Dirt
by Jack O'Donnell
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: A couple of strong ones.
Description: Tam Devlin goes to work in his garden and unearths a global phenomenon.
_____________________________________________________________________
Ground elder wound its way between the slabs, tripping over Tam Devlin’s green, splaying up to his back door and filling the air with a green haze. Season on season he kept meaning to ask advice, buy a spray from B&Q, or even Asda. He kept waiting for the weather. Not too hot, digging was hard work. Not overly wet, the garden was a clay bowl. It would suck the feet from under an army of men no matter their footwear. Stories of slipped disks, with the thought of all that bending and calisthenics, grew arms and legs in his mind. There were other considerations. He cultivated Darwinian difference in healthy bindweed, crabgrass and ragwort, but the neighbours’ gardens were shoe-box neat spilling out nicotiana, iris, peonies and hosta.
Tam broke the work he had to do into stages. Stage One, procrastination, had taken longer than expected, especially with the World Cup on widescreen in the living room.
Stage Two was zonal marking. He used wooden clothes pegs and a ball of his wife Maggie’s purple wool to mark out each area to be attacked. His plan was to start nearest the concrete path that ran parallel to the hedge and beat back the weeds one zone at a time. He had a garden fork, spade and sieve. By his reckoning it would take him three or four days, but the quicker he got started the quicker his wife’s nagging about the state of the garden would finish.
He eased his foot and weight onto the lip of the spade. It made a sucking sound as he turned over the first clod. He picked at the roots of elder flinging them into the sieve at his feet. It took ten minutes to separate clay from root tendrils, but he had more soil clinging to his boots than in his hand. The weekend would be gone and with it his chance of a quick pint and he would still be in purple-wool zone one.
He had completed zone two and could almost taste the sharp taste of that first pint in Macintoshes Bar when his fork hit something solid. He jabbed at it, but the fork rebounded. Attacking the lump from a different angle, swinging the spade he scraped away top-soil to reveal a solid bump. Gasping for air, his back pressed against the overgrown privet as he tried to work his way round and under the object, but it was no good. He could not get enough purchase. It looked as if someone had buried a car’s tyre in his back garden. The tread oozed clay, but the rubber seemed newish and the treads were thick. The tyre—if that what it was—looked in reasonable condition. He straightened his back and his head turned left to right as he peered along the rows of windows on the terraced houses to see if any of the neighbours were looking out and ready to laugh at the joke that they had played on him. Fuckers. He would show them.
Tam worked the prongs of the fork around the contours of the tyre, trying to lever it out, but his left knee buckled and he felt a band of pain around his wrist. Rain drifted in and began to grow steadier. He covered over his failed efforts with the spade and started forking and digging again.
He worked his way forward, about five meters, cutting through wool gathering and using the line of a privet to mark his progress when he felt the fork rebounding again. The soil was sandier, he uncovered the contours of another tyre which, in the twilight muck and glaur, seemed much like the last one. He used the spade to dig down below the rim of the tyre. The wheel was attached and somebody had positioned it so it sat vertically and following the line of the zones was in line with the other. He didn’t bother covering over this tyre. Somebody was playing funny-buggers with him. He wasn’t going to let them win. It drove him forward with a renewed urgency, forking and turning the soil, rain and sweat blurring his vision.
It was getting dark when he worked his way back from Chalmers’s fence and hanging baskets when he hit the third wheel almost two metres from the pit where he had left the uncovered wheel.
‘You’re dinner’s gettin’ cold,’ Maggie shouted from the back step. Her blue nightgown was tightly cinched around her waist and her head ducked down as she peered through the rain at him.
‘I’ll no’ be a minute,’ he shouted back.
He used the shovel to dig down and create a space for himself to work in. His fingers felt the stud of the nut. He licked his fingers and rubbed it clean. It was silver and new as minted coin. He kept working. The kitchen light went on and off a few times as Maggie stood at the back door looking out at him. Other lights in the houses in their cul-de-sac winked on and off. His wife padded down the garden path, her flowery nightie poking out under her housecoat, smelling as if she had been dusted down with talcum powder and dirt was something other people got under their fingernails.
‘What are you doin’ ya eejit?’ she asked.
