Free Ivy Lane: Spring: by Cathy Bramley Page B

fifteen left.
    I didn’t understand. Why had everything gone wrong? I felt my fragile layer of happiness tear and peel away like the papery skin of a bulb.
    All that remained were the carrots. Bloody stupid carrots. There were lots of them, their feathery fronds battling for space with their neighbours. Except for the end nearest the path, which was bare; presumably I had somehow managed to douse them with weedkiller too.
    Maybe it was because I was still low from my illness, but suddenly I felt drained and weak. Disappointment flooded through me and I had an overwhelming urge to lie down and give myself over to a good cry.
    ‘Looks like the birds have had your shallots.’ I recognized Charlie’s voice but I couldn’t bear to answer him. I shut my eyes in a vain attempt to block the tears. ‘I was worried about you when you ran off.’
    Go away. Leave me alone.
    ‘Lol!’
    Oh no. That was Gemma’s unmistakable voice. ‘So much for the old beginner’s luck!’ she added with a chuckle.
    Since losing James I had kept everything bottled up. No matter how awful I felt, I had been determined that no one would be able to tell. Now all my emotions came rushing to the surface.
    I wiped a hand across my face, adding mud to the tear tracks, and stood up. My legs were shaking, my lungs on the verge of collapse and my head felt like concrete. I was a complete and utter failure.
    ‘I give up. I can’t do it,’ I sobbed. ‘I can’t even grow easy stuff. Everything I touch just dies.’
    Gemma lurched towards me, her face crumpled with horror. ‘I was only joking . . . I didn’t mean—’
    ‘You don’t understand,’ I said, shaking my head like a loon. ‘I’ve failed. I’ve failed again. Why can’t I keep anything alive?’
    I pushed past them, tears blinding my eyes.
    ‘Tills?’
    ‘Don’t call me that,’ I shouted. I wanted to go home, shut myself away and hide.
    ‘What about your shed?’ called Charlie.
    ‘What about it?’ I shouted. ‘I don’t care. I’m not coming back.’
    What was the point? What was the bloody point?
    I lay awake most of the night, taunted by my failure as a gardener, and finally fell asleep around dawn. Barely five minutes later, or so it seemed, I was rudely awakened by someone knocking loudly at my front door. Someone who clearly had a death wish.
    I clomped down the stairs. My head was pounding, my eyes were sore from scrubbing at them with toilet paper and I had toffee popcorn stuck in my teeth. I flung open the door and prepared to let rip.
    A short stout man with a ready smile, which only wavered momentarily as he took in my appearance, greeted me from a safe distance up my path. It was drizzling and he had his shoulders hunched up to his ears.
    ‘H’llo.’
    ‘Morning, Roy.’
    Even though it wasn’t Christine in person, I knew I had to be on my guard. I had no intention of going to the allotment, community spirit or not.
    ‘C’n-I-c’me-in?’
    I stood aside to let him in.
    Drunk, I had no chance of understanding him; sober, I still struggled. The trick, I had found, was to imagine I had a UN translator in my head, slowing his words down and adding in the missing vowels.
    ‘Let me take your wet coat.’
    He shrugged off his coat and I hung it over the banister and nodded towards the kitchen. He climbed up on a bar stool while I put the kettle on.
    ‘That was Christine’s chat-up line, thirty-odd years ago,’ he said wistfully.
    ‘Really?’ Hard to imagine Christine doing the chatting up. On the other hand, once she had made up her mind that Roy was the one . . .
    ‘I was driving to work, the back of the car full of half-used paint tins. It wasn’t a van, just a car I’d ripped the back seats out of. Anyhow, I looked down at my diary to check the address of the job and next thing I knew I’d hit a lamppost. Twelve gallon tins of paint came flying down the length of the car, blew their tops and covered me head to toe in emulsion. Now this was the seventies.