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By four-forty, the top half of the drainpipe had come away and was being eased down for Rob to direct its trajectory to the ground without hitting the flowers as Terry and Ray hacked feverishly at the ivy that pulled away with the drain at the angle of the gutter.
Once down, they carried it over to the bushes and rested it, hidden away alongside the lower section like prowlers waiting for the ivy to reconstitute overnight.
‘That’s enough for today,’ said Ray, clearly pooped now that he was off the ladders and back on terra firma.
The ground felt uneasy in his boots, though, and he had to grab onto the branch of a tree to steady his weight.
‘You two go ahead,’ he said.
He didn’t want to keep the lads from heading off.
‘Hold up, chef,’ replied Terry. ‘We’re not leaving you ‘ere if that’s what you’re thinking.’
Rob agreed. It was out of the question.
‘Tell you what,’ said Rob, trying to take the attention away from Ray so that he could rest. ‘I’ll bag some more ivy up and you can have a roll-up.’
Terry nodded in agreement and went to sit down on the lawn.
Ray felt for the grass and joined Terry on the lawn, lying back slowly, eyes to the sky.
‘You sure you’re OK, chef?’ asked Terry as he lit his roll-up.
‘When you can work up a ladder cutting away clumps of ivy all day at the age of seventy, then you can ask me your stupid questions. Till then, leave off.’
There was no antagonism in what he said and Terry smiled as the nicotine tickled his endorphins.
‘Bloody sight for sore eyes, though, isn’t it?’ he said, looking over at the nigh on naked wall with its elephant eyes and the remains of the long, hacked-out trunk.
The ivy remaining at the top, tangled up in the gutter, made it look like the elephant had thick, candy-floss hair.
Tomorrow morning would see to that and the knuckles, the remains of which were still embedded in the wall with a big drill bit screwed into the nucleus.
Terry reckoned that they’d easily have it ready for rendering by lunchtime.
‘It’s a thing that no one’s come round looking to see what’s going on, isn’t it, chef? And Spokes being away, well, who’d have thought that? We’d have been up shit’s creek if he was here.’
But Ray was clean out, lost in slumber with a feeling of contented happiness the like of which he hadn’t encountered since being a teenager.
Rob came over and, hearing that Ray was asleep with Terry flapping about over him, placed his hand over his mouth to make sure he was still breathing, just as his brothers would have for him as he lay pretending to sleep for fear of his mother coming to strangle him in the night.
Ray was fine, of course, so the lads decided to pick up some more bits of ivy, which, if they looked carefully, had strayed into the flowerbeds.
Fortunately, for them, not one flower had been damaged.
Terry noticed Rob scraping some ivy skin from the wall and when they looked more carefully, they saw that there were hundreds of hairy strips of ivy skin still glued to the wall.
These would have to be chiselled out and wire-brushed, which would require at least a morning’s work alone for all three, then there was the extra pointing that needed doing every five inches, thought Terry. That would easily take them the rest of the day, and they’d have to bond it all.
Ray never scrimped on work, so it would more likely need the whole of tomorrow and Thursday to fully prepare the wall for the brickwork.
If nothing else went wrong, they’d be finished by Friday night and the Garden That Flows could re-open for business on Tuesday, Monday being the day to mount the new trellis.
Noting on a piece of cardboard taken from his inside pocket that he should bring extra chisels and wire-brushes in the morning, Terry hid the tools that didn’t need too much sharpening under the bushes and clinked the other tools into his bag.
Ray would probably put Rob to the task of getting rid of the ivy skins, while he and Ray would tackle the top together.
The knuckles and the rest of the ivy skins would take the best of Thursday and then they had to take the bags to the river to decompose.
After a while, Ray jolted upright, and asked ‘Where am I?’ urgently.
The lads went to help him up and moments later they were on their way back to the shed without a backward glance.
They’d seen enough of that dreadful ivy for one day.
It had been so happy and welcoming on the wall, a curtain of beauty for the flowerbed to boast its colours, but now that they’d killed it, they could give it no more thought.
The flowers would stand alone, and they looked awfully weak without their shroud, but the ivy had to go for the wall to remain in place.
The three gardeners threw their smocks into the big wheelie-bin outside the shed. They were thick with the blood of a thousand feet of ivy.