Notes from a Dirt Engineer - The Wrong Things

It isn't the rain but rather the water which collects upon the surface of the leaves. It transfers onto my clothes as I brush against the plants going about my work, it drips down my sleeves and the back of my neck. The mud too sticks to my tools and gloves, it is heavy, cloying, it slows me down, makes me ask questions, why am I here, what am I doing playing with this dirt, the stuff of life. Most people wouldn't do it. So much of life is dirt, filth and we are repelled, by germs and creatures, nature and sex, why? One day I will dig and dig until I reach the core where dirt has no meaning, germs are immaterial and there is only light.

Mr Honey comes to the door in socks and sandals holding a dead man's hankie. I get the feeling he has been hovering there a while. He has stored up energy, each movement he makes is a little too full, it spills over, eating up extra space and time. I watch as he holds the inner porch door closed and comes out through his front door, locking it behind him. He never lets me see inside the house, I have noticed this over the years and all his windows are fully netted. Perhaps there is no inside, maybe it opens straight into a wormhole. This seems unlikely but not impossible. His uncle built the house, this he has told me thirty times or more. The bunch of keys he holds in his puffy hand is enormous. He unlocks the sidegate and hooks it to the wall behind.

'Did you get me my bucket?' he asks.

'Oh yeah. It's in the van.'

I go to the van to fetch his bucket. He rarely goes to shops, I'm not sure why but recently he has been demanding I run more and more errands for him. Last week he wanted a watering can, this week a bucket. I won't charge him for my time, just the price of the object. He fills the bucket with water from his rain butt and puts it in the garage where there are a dozen or so others all filled with water.

'This rain is good,' he says, 'it'll fill the water butts again. It's been very dry again hasn't it.'

'Yeah, it's been a very strange spring with all these......cold nights and this bloody wind all the time. It's more like October.'

'Have you been over to Mrs Lee's this morning?'

He knows I have, her house is directly opposite and he watches me. I'm not really sure how he fills his days, he hardly leaves the house but I imagine him sitting at the front window peering through the nets. I wonder how he passes the hours. It's none of my business of course but I know he has no internet, no family and very few friends except a few churchy people who do his food shopping. The world he inhabits seems incredibly small and that makes the wormhole theory all the more plausible. In reality there must be so many people living just like him, shut away, unknown and unloved. It's sad, too sad to dwell on by those in the swim of life and so it goes on unchanged.

I nod and say, 'Yes, just had tea with her as usual, and cake and biscuits....and the rest.'

He looks jealous. I am in fact hyperglycemic, I always leave Mrs Lee's house hyperglycemic. 'So what would you like me to do today?' I ask, keen to burn away some of the sugar which now jumps and buzzes within the tissues of my body.

'How's her daughter?' he says. 'Her husband still alive is he? What's his name again?' He knows the name. 'Malcolm is it. He must be in his seventies now, musn't he, still doing okay is he, healthwise I mean?'

Mr Honey asks me this most weeks. He is waiting for his neighbour's daughter's husband to die, then he can make his move. 'Malcolm is still alive I believe. And fit too, he painted Mrs Lee's garden furniture, it looks good, like new.'

He scratches his head and looks disappointed. Despite his age his hair is still mostly black but very greasy and full of dander, he has the kind of white shiny skin which doesn't crease and his teeth, his teeth....oh, I once looked at his teeth, they were sort of pinkish, covered in food and half dissolved. I am utterly repelled by his physical appearance and yet in his ways he is sort of innocent and childish. He has never left home. I believe the house has stood unchanged since his parents passed away. The clothes he wears are the ones his mother bought him in the seventies or his dead father's, some are Mr Lee's; he knocked on Mrs Lee's door a few days after she was widowed and asked for them. The only thing new on his property are the plastic buckets and watering cans which sit in the garage all filled with water, waiting for what? A fire, a drought, the apocalypse? 

His childishness is appalling yet endearing. During our chats I often feel a surge of oxytocin running through my blood and into my brain. Sometimes it is strong and I want to cry and hug him, I can almost feel my milk coming in and yet I am disgusted, repelled. No woman I know, not Mrs Lee's daughter, not anybody anywhere could want to have a relationship with Mr Honey. I hope I am wrong but I have a feeling it's too late anyway, he is old now and set in ways of social ineptitude.

I know he is a virgin. I have no physical evidence of this of course, it is more of an innate feeling, like his virginal state gives him a special aura and I see it. It has occurred to me that this particular type of purity at his age might give him special powers. Indeed I have considered knocking on his door on midsummer's night and brushing my lottery ticket against his groin. I decided this was risky. His previous gardener warned me that he had locks on all his internal doors (hence all the keys) and to be careful in his garden because in certain places 'the ground falls away.'   

The rain has stopped now and the sun is beginning to shine. He fetches his ant powder from the garage and sprinkles it all over the cracks in his paving. 'Can you do my edges,' he says.

I am always doing his edges. I've resorted to scissors before now to get around all the nooks and crannies. The edges of his lawn are something for him to worry about, to fill the space in his brain, the hours of the days. Who am I to say that this is a waste of time and there are better things to worry about. Last year he had me grow him a few vegetables in the part of the garden where the ground apparently falls away. The soil is sandy and things germinate easily and grow quickly. He had a few carrots, beans and potatoes but impatience got the better of him, he harvested them early then complained that they were too small. 

He walks up and down the garden, clutching his bottle of Nippon. The ants bother him, I'm not sure why. Perhaps he thinks they will drink all his water, get into the wormhole and trigger the apocalypse. I hate insecticides, particularly ant powder. The ants work so hard to built their world, he could be entertained for hours watching them doing their thing but he'd rather sprinkle deadly white powder on them and any other life which happens to reside in the paving cracks. It's their equivalent of the nuclear attack he is perhaps himself living in fear of. 

'I really think you should get a computer Mr Honey, get the internet. You could get all your shopping delivered, and there's so much to look at and learn. You could joing a dating agency....'

'Nah,' he shakes his head, 'I might look at the wrong things.'

His answer is quick, he's obviously given this some thought. The wrong things. I'm not really sure what he means, pornography, hard-core left-wing propaganda sites, the Daily Mail website? Who will come to his funeral? The churchy do-gooders who do his food shopping, Mrs Lee's daughter, me? 

'If you're going up the shops at the weekend can you get me a budgie?'

'A budgie?' 

'Yes. We had one years ago....'

He is still clutching the ant powder, the lid isn't on properly and every so often a it releases a little white cloud. 'No....sorry,' I say. 'I don't mind getting you plastic things but....'

'Oh don't worry then. Can you get me another bucket then?'

I nod. He gives me my money and a packet of crisps. I don't think I'll get that bucket, not for a few weeks anyway.