Dating : Trap Ground Allotment Association

A short story — for Molly and Lizzie.

***

In May, Lizzie inherited one hundred and twenty-five square feet of earth. The chalky Oxfordshire soil called to her on those long summer evenings. She discovered life decaying in its grasp. On that first evening, she tentatively shovelled at the earth and dug up blackened potatoes. Later, her small green trowel pierced orange flesh: two rotten carrots intertwined; lovers wrapped in an embrace of twisted limbs.

The Trap Ground allotments spread from Aristotle Lane off Kingston Road, across Port Meadow to touch the southern corner of Burgess Field. Cows grazed on the open expanse of land in the meadow, gathering in groups of three along the muddy route leading south to the river and north to the allotments. They met Lizzie’s gaze as she walked across the gravel path, their eyes fixed on some unseen point. She wasn’t sure if they were looking at her, or through her. She didn’t like these big creatures, their presumed judgements of her glaring through their all-seeing stillness. Beyond their backs, the vast, grassy landscape met the horizon and rolled away into nothingness, sparse elm trees in the distance elongating their fingers to clutch at the sun’s white light.

Molly had suddenly left town for Chile. She told Lizzie over their warm pints of Stowford Press that Friday night and was gone by Saturday afternoon.

‘You take it, Lizzie, please.’

‘But the waiting list’s like three years or something, right? I’d feel bad, it’s not mine really. I don’t even know how to grow stuff.’

‘You’ll love it. It’s so peaceful there. You have to, I need it to go to someone I know.’

She couldn’t let Molly down. Lizzie envied Molly’s transience; she refused to stand still for too long. She was gorgeous, with bronzed, glowing skin and a bright smile. She always looked effortlessly cool, a black tattoo of a hare on her forearm and five delicate gold hoops in her ears. Her warmth was matched by her strength: nothing was ever too challenging or too tiresome. She’d be out in the allotment in the rain until her light brown hair clung to her cheeks in tendrils, wet soil trapped underneath her fingernails. She’d arrive late to the pub, a soaked plastic bag of freshly dug beans swinging from her wrist, smiling to herself. She often smelled like a wet dog. Her ease drew men to her, time and time again offering to buy their round.

‘What are two beautiful girls like you doing sitting by yourselves? There’s all kinds of people out there, you need some protection on a Friday night.’

She’d turn to Lizzie after they’d sulked back to their tables empty-handed, muttering bitch under their breath.

‘Listen, Lizzie, a man would fuck a McChicken sandwich. Don’t ever take a man fucking you as a sign of anything at all.’

Lizzie rolled the seeds back and forth in her palm before plunging them into the darkness below. She wrenched bind weed from the ground, pulling its never-ending ropes from where they’d wrapped around bean shoots and the thick leaves of cabbage plants. She walked home alone as the sun set across the meadow. The sky was coated in puffy pink clouds, like soft brain tissue. Her shoulders ached from the repetitive strain and she sank into the deep sleep of a tired body. That night, her dreams tasted of flesh. She sucked the pale meat from a lobster’s claws, cracking its spine and staring into its beady black eyes, its innards exposed as it lay on its back. She tore the wing of a bat from its hollow bones, bloodied skin exposed along one side of its tiny body, each bite fuzzy with soft black fur.

The allotments were separated from the homeowners of North Oxford by a footbridge crossing a muddy tributary of the Thames. The next morning, Lizzie walked over the bridge, punched in the entry code on the black box labelled ‘Private Property: Entry for Association Members Only’ and pushed against the heavy gate. It slammed shut behind her and clanged against the railings. She walked down the footpath and met the thick grass at the entrance to the plots.

Immediately, her Birkenstock footsteps were muffled by the depth of the grass, each blade tickling her exposed ankles. All around her was greenery, growth spilling out across the paths between each plot. Brambles with spiked edges grew over six-foot-tall and pointed at unprepared limbs, ready to tear at a calf, or a forearm. Huge marrows were abandoned at the edges of plots, left to rot while the owners went on holiday to Santorini, to the Amalfi coast, to the Algarve, their decaying green carcasses soft to the touch. Lizzie knelt down and pressed her index finger against the rounded edge of the largest one by her feet. A beetle emerged from the split indent her fingerprint left behind.

As the summer day drew on, students gathered on the banks of the river and drank. The pulsating bass of their speakers distorted as it warped across the green fence of the allotment. Lizzie heard high-pitched screams as girls jumped into the icy, black water in their bikinis, crossing their arms to clutch the elbows of their goose bump flesh. The sweet smell of burning meat dominated the air where groups of teenagers sat and cooked sausages on tin barbeques, holding their joints between thumb and forefinger, kissing each other hungrily between tokes.

