I almost laughed, half-laughed, but managed to hold it back while making a mental note to consult the ledgers at Kew. There would be notes on this one, for sure. But still—and perhaps a little flippantly—I couldn’t resist saying, “Colonel, you’ll be telling me next there are four-leaved clovers on your lawn!”
“Yes.” He nodded, deadly serious. “And quite a few with six leaves, too. Eh, what? I’ve been preserving them for posterity, pressing them under ‘flora’ in my old gardening dictionary, for at least a fortnight now!” Then he showed me his right forearm: a fresh red scratch deep enough to leave a scar. “See this? Got it from my ‘thornless’ roses—by God!” He scowled at the sore red gouge. “And what do you think of that? Eh, what?”
I scratched my head. “Something in the pollen? GM rapeseed maybe? I remember they were experimenting with it last year in a field not a quarter of a mile away. Some people from Friends of the Earth and a slew of other so-called eco-friendly groups were down there, ripping it out as quickly as they could plant it. But they didn’t get it all. The police were there dragging them away, putting a stop to it. And then, just lately, there’s been this problem with the bees.”
“Eh, bees?” the colonel queried, somewhat absentmindedly. “Never bother with the little buggers. Eh, what? Got enough on my hands with the greenfly, sod ’em all! I did get stung once, though.” Frowning, he sat down in one of his favourite places: a rustic oak bench where it circled the magnolia. And resting his back against the bole, he squinted up at me and asked, “So what’s that you were saying? Something about the bees? Come to think of it, I haven’t seen a bee in quite a while.”
“That would be about right,” I told him. “It seems there’s something of a scarcity. The local beekeepers are complaining that the workers haven’t been making it back to their hives.”
Sellick clenched a military jaw, narrowed his eyes, gloomed out over his quarter acreage. “It’s not right,” he growled. “It doesn’t feel the same. This year—I don’t know—it’s like it isn’t my garden at all! Ever since that bloody meteorite! Well, bollocks to it! One way or the other, I’ll get my garden back.” And starting to his feet: “It’s Friday. Do you fancy a pint?”
And I did, so we took the river path and made our way down to the Olde Horse and Carriage…
The following Monday I spent an hour looking for Sellick’s ivy in the manuals at Kew Gardens. I never did find it, though. And I never will. It simply isn’t there, never will be unless I name it and register it myself; name it after old Sellick, perhaps?
If ever I get the chance.
If we win this war with the rest of the damned foliage: the ivies, roses, and clovers—and the fungi, mosses, and ferns—these and every other botanical order and species that was ever catalogued, all of them changed now and forever changing. Every damned one of them. Hundreds, thousands of seething, continuously mutating species; most of them hostile to animal life, just as animal life was once inimical to them…
My mind went sideways again. Meteorites and shooting stars.
Those previously “crazy” people who believed that life came to Earth on meteorites or in the tails of comets. I mean, that was something I’d never been able to take on board! Here we had a world of soft oceans and rocks worn down into soils that were simply screaming to be inhabited; an oxygen rich atmosphere and free running rivers of fresh water; black smokers pouring their chemicals into the depths of soupy seas, and lifebuilding ribonucleic acids galore. Was it any wonder life happened here?
And then on the other hand we had this “ridiculous” theory of maggots from Mars and other places: space-rocks falling out of the skies to seed the predawn Earth with life. That was what I couldn’t get my head around: rocks, without air, water, any-damned-thing at all, cruising the universe’s most deadly environment, outer space, with these dormant seeds clinging to them. How in hell did those seeds get stuck on the meteorites, or in the comet’s tail, in the first place? Where did they come from?
And that’s not the end of it. For then this chunk of interstellar debris comes hurtling down at tens of thousands of mph, gets burned black from atmospheric friction—without damaging the seeds, of course—and slams down with sledgehammer force, releasing, but not hurting, its passenger/s. For me, that just wasn’t logical. Not then, anyway.
