Dog Days by Ericka Waller

Author:Ericka Waller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

George

(Knit and Natter)

GEORGE IS WORKING ON the allotment. Betty is prattling on about something, but George has his radio turned up to drown her out. Poppy is snuffling through the mud and Lucky is trying to wriggle out of his latest jumper.

George will stop soon to eat the sausage sandwich with lashings of brown sauce that Betty has made and is keeping warm next to a flask of tea. Betty loves food almost as much as George does. She’s like a hamster, cheeks always padded out with a toffee or a piece of cheese. It makes him think of Ellen’s cheeks, the soft, powdery down on them. How did he never notice how thin his wife had become?

He turns over the soil, adding fertilizer until it’s rich and filled with luscious pink worms that he tosses at Betty when she tells him to put his back into it. She knits as she watches, and her latest project is starting to look suspiciously like a man-sized jumper.

George likes gardening. Forks and spades don’t talk back. The bulbs light up the trenches he ploughs like glow-worms, and he likes how strong he feels when he pokes them down, hiding them under a blanket of earth, knowing they’ll reappear. If he were a singing man he’d warble ‘We’ll Meet Again’ by Vera Lynn. He’s not, though, so he just pushes each bulb in with a ‘humph’ and moves on to the next.

Ellen’s ashes lie under a bed of earth, but she’s not coming back. She won’t grow roots and layers of skin, like his onions. She won’t poke her head up one day. They won’t meet again. He doesn’t like to think of Ellen in this way. It makes him need to sit down and catch his breath. To distract himself he asks Betty if her husband was buried or cremated.

She finishes counting her row of stitches, then looks up from her knitting. ‘He wanted to be buried. Lord knows why. I wouldn’t want to be stuck in the ground being eaten by worms. That’s what he wanted, though, so that’s what we did.’

‘Was it a big funeral?’ George doesn’t know why he cares, but something about the way Betty talks about Bill makes him feel a bit itchy, right in the middle of his back where he can’t quite scratch it.

‘Aren’t you a nosy parker? It was big enough. He’d been poorly for years. Lots of the nurses and carers came. They’d grown fond of him.’ Betty has her head back in her knitting now. She’s talking to an uneven row of purl stitches in a diarrhoea brown.

‘I thought you said you nursed him yourself.’ George takes a handkerchief out of his pocket to mop his brow, then stuffs it back up his sleeve. He’s wearing a vest under his shirt and jumper.

‘Strike a light, George! I did, but you can’t do it all alone. There are machines and medication and all sorts.’ Betty sounds defensive, like she does when George asks her where the last bit of pie went.

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