A cold breeze caught the copper beech trees. The rattling branches were the only sound cutting across the evening’s silence until Lizzie’s allotment neighbours arrived after The Archers. Jean and Derek were a cold couple in their seventies. They surveyed her with suspicion and always called her Molly.

‘So, what happened to your fella, then?’

He was talking about Molly’s boyfriend, Dean. Dean had left just before Molly announced she’d booked her flights that Friday night. Molly said he woke up one morning and told her he couldn’t carry on. It seemed unimaginable. When they’d all met at the pub the Friday before, he squeezed her hand and stared at her open-mouthed as she talked. She looked away, scanning the shelves behind the bar. His black plastic crucifix bounced against his sternum as he gesticulated about Caravaggio’s artistic mastery. He once said Molly’s profile reminded him of Portrait of a Young Woman by Botticelli and called her “his little woman.” They’d been together for eight years.

‘Oh, he- he’s not around anymore.’

‘That’s a shame, not easy taking care of this alone. Maybe not something for a young lady anyway — better off going out in the evenings and finding a husband.’ Derek laughed, looking at his wife.

‘Jean does so much for me, I don’t know where I’d be without her. Certainly wouldn’t know how to turn the oven on.’ Jean met Lizzie’s eye and they exchanged a weak smile.

Lizzie gritted her teeth and walked into the shed. Looking across to the west, she could see the Dreaming Spires, their gothic spikes a distant reminder of Alan Bennett’s cloisters and ancient libraries. A row of tools lined the left side of the shed, hanging from a wooden plank on the wall. Shears, trowels, spades and an axe. Two pairs of gardening gloves lay abandoned on the shed floor, along with an array of open seed packets, plastic bags and a folded polytunnel. On the right side of the shed, a mirror hung from a rusty nail, a metal hamsa hand dangling over its pane from a chain of blue beads, cutting her reflection in half. Lizzie took herself in. Her brown fringe was cut bluntly across her forehead and tickled her long eyelashes that almost obscured her deep-set brown eyes. She wasn’t wearing makeup and the beginnings of a tan graced her cheeks, her freckles decorating her straight nose. She turned away from the mirror and bent down to slide on the smaller pair of gloves. Before Molly, Lizzie had spent spring alone.

Since moving down to Oxford in February, it felt like she had spent all her time at the publishing office. She smiled at her co-workers, replied to all her emails and ate her Tesco falafel sandwich at her desk. Molly had been her only friend at Taylor & Francis. They’d always go to the Rickety Press after work on a Friday. Lizzie let the conversation rise and fall around her. Molly would point out men that would be ‘lucky to even drink her bathwater, but maybe good enough for tonight?’ Truthfully, Lizzie was happiest alone, watching horror films on her laptop under her white floral duvet. But she felt a heat rising in her that spring, a craving for skin against hers.

She met Sam in the Rickety Press. Lizzie fumbled with her cards at the bar, and a loyalty card for Purple Turtle slid onto the sticky wooden counter. A pale hand appeared at hers, a gold signet ring glistening on a little finger.

‘I love that place. You ever go to their Funky Friday nights?’

He wasn’t bright, but he was sure of himself and firm in his preferences: for Timberland boots; for funk music; for his cigarettes, smoked on the tiny balcony of her one-bed flat after he’d knelt at the foot of her bed, lifted her legs onto his shoulders and run his tongue back and forth over her labia until her hips raised to meet his chin and she shuddered in paroxysms of pleasure. Sam’s enthusiasm for oral sex was boundless. He’d moan into her as she fell into orgasm after orgasm, guttural sounds from the back of his throat meeting hers, releasing, together.

Lizzie brought him to the allotment. He wasn’t interested in gardening, but he wanted to please her. She brought bottles of Heineken in her Blackwells tote bag and played Spotify’s Funk Soul Classics playlist from the tinny speaker of her iPhone. Matching smiles graced their faces as they played grown-ups for hours on their little patch of Oxfordshire. As Lizzie leant down to finger the slug-eaten leaves of the chard plant, Sam wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed the nape of her neck. She felt a shiver run across her shoulders.

They talked about their families as they sat cross-legged on the ground and sipped their metallic lager, Sam smoking a cigarette. Sam talked about his old room at St Edward’s, a boarding school which charged £10,000 a term. He told her they used to play a game called ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’ where the older boys would form two long lines facing each other. The younger boys would then run through the ‘tunnel’, getting smacked with whatever the boys had armed themselves with that day: a pillowcase stuffed with cricket balls; an unread copy of War and Peace; a rugby boot. Sam spoke with pride about his turn on the other side of the tunnel. Once he’d reached Year 9, he had the chance to ‘get his own back’. He called the fifty-year-old woman with Down’s syndrome who cleaned their rooms a ‘mad old thing’, because she used to talk to herself as she emptied their overflowing bins filled with ejaculate-soaked tissues. Lizzie held his hand walking back across the meadow and felt nothing until her ankles were squeezed together behind his neck again.