No, for then I’d believed in Gaia, Mother Earth, Ma Nature, the planet perceived as a living entity. And that was where I’d made my mistake, me and thousands of others. We’d been thinking on a less than cosmic scale—indeed a microscopic scale—that was typical of human egocentricity; thinking in terms of a tiny little mudball Earth-nature, and almost completely ignoring the fact of the great big universe out there. Much like the Inquisition, we’d considered our world as the “Center of Everything”, when the center of everything was an entire Big Bang away back at the beginning. What we should have been thinking wasn’t Gaia but Galactica, or at the very least Megagaia: not Earth-mother but Galaxy- or Universe-mother.
A nature through all space and time that’s just waiting for the right conditions. Planets form around a star; they cool; Ma Nature—Universal Nature—is waiting. She tried before, but her babies got burned up. No problem; she has plenty more; it’s just a matter of hitting the right place at the right time. For after all, how many dandelion seeds land on rocks or in deserts or oceans? A very hit-and-miss process, true: trial and error, but they get there in the end. And time is on Megagaia’s side.
So eventually the time is right; another rock falls out of the sky, slams down on the surface of this entirely conjectural planet. There are the makings of life on the new world, perhaps even the first amoebic stirrings on the fringes of soupy oceans, and that’s what Universal Ma Nature is looking for. That’s what she does. She assists. She releases the meteorite’s gasses, or whatever it is that those bloody things contain: the catalysts that form chains in the RNA, that bring about life or—where it already exists—accelerate its evolution!
It was guesswork, of course, science fiction, but…just suppose I was right? And now I’m not thinking some conjectural world but Earth again. If I was on the right track, then maybe this wasn’t the first time this had happened. Back then, after the big lizards and their killer rock, maybe there was another space pebble, something that balanced things up again, brought about mutations, caused life to continue. The dinosaur survivors became birds, and a certain branch of scared little mammal creatures became monkeys and then men.
And why not? I mean, they’re still looking for the missing link. And maybe I can tell them where to find it: behind glass in a museum in a town not far out of London…
Two and a half years ago, that might have been when I poisoned Kew—but accidentally, of course. Anyway, Kew wasn’t the only thing that was dying. Lots of things died.
I remember a certain story, a piece of fiction. (I used to read scads of macabre stuff, anything from E. A. Poe to Stephen King.) This one was by an American author whose name I’ve since forgotten. But he was very good. Coincidentally, it concerned a colour out of space, something that crashed out of the sky on a meteorite. It seems especially relevant now…though nowadays I can’t think why I chuckled at the idea of malevolent, shining mutant skunk cabbages! Or I can…but it no longer strikes me as funny…
It was the last Saturday of summer. I had been down to the Olde Horse and Carriage last night, but old man Sellick hadn’t shown up. That was peculiar; the colonel liked his Friday night pint. Something else that was rather odd: the pub’s usually excellent menu wasn’t nearly up to scratch. Meat, but no fresh vegetables…only frozen ones. Fish, but no homemade chips. And then, on overhearing a few snatches of conversation from a group of disappointed, would-be diners, I couldn’t help but feel troubled:
“Salad days? Forget it! Tried buying tomatoes or a lettuce just lately? Rotten soil, no rain, no spuds…not that taste like spuds, anyway!” And: “My apples are blistered to hell and full of yellow shit. Taste like it, too. I caught some vil
lage kids scrumping in the orchard. Next thing, they’re curled up in the grass crying and puking their guts out. Poor little buggers, I didn’t have the heart to give them a hard time. But I’ll give you odds they were shitting their pants all the way home!” And: “Don’t talk to me about apples. Last year, mine were eaten rotten from the inside out by wasps. This year I’d be pleased just to see a bloody wasp!”
Trouble with the veg, yes, but all very local. The restaurants were shipping veg in! Blame it on the weather or something…or something.
So then it was Saturday morning and I gave old man Sellick a call. His phone rang but the colonel didn’t answer. Yet from my upstairs balcony I could plainly make out something of him—the odd patch of suntanned skin, tatty jeans, and stained white shirt—stirring under the foliage in his garden. Not fifteen feet from his open door, he must surely hear the phone ringing—I could just about hear it myself—but he wasn’t making any attempt to answer it.
