Griefwork by James Hamilton-Paterson Read Free Book Online Page B

They’ve got a lead tag on them which you bend over the stem to grip it. It’s the lead he was after. Any scrap merchant’d give him a good price for … Yes?’
    ‘I want to do your glazing,’ said Leon.
    ‘We’ve got a glazier.’
    ‘We had a glazier,’ the woman reminded him tartly.
    ‘There’s a lot of panes missing or broken,’ Leon insisted, adding truthfully, ‘I’m good,’ thinking of all the glass he had helped Wim replace. There was hardly a winter storm which hadn’t taken its toll.
    Whatever wind had blown him here was evidently still blowing his way. Within half an hour he was engaged as a gardener’s boy for a pittance and with permission to sleep in a potting shedwhere there were some bales of peat and a horse blanket. ‘Can’t think why I’m doing it,’ the man kept saying. ‘No references, nothing. And especially after all this. I suppose you’ve not got your eye on anything? There aren’t any trellis straps left but maybe you’re planning to start a black market in putty?’
    ‘I’m not a thief.’
    ‘No,’ said the man with a slight stare. ‘I don’t believe you are. I wonder what it is you are, though? Apart from being mysteriously punctual?’
    ‘A good glazier.’
    Not only that but a willing and reliable worker. By the year’s end Leon had made a niche for himself in the Gardens’ hierarchy of labourers. True, it was near the bottom; but in some way he had made himself indispensable, or at least was off the list of those who might be dispensed with if the worsening economy made layoffs necessary. Wearing his leather jerkin and gaiters (obligatory for all staff members, a remnant of eighteenth-century uniform) he mastered various kinds of maintenance while learning all he could about horticulture. For the first year he was not allowed to have anything to do with the plants, many of which were rarities from all over the world. He asked questions and remembered answers, watched and watched. He lived in the potting shed, ate at workers’ cafés, bathed once a week in the Palm House boiler room, had his own key to the wicket in the main gates. This by itself was a measure of the peculiar trust he inspired.
    ‘Very odd boy,’ as the head gardener remarked to the Palm House curator. ‘Talks to plants.’
    ‘Not just to plants. Sits there in that tin tub in front of the furnaces carrying on to himself. I can hear him from the next room. Sort of nonsense full of squeaks and groans and things. You wouldn’t say he was potty, though, would you?’
    They thought for a moment, warming their hands on themugs of tea they were holding. The dried mud on their palms husked over the glaze. ‘Not to talk to, no,’ said the gardener. ‘That’s what’s odd. Remember that painter they brought in? The one who’d been gassed in the trenches? Now there was a fellow off his onion. He didn’t just talk to himself. Went about shouting at people who weren’t there. Gave me the willies. But young Leon’s not like that. When he’s on his own he talks to himself, right, but when he’s with you he talks perfectly normal, doesn’t he? No, he’s not potty. And I’ll tell you what, that boy’s got the greenest fingers I’ve ever seen. You know when you’re losing a plant? You’ve tried everything short of sitting up with it at night? Point comes when you think sod it, that’s it, heave it up and put it on the bonfire. Old Leon’ll come by and say “Don’t pull him up, Mr Smy, don’t pull him up.” And he’ll mess about with it and make sort of hissing noises at it as if it was a horse and blow me, a week later there’ll be this little green shoot. Soon as winter’s over I’m having him off maintenance. It’s a waste. You could go out in the street right now and in five minutes find thirty men to put a washer on a tap or patch a water butt or dredge dead leaves out of the lake.’
    ‘And glad of the work.’
    ‘Exactly. No, I’m having him off that. The lad’s got