Grunting, he speared rain, grime smears making a pelmet where he rubbed his bald head, sweat dappling his forehead and cheeks. His eyes narrowed and he squinted as he watched Maggie sloping off. Extending the hole, he dug down, all thoughts of a pint petered away, the barrow of dirt on the path spreading, and the pit he was working in growing wider and deeper until it began to swallow him. Wheezing, with soft knees and arthritic fingers, he was able to reach up and under the wheel and feel the shape of an axle attached to the wheel, running perpendicular to the other wheel.
The next day Maggie phoned his boss at Hillington, said her husband was in bed, Dr Dryden had said he was suffering from nervous exhaustion. He had been given a sick-line for four weeks. But it was her suffering from nervous exhaustion, watching him working outside from early light to night uncovering a car that had been buried upside down in their garden.
The third day, when more than half the car was uncovered and a car buff in the crowd that had begun to gather had identified it as classic Lincoln Continental, Chalmers had chapped the front door. He was a pensioner that shared a boundary fence with them. He wore a cloth cap and overalls and spent most of his time pottering in his garden. He clutched a silver bread bin tightly to his chest like a cat. Maggie invited him into the house, but he declined with a nod of his head, his watery eyes sliding away from hers
‘Thought you’d like to see this,’ he said to Maggie.
‘That’s very nice,’ she said in an upbeat tone. ‘But we’ve already got a bread bin.’
‘Found it in the garden. Didn’t I. Near the compost heap.’
‘Well, good for you, Jim,’ she said, smiling like a politician, edging the door shut.
‘Turtle up it was. Didn’t know what it was or who put it there. Cleaned it up. Good as new. Better than new. Not a scratch on it. Didn’t want to tell anybody in case they thought I was goin’ senile.’ He sniffed. ‘The truth is Maggie, I thought it a bit strange; didn’t really have nobody to tell with my Agnes passing...until now.’
‘You best come in for a cup of tea,’ she said.
When Tam finally uncovered the car the local press had become national press and television cameras appeared. Help came from local companies, keen on advertising their expertise. He was filmed smiling sitting in a spanking new silver luxury four-door sedan. It had no number plates and no engine number, but the keys were in the glove compartment and when the fuel tank was full the engine kicked in and the crowd behind the makeshift cordon of tape cheered. A Police Inspector detailed to monitor crowd control warned him that he couldn’t drive it until he had registered and taxed it.
‘Fuck that,’ replied Tam. ‘It’s no’ goin’ anywhere. The seats are that comfy I’m goin’ to keep it in my living room.’
Scientists linked the car’s discovery to the Piltdown Man hoax. But a week later a man in Ohio dug a Kawasaki Ninja 250 motorcycle out of his flowerbed. In Hawaii a George Davis shot three of his neighbours over a dispute about a three mast and square-rigged Clipper, the hull of which extended under their property. A woman in Sydney unearthed a man-sized crucifix, the wood of which was carbon dated to over 2,000 years ago. Pastor Jack McMurty went on Fox News and scoffed at those that questioned theories of intelligent design. Science had been shown up to be what it was—a loser’s guessing game.
Three days later the equivalent of the Toi Gold bar worth over three million pound sterling was dug out of a ditch by children in Easterhouse constructing a den.
Seven days later Tam and Maggie Devlin had to line up with their neighbours with water containers to get water from a standpipe. Roads had been jackhammered. Newly planted crops were ploughed up and in some cases ripped out by hand. Sewerage pipes had been cut. Most of all he missed watching telly, but old-style analogue aerials has begun to reappear on rooftops. Fibre-optic cables had been cut so that the internet was a rich-man’s toy, a thing of the past to tell their children about. Not that they would believe them. They didn’t believe in anything but sticking metal pipes into the ground and searching for riches. They only needed to be lucky. They only wanted something for nothing. Nobody was going to stop them.
Swearwords: A couple of strong ones.
Description: Tam Devlin goes to work in his garden and unearths a global phenomenon.
_____________________________________________________________________
Ground elder wound its way between the slabs, tripping over Tam Devlin’s green, splaying up to his back door and filling the air with a green haze. Season on season he kept meaning to ask advice, buy a spray from B&Q, or even Asda. He kept waiting for the weather. Not too hot, digging was hard work. Not overly wet, the garden was a clay bowl. It would suck the feet from under an army of men no matter their footwear. Stories of slipped disks, with the thought of all that bending and calisthenics, grew arms and legs in his mind. There were other considerations. He cultivated Darwinian difference in healthy bindweed, crabgrass and ragwort, but the neighbours’ gardens were shoe-box neat spilling out nicotiana, iris, peonies and hosta.
