A New Bed by Isabelle Evans
Photo by Andreea Ch from Pexels
Topsoil
“If I lay down, do you think the ground would swallow me up?”
I was already talking to myself. A strong start. There was sweat on my brow before I even started digging – it was an unseasonably warm Saturday in March, in a green patch of Surrey where I reasoned I could be by myself, and would be better that way. The intention was to separate myself (at the weekends) from everything that the city is. It’s an engorged spider, swallowing time and energy which I offered up as if I had spare. But I didn’t have spare, I needed to save up my energy, and make my spare time sacred – not for sale. Just rest.
The gardening had come with the move. Or at least the ambition to garden. I was looking for wholesome – things my mother used to do on the weekend – something that used to be just gardening, but was now “wellbeing”. It made for interesting conversation when I was back in the office. All the city-dwellers began wondering whether I’d suddenly become middle-aged. I hope they didn’t feel judged when I told them I’d rather come back to work on Monday with grass stains than a two-day hangover. And I hope they believed me. To start with I’m not sure I was telling the truth, but the more I said it, the closer it felt to the truth – and the less I wanted to come back to work on Monday at all.
Anyway, this was my first real attempt. I’d done the due diligence, bought some bulbs, scoped out a plot and here I was digging myself a new flowerbed. Little blooms of ache started to blossom along my limbs within minutes. The shovel was heavy, the motion abrupt, and the smell of the earth made me feel like even my lungs were collecting a layer of dirt. Every so often I’d disturb a family of worms, who would writhe nakedly in the unexpected sunlight for a little while before tunnelling their way deeper, where I would doubtlessly find them again later.
It had been raining in the middle of the week, and so by the time I’d got through the first few inches of soil I was plastered with claggy mud. I hated to be so caked in it, resisting the temptation to keep wiping it off, because it would only be back a moment later and really my filthy hands were doing nothing more useful than moving the mud around. As I felt it drying on my skin I began to question whether gardening would be the therapeutic wonder-drug I was hoping for. As my little flowerbed had grown broader, and I’d got into the topsoil, it felt increasingly like I’d started digging a little trench. I suppose it’s only fun to tend your garden if you dwell on the idea of filling it with life.
***
Standing in the kitchen later I could see my handywork as I washed up my dinner plate at the sink. It was about six feet long, maybe two and a bit feet wide in the far corner of the garden, like a stamp in the corner of an envelope. As the evening light saddened from rosy to blue it was the first place in the garden to be totally shaded by the hedges which bordered the space that was mine, and held the shadows in like ink in a jar. The light from the kitchen bled a little of the warmth indoors onto the lawn, but the orange pool didn’t make it far. My little flowerbed got dark quickly. Before long it was impossible to see the earth that filled it, and it was only a lack of grass, of light, of anything at all.
Subsoil
It’s funny. I felt as if I spent last night in the soil. Perhaps it was the digging – muscles long dormant had been wrenched into wakefulness, and perhaps even in my sleep I couldn’t forget it. There was also the smell. I’d stood under the shower for what felt like hours, until the dirt which was dried on the tiny hairs of my arms, and pressed into every crease of my fingerprints, was washed away. But there seemed to be no fully getting the smell out of my nose – no freeing the damp, earthy air from my chest.
I woke up with a familiar feeling. It had followed me here from the city and was unwelcome in what I had hoped to make my peaceful escape. It was the feeling, even after sleep, after food and peace, of needing more rest. It had taken a lot from me before – the need to stay down, as if the duvet was too heavy to shift, and my only choice was to lie there, crushed by it. I’d lost months to it in the past. I’d lost friends. Getting out from under it had strained me to the core, and that had brought me here – a place where I could truly feel the benefit of rest. But it was different this time. There was a drive, as if I had found the answer to feeling restored. Perhaps it was the earth in my breath, but I felt quite sure that the way to truly rest myself was in the garden.
***
I didn’t toast my bread that morning – I just buttered it and ate hastily, stood over the sink to see the garden, and the new bed. It was wide enough, yes, but it needed to be deeper. When the bread was gone I dropped the crusts in the sink, slipped into my wellies and picked up the shovel. The day was a little colder and the work seemed familiar to my limbs, shunting and heaving the earth around. I could still see the roots of the weeds which riddled my lawn, their heads bobbling the garden like a ruined old jumper. I started to take pleasure in removing every trace of them from the flower bed. Off with their heads, off with their roots. At one point I cut a worm in half with the sharp end of the shovel and wasn’t sure whether to expect the two severed little cords to wriggle their separate ways. I didn’t want more worms. This was going to be my flowerbed, my rest, and there was nobody and nothing I wanted to share it with.
A while later the weeds were all gone – all trace of them, each root and petal cleared. The ground was drier today, and rather than sticking to my skin the earth seemed to have settled on me, like dust will gather quietly on the tops of photo frames and book shelves, dust that might be there for years. It bothered me less today. Perhaps it helped me keep warm. I know the centre of the earth is a long way down, but as I rested my hands on the ground for a few moments, palms pressing into the soil, it felt like the warmth of a body, with a heart beating in its chest. I wanted to lie down. The weekend was nearly over.
