It had come as a relief, in his late teens, to uncover a deep seam of scepticism and, while embarking on an NVQ in Horticulture (and retaking Maths GCSE), Chris abandoned his old imaginings and leaped, like the lame man at the gate of the temple, into a whole life: one that had the potential to reach a deliciously mundane conclusion; illness and old age were his new prospects and he embraced them. Relieved from the anxiety of premature death – not just his own, but that of everyone and everything around him – Chris had learned to live.
Now, he sees those happy years for what they were: an interlude. And, as he turns on to the coastal road, the rain finally easing, he longs to return to that halcyon time: falling in love, finding the house, creating the garden. Emma wanted a meadow, a vegetable plot and grass where their future children would play. He started with the meadow, cutting the patchy grass and removing the clippings; working up the soil with a rake before blending wildflower seed with yellow rattle and sand, then scattering the mix like magic dust. Sometimes, when he was at work, Emma buried bulbs among the seed, no scheme or pattern in mind, just an array of surprises. She could quote great chunks of poetry and happily recount the plots of novels she’d read years ago, but she had no knack for remembering plant names: ‘What’s this one, again?’ she’d say. ‘What’s that one?’ He had supposed her initial enthusiasm would fade but it didn’t, and he remembers the summer solstice when, six months pregnant with Dylan and proud of their outdoor endeavours, she invited their parents for a picnic tea. Emma’s mother, unwilling to sit on either the grass or a picnic blanket, hovered on foot, bemoaning their lack of garden furniture as her father gamely remarked on the weather. Chris’s father offered thanks for the homegrown food in an uninvited and unnecessarily long prayer that referenced each stage of the water cycle, and his mother, while helping in the kitchen, saw a container, lid-side down, which she ‘righted’, only to upend the cake Emma had carefully iced that morning.
Guests finally departed, they lay side by side on the grass, chuckling – oh, they were so pleased with themselves: the rational, reasonable progeny of risible parents.
He leaned across and kissed her. She straddled him, sundress spilling over her stomach and on to his as she rocked her hips and kissed him back.
Afterwards, Chris dozed off.
When he woke, Emma was standing in the wildflowers, head ringed by a daisy-chain crown. The light felt like a gift and he could almost believe it had broken curfew purely for his pleasure.
‘Welcome back, sleepy head! Did you have a most rare vision?’
‘A what?’
‘You, lying there, made me think of Bottom.’
‘Who?’
‘From A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’
Emma launched into a bewildering tale of lovers, fairies and magical juice. She followed it with one of her own: a midsummer night during which she and a group of friends left a post-exam party and, having ‘borrowed’ a copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and several cans of cider, gathered at the bandstand in town where they stumbled their way through the play.
He lay watching her talk, thinking how much pleasure she took from things: her pride in the vegetables she’d picked and prepared that morning; her delight in her expanding stomach; her lazy smile as she’d straddled and subsumed him.
Having reached the end of her story, Emma turned on the spot, taking in the garden.
‘Isn’t everything beautiful?’
He agreed that it was.
‘The world was all before them, where to choose their place of rest, and Providence their guide.’
‘Shakespeare?’
‘Milton,’ she said, and then, pointing at the yellow flowers that almost reached her knees, ‘These tall dandelions are so pretty.’
‘They’re cat’s-ear.’
‘These long spiky things. I thought they were a bit boring, but the tips – look, they’re flowering.’
‘Purple toadflax.’
‘What about these pinky ones, with little faces?’
‘Red campion.’
And as the light finally faded, Chris lay on the cooling grass, naming everything, like Adam. His clever wife, his beautiful garden, and the world all before him.
Chris decelerates as he approaches the roundabout at Pontins, taking it slowly, one eye on the road, the other on the curve of the holiday camp’s exterior wall, the cheerfulness of the bright fence panels undermined by a series of flags dangling from their posts like sodden ponytails.
A few years ago, during the then wettest December on record, this road was closed for eleven weeks due to flooding. The dune slacks filled with water which, instead of running out to sea, poured on to the road, along the footpaths and through the golf course. Channels and pipes in the area hadn’t been maintained and gullies hadn’t been cleared of leaves. It was rumoured that the outfalls of some drains couldn’t even be found and retired council workers were contacted to locate them. He wonders how many more long-forgotten drains snake along this essential road? How many pipes are silted up? How much water would it take for the slacks to spill beyond the road and the footpaths and past the golf course before trickling into town?
He adds these worries to others that plague him: increasingly extreme weather events, the decline of wildlife populations, political inertia and, closer to home, the gradual collapse of the lawn-care scheme that used to be the backbone of his business.
Customers started switching to pay-as-you-go last winter. And who could blame them? Chris promised they’d get their money’s worth, eventually. But who wants to make monthly payments to maintain a lawn that’s under water? Then came the heatwave. It didn’t rain in June. Not once. The rest of the summer wasn’t much better. Every night on the news it was ‘hosepipe ban this, hosepipe ban that’. Customers called and said, ‘No point in you coming out, mate. Let’s leave it for now. Oh, by the way, I’ve cancelled my direct debit.’ And in the midst of this, his father died. Rudely, without notice. Chris has since learned there was a spike in deaths coinciding with the high temperatures. Hundreds more than expected. Another thing to blame on the weather – the climate. He doesn’t exactly miss his father. It’s more that he can’t help noticing his absence. There’s an empty space on the horizon, as there was after the town’s gas holder was demolished. Chris had liked knowing where he was in relation to the tower; it had been a place-marker, something he looked for on his way home.
Disoriented and gloomy, Chris did what he could in the boiling weather. When he cut grass, he kept enough length to offer the soil some shade and left the cuttings in situ, hoping they’d also provide some cover. Customers on meters worried about the cost of watering. Others recycled bath, sink and washing-up water, but the ground was so dry, the water rolled, settling at the lowest point. There was nothing to do but leave the grass to recover, and it mostly did, after a few weeks of regular rain. In the meantime, Chris mulched borders and got on with hedge trimming and bed work. He had a decent clearance job, so he wasn’t unoccupied. But the regular money he could count on each month was shrinking again; he knew things would tank if there was another wet winter.
And here he is, tanking. Here he is, back to his beginnings: the interlude of his happiness a distant realm, a most rare vision. Here he is, waking each morning listening for the rain, plagued by a fresh dread of the future which now includes Emma, Dylan and James; the house; their land. And he is already grieving. Imagining the loss of everything he holds dear. Just as he imagined the obliteration of the dinosaurs when he was a boy.