Uchenna's Apples

  Uchenna didn’t need to be told twice. Five minutes later she was out in the Back Office, curled up on her tatty couch and dialing furiously.

  Jimmy’s phone rang a few times: kept ringing. Come on, come on…! Uchenna thought. I have to find out about this! If this’ll work—

  “Yeah?” Jimmy said in her ear. “What?

  “What took you so long?” Uchenna said. “Thought I was going to get your voicemail.”

  “I don’t have that set up,” Jimmy said. “What’s up?”

  “Listen, I had an idea. Horses eat grass—”

  “Well, duh!” Jimmy said. “You win the smart prize for today.”

  “Shut up!” Uchenna said. “What I’m asking you is: sure, they eat it when it’s growing in the ground. But they’d still eat it after it wasn’t in the ground any more, wouldn’t they? After it was cut?”

  There was a pause. “Yeah, sure,” Jimmy said. “That’s all hay is, anyway, dried grass, though I think it’s not as good as the fresh stuff.”

  “Okay,” Uchenna said. “So let’s say you just mowed the lawn and then you gave them the clippings. Would they eat that?”

  There was another pause. “Yeah, they would.”

  Uchenna squiggled around where she sat out of sheer delight at her own cleverness. “That’s it!” she said. “I completely rock!”

  “And you’re so feckin shy about it,” Jimmy said.

  “Oh don’t be such a begrudger,” Uchenna said. “It’s the answer! We can mow people’s lawns and use the grass to feed the horses.”

  “And they’ll pay us for it,” Jimmy said after a moment, with a sudden air of someone who’d realized where the real high point of the scheme was.

  Uchenna almost shrugged: she was much more concerned with the horses than the money. Though there’s that new iPod I was wanting and Daddy told me to wait until Christmas… She grinned. Maybe Christmas was going to come early this year. But it wasn’t an issue right now. “Sure, whatever, never mind—” Uchenna said to Jimmy. “Let’s make a plan to—”

  “Never mind? You daft feckin doughnut, this is money we’re talking about—”

  “Tell me later, I’ve gotta call Emer,” Uchenna said. “Can you meet us at—” She glanced at the phone to see what time it was. “Five? We’ve got to work out the details on this.”

  “Think I can get away,” Jimmy said.

  “Okay. We’ll meet around the corner from the Spar.”

  “No! Anybody could see me there. Us.”

  That took Uchenna by surprise. “Okay,” she said. “How about the park by the train station, where the kids’ sandpit and the swing set are? You know that little bunch of trees on the east side there. Is that un-public enough for you?”

  A pause while Jimmy thought about it. “Yeah.”

  “Okay. See you then.” And Uchenna immediately hung up and dialed Emer.

  6: Entrepreneurship

  Half an hour later they were all sitting in among the trees at the back of the little park by the train station, where a few big boulders carved with Celtic spiral designs were scattered among low shrubs and plantings of heather. At the front of the park, on the development side, Adamstown mums could be seen pushing their babies on swings or sitting on nearby benches and gossiping while the wee’uns played in the giant sandbox. No one could see them from that side, which was as well, as Jimmy was still looking nervous about being here in the first place, and Uchenna kept wondering why.

  “It’s so retro, though. Mowing lawns?” Emer said. “Why don’t we open a lemonade stand while we’re at it?”

  Uchenna looked oddly at Emer. Emer rolled her eyes. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, waving her hands, “I keep forgetting, your lemonade is Seven-Up, not stuff you make at home. God, am I not in Kansas any more.” She looked around as if she’d lost something. “Where’s my little dog?”

  “Will you cut it out,” Uchenna muttered. “And anyway you have a cat!”

  “How’re we going to get the grass out of people’s yards and out to the horses?” Jimmy said.

  “Bag it up,” Uchenna said. “Not in really big bags: or we won’t fill them all the way, anyway. Afterwards we’ll carry the grass to where the horses are.”

  “It’s a good idea,” Emer said after a moment. “And it beats apples. At least the grass’ll keep them fed until we can find them something better.” She gave Uchenna a look. “Now all you have to do is convince your mam.”

