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  Subject: DUMPED SKIP

  Dear Sir/ Madam

  After repeated attempts to telephone you (is your phone cut off?) and writing to you I hope email will get through. One of your skips has been dumped on vacant land in front of my house and has not been collected for FIVE MONTHS. It is now overflowing with household waste, including a filthy mattress that smells of dead dogs. I imagine. Please can you move it immediately otherwise I will have to take legal action.

  Yours sincerely

  Edda Mackenzie

  189 Geoffrey Road, Brockley, SE4 1NT

  One

  “Where’s the goddamn trowel, Edda, I need it right now!” Beth called from inside the skip.

  “Shhh!” I was on the pavement below and looked up from my cork-wrangling. “I haven’t got the trowel,” I hissed as loudly as I dared. “You were going to bring it.” I turned back to the bottle of Cava. Why I’d bought Cava I don’t know: the deafening POP! was going to wake the neighbourhood and blow our cover. We should have brought something silent like a box of wine – although how much we would actually have achieved if we’d brought an entire box of wine with us was another matter. I also should have brought night-vision goggles: who would have thought it would be so dark? Only every other street light was working.

  “Edda we talked about this!” A stern-voiced Beth peered over the top of the skip. “I mean, for God’s sake Eds, the plan was that you would bring the trowels and I would bring – the – oh pants – no no, it was me bringing trowels wasn’t it? Oh, hon, I’m sorry!” She sank back into the skip again, out of view. “I don’t know what’s got into me lately,” her voice wobbled into the night, “I’m all over the place! I’d swear I’m going completely mad. I am! I’m going mad…”

  Shpfut-thhhhhhhh. The cork greasily slid out of the Cava bottle. It was obvious from the wet noise that the drink inside the bottle was not destined for greatness.

  But who cared about greatness? It was Cava – probably – and it was needed. I clambered up onto a rickety dumped chair I’d found inside the skip and got into the skip itself beside my best friend. “It’s fine that we don’t have trowels,” I said, sniffing the neck of the bottle. “We can trowel with our hands. I bunged two spades in the shopping trolley, so we’ll be OK for the big stuff. Here – try this!” I drank from the bottle and passed it to her.

  And nearly threw up. “Urgh!”

  “Bloody hell, Eds!” Beth angled the label to the faint orange street light to read what she’d just imbibed. “It’s like … it’s like … white wine vinegar. Carbonated.” She gamely took another swig and passed it back. “Dear God! But hey it’s probably really good for my teeth though. How are they – are they Hollywood white now?”

  “I can’t see, Beth. It’s dark.”

  “So it is.” She laughed, took another mouthful, gasped and passed the bottle back to me.

  “Shall we have a fag before we start?” I said, hunting in my pockets. Anything to delay the start of the actual manual labour.

  Beside us were two shopping trolleys, merely borrowed – and in no way stolen – from the local Sainsbury’s in New Cross Gate. They were filled to the brim with bags of topsoil, shrubs and flowers. Mr Iqbal from the corner shop had lent us vast empty water bottles refilled with tap water – For a party is it girls? I don’t know – you two girls are forever on the town. You need to get yourselves good husbands and you know my two sons are very successful in the City. Did I tell you about my Ali who is forty and a very good looking boy…

  The water bottles were much too heavy to lift so to transport the water from the bottles in the trolleys to the garden we had the tiny watering can that I’d had as a child. Beth had scoffed when she saw it, but I loved my watering can. Around the body of the can was a picture of Zippy and Bungle holding an enormous marrow which, even at an early age, had struck me as inappropriate: something to do with the look in Zippy’s eyes.

  It had been 1am on Saturday morning when we had finally sneaked out of my house after many fortifying bottles of beer. We’d each pushed a squeaky trolley the few metres across the road to the offending waste receptacle, which for all the complaining in the world had proved immovable. An hour of settling, stamping and pushing later, and the dumped waste only came three-quarters of the way up the abandoned skip, leaving us the top to cover in soil and plant up. My plan was coming together.

  Beth knocked back the Cava. “Let’s save the fags for when we’ve put the soil in… This skip stinks! Do you think there really is a dead dog or something in the bottom?”

  �
��Get down!” I hissed, and as one we ducked.

  “What is it?” came a tiny voice beside me.

  “It’s Babs. I think I see her watching from her bedroom window,” I whispered.

