Who knew, maybe in time Chalkie would find something?
‘Think about it,’ I said.
‘No.’ He was suddenly adamant. ‘Only one person I can depend on and that’s me.’
‘But can you? Depend on yourself? Your own best judgement has had you using heroin for seventeen years.’
‘I’ve stopped. I’m here.’
‘Stopping is easy. Staying stopped is the hard part.’
‘I’ll stay stopped.’
My heart sank. Something needed to change with Chalkie, because the feelings that drove his every relapse were still stashed in some secret part of him. It wasn’t his fault. Whatever, wherever they were, they were just too painful to be felt.
But without connecting with them, he’d go back out into the world, where his relapse was inevitable. And right then, I couldn’t bear that thought.
As soon as group ended, I had a strong urge to call Gemma Kaye, the mother of Harlie’s friend, Tegan – the young woman who’d died from alcohol poisoning. I didn’t understand the urgency burning in me but suddenly it seemed imperative to persuade Gemma Kaye to visit. We’d spoken last week. She’d been reluctant but I’d sensed that if I kept pressing, she’d agree. I’d no clue what this had to do with Chalkie, but I did it anyway.
35
On my knees by the flower bed, I gently, gently, gently loosened the aster seedling from its pot, taking extra care with the roots, then placed it into the hole I’d dug with my beautiful new trowel. After the intensive mollycoddling the seedling had got in the warm utility room, it looked vulnerable and tiny as it set sail on the high seas of the great outdoors.
Don’t worry, I instructed this little lad as I crumbled handfuls of compost around it. Your soil is the right pH, you’re in a lovely sheltered spot and you’re surrounded by your pals.
I didn’t actually talk out loud to my plants but I couldn’t deny that, in my head, a lively dialogue took place.
You’re too big now to be eaten by the birds, I promised. And if a late frost comes, I’ll be straight out with the bubble wrap, to keep you warm. And don’t worry about Crunchie, she’s afraid of flowers. Ever since she ate a bedful of daffodils and vomited for three days, but no need to go into the details.
When I’d bought my house, it had a lot in its favour – the perfect size, near to work and, handily, the right price （a low one）。 But it stood in a biggish patch of ground. There was a lot of grass, which I’d have to cut and I knew nothing about lawnmowers, about any gardening really. But thanks to what Garv had shown me, I was very interested.
So Nola took me to a garden centre and made me buy a load of ‘beginners’’ bulbs: snowdrops, daffodils, crocuses. Under her watchful eye, I planted them. Then, for several months, absolutely nothing happened except that the weather got very cold.
Just as I had started to wonder if this would be the year it stayed winter forever, strange white things began to push up from the frozen soil. My snowdrops!
‘But how?’ I asked Nola. ‘They’re such tiny delicate things.’
‘Delicate?’ she asked. ‘Them? They’ve petals like blades. It’s how they shove their way out of the dark into the light. Oh, they might look fragile, but they’re well able to survive.’
I’d frowned. ‘Are you metaphoring me?’
‘So what if I am?’
Not long afterwards, the crocuses appeared, pretty and startlingly vivid, then the daffodils, in their exuberant bursts of yellows. Everywhere were fresh shoots of green, shocking against the January pallor – and I was ‘in’。 A gardener. On-board for wherever it took me.
My hands in the soil, helping living things to grow from almost nothing, did something good for me. Working in silence and solitude, caught up in concentration and care, was the closest thing to meditation I’d found. I could lose hours to it.
When, inevitably, flowers died off, I felt it deeply, but after the first couple of years, acceptance crept in. Everything had its moment, its time to be alive, and then it stepped aside to make room for fresh life.
‘Hey!’ Claire, followed by Kate, had come into the garden. ‘Rachel. C’mon!’
‘C’mon, what?’
‘Dresses,’ Kate said. ‘For Granny’s party. Mum’s ordered lots for me to try on.’
Immediately I abandoned my tools. Following the pair of them up the stairs to Kate’s bedroom, I said, ‘I can’t hang around too long, I’m going to a meeting.’