They were working at the southern corner of the allotment, cutting back a lavender bush sprawling out across the path. Lizzie’s neck was covered in a film of sweat as she hacked at browned branches. The root of the plant lay exposed, fallen purple lavender heads dotted around its base and spiders retreating back into the earth, twenty-four legs speeding away from the blinding light shone onto their homes. A piece of string trailed towards Lizzie, and she pulled at its frayed end. A black, plastic cross slid over the uneven earth and she picked it up with thumb and forefinger, dropping it into her left palm. Her hamstrings were twinging as she squatted over the earth and looked at the familiar shape. She remembered it slipping from Dean’s open shirt as he swayed from side to side at the bar after his fifth pint one Friday night, his hand on Lizzie’s shoulder.

‘I love Mol, I really do, but marriage? Having sex with just her for the rest of my life? I dunno. She’s wild though, lets me do whatever I want, lets me do stuff to her where I feel guilty afterwards. Don’t tell anyone Liz, don’t tell anyone, but once, I made her lick my cum up out of a dog bowl! It was so hot.’

‘Hey, babe, where’d you go?’ Sam laughed, as Lizzie clenched her fist around the cross, hidden from view. She slipped the necklace into the pocket of her denim shorts.

From then on, her dreams were realised in black and white. She’d see Sam’s face, looking up at her from between her thighs, his head suddenly dropping onto the duvet and black blood trailing from his lower lip. She’d feel the warmth pooling at her crevice of her coccyx and wake. They started bickering. Over small things. Over big ideas. Over everything that hadn’t happened yet. Sam smoked more and talked less.

‘I just don’t think you can hear how that sounds coming from someone wearing a signet ring.’

‘It was my grandfather’s Lizzie. The crest is a family crest and it reminds me of him.’

‘Okay, no, I get that, but there’s such a strong link between public school boys and — ’

‘Teddy’s is a private school — ’

‘Sam’, Lizzie threw her hands up in exasperation, ‘It’s all that Bullingdon Club stuff, colonialism and imperialism and British superiority. And the patriarchy! All wound around your little finger. All I said was that I didn’t want our kid to go to school somewhere that –’

‘I don’t know why we’re even talking about our kids, we’ve been dating for three months. It makes me feel like we don’t share the same values, Lizzie. I don’t know, maybe I just don’t know you really.’

Lizzie breathed out through her nose and looked at the spade by her feet. She retreated to the shed and pulled out the polytunnel to cover the newly planted garlic bulbs. She watched Sam on the other side of the plot, filling a wheelbarrow of weeds to push towards the compost heap at the back of the allotments. As he walked away, she heard his phone ringing. His voice carried across the empty plots, crossing past neat rows of cabbages waiting to be harvested.

‘Yeah, yeah, still out at the allotment. It’s nice, can smoke out here and just chill man. She buys the beer…It’s not great to be honest mate, I should break up with her really, but she’s just so fucking hot. I keep thinking I’m gonna do it, and then I’ve got her on her back and I just can’t. Yeah, a few more weeks of it and then I’ll move on.’

Jean and Derek were on holiday, a cruise around the fjords of Norway. As Lizzie pushed the last prong of the polytunnel into the earth, she watched Sam slide the phone back into his pocket and return towards the allotment, whistling as he steered the now-empty, careening wheelbarrow with both hands.

‘Time to get started on this thing, right? Then we can head back to yours. Grab the clipper thing and help me cut these branches back babe, and I’ll get the roots out?’

Lizzie walked out of the shed with the rusty shears in her right hand. Sam was kneeling with his back to her, digging at the stiff roots of the raspberry bush. She wanted to free up space at the edge of the plot to plant sunflowers. She watched him, cigarette hanging from his open mouth, pale blue shirt tucked into his cream shorts. He was nodding along to James Brown, humming to himself, the bobbing of his head pushing his Ray Bans down the bridge of his nose.

When I hold you in my arms
I know that I can’t do no wrong
And when I hold you in my arms
My love can’t do me no harm

She put her left hand on his shoulder. She didn’t stop until she felt metal meet the lumpy bone of clavicle.

*

The heads of the sunflowers raised their dark eyes to greet Lizzie as she arrived at the allotment with her tote bag over her shoulder, Ray Bans on, a cold lemon San Pellegrino in her hand. She waved cheerily at Jean and Derek.

‘How was the cruise?’

‘Far too many fat women in bikinis, makes me glad Jean knows how to dress. Pond life, that’s what we call it, don’t we dear? So, what happened to your fella then?’