Something had to be wrong, so I went round to his place and into his garden to enquire personally.
I couldn’t believe how quiet the garden was as I approached down the crazy-paved path. No birds—not a one—and I truly missed the buzzing of bees. As to why I hadn’t noticed anything before, I mean in my own garden: that’s hard to say. I had been busier than usual, putting in a lot of overtime at Kew. There’d been a great many queries from the public about odd hybrid species; many specimens had arrived, been isolated, were being studied by various botanical specialists. Maybe that’s the answer: I’d had too much on my plate to notice what was going on in my own or Sellick’s garden, the weirdness that was happening.
But the old boy had noticed it, certainly; and right there and then on that garden path, suddenly I could feel it, too…I felt the strangeness, like an alien cloud hanging over everything. Oh, it was very obvious. And the colonel had had it dead to rights the day he’d told me, “It’s not right—doesn’t feel the same—not like my garden at all!” Dead to rights, yes.
But where was Sellick? I jumped twelve inches when a hedge cutter burst into clattering mechanical life. And there he was, the colonel: under a small mountain of Clematis vitalba, traveller’s joy, where his garden shed had used to be. Hell no, where it was now—a considerable wooden structure—but buried deep in the clematis! What in the name of…? Why had he let it get so rank, so out of hand?
Anyway, as a great swath of it was sliced through and toppled to the ground, he saw me framed in the gap and switched off his machine. Then, stumbling over a heap of cut growth as dense as box hedge, finally he confronted me. Grimy, dishevelled, and with sweat rivering his dusty face, he panted a hoarse, resentful greeting and continued, “Meteorite? No, that was more than just any old meteorite. It was the green hand of God, advising us to go easy on the GM stuff! And for the last fortnight I’ve been fighting this…this green jungle that you bloody scientists…and botanists,” (he literally spat that last word in my face,) “have conspired to make of my garden!”
“Colonel, I—” I began.
But waving his hedge cutter at me until I fell back a little, the old boy almost literally cut me off. “My roses are far bigger, and more beautiful than ever before,” he snarled, “but their thorns are inches long, and for all that I keep trying I can’t dead-head ’em. You know how you’re supposed to nip their withered heads off to encourage new growth? Well, these things are like bloody rubber: they stretch but they won’t break. And as for encouragement—I swear they don’t need any! What? They don’t even like being touched!” He showed me his arms, his new wounds criss-crossing a great many old ones.
“Gordon—”
“And look at this!” He hurled a bloodied arm to point at his shed where it leaned under the weight of rampant clematis. “Would you believe—could you believe—I cut this lot back just three days ago? You’re lucky with your garden, which I’ll admit I’ve long despised: all those flagged paths between segregated beds, more like a piece of fancy tatting than a garden proper! Lucky? Oh, yes: because you don’t have half the damned greenery that I’ve got! Eh, what? Why, right now you haven’t a tenth of it! And as for the grass…now tell me, what do you make of the bloody grass?”
“Gordon,” I tried yet again. “I mean, am I to be allowed to speak, or what?”
He didn’t answer, just stood there glaring at me, or if not at me at the world in general; stood there with his chest heaving and the sweat of his uneven fight running down his neck and staining his shirt.
But now that I was able to answer him I could find nothing immediate to say, except: “Grass? What on earth are you talking about?” Where we were standing there was a little grass—a few tufts coming up between the chinks in a small paved patio area—but apart from the fact that it was coarse and needed tending it looked normal enough to me.
“You haven’t noticed?” He stared hard at me, then relaxed a little. “Ah, no, but then you wouldn’t, would you? You’ve not got enough of the bloody stuff, not in your pallid little horticulturist’s paradise!”
Now I was annoyed and told him so. “You’re taking all your anger out on me,” I said, “insulting me. But I didn’t cause any of this and I don’t much care for your accusations. Oh, I agree something is wrong with the vegetation—but the problem isn’t special to you and your ‘bloody’ precious garden! Weird looking plants, seeds, and fungi are arriving at Kew daily, and there’s been some strange stuff happening in gardens all over the southeast. It seems we’re right in the middle of this…this infestation, whatever it is. And it could well turn out that you’re right and our extraterrestrial visitor was its source. I can’t guarantee that, mind you. But I do care about what’s happening; while on the other hand I don’t much care for this tongue-lashing from a cranky old soldier! God, I only came round to see if you were okay! I missed you at the pub last night.”