Substratum
At 6:30 on Monday morning I decided to unplug the wi-fi and the phone. I couldn’t see why I’d want them. It would be better to be uninterrupted – to enjoy the same peace as I had all weekend, as I work towards my rest. I cut the cords with the kitchen scissors.
There wasn’t much left in the fridge. I’d finished the bread, but there was a little butter left so I unwrapped it and licked it from the paper packaging, dropping the packet into the sink with yesterday’s crusts. Butter coated my teeth in a frictionless film which I ran my teeth over every so often as I got settled back into my work.
I was thinking about tree roots. How deep they must go, how far into the earth they can climb, to anchor themselves in place in such a way that nothing can sway them, change them or forget them. How restful it must be to live such a statuesque, unchanging life. To need nothing that wouldn’t naturally come to you. To serve nobody and nothing, no purpose but your own, with no language to convey pain or weariness, or to take on the pain and weariness of the rest of the world. Just its light and the kindly warmth of the earth.
In the afternoon I was distracted by my phone. Not the landline I had killed earlier, but the mobile. I could hear it buzzing against a tabletop somewhere – how could I have forgotten it? I went into the house to put a stop to it. Four missed calls from the receptionist at the office. The fifth came in as I was carrying the phone upstairs, humming rhythmically in my grip. I left it on the toilet cistern while I plugged and filled the sink. The water was chilly and I dipped my hands in it distractedly for a few moments. Gripping the shovel had formed the beginnings of little callouses where each finger met the palm and my hands were hot. Dirt from my fingers spread out in grainy tendrils and slowly settled onto the bottom of the sink. I turned off the tap once the water had reached the brim and slid the phone gently in. It settled at the bottom and I saw the screen light up for a moment. Streaks of pink began to spread from the top and a few moments later the whole thing went black. I left it there and went back to the new bed for the rest of the afternoon.
In the evening there was a knock on my front door. I was still in the garden with my bed so it took a little while for me to notice the persistent little noise coming from the front of the house, but then it was there. I blinked and felt the dark dust crack and shift on my face, grit on my eyelids. Placing the shovel down as quietly as I could, I glanced around the edges of the garden fence. Crouched down, it was a perfect wall against the world – looking out from the ground near the bed, you could see nothing over the fence but the sky and the tips of distant trees, as if the garden was alone, suspended among clouds. But standing, turning around, I could see more. If you were tall enough standing you could see over the fence, and I felt freshly appalled by the sight of windows, doors, rooves – my neighbours’ houses pressed so intimately against mine. I went inside.
The person outside knocking was still there. From the hallway I could see them silhouetted against the frosted glass panel in my front door. Tall, a man, stood up on the doorstep with an arm raised, trying to see in. How dare he? How dare he come here. There was a pulsing I could hear – it must have been my own pulse, unless I was hearing his blood through the door. It was fast. I didn’t switch on the light. I waited where I was, feet away from him, eyes fixed on the glass, until he gave up and left me in peace.
Bedrock
You hear people talk about wanting to feel seen. I think that’s a curly mess of wanting, feeling, seeing, all that out in the open, when all I really want is to be, without observers. I had felt seen when that person looked for me through the glass in my front door, but also looked at, like a zoo animal. It’s always so disappointing when animals in the zoo hide unseen in their little sanctuaries, but you can understand why they do it. In the morning I closed all the curtains in the house. I struggled to find something to block the frosted glass in the front door though. In the end I nailed a dark tablecloth into the wood above the window and it hung there like a curtain – I felt like the strikes of my hammer were an answer to the knocking. Knock no more. Don’t come back.
Looking from my bedroom window I could see the garden and it struck me with a queasy pang that I could see into the other gardens too, hemmed in by their little walls like petri dishes for observation. I couldn’t have my rest with observers. I would go into the garden later, when the lights turned on in the houses and stopped a soul from seeing out. The crusts in the sink weren’t mouldy, so I ate them and sat to watch the day pass.
At about seven o’clock I set to work once again.
Evening turned to night. My hands were getting too sore to grip the shovel any longer – I could feel blood blisters which had been surging towards the surface of the skin on my palms for the last few hours. When I pressed them with my fingertips they throbbed. I tossed the shovel onto the lawn and began to shift the earth with my hands, burying the blisters in it, making it soft. It felt clean then. No more worms, no ragged weeds making their unbidden home in my bed. I had made the earth fresh and perhaps, like the delight of clean bedding, it wouldn’t last, but for now it was hard to resist. When I was quite sure I had made it perfect, and just as clouds had cleared to cast a curtain of moonlight across the lawn, I made myself a soft pillow and finally had my rest. Perhaps nobody will find me for quite some time.
Isabelle Evans
Isabelle is a writer and researcher from Wales, living in London. She writes short stories and poems about all sorts, and likes to escape the city, walking in hills and getting in the sea whenever she can.
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