Untitled 19

Ray couldn’t help feeling hatred towards the wall.
If things continued to complicate, he could end up losing his job over it, and that wouldn’t do, especially as Annie’s care depended on it.
The care-home alone accounted for 80% of his take-home pay.
Ray lived very sparingly on the savings that he had managed to claw back from the part-sale of his house to the building society. Or was it now a bank? He couldn’t remember. All he knew was that the house he’d paid for over a period of thirty years would be slowly taken away from him, chunk by chunk. If he had no income, he and his wife would be homeless before long.
Left to survive on his small pension plan, he had calculated that he’d be destitute within five years, maybe six at a push.
He’d worked without a break for fifty-five years, but the bottom-line was that he needed his job more than ever.
Whether he was seen as irreplaceable by the staff was irrevelant. There wasn’t one gardener on the National Trust’s books who couldn’t be replaced in a flash, unless he was connected to a gentrified family.
The Trust had its standards, after all.
On the short walk there, clouds gathered and the landscape turned from bright to dull as if curtains were calling the premature ending of a show.
‘Oh, rollocks,’ said Terry, who hated the rain.
‘Damp patch. Won’t last long, lad,’ Ray assured him. ‘Forecast said sunny with a few showers.’
But that did little for Terry.
If the way the day had started was anything to go by, the weather would defy the forecast and pelt them with hail all day.
He couldn’t stand the rain, especially on ladder-work, and as he trudged towards the Garden That Flows, he began to toy with the idea that his life meant nothing.
Rob opened the gates while Ray and Terry waited behind him. The three gardeners stood there as the gates were flung open. They all looked with cold eyes at the wall as if it were their worst enemy.
Dark clouds clung to the vastness above, malicious marionettes teasing the gall of the Gods.
‘Let battle commence,’ said Ray.
Terry put his hard face on, looking down and slightly to the side.
‘Charge!’ cried Rob, after locking the gates, running headlong towards the wall shaking a wire-brush in his upheld hand.
Once they’d got the ladders out and Ray had given Rob a quick demonstration on how best to take the ivy skins from the bricks and mortar without overly damaging the surface, Ray and Terry made the ascent to the cluttered and matted guttering.
With their chisels, saws and claw hammers at their sides with others stored in their satchels, they worked about a metre apart from eachother, starting from the left side of the wall.
They set to thrashing, stabbing, sawing and pulling at the coiled branches, agreeing that the first few metres of length would most likely indicate whether the gutter needed pulling down or not.
In the first hour of hacking and pulling away what seemed to be the most tiresome ivy that Ray had killed, the second problem of the day was made clear to them.
The ivy hadn’t even played with the gutter; it had just used it as a buffer, a calling-card to better and higher places.
It knew very well that the dislodging and overloading of the gutter would be very likely to cause it to crack, which would draw attention to the wall, and the ivy didn’t want that.
It liked the wall the way it was; strangled, crippled and decrepit, and so long as the ivy continued to dominate the wall, it was quite happy to suffer the humiliation of being the Trust’s favourite picture-postcard.
Ray and Terry shook their heads and mumbled to each other while Rob stole glances at them from below, sure that something was the matter.
The cunning ivy had used the gutter to strengthen its ascent up into the roof by way of the joint between the wall and the roof.
One pull and Ray knew that the ivy was stuck tight.
Without taking the slated roof down, or tackling it from the inside by smacking the ceiling and cladding out, both options taking weeks and sure to cost tens of thousands if done within the latest strict codes, they’d never know how far in the ivy had got.
‘I bet it’s gone all the way to the top of the roof,’ said Terry, wiping his brow.
To this, Ray said nothing.