  “Babs? Babs from next door? God I hate that old crone!”

  “Don’t be so rude. I like Babs.”

  In the dark I could just make out that Beth had turned in my direction and was staring incredulously at me. “Seriously Eds, you don’t really like her do you? She’s just a miserable old rumourmonger. Here,” she reached over the side of the skip to the trolley and passed me an enormous sombrero, which I donned while she put on her own. Our disguise was now complete. No one, not even my neighbour Babs with her beady eyes, would know who was gardening the skip. Unless of course Babs had noticed the shopping trolleys in my front garden, which for the last week had been piled with bags of topsoil…

  It was my job to heft the bags of topsoil from the trolleys up to the skip and it was Beth’s job – on account of feeling under the weather – to open them and distribute the soil over the dumped waste. A quarter of an hour of hefting and carbonated-white-wine-vinegaring and we were done: the aroma of dead dog was sealed off for good. A mini garden was being born. I clambered up onto the cool earth and together we enjoyed our Marlboro Lights – no easy task when sporting a one-metre sombrero – and the rest of the Cava, leaning back against the rusty metal of the skip.

  “You know this is such a cool idea of yours honey – it’s going to look ace!” Beth gave me a one-armed hug and we clashed hat brims. “And I just can’t believe that you actually came up with it! Of all the people!” She laughed, quietly, and tipped back the Cava bottle.

  “Ha!” I said. And then added, “Me of all people? You’re surprised?”

  “Well a bit. Do you want any more of this by the way?”

  I took the bottle from her. “Surprised by what?” I asked, as lightly as I could.

  “What? Oh. Well. I suppose it’s just that you’re usually so … I don’t know … you’re usually quite reserved?”

  “Reserved?”

  “OK, quiet then.” Beth contemplated her cigarette. “I mean, illegally planting up a skip in the dead of night seems a bit extreme. For you. That’s all. Cracking idea, though, my love. Brilliant.”

  “I can be extreme,” I said, in a small voice. “You know I can.” After spending half our life together Beth must surely have up her sleeve one or two examples of when I’d been extreme.

  Beth lifted up her sombrero and looked me in the eye. “Darling you’ve never been extreme in all your life. Not ever. And that’s no bad thing.” She managed to find me in the dark and plant a hat-dislodging kiss on my forehead. “I guess you just snapped when no one listened to your complaints. Did you call the newspapers by the way? They’re usually pretty good for stories like this and once the papers get hold of it then the Council will have to do something.”

  “They weren’t interested. Unless there was a body in the skip and then they said they’d send someone round.”

  “What about the dog?”

  “I think they meant a human body. Anyway there might not actually be a dead dog beneath us: it just smells like there’s one there.”

  “I hope there isn’t. It’d be kind of freaky if we were sitting above a dead dog. Now pass the bottle over and— It’s empty! Edda you’ve finished it all!”

  “I think you had more than half actually,” I said.

  “I think not! You’ve pigged the goddamn lot! How am I supposed to carry on with this illicit manual labour without any more Cava? Since you finished it you should go and get some more.”

  “Beth! You could go too – you had just as much as I had. If not more.”

  “Yes but that’s your house, right there. That is your living room window. I can see your cat sleeping on your bedroom windowsill.”

  “You boss me about too much.” I said but nevertheless stood up and made to exit the skip. Not such an easy thing to do in the dark with a sombrero and after drinking half – well, maybe three-quarters – of a bottle of Cava.

  “I do not boss you around too much,” Beth waved my comment away. “You love me telling you what’s what. If you didn’t have me to boss you around you’d be— ”

  “I’d still be up in a skip with a trowel, but on my own. And I’d have had a bottle of Cava all to myself.”

  “Shut up, woman, and do as I say and get more supplies!” and she threw a handful of topsoil at me.

  Extract from the Lewisham Advertister

  SKIP SKIP HOORAY!

  FROM ABANDONED SKIP TO CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW CONTENDER

  Something beautiful is happening in Brockley. On Saturday night, an abandoned skip was transformed into a miniature Garden of Eden fit for the Chelsea Flower Show itself. The skip, situated in the conservation area of up-and-coming Brockley, had been left there when local firm Invinci-Skips went into receivership. It had become a dumping ground for the community but one enterprising individual – or individuals – has turned it into something quite remarkable, as our picture attests. Painted in Farrow and Ball’s Saxon Green, the skip features trailing variegated ivies, scented rosemary bushes and striking scarlet geraniums that brighten the street.

