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We just stare and chew; regurgitate a little bit, and purge. All that passes between our ears is the odd woolly thought about tussocks and the sensation of rain. The highlight of our day is a head-scratch over by the long fence or a skittering lollop to the trough. We announce ourselves to the world in a guttural way (nightingales, we are not). A trip to the seaside is beyond us. Instead, rubber-clad men visit despicable things on us in dark fields. Dogs, too, are not our best friends. Even stitched into thick jumpers, winter makes our knees knock. Summers, we sweat. We are lumped together, deprived of an extra ‘s’ to dignify our existence. And death, when it comes, is unrepeatable. Our legacy to you amounts to little: we are an insult to older ladies; errant individuals acquire our name. We are a simple wisp on the barb.
This seaside allotment, and at its centre a shed the size of a trawler to a seven-year-old boy, spellbound
by the waft of warped boards and the churn brimming with dung that she ladled onto vegetables like gravy.
Twenty years later, the bench where she made me her apprentice stands empty. I breathe deep,
remember the peas we hulled by lamp-flicker, her quick-fire fingers that gutted the pods and filled an aluminium bucket
with bright green. Potatoes fished from the murk of the Belfast sink were not long for their skins. Her knife,
that flashed in and out of frothing chlorophyll, is heavy in my hands. The shed’s awash with sun
and I see her in a sackcloth apron, mending nets and measuring a line, making ready for the spring.
Get your head down, son. The words that punctuated weekday mornings as I reluctantly pulled on my coat. Then you can hold your head high when you leave.
That afternoon at school, an incident: four boys onto one in the showers when he had his back turned. Naked and glasses-less, he fought for footing in the scummy water as they reddened his slithering ribs with their knuckles. Then scuffled him into his blazer and to the hooks, to hang like a rack of lamb. His face in flames, a string of blood and snot dangling from his chin.
I saw nothing, sir. The words I rehearsed as my friend lay bruised, too petrified to sleep in his own bed. It must have happened after I left.
Pricked by Christmas whisky and righteous indignation, we sparred at the scarred oak table for hours and hours, the hopeless idealist versus the sold-out cynic, fighting their corners after the women had scattered. We smoked and drank and snarled as the old grandfather clock bonged off its rounds and the sound of canned applause surged and subsided like high tide over shingle. I flagged my delight in the black-and-whiteness of life – the only good capitalist is a dead capitalist. You were the advocate of the devil — I’d rather a Thatcher than a lily-livered liberal. We fought some more, wild-eyed, and when the bottle went down and rolled on its side, we knew it was over. Mother made her entrance in a flap and flung wide a window to let out all the hot air. Then, red-faced, unsteady, we took a step towards each other for a second but thought better of it, as if one inch given might threaten what we had, these times spent together.
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