Summer
2
Henry Garnett was a rare man in modern times. He could fix anything. It didn’t matter if it was run by electricity, water, steam or by hand, he could fix it. The only thing he couldn’t seem to mend was his heart.
Naomi was fine and then she wasn’t. She died within weeks of the diagnosis of the tumour. She had wanted to die in the van, but no one was having it, not even Henry. He didn’t want Pansy’s last memories of her mother to be in a cramped van with a drip hanging from the brass hook above her head and God knows what else going on as she died.
In the end, it didn’t matter where Naomi was when she passed because the tumour had taken over most of her brain and her last words to Henry were garbled, nonsensical. He had spent so much time running over her words, trying to find meaning in them.
‘Say yes,’ she’d said, opening her eyes for the first time in days.
‘To what, my darling?’ he’d asked. She hadn’t eaten in a week. She had stopped drinking last night. He knew it was close to the end.
But Naomi had shaken her head and said it again. ‘Say yes.’
He’d tried to get her to open her eyes again. She always had the right advice, the right way to do things, to say things. Naomi was everything and then she was nothing.
The nurse had put up the drip as Naomi was clutching the sheets in her tiny hands. Those hands could make anything. They could turn roadside flowers into a display worthy of a royal wedding. They could plait pastry and spin wool and tame Pansy’s curls into bunches with ribbons intertwined.
But the hands were soon still, and Henry had to say goodbye to his Naomi and send her body to be turned into ashes.
‘Bury me in the vegetable garden when you find the right house for you and Pansy. I promise to help your crops grow. You can call it Naomi’s Veggie Patch,’ she had laughed.
Henry hadn’t laughed because he didn’t want her to be in the garden, with the worms and the cold damp soil. Three years later and he still hadn’t bought a house and Naomi’s ashes were still in the cupboard next to the potatoes and onions.
Instead he and Pansy had been on the road for those three years. He had the tiny house on wheels painted by Naomi, with intricate scrolls, vines and flowers around the front to look like a real garden. There were yellow shutters on the real glass windows, and a blue door and a little thatched roof to advertise that he did thatching for a living, but he did anything he could to pay the bills and keep busy. Repairs, painting, gardening and some labouring.
Pansy was now six and probably more self-sufficient than she should be for a child of her age. She was happy to keep him company with her drawing and colouring books, but he knew she needed to be in school – that would mean settling down and finding a vegetable patch. Not yet, he told himself.
Naomi and Henry had met in art school when Henry was studying to be a sculptor, and Naomi was studying painting. He swapped to fine art to be near her. She won the art prize at college and he won her heart. They graduated happy, in love and ready to share their creativity with the world. The first work of art they brought into the world was born just after midnight during a balsamic moon. They named her Pansy Jean Garnett and she was everything they had hoped for and more.
With their van and Henry doing odd jobs and Naomi painting, it was an idyllic life, with hopes to save enough money to buy a little cottage one day for them to settle down in as a family.
It was funny how life knew exactly where to place the cuts to make you bleed and hurt the most, thought Henry as he drove towards a small village called Merryknowe. He was to give a quote on a thatched cottage for a woman who had emailed him saying there was a hole in the roof.
Probably a weekender. He glanced at Pansy asleep in the seat behind him, her copper curls falling over her face, the curls he hadn’t been able to tame as Naomi had.
Henry drove into the dull little village and found a parking spot big enough for the van and checked the time. He had to quote a job tomorrow morning at a nearby house so thought he would stay in the area for the night.
He looked up and down the grey street. A few shops but nothing thrilling and certainly nothing that would make you want to stay. Some villages were so picturesque they looked like something from the front of a chocolate box, and others were a mix of function and frill, but Henry wasn’t sure if Merryknowe had ever had any frill because it certainly didn’t have any function.
A pub. A post office. A tearoom and a bakery and a few other little shops dotted the street. A small creek ran alongside the main road, with a green grassy bank and a stone bridge barely big enough for his trailer to cross.
‘Let’s get something nice for lunch,’ he said to Pansy, who was waking up.
‘Can I have cake?’ she asked sleepily.
‘Yes, my little Marie Antoinette, you may have cake but after something that isn’t cake, okay?’
After gently unstrapping her from her seat
