Free Carnival Sky by Owen Marshall Page B

same, though. They want to see you,’ Georgie said. Sheff knew she was right, but didn’t enjoy being instructed.
    ‘What’s he like?’
    ‘Sick and sad. What do you expect.’
    ‘I suppose that’s what I’m afraid of, and there’s nothing you can do except sit around.’
    ‘But it’s not about you, is it? It’s what Dad might get out of it.’
    ‘Okay. Okay.’ Did he need a younger sister to be reminding him of his family duty? It was a tendency in Georgie that irritated him. ‘I can’t believe it’s happening. Don’t want it to happen,’ he said, surprising them both, so that there was a long pause, and then he said, ‘I think that’s stopping me thinking much about him being so sick, but you’re right of course. I should go.’
    ‘Of course you should.’
    ‘Is there anything especially harmful in seagull shit, do you know?’
    ‘Seagull shit?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘I imagine not, unless you swallow a heap of it. What brought this on?’
    ‘Nothing really,’ said Sheff. ‘It’s just I got shat on today and it splattered a bit.’
    ‘Have a good wash and forget it,’ said Georgie briskly.
    The call finished soon afterwards. Brother and sister were wellintentioned, but neither had much knowledge of the other’s life, and since he’d left home they had always lived in different places, even other countries: Georgie had spent two years at Western General Hospital in Edinburgh. As children they hadn’t been close; both had their own group of friends and divergent interests. As adults any deepening of feeling was thwarted by separation and busy occupations, but brother and sister they remained, and his awareness of that had grown since his separation from Lucy, and then his father’s illness. No one except Georgie shared his knowledge of their mother and father, a family life memorable only because it was their own.
    Sheff worked in his section most of the next day. The energy he displayed in lawn-mowing, pruning and weeding wasn’t the expression of any enjoyment, but his fierce almost desperate resolve to atone for months of neglect. For Sheff, gardening wasn’t a love affair, but an act of war. The docks and twitch had flourished, while the flowers pined. Of the legitimate plants, only the climbing roses were luxuriant, sending arms even into the shrubs and tree branches, and tearing at his hands as he cut them back. Lucy always wore gloves, but when he fossicked them out from the garage bench they were too small for him. The paraphernalia of gardening bore witness more to Lucy’s interests than his own. Sprays, potting mixes, packets of granular plant food, plastic planters, garden tools, and on the windowsill dry pods for seed, small sarcophagi, were all relics of her industry. So much of his home still bore trivial yet painful testimony to a partnership, a happiness that lay as sunset in the past.
    The scratches, the heat and his general dislike of gardening added to his bad humour, and he swore at the plants as he worked. He was more blasphemous when alone than in conversation, for he considered swearing was a sign of lack of ingenuity in the use of language. Yet even the most delicate of blossoms were little buggers, and the plum tree suckers that came up like fingers from the grave were devious bastards. He was in full voice at oxalis growing cunningly in the protection of a lavender bush when Janice Wallace, supervisor of thelocal crèche, appeared at the fence to admonish him.
    ‘It’s not at all necessary,’ she said firmly. ‘It doesn’t make anything easier you know, and what if I had my granddaughter here?’ Just her top half was visible above the wooden fence: an erect torso and a Thatcherite face held in place by a stake of a nose. But Sheff knew she was a good sort, if somewhat conservative. Knew also he was in the wrong, and disliked excessive obscenity in others.
    ‘Yeah, I’m sorry, Janice. I keep getting scratched and it’s made me mad.’
    ‘Because you’re