At that, whatever sort of fury—or funk?—he was in, the colonel snapped out of it at once. “Good Lord!” he said. “Oh my good God! Eh, what? But that wasn’t like me at all! No, not one little bit. Not to a friend. And you’ve been a very good friend. But…” He gave a helpless, frustrated shrug. “It’s the garden. I mean, it’s really getting me down. I’m sorry. What more can I say or do?”
“Well, for a start, you might want to flush it out of your system!” I told him. “And first off: what’s all this about the grass? Yes, as I’ve already allowed, there seem to be some serious problems with all sorts of greenery, but to the best of my knowledge no one’s so far mentioned anything about grass!”
“Come,” he beckoned. And as we walked, skirting the sprawling undergrowth—the rose tangles, and the overgrown brambles that not too long ago were cultivated blackberries—he inquired, “You don’t have a lawn as such, do you?”
“No,” I told him. “At the front I have a wide gravel drive, ornamental pools and fountains, two chestnut trees over clover, and floral borders—all of it walled. At the back: well, it’s pretty much as you described it, except it too is walled, protected. As for grass: grass means work, and it isn’t especially interesting…er, from my point of view, that is.” (I didn’t want to start him off ranting again.)
“But I do have a lawn,” he said, “or I used to.”
“Used to?”
“Just here,” he nodded, grimly, “to the side of the house.”
But as I went to turn the corner he caught my arm. And: “Go careful, my friend,” he told me, very quietly, and in that same moment I thought I felt a shudder running through his hand into my arm. “I think we should go very carefully!”
I frowned at him, glanced around the corner of the house, and saw little or nothing that might be considered extraordinary or dangerous. A square, flagged path surrounded a lawn some ten by ten yards; and central in the lawn a white plastic table supported a floral parasol and was flanked by a pair of folding chairs. After a moment, I looked at the colonel enquiringly.
He gave an impatient nod of his head and said: “The grass—look at the grass.
”
The grass…was green, even, and looked in good health. I couldn’t understand why he’d let it grow so long—a good eight or nine inches—but other than that…
“I cropped it last Thursday,” he told me then. “Just a few days ago; cropped it as short as a bloody billiard table! Nothing normal grows that fast or that even. Every single blade is the same length. No meadow, no golf course or bowling green was ever so uniform. And there’s something else. Something really—I don’t know—macabre?”
He stepped round the corner of the house onto the path, and I followed in his footsteps, urging him: “Well, go on—what is it?”
“You see that mound,” he said. “Near the far corner there?”
The ground had a small but definite hump where he was pointing. We followed the path to the corner in question, and as the colonel halted, crouched, and stared hard at the mound, I said, “Yes, I see it. What of it?”
“Look closer.”
I did, and saw something of what he was getting at. Deep in the grass, the last six inches and scraggy tuft of a cat’s tail stuck up out of the ground. And a few inches away, a furry paw, claws extended, was also visible.
“You buried a dead cat there,” I said. “But not nearly deep enough.”
“I did no such thing.” He shook his head. “I buried nothing there—but the grass did! Let me tell you about it:
“Yesterday, I was battling with the garden, as usual. Hell, it’s my bloody garden, after all! But working late, I was just too tired to bother going down to the pub. As the shadows lengthened I went upstairs; I would have an early night, and get an early start this morning. But looking from the window up there, I saw this manky old moggy come out of the shrubbery. I really hate cats because they piss on every-damn-thing in the garden! Anyway, this one appeared to be on his last legs: he was stiff and scraggy; his eyes bulged; he could hardly walk. But he made it this far before collapsing. I thought: ‘Well, in the morning he’ll either have moved on or he’ll be dead—eh, what? And if the latter, then I’ll bury him.’