Notes from a Dirt Engineer - Failure

'You are a total failure!' she announced, her face contorted with pubescent vitriol. 'Look at you, you're a gardener for fuck's sake!'

As those words spewed out of my daughter's mouth I cried, just briefly. For either way she's right, I have failed. I have apparently failed at being a parent and, if she's right, I could even be a double failure. I swallowed my tears and went to work.

Mrs Lee's kitchen is beyond dirty, it's a small, over-heated den of absolute filth. There are kitchen electricals from the eighties, Molineux mixer, Creda cooker, bits and pieces from Woolworth's, they work still and are used daily. She invites me to pull up a folding stool which I do then she places various defrosted delicacies onto my plate, sort of pushing them down with her fingertips. The microwave pings and she leans across me to open the door. Inside is full of little brown marks and unidentified lumps defying gravity. She removes a dish of apple pie and spoons it onto my plate.

I've never been properly sick but I've had some bad stomach aches from eating at the homes of elderly clients. But the thing is, to refuse would really upset some of them so it's just not worth it; they get something out of feeding me. I chew and politely swallow, the apple pie tastes strangely of beef.

'Did you have a nice Easter weekend?' I ask, trying not to breath through my nose, fearing the flavours.

'Oh - it was quiet,'  she says not looking at me. 'Sue had thirteen over for lunch,' she laughs. 'That was too much for me so I stayed here.'

I find myself angry that she was alone again. She was alone for Christmas too. You get to know a lot about the relationships between the older clients and their grown-up children. It's easy to judge, too easy.

Her garden is dangerous, full of randomly sized panes of glass leaning against semi-collapsed structures. This morning she has me excavate a long-buried, brick path which leads to the compost heap but has been hidden by a few years of rotting leaves and other debris. She knows it's there of course, Mr Lee built everything in this garden and she knows every inch of it.

There's just not enough time: two hours a week compared to the daily hours he spent, not toiling but nurturing, pottering, sculpting, creating and destroying. It is the longest garden in the road. Sometimes I find an old screwdriver or some other ancient tool. He put it down, perhaps to answer the telephone or go and take a tray of tea from her. I handle the object, feel the vibrations of his energy, still present, it tingles my palm just briefly.

She wants the foxgloves removed and composted before they can flower, 'out', she says with a jerk of the hand, 'there are too many.' Mr Lee invested heavily in the soil; bags and bags of manure, the removal of stones, mustard manure crops and such like. The foxgloves are successful, too successful. They grow on the edges of the veg beds which she has me keep clear, clear of creeping buttercup, ground elder, bittercress and other successful plants. I don't know why, perhaps in case he comes back. If he returned the first thing he would do would be to plant vegetables, she knows that but the first part of her reasoning is flawed. 

The successful plants are casually murdered by my little fork and left to dessicate in a barrow before their final journey to the green bin. The disturbed earth attracts a robin. I planned to reason with my daughter about what makes success and failure but I decide it's too complicated. Perhaps it's not even a question worth answering and besides I'm tired now and can't be bothered.