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Luke lost everything. As the saying goes. From the day that he was let go from his job in the City with nothing on the horizon, he started to slip slide irresistibly down the grassy bank of obsolescence until eventually he took a hand in propelling himself towards the valley bottom. It was a seductive process. There was a part of him which enjoyed the surrender – like drowning in warm olive oil. His job had been heavy and all-encompassing to the point where he no longer feared death and saw it only as a long lie-in.
Very much the establishment man, Luke had a well-proportioned physique, important haircut and the healthy good looks of a successful City trader who wears Savile Row in the week and Abercrombie at the weekend. This slow, unpunctuated life was all new to him. At first he tried to become an alcoholic and built up an impressive stock of spirits, wines and six packs, but at heart he knew that a real addict would never have a selection of bottles, apart from empty ones. He remembered an older friend at university, a seasoned and committed drinker, who laughed maniacally when Luke gave him a wine rack for his birthday.
But in other areas of his decline Luke excelled – he stopped shaving, got up late, watched daytime TV and accumulated a tottering cityscape of unwashed dishes in the kitchen. His wife, Rebecca, left him when all the utilities were eventually cut off and her husband no longer answered her questions. She was not angry, more saddened and bewildered to see him so compromised. He hoped that she would be OK.
Something catastrophic had happened to Luke’s willpower and his muscles simultaneously. Like a lump of wet cardboard he felt heavy, disintegrating and inert. Yet despite his malaise, something warm and light within him strove to recover and cast around for a glimmer of purpose in the dark days leading up to Christmas.
The tinselled holiday slipped by uncelebrated by Luke, like a large celebrity in the room, ignored and unrecognised. The house in Highgate was repossessed at the beginning of the New Year and, five months after he had been made redundant, Luke moved into a basement flat near Holloway with a 1980s kitchen and an avocado-coloured bathroom. He left everything he owned in the house except for a few items of clothing and some books. Throughout his fall from grace Luke had continued to read, but these days he stopped as soon as the book jarred with him or made him feel an outcast. He became wary of certain story lines and themes – a book set in Europe in 1914 was likely to end in tragedy with all the major characters either dying or losing their marbles. Those set in high flying businesses were worse and caused him to recoil in horror. He baulked at anything too glamorous or too kitchen sink and negotiated a narrow path of tepid stories and biographies of which he knew the ending. The woman at the library (he didn’t buy books any more) was intrigued by his anaemic tastes and often suggested cosy new publications with blurry vignettes of a cottage on the cover.
The garden only caught Luke’s attention when he was retrieving a dustbin lid blown off by a gust of wind one Sunday morning. It was a small yard, maybe 30 feet long and 18 feet wide, filled with the debris of former tenants: old bicycle parts, calor gas bottles, odd shoes, and the discarded fast food containers of passers-by. Wading through this urban flotsam, he noticed a rose growing up towards the sky despite the car tyre leaning against its stem. Lifting aside the heavy crown of rubber he saw that the flattened foliage underneath was a deathly pale yellow. In a surge of empathy he cleared away other rusting objects to reveal more etiolated and stunted plants within what looked like the contours of a once tended garden.
Two days went by with Luke clearing the rubbish and dead vegetation whilst scrutinising what remained in an attempt to distinguish weed from decorative plant. Crouching down near the earth, the smell of leaves and soil intoxicated him and the dirt under his fingernails was redolent of summer and salad.
At the library his new ally advised him on gardening books and even suggested robust shrubs which would survive anywhere and in the hands of the most inexperienced gardener. A week passed and Luke was on the bus to the garden centre armed with a list. His redundancy money and savings were dwindling but he chose plants over everything else. At the nursery he bought four shrubs and some summer bedding and struggled on to the bus with his purchases to sit amongst the cool green fronds like a bird in a bush.
Nothing else cluttered Luke’s mind. It was as if a sweet-smelling wind had passed through dislodging old worries and preoccupations. He only thought of the garden, from 9 to 5 and from 5 to 9. It grew and flowered in his dreams. The names, as yet unattached to families, eddied in his sleeping and waking hours – Mexican Orange Blossom, Japanese Quince, Bleeding Hearts. At night he floated over other gardens, was lifted by the pungent pink and yellow scents and rolled in autumn leaves.
As summer rose up from the ground Luke’s garden swelled like green ink dropped into water. Sunlight settled in his new room and warmed his arms and forehead as he knelt to weed. His eyes adjusted to focus on the miniscule – the insects on the lavender, the minute buds along a stem. Sometimes he lay in the earth among the new shoots to see the beginnings close up.
Throughout June Luke was in his garden twelve, sometimes thirteen hours a day. He had learnt the names of many plants and weeds and with every new piece of knowledge he became more engrossed. One Tuesday he spent all day planting cuttings he had taken surreptitiously from the park. He was humming a quiet tune to himself and neither the past nor the future held any interest for him in that moment. Suddenly he became aware of the towering magnolia tree spreading overhead from the next garden, its giant, pristine white flowers opened like cupped hands, right then he stopped working, his loamy fingers motionless in mid air. And he looked up.

Alice Smith