  This was in fact the very thing that Uchenna was half wishing she could put off. But there wasn’t any time: she had to get permission for this right away so they could start first thing in the morning. “So let’s get on with it,” she said. “You guys have to come with me.”

  Jimmy’s eyes went a little worried. “What?” Uchenna said. “What’s the matter?”

  “Not sure I should be seen a lot on that side of town,” Jimmy said, looking away toward the tiny children on the playground swings. “Me mam ‘n’ dad don’t go that way, they don’t want us to go much either—”

  “It’s just until we figure out what else we can do about the horses,” Uchenna said. “Don’t worry about it. But we have to get started.” She got up and dusted herself off. “Come on, you guys can stay out in the Back Office while I deal with my mam.”

  As they headed out of the park, Uchenna noticed that Emer seemed a little uneasy about something: nearly as uneasy as Jimmy did. “What?” she said under her breath to Emer at one point, when they were heading into Uchenna’s circle and Jimmy had dropped a little behind to tie one of his shoes.

  “Nothing,” Emer said.

  “Seriously, what?”

  “I told you, nothing,” Emer muttered. Jimmy caught up with them. “Which one’s yours?” he said.

  Uchenna pointed at her house with her chin as they headed toward it. “Over there. Thought you knew.”

  “Haven’t seen it from this side,” Jimmy muttered.

  Emer snickered, then fell suddenly silent as Jimmy looked at her with an odd hurt expression. What is it with these two? Uchenna thought. But she had other problems now. Like Mam, she thought. All I have to do is act like everything’s okay… But she gulped as she waved Emer and Jimmy past her into the back yard, and herself headed into the house.

  *

  “Mowing lawns?” her mam said, looking at Uchenna with some surprise. She was stretched out on the couch in the front room, reading what Uchenna could see from the drug-company ads all over the back of it was a medical journal. “Whatever for, sweet?”

  Fortunately Jimmy had given her just the answer she needed. “Just to make a little extra money,” Uchenna said.

  Her Mam looked dubious. “But, sweet one, you get an allowance already, it’s not so bad as such things go—”

  Uchenna had known that this line of reasoning was going to come up, and she was ready for it. “Mam, I know it’s the same as what Daddy got when he was little, but this is the twenty-first century, everything costs more! You were saying so yourself in the store.” Her mother abruptly looked a little guilty, and Uchenna knew this was exactly the right note to have struck—especially after what she’d overheard last night. “And I want to start saving more so I can start getting bigger things when I want. Emer’s going to help, and our friend Jimmy from school.”

  Her mother got a thoughtful look, while Uchenna started to break out in a sweat. Don’t ask about him, don’t ask about him! But finally her Mam said, “It’s that iPod, isn’t it?”

  “Not just that, Mam,” Uchenna said, secretly relieved. “Other things too. But Mam, we want to get started as soon as we can! Tomorrow morning, first thing. There are a lot of people out here whose lawns could use a cut. It was so wet the past couple weeks, and now we’ve had some dry weather, all the grass is getting long—”

  “And you want to make hay while the sun shines,” Uchenna’s Mam said. Uchenna couldn’t help smiling.

  Her Mam thought for a moment, smiling a little too. “Well, we need to check it with yo
ur daddy: the lawnmower’s his department.”

  “Check what?” her Dad said as he came down the stairs into the living room.

  Uchenna explained. Her Dad looked thoughtful for a moment. “Flora?”

  Uchenna’s Mam shrugged. “I don’t see why not,” she said.

  “Well,” her dad said, “it’s lucky for you the lawn mower’s not the kind that you can hurt yourself with.” Theirs was a hovery type of lawnmower that, instead of blades underneath, used a rapidly-whipping nylon line to cut the grass. “What’ll you do with the clippings, though? There’ll be more than we can put in the composter.”

  “Just dump them over the wall, I guess,” Uchenna’s Mam said. “That seems to be what the gardeners around here do…”

  “Yeah,” Uchenna said, relieved: once again her Mam was saving everybody time by answering her own questions first.

