Nicola Barker - Small Holdings

SOME PEOPLE OPEN up like flowers; slowly, painstakingly, each petal unfurling, reacting, affirming. Responding, simply, to warmth and to tending.

Other people can be peeled; like a fruit — like an orange or a pomelo — the skin comes off, and underneath is something full and ripe, perfectly segmented, waiting to be apportioned by deft and inquisitive fingers.

Doug was like an egg. A boiled egg. Hard-boiled. He was knocked once, twice, many times, and his shell cracked, and it crumbled, and underneath was something slippery and rubbery and not especially digestible.

If he hadn’t been hard-boiled, he would have dropped from his shell, moist, sloppy, just a mess. In certain respects, in retrospect, that might have been preferable.

I’d been wrong about Doug all along. I’d thought he was an oyster: barnacle-hard outside, abrasive even, but with a vulnerable interior, maybe a pearl in there somewhere, hidden, precious, protected. I also considered at certain points that he might be a beetle. Beetles, it seems, like some other insects, have a skeleton on the outside and the flesh, the soft bits, inside. People are traditionally soft on the outside, and the bones, the frame, the supports are hidden away within layers of skin and fat and muscle. That’s exactly how I am. Soft and yielding, like tripe to the touch.

Well Doug, Doug was a boiled egg, hard-boiled with a blueish pallor — white turned blue — a pale yellow yolk (his heart, not soft either), and he was extremely entrenched, obscenely contained and mystifyingly, ridiculously, maybe even deceptively proud of himself.

We’d all worked as gardeners in the park for several years before the whole enterprise was privatized and a group of us — me, Doug and not forgetting Ray (Big Ray) — formed a partnership and along with Nancy, our driver, made a successful bid for the contract.

Doug was always nominally in charge. I’m too shy to do anything but blush and blunder. Ray, well, he’s moonish, and tender and completely unfocused. Doug is incredibly reasonable, too reasonable — monosyllabic, in general, admittedly — awesome, though, terrifying, as hard as a nut; a literal tough-nut. He is fair-minded but merciless. If he has a rule book (and he’ll usually find one close at hand) then he’ll play by it.

Working with Doug is like playing a game of snooker. The park is the green baize. We all look after the baize, we nurture it, we love it — but more of that later — and Doug is the white ball. He sets all the other balls in motion. He doesn’t confer, he doesn’t request, he doesn’t even cooperate. Doug simply knocks into the other balls, slams into them, bangs into them. Balls of all colours. And I’m a red ball. Shy. Embarrassed. Always the first to be pocketed, to scamper and scarper.

Doug’s technique is remarkably simple. Physical. He’s the big ball, the biggest ball. That’s all. He is also, and I guess this is ironic — or else this whole snooker business just isn’t working — Doug is also the black ball. He is the first and the last. If he leaves the table then the game is over.

There’s one question you should never ask Doug. Never ask Doug where he’s from. I know where he’s from because many is the time I’ve heard him talking French, a strange French, like a list of exotic ingredients from a fancy cookbook, to his wife, Mercy, who he walked out on a fortnight ago after thirty years of marriage.

Doug comes from a place full of bright birds and sun and tall trees. I can imagine this place so clearly, can even imagine Doug there, kicking up sand, shouting at people. It’s an island. One island in the Lesser Antilles: Martinique. I looked it up in my big old atlas. I saw the arc of Doug’s islands, islands humped in the Caribbean sea like the backbone of a long-forgotten animal. Barbuda, Antigua, Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, St Lucia, St Vincent, Grenada, Doug’s Islands.

Everything about him gives him away, external things, so he holds himself in, his real self, his inside-self, every-part. Every muscle tenses, resists, contains. That’s Doug all over. With his neat greying beard, his black hair, his hands like clams, his dark, bloodied eyes, his accent which is as strong and thick as rich molasses.

In fact, though, in truth, he comes from Palmers Green, North London. We all do: me and Ray and Doug and Saleem (one-legged Saleem, our squatter, my persecutor, our old curator) and Nancy. That Nancy.

Well, the park is my soul. I live off it, I work on it, I live for it. I love it. Doug loves it too, but lately he’s taken to growing vegetables — out back, in the greenhouses which are no longer open to the public. Giant vegetables. He thinks the punters don’t notice when they peek through the glass, expecting succulents, orchids, exotica. He thinks they aren’t surprised, shocked, maybe even piqued when they see only row upon row of onions (Doug’s an onion, yes, I like that. An onion) or marrows, cabbages, tomatoes. The occasional giant, merry sprig of a carrot top.

‘Phil,’ Doug said, last time I broached the subject of the vegetables — and the other things too, more recent peculiarities — ‘Phil.’ (He takes every opportunity to say my name, rolls it on his tongue, pronounces it ‘feel’, which never fails to activate something in me, something inside, something vulnerable and inadequate, something connected to feeling too much but expressing nothing, something soft and sad.) ‘Phil, whosoever diggeth a pit shall fall in it.’

Doug has another saying, equally incomprehensible, which he’ll interchange randomly with this one; ‘Phil, Phil, what-yagonna do when your well runs dry? Huh?’ He won’t wait for an answer. He’s too preoccupied. He’ll saunter off (that saunter, a true gardener’s gait) and he’ll be rubbing his hands, jangling the keys in his pocket and expectorating; drawing something deep from his throat which he’ll expel neatly into the border as he wanders past the perennials.

By then I’ll be blushing. Fool. I’m thinking about ‘Feel’. Feel.

Whosoever diggeth a pit.

Ray was digging a deep hole next to the perimeter fence on the east side of the park and preparing to sink a gate-post into it. He was glossy with sweat. He stopped digging as I approached.

‘Whosoever diggeth a pit,’ I said.

‘Now that,’ Ray answered mopping his wide forehead with his fat arm, ‘That’s Bobby Marley.’

‘You’re kidding me. I thought it was biblical.’

Ray shrugged. ‘Could be originally, but I’m sure I heard it in a Bob Marley song.’

Ray must be well over twenty stone, has long, frizzy blonde hair, a straggly beard, green eyes, the face of a cherub. I told him Doug had requested a meeting at five, in the house, the kitchen.

‘Fine.’

‘You, me, him and Nancy.’

Ray rested on his spade. ‘It seems like Doug’s finally cracked,’ he said, grinning gently. ‘At long last. And that’s what comes,’ he added, ‘that’s what comes of being too solid for too long.’

I didn’t like this kind of talk. ‘He’s only left his wife,’ I said calmly. ‘That’s all.’

Ray remained undaunted. ‘He’s talking to himself.’

‘I do that too, sometimes, when I’m not thinking clearly.’

‘You’re like royalty. You talk to your plants. Doug’s just talking. All the time.’

‘He’s got a lot on his mind. There’s the meeting with the council to re-assert our tender on Friday. That won’t be much fun. It won’t be easy. And Doug’s the man to pull it off.’