“Some vandal’s been in and destroyed my garden!”
Penny looked.
Every paving stone in the patio had been extracted and stacked neatly to one side, as if they were ready to be taken away. The dirt underneath was dark like rotten gums. The trellising up the fences had been dismantled and lay in splinters of blond firewood, and the rose bushes had been hacked systematically into useless thorny bits. Pink and yellow flower heads were heaped in a corner. Even the small pond had been drained. The orange bodies of the fish were lying to one side, as if resting. It reminded Penny of when vandals broke into the Blue Peter gardens and turned them upside down. That had made the evening news and the old man who tended them cried on the telly. All that work.
“My sweet peas are up, too!” Elsie cried and dashed outside. “Who would do a thing like that? It wasn’t like that this morning.”
It was so neat, Penny thought. Someone had taken great care to take it all neatly apart.
I still don’t know what to think. The truth of it is that I came home high as a kite. I was out of my skull, but I never imagined it. This is what I saw. It was true. Penny was out in that garden in the middle of the night with her arms raised above her head. Her hands were black and the rest of her was lit up.
I came home from my night with the lads. That was a successful night. I was back in with the lads. And there’d been me thinking I wasn’t part of them any more. Since I’d moved out and taken up with Penny, since I’d started working out with Andy, I was sure the lads would think I’d turned my back. But I should have known better. They’re loyal in a way you can’t put in words. At least we don’t talk about it. Our night down the Turnbinia and the Acorn just happened, we didn’t plan it, but suddenly we were all together again and it was like nothing had changed. I was relieved. I got drunk because I was so relieved. And they were happy to have me back again. We trogged back over the Burn singing Oasis songs at the top of our voices. Only Steve wasn’t there. I asked where he was. I got a shrug from Rob. “He doesn’t come out as much now,” I was told. “It’s different.”
We ran through the trees, still laughing and singing. My head was pounding, but the kind of pounding that makes you shout louder, run faster and you don’t care. It’s good for me, that. I stop thinking I’m going to trip over. And we were running through the trees and there’s all the hills and tree roots and if I thought about it, I could kill myself with this leg and everything, but when you’re like that and you can hear all your mates yelling out and everything, you don’t worry. I don’t.
They left me at the corner of Phoenix Court. I got invited back to the Forsythe house for a smoke. They all watched to see what I would say. But I thought I’d go home. Penny and my mam waiting. I said that and waited for someone to make a skitty remark. But Rob clapped my back and said, “See you, son,” and they all moved away, waving me good night. I was relieved we were still a team, but in a way I was more relieved to see them go home, the night finished, unscathed.
I walked past our house and I saw the back garden. Penny with her hands up in the air. She was concentrating. All I could think at first was of the Invisible Girl in the Fantastic Four. With the powers she had gained from being struck by cosmic rays, she could generate invisible force fields. Make matter do anything she desired. When artists drew the blonde, willowy, beautiful Invisible Girl, they indicated her force fields by inking in dotted lines that radiated from her forehead as she frowned and made things happen. Now I cursed the darkness and my ten pints of Stella because, try as I might, I couldn’t see the dotted lines in the air coming from Penny.
Yet she was making things happen. My mother’s back garden was up in the air. Rocks and stones of different sizes, clumps and tussocks of grass all dribbling bits of wet frozen soil were sailing and dipping through the air. Bulbs and shrubs and half-grown roots tangled and whirled in the dark, brushing by one another as if working out where to go, where to set themselves down again. The roses, my mother’s roses she was so proud of, transplanted from one council-house garden to another over the years, danced about each other, and reattached themselves to the bits of twig and branches that clicked back into one piece and snuck their roots into the ground.
At first I thought Penny was using these unknown, diabolical powers of hers to destroy my mother’s garden. I almost shouted out for her to stop. But then I realised, as the rockery and the shrubbery and the sweet peas were sucked back into the cold earth, that she was rebuilding it. She was making it better than it had been before. Like giant dominoes, the paving stones slapped onto the ground, one after another. Then she was finished. Her body sagged with exhaustion and that glowing light ebbed away.
I wanted to dash over and give her a kiss. My own girlfriend. My new, clever girlfriend. With superpowers!
THIRTEEN
‘There was a little monkey,
ran across the country
fell down a dark hole
split his little arsehole
What colour was the blood?’
“Frank!”
She grabbed her son by the arm and shook him. She shouted indoors again.
“Frank! Come and listen what this son of yours has learned!”
For good measure Fran shook Jeff again and the tears bubbled up in