  “Well,” Uchenna’s Dad said, “since you’re so eager, you can start with our lawn. I have to admit it’s getting a little long out there.” He threw an apologetic-looking glance at her Mam. “Somebody’s been ignoring any power tool that doesn’t have a screen attached to it…”

  “Okay!” Uchenna said. “Thanks, Dad! Thanks, Mam!” She ran out into the back yard.

  In the Back Office, Emer was slumped on the couch and watching the TV, while Jimmy had found a stack of Uchenna’s comic books under some of the stuffed animals, and was standing there paging through them. As Uchenna came in, they both looked up hurriedly. “Come on,” she said, “they say it’s okay, but I have to mow the back yard first.”

  “Great,” Emer said, “we’ll have something for the horses tonight!”

  She and Jimmy followed Uchenna out into the yard, where Uchenna went over to the shed and struggled as usual with the sliding latch that opened the shed door. Inside, the mower took up most of the space that was otherwise occupied by rakes and gardening tools and cardboard boxes of stuff that had migrated out here from the house. Uchenna reached up to the hook where the mower’s long electric cord hung, passed it back to Emer, and then pulled the mower out backwards by the long hooped handle.

  “And what’re we supposed to do?” Jimmy said.

  “Take turns emptying the grass into bags,” Uchenna said as she pulled the orange-shelled hover-mower out of the shed. “See, when you run this, it stores all the grass up inside a basket under the hump on top. When it fills up, you take the top off, pull out the basket, empty it into the bag. Then you put it back and start over.”

  “We should all get to take turns using the mower,” Emer said.

  Uchenna glanced over her shoulder: her dad was watching them out the kitchen window. “Not while we’re back here,” she said quietly. “Wait till tomorrow, when we’re mowing somebody else’s lawn. You guys should watch and look real interested, okay?”

  The others saw her glance at the window and understood what she meant. “Where does it plug in?” Emer said, picking up the plug at the end of the long orange cord.

  “Over there by the edge of the patio,” Uchenna said.

  Emer ran over to the capped outlet set into the outside wall of the house, flipped it open and stuck the plug into it. Uchenna threw the switch on the handle of the mower, and looked over her shoulder at Jimmy as the mower woke up. “Make sure you always stay behind me,” she said, “or at least three feet away on either side. That’s my Dad’s rule, so nobody’s feet get underneath there.”

  “Thought these things couldn’t hurt you,” Jimmy said as Uchenna started pushing the mower along the edge of the flower bed near the wall.

  “They won’t cut your foot off or anything, but if the cord snaps and flies off, you’ll get stung pretty good. Eames, look in the Back Office and get some plastic bags out of the drawer—”

  The mowing took longer than Uchenna would normally have taken over it, since she was really aware of her Mam and Dad looking out the windows at them every now and then, seeing how she and the others were behaving. But it all went smoothly enough. It didn’t take Emer and Jimmy long to work out how to get the mower open quickly, empty it out, bag up the grass and get the mower going again. After an hour or so they were all warm and sweaty, but could look around with satisfaction at a lawn that had been very tidily mowed, and also at six Tesco shopping bags stuffed full of grass.

  “So what now?” Uchenna’s mam said, wandering up the path from the house with a glass of wine in her hand, looking around admiringly at the yard. “I thought you were just going to put the grass over the wall. There’s no room in our composter, I looked the other morning…”

  “There’s a composter up by the school,” Emer said. “It’s big, there’s plenty of room in it—”

  “Well, as long as it gets recycled,” Uchenna’s Mam said. “And you’re—what was your name again?”

  “Jimmy Garrity, Mam,” Uchenna said, once more marveling at how fast Emer could improvise. “He’s in third form.”

  “Howya, missus,” Jimmy said. To Uchenna’s complete astonishment, he actually ducked his head a little to her Mam.

  She smiled slightly. “Hello there,” Uchenna’s Mam said. “All right, you three… it’s getting late, you want time to get over there and back before it starts getting dark.”

  “Let’s go,” Uchenna said. The three of them got busy putting the lawn mower back in the shed, coiling up its cord and hanging it up, and then picking up the bags of grass. They hustled out of the back yard with them, Uchenna waving at her folks as they went, and then headed out across the circle.

