nothing but lawn, daisies and dandelions. I liken the latter to teenage spots: their arrival announcing a growth spurt.

My neighbour has a magnolia tree, which drapes into mine and drops its petals like lavish confetti. His name is Terence. Can you believe it? Terence! And he insists on its full form and won’t answer to Terry. God knows, he’s made it clear enough that he won’t. I never gave him a sidewards glance when my husband was here. In my ‘coupledom,’ however unsatisfactory, I just saw him as a pot-bellied sad sack, and that’s the truth.

I find myself lying on the rug a lot lately. Just inches from my nose is the tip of a tightly- folded leaf in a tenderfoot shade of chartreuse.

In short order it will unfurl and become a dull bilge-green. One of the leaves I can see from here is scarred from my touch. I wanted to know if it was holed/serrated/fenestrated, so I took a pre-emptive peek. I unwrapped it, like an intemperate child before Christmas. Clearly I have inflicted some cellular damage, which is proof enough that the injuries inflicted in youth must and will prevail.

I am not sure why I’m on the floor. It is possible that I collapsed, but like a tree which falls in the forest ...

Still, I shall stay here a while and see whether I can watch the leaf unclench.

A thought which won’t dislodge is that if the devil had metaphorically come down to Georgia and wanted my rug in exchange for my husband, I might have vacillated. It’s not that I didn’t sometimes love him, but it’s a really nice rug.

By the time I wake up tomorrow, (if I wake up), this leaf will have unfurled some more. In the space of a few hours it will have become blowsier and less uptight. And yet the fascinating thing is that if I stayed here all day, just staring at it, I would not see it move. I know it’s going to unfurl, but like a burglar on the porch, it doesn’t want me to see it.

You don’t have to particularly like someone to miss them. In fact, maybe it’s worse when you don’t. That frisson of contempt clearly carried me through the years. It lifted me, whereas nowadays I am just an ageing woman who finds herself on the floor staring at her cheese plant.

My son worries about me. Very specifically, he worries about finding me dead one day. Telescopically specifically, he worries about finding me dead and putrefying. He hasn’t put it in quite those terms, but trust me, when you live alone, you worry about this yourself. This is why Peggy rings me every morning, and why, if she forgets, I ring her. Just two old broads who don’t want to stink the street out.

I never go to the doctors. Just once, to give birth - and only then because I didn’t have an endless supply of clean towels. Now and then they send me a letter to make sure I’m still alive, but that’s it. I have no idea if I have a cancer, or dangerously high blood pressure, because I don’t want to know. There are days when I am anxious enough: when I carry the nauseating buzz around in my solar plexus, which is another feeling I never got when I was disliking my husband. Dissatisfaction, hatred, revenge, poverty, a polyp on your larynx, are never going to win the human anxiety race. That would be loneliness, every time.

The leaf just shuddered, and yet the window is closed. It’s not my breath: I am talking in my head. At least, I hope I am. I stare intently, but nothing further happens. How tantalisingly rude.

One of the leaves, one of the old-timers, is glistening in the sunlight. It’s palmate, this one. This one didn’t get the cheese plant memo. I realise it is a slick of cider from when my husband threw a can at me. I thought I’d got everything up, but clearly not.

These foolish things remind me of you.

I’m now up on my elbows. Nothing is broken, nothing hurts, not even my head. The nascent leaf, like a bayonet, pokes my nostril. On my knees, I stare at it. I think I can see fenestrations which, (and any monstera owner will tell you this), is a thrill almost as captivating as watching fungus grow on the internet. There is something, (everything), crudely sexual about a burgeoning toadstool.

The place is a dustheap, and the spring light writes it large. I was never house-proud, but now, without audience, I have let things go. I have let myself go. I recently found all my old passports. Glancing through them, in order, had the manual equivalence of time-lapse photography. It is incredible how much one ages, almost without notice. You cannot spot precisely where the process of decay begins in the span of a year, and yet, with the remove of a decade, it is startling.

