Nick
Nick
Twelve years after
Nick’s room is the one part of the house that his mum leaves untouched.
He has to lock the door in order to ensure it, but even so, he’s grateful to her for that.
‘Mum,’ he says, squeezing down the stairs.
‘Yes, love?’ she calls, from somewhere in the dining room. A family of bluebottles have taken up residence in there, and she’s sticking up fly tape by the window.
He sighs as he sees her, precariously balanced on a box, reaching up into the corner of the French doors. They haven’t been opened since he was around fourteen.
‘Be careful Mum, for Christ’s sake.’
‘It’s alright!’ she snaps. ‘This stuff always works really well. It’s the bright yellow colour, see? They’re attracted to it. It’s irresistible to them.’
She gives a little chuckle, as though pleased that she’s managing to trick them.
‘I’ve got to go to college,’ he says. ‘I’ll be late. But be careful, won’t you? That box you’re standing on isn’t very stable.’
Nothing’s very stable in this place.
‘Yes, yes. Don’t fuss!’ she says.
‘Bye mum,’ he says, smiling. ‘Love you.’
‘Love you too, Nicky. Have a good day.’
He whistles as he presses the button on the key fob to open his car. He will have a good day. He’s been having good days ever since he left London and moved back to boring old suburbia.
But more than that, he’s been having good days ever since he started his course.
It took him a while to persuade himself that he should go for it. That he could do something totally new. That just because he was good with figures it didn’t mean he had to spend the rest of his life as an accountant.
When he told people what he was going to study they all thought it was a joke. A wind up. Green-fingered Nick?
But it wasn’t a joke. And he’s loving every second of his Horticultural Practice diploma.
He heads towards the A3 and takes the fork off the main road for RHS Wisley. He has lectures this morning and then they will be grafting apple trees – combining scion wood and rootstock to create strong healthy plants.
He also has his own allotment – as all the students do – which requires daily maintenance.
The other students are mostly younger than him, recent graduates or school-leavers, but there are a handful of middle-aged people too. He likes the mix. He feels, finally, as though he has found his tribe.
At lunchtime, he sits in the sunshine by the big fountain and eats the sandwiches he made the night before.
Today his fellow student, Kate, who’s twenty-two years old and impossibly, infectiously optimistic, joins him.
‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Room for a little one?’
‘Sure.’
The sunlight is bright across her face, almost obscuring her features, but her wispy brown hair forms a halo around her head. It makes her look even younger.
‘How’s it going?’ she asks, taking a bite of a sausage roll.
‘Good,’ he says, looking out across the fountain, watching the water-spray dance in the sunlight. ‘Do you know what?’
‘What?’
‘I worked for seven years in Canary Wharf and I passed by this great big bloody fountain every day and I never once sat down next to it and ate a sandwich. Never once really looked at it.’
‘OK. That’s… deep.’
She rolls her eyes.
He laughs.
‘Canary Wharf? Never been. What did you do up there?’
‘Nothing of value,’ he replies. ‘I worked for a hedge fund. Making rich companies richer. Don’t hate me.’
She smiles, shakes her head.
‘It’s behind me now. I survived and now I’m sitting here with you in the sunshine, knowing that I’m going to spend the rest of my afternoon cutting slices into apple tree branches and hoping that they’ll bond with my rootstock, and I literally couldn’t feel more alive.’
‘O-kay, Monty Don.’
‘You can mock. But it’s true. Being out here. Getting my hands dirty, quite literally. It feels like I’m living on a higher plane or something. Actually doing something productive. Something that’s creating new life. Sorry.’
There’s a pause. He feels embarrassed now. Poor girl, she probably just sat with him out of sympathy, and now he’s offloaded a load of cheesy crap on her.
‘Nah, I get it,’ she says, after a while. ‘It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. It’s a vocation.’
A vocation. He thinks about the word. It’s what Beth always says about her acting. When she first told him that her passion for acting felt like a higher calling, he was dismissive. Flippant.
Why was he always so flippant about everything? Fear of being hurt? Nick the joker. Never took anything seriously. Until Maggie, and then… Suddenly, he took everything seriously. But they were the wrong things.
‘I’m just grateful,’ he says. ‘Grateful to be alive. Grateful to be here.’
Their eyes meet and she smiles at him.
‘Yeah, me too. Listen, some of us are going to The Flying Horse after college tonight. Are you around? Want to join?’
He bites his lip.
‘Oh.’
‘Come on, you don’t have to stay for long.’
‘OK,’ he says. ‘I don’t drink though.’
She screws up her nose, and she looks, momentarily, like a cute squirrel. Then he checks himself: she’s twenty-two years old. He’s thirty-one.
‘I don’t either,’ she says, taking him by surprise.
‘Really?’
‘Never saw the point in it. Call me weird but… I don’t actually like the taste, and it costs so much more than normal drinks and basically alcohol is a poison isn’t it? So the effects that you feel from it are the effects of a poison and I don’t know, that just never really made much sense to me. Plus, I’ve always been skint and I’d rather spend the money on plants.’
‘That’s not weird,’ he says. ‘It’s not weird at all. You’re very sensible.’
She stands up, screwing the wrapper from her sausage roll up into a tight ball in her fist.
‘Well,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t say that.’
And then she winks, and walks off towards the lecture hall, her figure silhouetted against the sun.
*
He calls home after his last lecture and leaves a message for his mum on the answerphone, telling her that he’ll be a bit later today and not to worry about him. She doesn’t often answer the phone in time, so he’s not unduly worried when she doesn’t pick up.
Then he drives to the pub.
He’s passed it many times before, and he may have gone inside once or twice when he was a teenager. He can’t be sure, those days are a blur now, and feel like a lifetime ago.
As he gets out of his car, feeling rather nervous, he feels a vibration in his pocket.
It’s a text message from Beth. She has spent the last year flying back and forth between London and LA, grappling with Covid restrictions, trying to sort everything out after Vaughan’s death.
Hello, how are you? I’m back, for good now. Moved into my new house this week. Just about getting settled. Are you around? Dinner? Anything? How’s the gardening going? X
His heart lifts. A voice he doesn’t recognise seems to whisper in his ear: she’s home.
He closes his eyes briefly and thinks of Beth, overcome with a longing to see her. To hold her, to make sure she’s OK. Ever since Vaughan died, she’s been distant with him. In shock, he supposes, but still, it’s been difficult. The way she’s pushed him away when he wants nothing more than to help.
He wants to get in his car right now and drive up to see her in London.
He looks up briefly, considering it. But Kate is waving at him from inside the pub.
He swallows, taps out a reply quickly.
Name your time and place and I’ll be there. X PS It’s not gardening, it’s HORTICULTURE. Moron.