Untitled 20

The enormity of this new problem was well beyond his capabilities. He could imitate the reparation of stone masonry well enough, and painted better than most in the trade, but demolition had never been his bag.
He’d taken on the wall without thinking it through.
With the damage done, undetected for generations, these three well-intentioned gardeners had been beaten in a matter of days.
‘What shall we do now?’ asked Rob, sat with Ray and Terry on the lawn.
‘We’ll cut the damn thing down as planned and treat what’s gone up through the eaves. Hopefully it’ll kill it off from the stumps,’ said Ray, knowing that this would only ever be a halfway measure, if that.
‘That’s all we can do now, I s’pose,’ agreed Terry with a stout sniff, wondering when he’d get a chance to call the brick man in Eastleigh.
He had to get those bricks back even if it meant paying a little on top of what he sold them for, which would surely be the case as he hardly knew the brick man. Ray’s job was on the line and the prospect of not having Ray as boss was unthinkable for Terry.
Ray had become a father-figure to Terry over the years, and although there had been little emotional progress in Terry’s life, he felt that without Ray he would be far worse off.
He was aware that the brick man may have already sold them and so making the call to him was vital.
By lunchtime, Ray and Terry had cut out all of the exposed ivy from the gutter, which was in remarkably good condition, while Rob had almost finished scraping along the length of the wall from the ground to about head-height.
In the afternoon, Rob brought another ladder from the shed.
Ray treated the stumps of the trapped ivy at the gutter while Terry and Rob scraped out the ivy skins from the ladders.
When they’d finished, they took the ladders away from the wall and sat on the lawn, gazing at the transformation.
Stripped of its clothing and completely naked, the wall looked miserable.
It was covered in scrapes and pockmarks and where there wasn’t any evidence of that, the ivy had gnawed into and all but destroyed the brickwork.
The two eyes that were the windows for the hay in better times appeared wholly depressed and the nose, where the long chain of knuckled ivy had taken refuge behind the drain, made for a very long face.
If one was to look carefully, the stumps could be seen dotted along the length of the wall above and behind the gutter.
Hopefully David wouldn’t notice once the gutter was painted again and the trellis was placed flush to it, but, always at the back of his mind, Ray worried that he’d have to act fast to make the wall look good for the public’s expectations of this otherwise magnificent walled garden. Being May, there were still three or four months of good business ahead.
All it needed to get through the summer months was an arrangement of trellis, the promise of a fast-growing but feeble climbing plant with abundant flowering for next year, and the dreaded bricks.
On the way back to the shed, Ray felt wiped out. That wall was doing him no good at all.
He’d hatched a plan to dismantle a small amount of bricks from a low separating wall in the old coal shed if Terry’s source was no good.
‘Are you two going to vote tomorrow?’ asked Ray, as they walked past the river.
Tomorrow was Election Day.
Terry was too tired to get angry. ‘I’m not. They’re all crap anyway.’
Rob hadn’t given the election any thought whatsoever. He’d seen as much of politics as he wished, and wanted to waste no time on debating the current system. ‘I can’t be bothered,’ he said. He’d get what he was given and be grateful for whatever came his way.
‘Are you voting, chef?’ asked Terry.
‘No, I haven’t voted for over thirty years,’ said Ray. Labour’s capitulation from its roots had seen to that.
They’d spent what money was there and now it would be left to the people of Britain to pick up the pieces under a new government.
Talk of a hung parliament pleased Ray, but he knew that whatever happened, normal service would resume once the new ministers’ palms had been sufficiently greased. The wheels of corruption would be sure to turn unhindered and without interference once they’d gained momentum.
‘What made you stop voting, chef?’ asked Rob.
‘Much like Terry, really,’ replied Ray. ‘I just couldn’t see how it would change anything.’