  “It would’ve been easier if we could’ve just thrown ‘em over the wall,” Jimmy muttered.

  “Wouldn’t have fit the story,” Emer said.

  “And they really do have a composter over at school,” Uchenna said. “How do you do that? I never would have thought of that.”

  “You made that up right then?” Jimmy said. “Hey, you’re a right ‘un.” He looked impressed.

  Emer shrugged and smiled. “It’s not hard,” she said. “I try to think about what might happen ahead of time. Then I’m ready when stuff really does happen.”

  The bags were surprisingly heavy. At the far side of the circle they paused, choosing their quickest route. “Down between those houses,” Emer said, nodding at the next circle, “hang a left into the side alley. Then out into the field—”

  “What’s down there?” Uchenna said, mystified. “There’s no way over the wall there—”

  “Got something better than that,” Emer said. And a few minutes later, Uchenna and Jimmy saw what she meant: for the wall at the end of the alley between the first two houses in the next circle was half knocked down.

  They went to look more closely at it. Someone had made a half-hearted attempt to drag some old rusty metal sheeting over the gap to patch it temporarily, but it could just be dragged aside. “Somebody rammed a car into it last night or the night before,” Emer said. “Trying to get into the next house’s back yard—”

  Is this the same place my Mam was talking about? Uchenna thought, with a shiver. Wow, this is close. It could’ve been the Back Office. And I could’ve been sitting in it— Nonetheless she pulled the scrap metal aside and peered through. “Come on,” she said, “we don’t have a lot of time. My Mam and Dad know how long it takes to get to school and back.”

  They hurried along in the warm sun on the far side of the wall, having to shift the bags from hand to hand often: the narrow handles of the thin bags cut into their hands. “We need a wheelbarrow for this stuff,” Emer said under her breath as they went across the field, making for the next hedgerow.

  “We won’t need it next time,” Uchenna said. “The people we mow lawns for won’t mind if we just throw stuff over the wall.”

  “You hope they won’t,” Jimmy said. “And afterwards you’re still gonna have to come around the other side and pick the grass up to take it to the horses—”

  They discussed the logistics of grass transport as they worked their way through the weeds and the grass to the
field on the far side of the Condom Ditch. It was further than Uchenna had thought, even with the shortcut they’d just taken: she found herself hurrying now so that she’d have a few minutes with the horses before she had to start back.

  As they made their way across the board that bridged the ditch, Uchenna saw the head of one of the black-and-white horses go up—one of the boy horse’s, she thought. Some noisy whinnying came from over that way as well.

  “I think they’re starting to figure out that we bring them stuff,” Emer said as she hurriedly squeezed through the hole in the hedge, pushing her bag ahead of her.

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said as he followed. “My Dad says horses are dumb about a lot of things, but food isn’t one of them.”

  On the far side of the hedge, the horses were now walking toward them with slow deliberation—and the Mammy Horse was in the lead. “Come on,” Uchenna whispered, feeling freaked out again as the sheer size of the Mammy impressed itself on her, “empty it all out for them, it’s not like they’re going to eat it out of the bags!”

  All three hurriedly emptied the grass out on the ground. The horses behind the Mammy Horse hung back a little, as if wanting her to make the first move. As Uchenna and the others backed away, the Mammy Horse walked over to the piles of grass, put her head down, sniffed at one of them, and without more than a second’s hesitation, started to eat.

  “Yay!” Emer said, and did a couple of very restrained little bounces of joy as the other horses moved up to have some grass too. More or less by accident, Uchenna and Emer and Jimmy had spread the bagfuls of grass out in a line rather than dumping them all in one heap: and the horses now moved up to that line, sorted themselves out side by side without too much pushing or shoving, put their heads down and ate.

  “They’re all so hungry,” Uchenna said, already feeling less happy than she had when the horses first started eating. The Mammy Horse was already almost halfway through her pile of grass, and what had seemed like a lot—at least while Uchenna was carrying it—now seemed very insufficient. “They’re going to be done with that in about ten minutes!”