Open Writing

“Two hundred and sixty-four.”

An index finger thrust emphatically above a ragged hedge. Old Thompson’s. Octogenarian and self-styled horticulturalist. Startled, I halted.

He framed himself behind his shattered garden gate, his trousers upheld by a length of rope, shirt clay-smeared, grizzled locks wild beneath a battered hat. The eyes glared at me in triumph, one hand aloft and a bucket suspended from it.

“Snails!” he spat the word at me.

Behind him stretched half an acre of suburb and a last-century mansion decaying on it. His lips parted in a grin.

“This week’s haul,” he said triumphantly.

The contents clashed against metal.

“You’ve been invaded,” I was somewhat humbled by my own lack of resistance to pests. “Snail bait helps.”

“Snail bait!” his response was sarcastic. “Hunt them out. That’s the only way.”

He shook the can again.

“3780 so far this year,” he said.

At that rate, I thought, they’ll take over the earth!

“Call in on the way back,” he waved me off. “I’ll have a couple of lettuce for you.”

I glanced over my shoulder. He was hobbling down to his vegetable patch. Most of his land was weedy and bare. Clearly the old bones couldn’t cope. Nevertheless he had green fingers. I’ve yet to see fatter melons or pumpkins, fist-sized spuds, clusters of beans, cabbages as large as your head and, of course, lettuce by the score. Then, jewels in the crown, apples and plums dangling in dozens.

“Cow pats,” he once reminisced, “can’t get them now. There used to be a dairy,” pointing across the valley. Then scornfully, “These new-fangled fertilizers. . . .”

No less change inside than out. The house had devolved to a dusty shell - blinds tattered, walls stained, plaster flaking. He slept on a canvas stretcher, the blanket like himself grey with age and long usage. An ex-army Spartan, my neighbour.

Last time I saw the seat of repose newspapers were layered underneath. Above a nearby chest of drawers was a dusty print of Thompson when young. Sepia tinted - or was it simply exposure to the elements? He’d never married. Seemed to have a grouch against women.

“There a ball and chain,” he once told me.

I’ve an idea he was turned down by one of them. Alongside his own was a photo of a girl posing with seagulls on a pier. His one and only? I’m guessing. She may have been one of the family.

All but two rooms were vacant as skulls. Your voice bounced off the walls. You could see dust rising whenever you moved. Outside on a splintered veranda he washed his rags (occasionally!) in a bricked copper fuelled from a subterranean recess. A shonky rocking chair stood beside empty boxes. His throne.

The back yard was a shambles. Under a peppercorn tree a dog, decrepit as its owner, lay tethered to an iron upright. Harmless to humans, it snapped lazily at a circlet of flies. They weren’t really threatened.

Incongruous, too, the three rose bushes flourishing beside a dusty foot track - splashes of colour in a wilderness. A vine assaulted the palings of the rear fence. A geometry of bearded and neglected garden beds confronted it.

Was he wealthy? Twenty years or so retired, he told me. What past employment had engaged him? He’d never divulged and I’d never questioned him. Relatives? He’d once mentioned the death of a brother in The States.

“First I’d heard about him in thirty years,” he told me. “Not even a Christmas card.”

Sometimes, passing the house at night, I’d hear him muttering to himself. Once he cried out angrily. I wondered whether his would be my future condition. Old Thompson - a spent force.

Lonely. As far as I knew, I was his only visitor. I’d imbibed with him now and then, elbow propped on a deal table near the fuel stove while he ladled the past into my ears and poured tea into chipped mugs. Five years ago his brother had passed away. An MP of some standing in the state parliament.

“Wronged by his own mates,” Thompson spat in the dust. “Something to do with funds. They were out to get him.” His anger rekindled. “An honest man if ever there was one.”

I had become his sounding board - glad to be. It was easy sitting there in the shade listening to his diatribe, his dredging of the past. Sometimes I caught his enthusiasm.

Then early one morning, a sparkler with droplets and birds beading the telephone wires, I found him sprawled full-length behind the hedge. My old friend dead as a dodo, a snail on his collar, another on his chest. They had reclaimed their kingdom.