Dues

(Superstition factor: 11)

You see, most people only go up to 10, but me, I can go up to 11.


I bought a new fork, an all-steel one, because I have so far cracked three wooden handles whilst levering out brambles at the roots. I've developed a knack of plunging the fork in two or three times, testing to see which way the root branches off beneath the surface, (because they never go straight down, you know), and then giving a mighty plunge on the fork handle. This loosens the root enough for me to then get both hands around the stems and pull it out of the ground. Bramble nil, Me 1.

I sometimes feel guilty about murdering life-forms in this way: what I'm doing is against nature, after all. Left to themselves all plant life manages to achieve some sort of equilibrium. Some plants might achieve dominance in one patch of ground, but not everywhere. I come along and quite callously rip up this and that in order to allow the other to thrive where it previously had to share. And what's ripped out of the ground isn't even allowed a replant, it goes up in smoke or into the compost heap. I am final for lots of green life-forms. Am I too soft? Possibly. But I do it for money. A bit like the SonderKommando; it was their job. If they didn't, someone else would.

At the end of a busy afternoon I christened the new fork. We went to the bottom of the garden to plant a plum tree for the lady. I cut a nice hexagonal patch of turf out with a spade, then dug down with the fork to excavate a hole deep enough for the mass of compost around the roots. I reached for the plum tree to pick it up and shake off the pot, and one of the small branches raked my cheek viciously. As I shook off the pot I felt something trickling down my chin. Blood. It had slashed an inch-long scar on my face.

Little Petal, when I got home, asked what on earth I had been up to. "Dueling with a Plum-tree," I said with some bitterness.
"And it won?"
"So it would seem. I wasn't free to slash back at it."

Maybe the Plum-tree knew it could strike me with impunity, because I was just the hired help doing my job. Perhaps the uprooted brambles had clubbed together and slipped it a bribe to get me back for their untimely deaths. Or perhaps my customer is an ancient Wiccan who knows that trees need a blood-sacrifice if they are to grow into proper trees. Or perhaps a steel fork demands a christening in blood, since it is a weapon all the way through.

The next day, I was preparing to cremate several weeks worth of bramble-slaughter at another customers. I popped round to the yard to get an old oil drum with which to make an incinerator. I was told which drum to choose: not the one that had held anti-freeze, or the one which had held clean engine-oil, but the one which had held dirty oil. I recognised it easily enough, it was the dirty oily one, and carried it back to the workshop where the man was going to wizz round the top with a plasma-cutter so that I would end up with the basis for a very effective incinerator. I stood watching him prepare to start, chatting with another onlooker whom I hadn't seen for a while.

The explosion was memorable not for the noise, which was just a short violent bang, but for the absolute silence which followed it. It had been so unexpected that I had only the briefest memory of seeing the drum leap up three feet, the lid fly off out of sight, and the man with the plasma cutter jumping backwards for twice his length, and then that memory seemed to be blotted out by the silence. As I got used to the hush I realised my ears were ringing.

"Are you alright?" I called to him.
"I haven't got a clue," he answered, staggering out into the daylight and blinking.
He rubbed his hands through his hair and they came away black from the droplets of old engine oil which had been blasted out across the floor and up the walls.

Apart from a tiny drop of blood on the bridge of his nose and some singed hair, he was fine. I trod carefully through the patches of old oil and switched off the machine, then found the tools which had been flung from his jacket and the portable phone, scattered around the workshop floor. The drum lid, which other onlookers had said cleared the top of a nearby tree, was nowhere to be found.

I hadn't got the nerve to ask him to cut half-a-dozen air holes around the bottom of the drum a few inches up from the base. I paid him the money, and then put all my remaining change in the lifeboat box they keep on the shelf, as a way of saying thanks for being spared, yet again.

I used a club-hammer and chisel to punch holes in the drum and got the incinerator going, spending a couple of happy hours cremating the brambles and ivy I'd murdered the previous weeks. My trousers and fleece stank of burnt engine oil all the way home, and went straight into the washing machine.

That night, I dreamed, as I usually do, but this time it was, for me anyway, a very unusual type of dream. It began ordinarily enough: I was walking along a road that was covered in mud and debris, and the banks were littered with abandoned cars which seemed to have been washed along in a torrent of water. I had no clear idea what I was doing there, or how I had got there in the first place. A white camper-van pulled up and a man got out. He said he was the county sheriff, and told me to get inside.

There were two other men inside the back of the camper, his deputies. The sheriff asked me if I had a motor bike. I said that I didn't. He looked sad at that, but then said it didn't make any difference, I would still be just another victim of the bike-killer. I asked him what he meant, and he said "Ignorance is no excuse in this matter."

He went to the other end of the van and un-holstered his pistol. One of his deputies was sitting at a fold-down desk, filling out paperwork. The other deputy came down to where I was and offered me his gun. I shook my head.

"Take it," he said, thrusting it towards me, "We're making it fair."
I refused it again. I didn't want it.

I said I hadn't done anything. The sheriff laughed at that and said "You know? That's what all of them say."

The deputy offered the gun one more time and I said "No" in an insistent tone.

"Have it your way, then," the sheriff snapped in annoyance, and shot me. I saw the bullet moving towards me in slow motion, leaving behind it a trail of little bullet-outlines, just as in Matrix, and I tried to twist away and duck my head forwards, but I felt it rip into the back of my neck.

And then I died.

And then I woke up.

I have very rarely experienced death in my dreams, it is totally unlike what I normally see. So now I'm wondering if, because I cheated death in the daytime, I had to experience it in the nighttime, just to pay my dues.

My life is anything but mundane, I'll have you know.