Tam broke the work he had to do into stages. Stage One, procrastination, had taken longer than expected, especially with the World Cup on widescreen in the living room.
Stage Two was zonal marking. He used wooden clothes pegs and a ball of his wife Maggie’s purple wool to mark out each area to be attacked. His plan was to start nearest the concrete path that ran parallel to the hedge and beat back the weeds one zone at a time. He had a garden fork, spade and sieve. By his reckoning it would take him three or four days, but the quicker he got started the quicker his wife’s nagging about the state of the garden would finish.
He eased his foot and weight onto the lip of the spade. It made a sucking sound as he turned over the first clod. He picked at the roots of elder flinging them into the sieve at his feet. It took ten minutes to separate clay from root tendrils, but he had more soil clinging to his boots than in his hand. The weekend would be gone and with it his chance of a quick pint and he would still be in purple-wool zone one.
He had completed zone two and could almost taste the sharp taste of that first pint in Macintoshes Bar when his fork hit something solid. He jabbed at it, but the fork rebounded. Attacking the lump from a different angle, swinging the spade he scraped away top-soil to reveal a solid bump. Gasping for air, his back pressed against the overgrown privet as he tried to work his way round and under the object, but it was no good. He could not get enough purchase. It looked as if someone had buried a car’s tyre in his back garden. The tread oozed clay, but the rubber seemed newish and the treads were thick. The tyre—if that what it was—looked in reasonable condition. He straightened his back and his head turned left to right as he peered along the rows of windows on the terraced houses to see if any of the neighbours were looking out and ready to laugh at the joke that they had played on him. Fuckers. He would show them.
Tam worked the prongs of the fork around the contours of the tyre, trying to lever it out, but his left knee buckled and he felt a band of pain around his wrist. Rain drifted in and began to grow steadier. He covered over his failed efforts with the spade and started forking and digging again.
He worked his way forward, about five meters, cutting through wool gathering and using the line of a privet to mark his progress when he felt the fork rebounding again. The soil was sandier, he uncovered the contours of another tyre which, in the twilight muck and glaur, seemed much like the last one. He used the spade to dig down below the rim of the tyre. The wheel was attached and somebody had positioned it so it sat vertically and following the line of the zones was in line with the other. He didn’t bother covering over this tyre. Somebody was playing funny-buggers with him. He wasn’t going to let them win. It drove him forward with a renewed urgency, forking and turning the soil, rain and sweat blurring his vision.
It was getting dark when he worked his way back from Chalmers’s fence and hanging baskets when he hit the third wheel almost two metres from the pit where he had left the uncovered wheel.
‘You’re dinner’s gettin’ cold,’ Maggie shouted from the back step. Her blue nightgown was tightly cinched around her waist and her head ducked down as she peered through the rain at him.
‘I’ll no’ be a minute,’ he shouted back.
He used the shovel to dig down and create a space for himself to work in. His fingers felt the stud of the nut. He licked his fingers and rubbed it clean. It was silver and new as minted coin. He kept working. The kitchen light went on and off a few times as Maggie stood at the back door looking out at him. Other lights in the houses in their cul-de-sac winked on and off. His wife padded down the garden path, her flowery nightie poking out under her housecoat, smelling as if she had been dusted down with talcum powder and dirt was something other people got under their fingernails.
‘What are you doin’ ya eejit?’ she asked.
Grunting, he speared rain, grime smears making a pelmet where he rubbed his bald head, sweat dappling his forehead and cheeks. His eyes narrowed and he squinted as he watched Maggie sloping off. Extending the hole, he dug down, all thoughts of a pint petered away, the barrow of dirt on the path spreading, and the pit he was working in growing wider and deeper until it began to swallow him. Wheezing, with soft knees and arthritic fingers, he was able to reach up and under the wheel and feel the shape of an axle attached to the wheel, running perpendicular to the other wheel.
