Accidental Flowers

Lily Peters

• Publisher: Arachne Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781913665340
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

Set mostly in the north of the UK, in a near future.

Women march together in protest at a government reneging on climate promises. Two glorified paper pushers in Spain help British ex-pats escape a heatwave that will soon lay waste to most of southern Europe. A twitter storm erupts in the panic of a real tempest. In the northeast, a beloved allotment sinks below the waterline. Sea levels rise, toxic rain falls and the earth poisons the food that grows in it. The elite, and winners of the life lottery, are evacuated to giant towers. As a notional government tries to keep control at ground level, eco warriors, protestors and radical 'allotmenteers' proliferate. In the towers, new blueprints for the regime of the future are drawn up. For many, a decision has to be made between living safe or living free.

Beginning

2030

Bliss

Everyone says that they love spring because of the longer days and the green leaves, but I think the real reason that people love spring is because of cow parsley. Would that I could sell the bliss that cow parsley brings. Anthriscus sylvestris – a silvery cloudy line that links cities to the countryside, seaside towns to landlocked hamlets. Heaven in a plant.

It’s May and muggy with it. I have made it through the traffic in the city, a slow process, accompanied by the sound of too-loud talk radio, and rumbling from other road users. I’m now heading out into the country. My SatNav tells me I have twenty or so glorious minutes of winding sixty mph roads, bordered by happy banks of – yes, you guessed it – cow parsley.

Freedom.

If I were to marry, I’d do it in May. I can see it all: jugs of cow parsley spilling onto tables, cow parsley buttonholes, cow parsley accessories for my hair, letting all the indigent creatures crawl from the stems and build a home on my scalp.

*

Bliss and I met in May. A long time ago, at a party. We were both fifteen and it was one of those house parties that started off with bowls of Doritos and ended with local boys coming around to smash televisions and pull chests of drawers apart. Their arrival signalled that it was time to leave (if you hadn’t already left with your latest crush, of course).

We were standing in the narrow, noisy kitchen. Some of the skinny girls, the ones from our year or the year below, the ones who still looked like infants, were sat cross-legged on counter-tops.

I’d offered Bliss a drink from my can of cider. She’d declined. She didn’t drink, not then.

‘It messes with my artistic nature,’ she informed me, her eyes lost beneath a thick layer of shimmering blue makeup. I fell in love.

*

Apart from the occasional surprising Land Rover, the roads are quiet. Cows stand pressed against the hedge, their big black snouts poking through the hedgerows. I want to put my hand out of the window and boop their noses, but I’m going too fast. And cows have always scared me. It is the city girl in me perhaps, I’m wary of their sheer size. The SatNav beeps a speed warning. I take my foot from the pedal as the road hairpins. Something I’ve not secured well enough hits the side of the truck with a metallic ping. Possibly the watering can? Possibly the handle of a now ruined tool?

It always surprises me how well gardening businesses do in May. I mean, the best time to plan a summer garden is actually in October, but it’s the cow parsley thing again. People live on scrubland all year around and then they take one May walk through the park and there grows inside them this aching desire for a perfect, bee-humming, paradise-possessing back yard. Before last year, I was always so busy in April and May. So busy, that when I shut my eyes, all I saw were the fine veins on the surface of a leaf, or the curl of an unfurling bulb. So busy, especially if it was warm.

And when isn’t it warm now?

*

Our friendship was never equal. Our loyalty to each other was fierce, but, at any one time, one of us always loved the other more. Her addiction to the melodramatic gave me a stomach ache and she thought I liked boys too much, that I spent too much time pining. Her eyes would roll when I said I was in love with a boy, but when she fell for ‘the one’, it was the end of the world if (when) he didn’t call her back. My school was ‘too posh’ for her, and I hated the way she would act as if her school was situated in a war zone, and that going to it was equal to risking her life.

I grew up on the sort of road where everyone’s hedge was big enough and wide enough to hide their goings-on. She and her mum shared a garden with their upstairs neighbours. A garden with an apricot tree and courgettes, with their pretty yellow flowers that Bliss’s mum would batter for us if we asked enough times.

If Bliss’s clothes were loose on me, she would throw a tantrum. If her feet were slight enough to wear a pair of ridiculous heels I couldn’t get past my little toes, I refused to talk to her for a week.

But really, for two wistful teenage girls, we were equally vital to the other. We grew up and, unaware, we became tangled, like two French dwarf bean seedlings, left to their own devices on a sunny windowsill.

*

There are hearty helpings of apple blossom here and there en route – ornamental orchards, there for show rather than produce. My mental boundaries blur and although I am currently on a winding country road and in complete control of the van, in my mind I’m elsewhere – on her hospital ward, by her bedside. Her cheeks are as pink as apple blossom, the rest of her skin the pale brown of new bark. Her lips still tinged green, the colour of new leaves.

