They're Not Bugs

"A job done properly only has to be done once. That isn't wisdom, it's arithmetic."

I'd gone out at first light to get the backfill in behind the shed and found the retaining wall lying in the path instead. Not all of it. Enough. The bottom rail had let go somewhere in the night and taken a good part of the slope down with it, and there was a fan of mud and leaf-litter spread across the paving where the wall had been holding it back for a lot longer than it had any business holding anything.

So we'd done the wall.

It had wanted doing for three winters and I'd had it written down for three winters, which is not the same thing as doing it. Every year the water came off the slope and pooled along the back edge and sat there softening the ground until the timber bowed and gave, and every year I'd tacked something onto it and called that a fix. Band-aid carpentry. I'd said the words myself often enough that Karen had started handing them back to me.

Not this time. We pulled the lot out — splintered, warped, half of it gone soft as cork where the wet had been living in it — and put fresh hardwood in, and the new rails sat flush and true along the edge of the garden with the ends squared off and the fall behind them running where I'd wanted it to run since 2015. The whole thing smelled of cut timber. That sharp resin-and-sawdust smell hardwood gives up for about an hour after you work it and then never again.

Karen rolled her shoulders back and her spine cracked loud enough for me to hear it from where I stood.

"That took a bit longer than I expected," she said.

I huffed at her, loudly, and meant it to carry. "We would have been finished half an hour ago if you hadn't been so distracted by those bugs."

I knew perfectly well what they were. I'd known since about 1998. Calling them bugs cost me nothing and paid out the same every time, and I had never once got tired of it.

"They're not bugs!" She had the whole of it out before she'd finished turning round. Then: "They're—"

And she stopped. Teeth right on the edge of it. I stood there and watched her decide not to give me the morphology, and the deciding took her the better part of two seconds, and I got more out of watching her not say it than I'd have got out of the lecture.

They're beetles, I finished for her, on the inside, where it was safe.

I turned my wrist over to look at the watch. Fine grey dust had worked itself right into the weave of the strap and there was a smear across the glass that I wiped off on my thigh, which achieved nothing, so I angled it into the light instead. The number was further along than I'd have said. It always went that way on a job I was inside of.

"So when is this friend of yours supposed to be coming around?" I asked.

She was wiping her hands down the front of her trousers, which put more onto them than it took off, and appeared entirely untroubled by that.

"I told him to come at nine."

"Well, it's quarter past now."

I tried to keep that light and I don't think I entirely managed it. I have never minded waiting. I mind being made to wait by the person who chose the hour. And I'd been holding breakfast off since I got up, on the strength of an arrangement I hadn't made and hadn't been consulted about.

"You may as well get yourself cleaned up and start cooking breakfast," she said.

"You're not going to wait for him?"

More surprise in that than I'd intended to put there. If you ask a man for nine, you are standing in the yard at nine. I couldn't have defended it if she'd pushed. She didn't push, which was worse.

Luke Smith. One of the bus friends.

I'd given up trying to understand the bus friends a long way back. A bus was a thing you sat on quietly until it stopped. Karen got on one and came off it with a network. This one I'd met exactly the once, on a spring morning when I'd had to go into town with her — pleasant enough, easy smile, the sort who talks to strangers because it has never occurred to him not to. He'd been out here once as well, with Jane, who had been standing in my kitchen twelve hours ago with a mug in both hands while I was down the back being an idiot about a trench. Jane came and went. Jane brought relish, which I'd have driven to Berriedale for. This one had rung up out of nowhere and asked for a morning and been given one, with a cooked breakfast attached, and none of that was any of my business right up to the point where it involved my eggs.

"A tasty duck egg omelette waits for nobody," she said.

There was a sigh sitting in me with a fair amount of pressure behind it. I left it where it was.

"Okay then."

I gave her the tilt of the head, which was the whole of my argument, and went off down to the wash-house.

The path ran past the rosemary, which had grown out over the gravel again and put a hand across my thigh as I went by. The smell came up out of it and then stayed where it was, the way smells did on a cold morning instead of going anywhere.

The wash-house was a timber box at the bottom of the garden with a tin roof and a floor of river stones bedded into sand. I built it our second summer here out of whatever the demolition yard at Glenorchy had going that week, which is why the door has never once sat true in its frame. The window at head height had no glass in it, only a shutter I propped open, because glass sweats and a wash-house that sweats rots out from the inside inside of five years. The water came off the solar collector on the shed roof, which in July was a proposition rather than a promise.