The next day Maggie phoned his boss at Hillington, said her husband was in bed, Dr Dryden had said he was suffering from nervous exhaustion. He had been given a sick-line for four weeks. But it was her suffering from nervous exhaustion, watching him working outside from early light to night uncovering a car that had been buried upside down in their garden.
The third day, when more than half the car was uncovered and a car buff in the crowd that had begun to gather had identified it as classic Lincoln Continental, Chalmers had chapped the front door. He was a pensioner that shared a boundary fence with them. He wore a cloth cap and overalls and spent most of his time pottering in his garden. He clutched a silver bread bin tightly to his chest like a cat. Maggie invited him into the house, but he declined with a nod of his head, his watery eyes sliding away from hers
‘Thought you’d like to see this,’ he said to Maggie.
‘That’s very nice,’ she said in an upbeat tone. ‘But we’ve already got a bread bin.’
‘Found it in the garden. Didn’t I. Near the compost heap.’
‘Well, good for you, Jim,’ she said, smiling like a politician, edging the door shut.
‘Turtle up it was. Didn’t know what it was or who put it there. Cleaned it up. Good as new. Better than new. Not a scratch on it. Didn’t want to tell anybody in case they thought I was goin’ senile.’ He sniffed. ‘The truth is Maggie, I thought it a bit strange; didn’t really have nobody to tell with my Agnes passing...until now.’
‘You best come in for a cup of tea,’ she said.
When Tam finally uncovered the car the local press had become national press and television cameras appeared. Help came from local companies, keen on advertising their expertise. He was filmed smiling sitting in a spanking new silver luxury four-door sedan. It had no number plates and no engine number, but the keys were in the glove compartment and when the fuel tank was full the engine kicked in and the crowd behind the makeshift cordon of tape cheered. A Police Inspector detailed to monitor crowd control warned him that he couldn’t drive it until he had registered and taxed it.
‘Fuck that,’ replied Tam. ‘It’s no’ goin’ anywhere. The seats are that comfy I’m goin’ to keep it in my living room.’
Scientists linked the car’s discovery to the Piltdown Man hoax. But a week later a man in Ohio dug a Kawasaki Ninja 250 motorcycle out of his flowerbed. In Hawaii a George Davis shot three of his neighbours over a dispute about a three mast and square-rigged Clipper, the hull of which extended under their property. A woman in Sydney unearthed a man-sized crucifix, the wood of which was carbon dated to over 2,000 years ago. Pastor Jack McMurty went on Fox News and scoffed at those that questioned theories of intelligent design. Science had been shown up to be what it was—a loser’s guessing game.
Three days later the equivalent of the Toi Gold bar worth over three million pound sterling was dug out of a ditch by children in Easterhouse constructing a den.
Seven days later Tam and Maggie Devlin had to line up with their neighbours with water containers to get water from a standpipe. Roads had been jackhammered. Newly planted crops were ploughed up and in some cases ripped out by hand. Sewerage pipes had been cut. Most of all he missed watching telly, but old-style analogue aerials has begun to reappear on rooftops. Fibre-optic cables had been cut so that the internet was a rich-man’s toy, a thing of the past to tell their children about. Not that they would believe them. They didn’t believe in anything but sticking metal pipes into the ground and searching for riches. They only needed to be lucky. They only wanted something for nothing. Nobody was going to stop them.
About the Author
Jack O'Donnell is from Dalmuir. Over the years, he's tried his hand at just about everything, from washing dishes to mental health care, monitoring elections to joining floorboards, editing to surveying traffic, care work to lugging bricks. And while accumulating all that life experience, Jack has also been pursuing a love for the written word on ABCtales.com, where he's a generous contributor to the community, a competition winner and a prized editor.
Jack has also written a book. Called Lily Poole, it’s described as a ground-breaking blend of ghost story, murder mystery and Scottish social drama. You can read a synopsis and an excerpt at this link: http://unbound.co.uk/books/lily-poole. And, if you like what you read, you might be inclined to make a pledge towards the book’s publication. Jack would be eternally grateful for any support.
Jack has also written a book. Called Lily Poole, it’s described as a ground-breaking blend of ghost story, murder mystery and Scottish social drama. You can read a synopsis and an excerpt at this link: http://unbound.co.uk/books/lily-poole. And, if you like what you read, you might be inclined to make a pledge towards the book’s publication. Jack would be eternally grateful for any support.