I can remember how helpless she looked. I can still see the police on their way down the corridor. Even on this beautiful spring day, the birds competing with the engine, I am still shaken to the core.

*

We grew apart, letting our shoots aim towards different patches of sunlight. It was such a slow process that there was no dawning realisation, no sudden devastation. Just a sporadic pang of loss, occasionally brought on by a change in the weather, like the sudden drip of a pipe reminding you that you meant to fix it last autumn, before the rain.

By the time we reconnected, Bliss had made a lot more of herself than I had. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my job. Running my own small garden design business allowed me to pass my weeks in the quiet friendship of plants and fertiliser, spades and seedlings. I was paid to spend other people’s money on wrought iron furniture and decorative pebbles. It was a gift, to be rewarded for merely observing and occasionally facilitating, green, earthy life. I became fit and slight and quick-fingered.

But Bliss, Bliss had actually become famous. She was a celebrity. She had rendered into reality the dreams we used to discuss over a box of chips, the night bus home taking its sweet, slow time.

When I first saw her face on the advertisement on the side of a bus, I was on a date, sitting in a pub garden. Lime fizzed in my tonic, bubbles popped on their pint. Bliss had done it! She had a leading role! As the vehicle sped past us and on up the high street, I had lifted my drink in stone-cold admiration for my old friend, and said ‘to Bliss’. Upon reflection, I think I may have instilled some false hope in the acquaintance opposite me, who, incidentally, I didn’t meet up with again.

*

By taking in gulps of the sweet smelling, almost alcoholic air hammering through the window, I manage to bring myself back to the present. I am speeding again. My shoulders have levered themselves up to my ears and my back aches as I force them back down. I slow as I come to a crossroads. The SatNav tells me straight on, but the signs say differently.

To the future, says the one to the left. I’m not ready, am I?

To regret, says the one on the right. Not again.

I put my foot down and screech across, following the sign that says head down, but chin up.

*

Dear Ms Forrest,

– went the emailed request –

You may not remember me, but I remember you. We grew up together, shared mutual friends. Your mum told mine that you had started a garden business and that your work was, as your mum put it, ‘exquisite’.

– Sounds like mum, always in my corner. Or on my side of the courtroom.

I’ve just moved out of the city and finally have a yard,

– interesting choice of word for what turned out to be a huge oasis of horticultural potential.

and we haven’t a clue what to do with it. Would we be able to book you in for as long as it takes to fix it?

– it took a lot longer to fix than either of us expected, didn’t it Bliss?

*

Before the court case, when I was driving to visit a new client, I would try to imagine what they looked like, how they behaved. My ruminations were always biased. Even now, my first impressions of people are fully formed before I even meet them. It is all down to how they contact me. If they email, then I respect their professional nature, their desire to keep everything above board – to have a ‘paper’ trail. If they text me, I know that they’re either single parents with very little time or looking at their patches of land like it is a second thought. So, it was lovely, driving out to Bliss’s new ‘yard’, the anticipation of our reunion bubbling in my stomach like water moving through dried-out soil. For the business, this deal was huge. I had never considered that kind of money or the demand of creativity. It was a job that should have set me up for life, but the legal fees devoured most of it like a snail on a marigold.

For me, the deal was about far more than money.

And her face, when I saw it, was just as lovely as portrayed on the many screens on which I’d watched her. A few more marks of life, but as delicate and supple as it always had been.

She had opened the door with a gin and tonic in a coupe. A few peels of grapefruit sailed across the top, a tonic-induced tang jumping to my top lip when she went in for the hug I had hoped for. It was just after lunch, but she was hazy with day-drinking. A floral silk shirt hung about her brown body. She was a magnolia incarnate.

I fell in love all over again.

*

That day, as the size of the project became clearer, we talked business. We knew there would be time enough for the rest, time for the roots of our friendship to begin to show again, shivering and tender, peeking above a decade of soil. She kept trying to press a cocktail on me, I kept nodding back to my van, Forrest Horticulture emblazoned across the back doors in teal lettering. Keeping my business close, as an excuse.

She was wonderfully haughty, like she had always wanted to be. She spoke over me constantly, as she always had. She wanted a vegetable patch, a pond, two separate seating areas, bamboo and flowering shrubs, ornamental trees and fruiting shrubs, grasses and variegated shrubs and...

‘Everything.’ She drained her glass, looking at me from above her over-large sunglasses. ‘Can you give me everything?’

*

I have to pull over. I am finding it hard to breathe. All my fault. I plead guilty – guilty for taking the road down memory lane. A journey bordered by edible flowers in a golden batter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Beginning
• Middle
• Ending
• After