My colleagues at the shop said she asked everyone, from customers to fellow shop workers, to tidy her garden. But, according to my manager, “If you say yes, you don’t know what you have let yourself in for. You could be washing her dishes, cutting her grass, then fixing a light switch. All in one day.” I had been warned by another colleague, confirming her scattiness: “She’ll wear three pairs of glasses. She’ll leave her jacket and purse in the shop for days. She’s not like everybody else.”
I felt I had received a mental bootcamp for this lady. I placed my rucksack into the locker in the backroom, ready to cover the till for the first time on a Friday. As I approached the counter, I felt almost star struck by her presence. All the references stacked up like notes on a spike file in my mind. The nervousness pierced my conscience and I muttered, “H-Hello, I’m Michael. Are y-you . . .” my introduction spurted out before she had even acknowledged my presence. She said, “Sorry, Matthew, could you cover me at the till. I need to sort a tiny issue.” She said Matthew with conviction. She was one of those people: whatever name they thought they heard, that was your name. She went down the small staircase to my right and returned a few moments later carrying a handbag with a price tag dangling from it. She told me of how she’d forgotten her one from home, so this was her new one. I asked if there was anything valuable in her old bag?
“Only my purse.”
She bought it and I let her have her spot at the counter, ready to witness her eccentric-ness first hand.
She let customers have anything for half price, she asked them how they were, what they did for a job. And despite her conversations being a mini biography of each customer’s life, and the queue building in front of me, no-one seemed bothered. She seemed to sprinkle glitter on their day. They enjoyed being treated like the only grandchild from their eccentric yet loving grandmother, giving them extra wrapping on delicate bric-a-brac item or getting their own special discount prices - and that wasn’t just because it was nearly Christmas.
I noticed she almost had a maternal quality that others passed off as ‘scatty’. She always asked how customers were or how their jobs were going, with eyes that seemed to care about the answer coming back at her.
She turned to me as I priced a pair of shoes with the pricing gun, “You sporty, Matthew?”
Not wanting to correct her out of knowing she would still call me Matthew anyway, I said, “I play cricket, so sometimes I am.”
“Do you do people’s gardens?”
She, like many other customers/staff would often comment, subtly, that they needed their gardens doing. However, she was the first to be direct with the question by asking me if I would clear the leaves from her garden. “You’re a strong boy, you could lift some leaves.”
I said I was a school gardener. My manager and other colleagues overheard this exchange and gave me the warning about her, again. They told me about a time when someone from the shop caught her watering the artificial plants on her front lawn - b I felt there was more to this lady than just a scatter brain.
I didn’t know how she would react if I didn’t pull up in a white van like a professional gardener. I had worked as a school gardener for two years and relied on the tools that I received when I was there to do the job, I wasn’t fully qualified nor had I the experience of working for myself at that stage.
I arrived on her front drive with only a pair of gloves and a rake. Her front garden had short grass and plastic flowers in pots - just as described to me. All seemed normal and sane so far. I knocked on the thick wooden Victorian door. The shadow behind the frosted glass magnified and it was yanked open. She eyeballed to see if she recognised me like I was a book from Amazon she forgot she ordered. “Hello, Matthew.”
Her home was dark inside, she let natural light glow through the thin floorboards, her decor was unseen but I could just make out a lot of it was old wooden structures. The home was not lit up, like all she needed was to imagine her own version of what the room looked like. I followed her out onto the patio. The garden was long and sloped downwards towards a row of endlessly long trees. As I scanned, I realised the whole garden was surrounded by them, like I’d stepped into Alice in Wonderland. She pointed down the garden. It had different levels containing overgrown pots of what were once maybe containers for a Buddleia or a Hebe, but nature had taken over. Weeds were long and slumped over between the cracks in the slabs like punctured balloons. Her clean deck chairs in the garden suggested to me she was used to sitting out there but she liked the way nature had taken hold of her garden, just like the way she would let her problems play out and not fuss over them in the shop. She said, “Here you go Matthew, do what you can. Just the leaves for now. There are so many.” Indeed, there were. Thousands scattered like an autumnal spread. I said, “Where would you like me to put them? Have you got a bin?”
“Just over the fence will do.” She pointed towards the petrol station.
I didn’t reply straight away, trying to figure out how I was going to hide the fact I was fly-tipping straight onto a petrol garage. “Am I allowed?”
“Don’t worry about it. They shrink down once summer comes.”
“Won’t someone see me do it?”
“They haven’t noticed in the past.”
Her lack of concern for fly-tipping into a public area was not surprising by this stage. But her lack of concern for her own law-breaking was of interest to me.
She left me to it. I tried to work as fast as possible. Shovelling leaves. Heaving them over the fence. Occasionally she would come out and drop a box of chocolates ‘Celebrations’ in a flower bed or balance a glass of orange squash on a wonky paving slab. I noticed the improvised way of living she undertook. The extension lead cable used to hold a climber plant up a trellis, and the ladder placed on either end of two garden tables with washing hanging from it.
By around 4pm. I had amassed a hill of leaves that peaked its head over the fence and provided a compact fly-tipped wall obscuring the view to the petrol station. She came outside again. It was dropping dark and becoming cold. I didn’t know how to announce my work for the day was finished considering this was my first time working as a freelance gardener. “You’ve done a good job, thank you.” She said this with a kind of formality like she was always going to praise my work no matter what I did. Her eyes distant - not to the pile of leaves poking over her fence but more to a different land altogether. She stood there with only one layer on: a shirt and jeans. Her body not even registering the cold that swept in as the sun dipped below the trees. She asked me if I had family locally and what I was doing for Christmas. I said, “Most of mine live over the other side of London from here.”
Her eyes focused on me for the first time. I felt like I was finally seen as ‘Michael’. She told me of how she missed seeing her family in Ireland and how she wished to move back but she couldn’t because of her husband’s job. She said she missed looking after people as a nurse and that I should look after my family and enjoy time with them.
“I miss living in a village where everyone knows each other and even though we had no running water most of the time, we were happy.”
It made sense to me now how she acted in the shop and towards her home. All that scatter brain appearance was because she didn’t see living here as important as back ‘home’. She gave discounts to make people happy because she wanted that connection with people again. She wished me a good Christmas and to enjoy the festive break with my family.
As I watched her disappear back into one of the dark rooms in her house, I realised I had not spoken about money yet; maybe she thought I was doing the gardening as a favour. This was my inexperience kicking in. I should have been clear from the outset. I walked through her garage so I could get back to my car on her drive and in a both unexpected yet expected sense, five ten-pound notes were pegged to a washing line, hanging from two wooden beams above. She may have been ‘normal’ for a few minutes just then, but she’s not like everybody else.
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