Untitled 9

Nobody could complain about the quality of Ray’s brickwork repairs because his was as good if not better than most tradesmen.
Besides, Ray wanted it gone now.
At four-forty, the three gardeners put down their saws and left them under a tarpaulin for the morning.
Walking back towards the gates of the garden, they turned to face the wall to see how it looked.
The ivy had been sawn off from the bottom of the wall to about eight foot up.
Most of the brickwork had survived, although there was certainly work to be done hacking out the embedded strips that had bled into and around the mortar in a hundred or so places. If they’d tried to get at them with the saws, it would have damaged the brickwork, making more work for themselves later.
‘Are you sure it’s not going to rip the wall down now that it’s top-heavy?’ asked Rob, looking suspiciously at the wall. ‘Looks dangerous to me.’
Ray settled his mind, but he too was transfixed by the wall. He couldn’t stop looking at it.
‘No,’ he said after a moment or two. ‘The ivy doesn’t need propping up, lad. It’s set tight around the gutter and drain. The only thing that’s going to get it down is us and the saws.’
‘It looks so weird like that,’ said Terry, who had also become completely entranced by the horrific sight.
‘Well it won’t be there by this time tomorrow so don’t worry yourself over it too much,’ said Ray.
Although none of the gardeners spoke of it, the thing that worried them most was David.
That afternoon, as they raped the wall in turns with the saws. Rob and Terry had peered across their shoulders, imagining that David was screaming at the top of his voice for them to stop.
That he hadn’t come bowling over with all the racket they were making was a miracle, a complete and utter one-off.
That evening, the three gardeners left work quietly and were immediately overcome by the most morose thoughts.
Before going home, Terry ducked into the pub as usual. After three swift pints, he had not been drunk enough to react to his wife’s niggling remarks, electing to take a long bath.
Rob, after the long walk back, had slumped in front of the telly and hardly moved but for food.
Ray had tried to read in his armchair, but he couldn’t concentrate. Either that, or the book wasn’t up to it.
That night, the three gardeners were consumed by an overwhelmingly mixed set of emotions that had taken over since leaving work.
They all felt as if they had in some mysterious way committed the most heinous of crimes.
Ray put it down to the executed ivy’s perfume and decided that it had infused into his body during the hours of sawing. He imagined that the ivy had died with a fight, letting off exotic aromas in an attempt to disarm the men.
Nature’s way of getting its own back, like a podgy porcupine having its way with a curious dog.
Rob resigned himself to the calculated notion that they’d done something very wrong to the ivy and to nature as a whole, and that some sort of consequence would be on its way to hurt him.
He would discuss his thoughts with Ray first thing tomorrow.
Terry tossed and turned in the bath, but with his wife’s constant nagging and Emerald’s screams, he had little time to put order to his own jumbled thoughts.
He felt sure that he’d done something very wrong but, in the shape of his life as a parent, this wasn’t so unusual.
An awful father and turning out to be a pitiful partner to boot, he was already guilty.
When the three gardeners finally went to sleep, the unknown meaning of the ivy held them captive in its grip.