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Ray has an apprentice called Rob.
Having almost completed his first year, Rob has been introduced to gardening by getting to grips with its nuts and bolts; the weeding and nurturing.
When he’s in the company of the lads, Ray dislikes idle chatter but will join in if they find something interesting to talk about. Otherwise, he stays quite quiet. There’s no animosity between the three of them.
Rob, a tall lad of nineteen, comes from Scotland and speaks as if his mouth is full of gravel from the many times that his mother tried to strangle him to death as a rebellious, fatherless youth. She had always been drunk on vodka and would only get worse as he learnt to take more severe beatings, so his decision to leave Scotland was welcomed by his two older brothers. They knew that it would only be a matter of time before she killed him.
Rob was taken on as part of a government scheme that has since been scrapped.
He lives in a well-equipped bedsit in town and has a small black cat called Jingles for company.
He’d like a girlfriend but has no money to entertain even the thought of one since his rent, council tax, TV licence, clothes and food account for all of his wage after income tax and national insurance contributions have been deducted.
Because of the abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother, Rob has difficulties with intimacy. In the company of the opposite sex, he is shy and withdrawn and is prone to imagining that he may be hit or strangled. Among male friends, he constantly worries that he will be cut off if he gets close, as was the case with his father, who could take no more of his mother’s drinking.
Having said that, there’s no denying the spirit of the lad. He works hard and wants for nothing out of the ordinary. He buys himself decent food and clothes, cooks well and has a deep interest in classic black and white films from Europe, although he would never share his interest for fear of being pigeon-holed pseudo intellectual or plain weird.
A keen amateur writer as well as a decent keyboard player, Rob’s time is his own when he’s not in the grounds.
Away from Scotland, he has found an independence and freedom that he will keep at any cost. There would be no going back, because there was nothing to go back to.
His life is his own now and he enjoys it to the full.
Terry, Ray’s assistant of five years, is a man of medium build, with no distinguishing features to speak of.
He’s twenty-nine years old, supports Chelsea and likes to spend time fishing. Either that or he’s in the pub.
He’s married to Josie with whom he has one baby daughter, Emerald.
Together with some money from Josie’s parents, he finally saved enough for a deposit and secured a mortgage on a run-down ex-local authority property just before the property crash, where they have lived in apparent poverty as a family for the past two years.
It’s a three-bedroom semi-detached house with a garden that backs onto a good-sized playing field. Terry and his wife are struggling financially, but he refuses to stop going to the pub and fishing. Josie affords herself what she feels is a disproportionate amount of freedom, and so she has yet to curb the hairdresser, frilly clothes and Friday nights out with the girls.
Having already re-mortgaged the property once without her parents’ permission, the baby continues to go without.
Terry has failed to tame the garden, which is a war of bushes and weeds threaded through junk all the way to the end-wall.
The back door won’t open because the weeds have started growing up the wall. The blown plaster at the angle of the ceilings and walls on the ground floor suggests that a flood remains untreated.
Terry always says he’s too tired to tend to the garden, and the baby continues to cry for an outlet.
Josie is far too busy-minded to see that her baby is in need of her.
Her dream is to divorce Terry, take a lover and keep the house for herself. She hasn’t decided what to do with Emerald.