I give my emerging leaf a little spray and think that I should invite Peggy round for tea. This will encourage me to tidy up.

*****

It’s still early. I pull out an enormous hard-backed book from the shelf, which I purchased in the days of Book Clubs where you could buy something like this for a pound. The Compendium of Flowering Plants and Shrubs. I really should put on a spring display. After all, if seasons were rooms, spring would be the throne room. The most opulent season of them all. I had already decided upon forsythia, daphne, camellia and rhododendron when my phone rang. It was Peggy, clearly not decomposing.

‘Have you heard from Matvey?’

Peggy always begins her conversations like this. Hard to know if she fancies him or hates him. I had the same problem. I told her I had not, and then invited her to come around for afternoon drinks. She was somewhat non-committal, which I think she does on purpose to make sure I do some housework anyway.

And if she comes, or after she comes, I might take up an open-ended invitation from Terence, who is as confused as me but does woodwork in the garage. He tells me that I am too curious to let it all overwhelm me.

Yesterday, over the garden fence, he told me about Vincent van Gogh.

In the weeks before his death, Vincent became obsessed with painting roots. It was what he was painting when he made a poor fist of shooting himself with a rusty gun and a rusty bullet: he lingered for a day or two with a wound to his chest. His brother Theo, (soon to die an agonising death from syphilis), purchased a burial plot at the back of a stone wall beyond which were fields of rippling wheat. But here’s the thing. Dr Gachet planted the artist’s favourite tree, the thuja tree, close to his remains. The roots, voracious in all seasons, eventually insinuated themselves around his body, and pinned him to the soil - perhaps taking advantage of the conveniently placed hole in his chest. When they exhumed him nine years later to put him somewhere else, it was a hell of a job to extricate him from the roots. People can wax lyrical about starry, starry nights as much as they like, but in the end, Vincent was rooted to the soil. Trust me when I say that in my mind, there is a point to this.

I sat on the back stoop with a cigarette and a cup of builder’s tea. A beautiful fragrance of spring shrubs came from my neighbour’s garden, and it was mixed with wood-dust. I could hear him drilling in the garage. What an odd man he is.

*****

Matvey was from Belarus. He came here illegally and worked cash in hand. He had a mullet and a meaty frame which, at the time, I found attractive. When he first came here he lived in a flop-house with a lot of other eastern Europeans. I don’t know why I found his monotone deliverance of the English language attractive, but I did. Then. Then I did. And of course his manners, no doubt learned from some Victorian chap book, were impeccable. My mother was bowled over with his garage flowers and his cheap chocolates. My mother was just always a patsy.

The thing about men is this. Most are not inherently nastier than women. In fact, a lot of men I know are much nicer than women. But when you get a bad one, you just have to factor in that he’s bigger than you. That’s it. That’s all it is. If women were bigger, they’d beat the crap out of men, and that’s the truth. People disagree, I know. It’s just my opinion. Matvey was big and nasty, and there’s your double-whammy right there. And I suppose that Terence heard things.

Matvey disappeared six months ago. Probably went back to Belarus, sidling up to the Russkies. I doubt our marriage was legal, not really. A Russian Orthodox Church in Chigwell. No passport, no credit card. Not here, at least. Just a non-person.

Anyways, Peggy didn’t come round.

About six months ago, Terence planted bamboo to hide an ugly wall at the back of his property. He tells me that he has sunk a yardstick in the soil so that we can sit there together, weather permitting, and watch it grow whilst smoking fags and drinking wine. He says that, even if we don’t notice it, we will know that it’s grown whilst we’ve been sitting there in our striped deck chairs, with the worker bees bouncing around the viburnum bushes like so many pinballs.

Terence says that bamboo roots are invasive, like Japanese knotweed or kudzu. Or thuja. Quite impossible to get rid of. And I don’t know if it’s the heat, or the wine, but because I have a curious mind, I am watching, without seeing, the meteoric rise of the bamboo and wondering just what lies beneath.