I got the shutter open and the cold came straight in, which was the arrangement.

The gumboots came off at the door and stood where they always stood. The socks were a write-off. The jumper had gone stiff down the front where the mud had dried into the wool, and it came off over my head in one piece and held its own shape on the floor for a second before it gave up and slumped. The shirt underneath had a tide line across the belly where I'd been leaning into the top rail. The jeans I had to peel. The knees had been through the wet stage and out the far side of it and they cracked when I bent them, and there was a strip of grit worked right down the inside of the left thigh from kneeling on the slope.

I stood on the stones and took stock, which I did without meaning to.

Both forearms scored up from wrist to elbow — hardwood splinters, blackberry, and one long clean opening where the sandstone slab had come away and gone for Karen's ankle on the way down. I'd got a hand in to turn it and it had taken a strip off me doing it. A bruise on the right shin, yellowing at the edges, which put it two or three days old, and I couldn't have told anybody what from. The wrist from the night before was the loudest thing on me. Not swollen. Just wrong when it rotated.

And the hands.

The knuckles were split from the trench and hadn't closed over, and there was soil in them that no nail brush was going to shift before Thursday. Two nails black. A splinter in the pad of the left thumb that had gone in at an angle while I held the top rail steady for the drill and had spent every minute since letting me know about it whenever I closed my hand round anything. The pads of both palms rasped flat and shiny off the rails. The skin over the base of the fingers thickened where it had been thickened for twenty-odd years. The whole arrangement was a fair enough account of what I'd spent my life doing.

I got the needle out of the tin on the shelf — a sewing needle, sterilised over a match about four years ago and not since, which Karen would have had views on — and worked the splinter out. It took longer than it should have with hands that wouldn't hold still. It came out longer than it had felt going in, the way they generally did, and it bled a little and then stopped, and I put the needle back in the tin.

The tap was a brass thing off a farmhouse at Bagdad with a handle that wanted two hands in cold weather. I turned it on and stood clear and waited while the line brought down whatever the roof had managed overnight. Cold. Then colder. Then, after long enough that I'd started doing sums on the collector's angle and whether it was worth shifting for the rest of winter — hot. Properly hot, better than it had any right to be after a night like that one.

I got under it.

I stayed there a good while doing nothing useful at all. The heat went into the shoulders first and then found the back, and the back had been putting in complaints since the second rail and now had nothing left to complain about. The cold that had been sitting in my feet since sometime the previous afternoon finally packed up and left. The water going off me ran brown across the stones and away into the sand, then a lighter brown, and then it ran clear off my shoulders and stayed brown at the knees for a good deal longer, because the knees are always the last of it.

I did the hands last and did them properly, with the block of plain soap off the ledge and the nail brush that had been going bald for a year. Backs first. Then the webs. Then each nail. Then the knuckles, which stung enough to be worth doing. The soil came out of the shallow parts and stayed down in the deep ones, which is how it always went. Karen's hands would look much the same by tonight and neither of us would remark on it.

The smell coming off me changed as I worked down through it. Soil first, which is not a bad smell — turned clay with that cold mineral edge underneath. Then the sweat out of the jumper, which is a worse one. Then, right at the end and under everything else, the resin off the hardwood. It had got into my forearms out of the timber and it did not want to leave. I stood a moment longer with my hands under the water, doing nothing, letting the smell of the wall come off me, and that was the nearest thing to satisfaction I'd had in a fortnight.

The towel was on the third hook, which was mine. Karen took the second one somewhere around 2004 for reasons neither of us could now reconstruct, and the arrangement had held ever since.

Dry clothes off the shelf where I keep them for exactly this. Clean flannel shirt. Clean jeans. Dry socks, and the dry socks were the best part of the morning by a considerable margin.

My hair was wet and the morning hadn't warmed up at all and I found I didn't mind.

I stood in the doorway with the towel round my neck and the steam going out past me into the cold, and looked back up the garden at the wall. Straight. Squared. Doing the job it had been put there to do. The ground behind it would drain where I'd made it drain, and come August I'd know whether I'd read the fall right, and I already knew that I had.