  “Brockley is on the rise,” says Eustace Fox, proprietor of Fox Estates of Brockley. “Once the suburb of choice for the wealthy Victorian industrialist, Brockley is being reclaimed by wealthy urban families appreciative of its beautiful early Victorian houses, large gardens and proximity to Central London. We’re just seven minutes away from London Bridge. I’m not surprised people are taking responsibility for their area, there’s a lot of love for the neighbourhood and the new Brockleyites are a force to be reckoned with.”

  So, for now Brockleyites are enjoying their new garden. But can a leopard really change its spots? Is Brockley ready for gentrification and a move towards becoming the new Greenwich? Perhaps not just yet: already the vandals have paid a visit to the skip and left their mark. “It’s such a shame,” Eustace Fox had to concede, “that disgraceful youths have thrown several empty Cava bottles and fag ends into the new skip garden. Some people have no respect.”

  Two

  Something really odd was happening. Since the skip escapade, I’d hardly seen Beth at all. In fact, I hadn’t seen her at all: all I’d had was a couple of text messages about the cheapness of the Cava, the cheapness of me for having bought it, and having sore muscles after the digging. Apart from that: silence. I’d left messages and had even wandered down the road to her flat, earlier in the week, to see how she was doing, but both she and Jack had been out. Or hiding.

  It was strange: horrible and strange, because I usually saw her or spoke to her if not every day then every other day. But it had been nearly a week and I was getting concerned. And lonely: the weekend was looming and it was going to be a long and barren one after the text on Friday night:

  sorry hon feeling dreadful. resched Saturday? B x

  I’d texted back but there had been no more replies. Just what was going on with Beth?

  So, on Saturday morning, with no raging hangover to battle and no partying to look forward to, I ran out of excuses to put off doing something I should have done a year ago or more. I decided to Clean My House. Since Beth had moved out two years ago, the place had begun to resemble the set of a gothic horror film: cobwebs, dust and dusty cobwebs – it was all there. And it did bother me and I did fully intend to clean, but there was always that nagging argument well who else will see it but me, why bother? That morning, however, buoyed up by my new-found activism post skip-gardening and with my enforced Bethlessness I’d got as far as finding the Dyson. And then the phone rang.

  “Oh!” said the person on the other end of the phone:, at least I thought it was a person. “Eh! Eh! Eep eep eep eep eep eep eep eep eep eep eep…” I held the phone away from my ear. Who on earth was calling me – a mouse? I put it back to my ear. “Eep eep eep eep eep eep!”

  My cat, Finley, could clearly hea
r the caller and was looking particularly interested. Most mice restricted themselves to the garden but I could tell that he was thinking that one bold enough to phone up was surely going to be fantastic sport.

  “Hello?” I said when there was a break in the squeaking. “Who is this? Is this a sales call?”

  There was a pause and then I heard a wobbly intake of breath, “Edda…!”

  “Beth? Beth, is it you?” My chest tightened.

  There was heavy sobbing followed by more squeaking.

  “Beth, are you OK? Is everything OK? Are you in your flat? Shall I come round?” I felt sick to my core. Was she ill, was she dying? Had something awful happened to her boyfriend, Jack?

  “Oh! Eds! Oh!”

  “What’s wrong?” I was almost crying myself, gripping the phone.

  “Oh, Edda,” Beth had a moment of squeakless clarity, “it’s awful!”

  “You’re at your flat aren’t you? I’m on my way! Stay there! Don’t die! OK? Don’t die Beth!”

  I have never sprinted as fast as I did between my house and Beth and Jack’s flat as I did just then. And in those three minutes scenes of horrific images filled my head: Beth with a kitchen knife plunged between her bloodied ribs, Beth on her bathroom floor with a bottle of pills spilling from her cold grey hand, Beth cradling an unconscious Jack in her arms at the bottom of her staircase…

  I pummelled her front door and, thank God, she opened it. Clutching the door frame and panting like a sex fiend, I quickly scanned her for misplaced knives and mangled limbs. All looked in order.

  She threw herself into my arms and wailed, “Oh, Edda, I am so bad! So bad!”

  “Why? Why are you so bad?” I stroked her hair. “You’re not bad, Beth!”