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Like Fleas on a Dog's Back - Chapter 1

I buried my mother in the garden. She'd tended it for so many years the earth was easy to work. Too easy. The task should've been a penance, as exhausting as the latrine I dug beside the potting shed. Instead, it proved no more challenging than watching a gardening programme on the telly, which my mother did with religious devotion and which I sometimes endured in agnostic tolerance.

Maybe the lawn was lank and corrupted with invading daisies and dandelions, maybe the flowerbeds and vegetable plots had surrendered to battalions of brambles and assorted weeds, it was still recognisably my mother's garden. Oh, dad spent hours out here, too, contemplating his onions and trying not to get in mum's way, but it was always her garden.

I moved the azaleas she'd planted, her favourites, showing them all the care she would have done, keeping them safe while I cleared away the weed growth and dug the hole, then replanted the bushes in what was now a raised bed. It was a simple pyramid, and I wondered how long it would stay free of nature's return.

Afterwards I sat on the bench my father had built and regularly repaired in the face of perennial suggestions that we go buy some 'proper' garden seating. I sat, drinking from his bottle of malt whisky, watching the smoke drift across the treetops and point the way to town. I wanted to be alone with my ghosts, terminally alone. I wanted to be drunk, to exorcise the rational part of me that asked questions, needed explanations, sought answers. I wanted to be loud, maudlin and tearfully drunk, I wanted to guarantee that I could collapse unconscious and sleep without nightmares. All I could manage was as occasional sip from the bottle.

Memories aren't like a garden. They grow, they flourish, they fade away, but they're never orderly, you can't predict them like the seasons. You can't even weed them. The bad memories persevere, regardless how hard you try to uproot them. At best, they become numb, bland reminders of a past you try to convince yourself no longer hurts. Not really hurts. There are always fresh memories to plant, fresh weeds to spring up. But the echoes of the past endure.

This was the first time in weeks I'd felt any sort of certainty about life. Weeks? More likely years. This was my mother's garden, but it was planted with my memories. I'd grown up here. It was the one place on earth I'd always felt secure. It was one the place where I always felt confident about who I was and what

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