Chapter 9
If Spike’s not actually dead then he’s chronically unwell. What the heck has Enzo done?
Nothing! He’s done nothing! He’s hardly even looked at him!
Although he’s alone in his flat, Enzo finds himself leaping to the defensive, pacing around the table and rubbing distractedly at his face.
He gave Spike some water, but only a dribble! To a cactus, was that akin to being waterboarded? Has he drowned the poor thing?
Enzo exhales forcefully and examines him more carefully now.
Spike is certainly no longer the proudly erect, spikey baguette that Enzo had carried so carefully from Laura’s place.
Now he’s flopped over and shrivelled in his pot on the living room table.
It’s as if every droplet of moisture has been sucked out of him during the night.
Enzo opens the venetian blind and hovers, trying to will Spike back to peak health through the combination of bright morning sunlight and the power of his mind.
Don’t panic . Maybe this is what cacti do in the night.
Yeah, that’s it, he decides. They wilt in order to conserve their energy stores.
They do this when no one’s looking so they won’t be mocked.
Isn’t nature amazing? Yet at the same time he knows he’s kidding himself, just as he had when Laura had left Mathilde’s goldfish in his care.
When he’d tried to convince himself that the orangey sliver floating on its side was merely ‘resting.’
What is it about him and his ability to let things die?
Two years, Spike has resided at Laura’s and nothing untoward has happened.
Yet now, at 9.15 on this bright and breezy Saturday morning, Enzo is downing his second coffee and flipping open his laptop because Mathilde is due home from Scarborough this afternoon. So he needs a solution – and fast.
Already showered and dressed, he’s also aware that the community litter pick kicks off outside the library in precisely fifteen minutes.
Saska insists on a prompt start as if overseeing an Olympic event rather than a raggedy group guilt-tripped into cleaning the streets.
It wouldn’t surprise him if she turned up with a starter gun.
Although he’d planned to help – clearly, he’ll have no time for that now – Enzo had already concocted an excuse as to why he’d be unable to join litter pick singles at Saska’s later this morning.
Polite but firm, he decided: Sorry, a pile of work to get through.
That’s the best approach. Give her an inch and you’ll be picking at Bombay mix from a distinctly turd-like ceramic coil pot.
Now Enzo couldn’t care less about litter pick singles or even the litter pick itself.
Fuck community spirit , he decides, now clicking into action and googling ‘droopy cactus’ and poring over the confusing array of information about positioning and ambient temperature and specialist feeds.
Has Spike been starved while Mathilde’s been away?
Admittedly, Enzo hasn’t paid him an awful lot of attention. Has he been starved of love?
Darling, I’m sorry, but plants don’t live forever.
Hadn’t he said, that day he picked up Mathilde from her mum’s, that cacti actually did ?
His mobile rings and his heart jerks. Mathilde, still more than 200 miles away in Scarborough, knows what he’s done! Never mind that she doesn’t have a phone. Teachers do, don’t they? She’s somehow cottoned on to what’s happened and begged to borrow one of theirs.
Enzo grabs his phone. It’s Saska. He lets it ring out and immediately she texts.
We’re ready for you!
At 9.32 he is now two minutes late to start cleansing the neighbourhood.
Enzo grew up in the Breton countryside where even the nearest town was sleepy, coming to life only on Tuesdays – market day – when the narrow streets filled with stalls piled with gnarly loaves and fat, glossy cherries, and glistening roasted chickens.
He’d found the country stifling and had yearned for city life.
So he’d moved to Nantes to study and messed around a bit, until he’d finally managed to haul himself together and establish a proper career.
He’d taught in schools there for a few years, and then there’d been that walking holiday in the Dordogne and that had changed everything.
Enzo had planned to do it alone but he’d met Laura, also a solo traveller, and he realised he never wanted to be alone again.
For a while they’d lived on Brittany’s south coast but she missed Glasgow, the city in which she’d grown up.
And although Enzo was a keen walker, and a lover of the wildest of landscapes, he’d always felt more suited to urban life.
You can be anything you like in a big city , he thought. Your every move isn’t commented upon. You are FREE.
He was wrong, he realises as Saska texts again:
Slept in, naughty man?! We’re coming for you!
He looks down from his second-floor window and sees the litter pick gang approaching in their hi-vis yellow vests, bin liners attached to hoops, pickers snap-snapping. Claire-with-the-shawl glances up and he springs away from the window.
He turns back to his phone. Sorry, something’s come up, he replies. But as he sets it down on the table – face down, as if that’ll halt further communications – his doorbell rings.