The Garden Path
Chapter One
How can I explain how this wall came down? I’m not one for fancies – ideas, niceties, all that. I simply took it down myself using a large hammer. A sledgehammer. And now you picture someone sweating and swinging at a massive concrete expanse. It wasn’t even concrete, I don’t think, because there was some dense cardboardy stuff and some fibre, and the white dust puffed everywhere. So it wouldn’t be appropriate to say that ‘the wall crumbled as I smashed it’, although that sounds good and proper, what you want to hear. All walls should crumble, but this one kind of ripped and I was pulling it apart rather than hammering it down. Every time I took a swing my hammer would get stuck and I’d have to yank it backwards nearly rending my arms from their sockets. Then at the end of it all there was white powder and board all over the place, which of course I had to clean up. It’s still not cleaned up properly but by then I was hungry and went inside for dinner.
My wife was sitting at the table, already eating. Macaroni. She’d called me for supper a few times, definitely more than once, but I was busy attending to the wall, wasn’t I? Her wall. It was part of a garden shed and did not please her aesthetic sensibilities. She complained that it was an eyesore. She loved her garden. Always worrying and fussing over it, pruning, picking, plucking. The mowing I had to do; the digging – yep, me again. She said that for visitors the wall created the first impression of our house, and first impressions were the most important of all, everyone knew that. And with that wall. Well, let’s just say that in my wife’s opinion, the first impression of our house was not positive.
We hardly had any visitors though, and so I was left to assume that she was trying to impress the early morning joggers that ran past our house. The random passersby. The nosy neighbours. It hardly seemed worth it to me, breaking things down so that strangers might think better of you, might imagine you better people than you are. But I don’t dare start an argument with her.
Not like I used to.
The macaroni was delicious. I love my wife’s cooking, just about the only thing that I love about her. It was covered in cheese, glorious cheese, and I enjoy eating it slathered with chutney. She even made dessert tonight which is unusual. Poached pears. Isn’t that so typical of someone who watches a lot of cooking shows on television? They were very good indeed, but I was put off by imagining one of those fools and his cookery show. A cookery cliché if there ever was one.
I went to the pub tonight. A life cliché you might say; middle aged man drinking to escape his life. Yep, that’s pretty much it. As I walked down the garden path I noticed that my shoes were leaving white tread marks from picking up the powder on the ground. She wouldn’t like that – I’m sure I’d get a comment about it tomorrow. The pub I went to (as regularly as possible) was only around eight hundred meters away from our house. It was one of those old fashioned ones that had wooden floors, wooden bar tops, wooden toilet seats. The yeasty aroma from years of neglected wood saturated with beer greeted me as I walked through the door. I ordered beer on tap. I don’t really care which beer I am drinking, as long as it’s beer. While sitting at the bar, I felt glad that I didn’t have children. Middle-aged, that time had definitely passed for my wife. I’m sure I still had it in me, but I am sure she is past ‘the point of no return’. It’s a bit strange now that I think about it that we didn’t have any children, when all my friends and acquaintances seem to have a few. But I never wanted them, and made that clear to her from the day that we got married. A dismal occasion, our wedding. It makes me nostalgic for my bachelor days just thinking about it. In fact, looking at most the people in this bar I feel nostalgic for my younger years. In that time I drank to have fun.
Chapter 2
It’s one o’clock the next morning and head is in a liquor spin and pub is all but dead. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed the evening although I’m sure it would have been better than staying at home; perhaps watching some cookery show with my wife and sipping tea. I will have to finish pulling down that stupid wall later today and then clean up all the debris. I’m sure I will feel like that task like a nail in the head.
It’s time to go home as the bell rings for last rounds. I’m grateful as it gives me an excuse to free myself from a particularly meaningless conversation about how often they change the pub’s chip fryer oil. According to some drunk (not me) they have to comply with food safety regulations and change it every day (I doubt that, judging by the taste of the chips). My wife makes wonderful chips. Of course it’s one of those arguments which would be easily resolved just by asking someone who works at the pub, but it’s also one of those arguments in which everyone is right and everyone else is wrong and the rightness of everyone increases proportionally to the liquor intake. It’s time to go home. Now’s when I wish I drove the eight hundred meters to the pub as I now have to walk home and it feels like a marathon at this time of night. I’m cold and tired and drunk, and that makes the whole experience so much worse. I feel dismal as I approach the end of my journey. All I want is a nice warm bed but undoubtedly that’s too much to ask. Beds are never warm when you get into them, you have to stay as still as you can in order for the small space around your body and the larger space around my belly to heat up. Only then do you gradually dare to inch further out into the icy frontier of the rest of the bed. My wife will already be in bed. She never seems to mind that I stay out so late at the pub. I suppose the bed might be slightly warm.
As I walk down the garden path to the front door I don’t even notice the broken wall at first and for a second I feel disoriented as if I’m in some sort of jungle. There are quite a few large trees around our garden that really envelope the path. Now that the wall is missing the atmosphere seems rather pleasant. Walking past the smashed wall, I can’t help notice that there isn’t much cleaning to be done after all. In fact, the white powder that I tread all over the place on my way out isn’t there anymore.
