Page 7 of Oleander

“Well, I’ll try and go easy on you today. Lots to do. First day on the job is always the most important.”

I shoved a spoonful of egg in my mouth and stifled a satisfied moan. I’d take his word for it.

Showered and dressed in my oldest pair of shorts and a ‘Green’s Gardening Group’ t-shirt a size too big, I flung my backpackinto the footbed of Luke’s van first, before climbing in after it. The van was loaded up with spades and forks and an array of gardening tools I felt exhausted just looking at. Luke whistled, happy – excited even – about the prospect of reanimating the long-dead gardens of Deveraux House.

I pulled out my book as he drove, folding back the cover and losing myself between the pages while he sang along to the radio. It was a forty-minute drive out of Gorey to St. Ouen in the north-west.

Luke hadn’t stopped talking about this job for the last month. He’d won the contract over a larger firm in St. Aubin to resurrect the gardens of one of the oldest properties on the Channel Islands: Deveraux House. Built and owned by the Deveraux family, its current inhabitant was Lord Deveraux: by all accounts, some crazy old queen who was as mad as a box of wet cats. I didn’t know much about him, and I didn’t much care either, but he was a source of morbid curiosity for the island as far as I could tell.

That day though, Luke was happy. Excited like a kid on his way to a theme park. He wasn’t thinking of anything except what this contract could mean for him, Beth, and me.

Back then, they fought a lot about money. Or rather, Beth did. I assumed myself to be the cause of that. Me, a kid neither of them had asked for but had been obliged to take in. My parents – mine and Beth’s parents, I should say – had been hit from behind by a truck driver on their way home from a friend’s wedding, making us both orphans in the blink of an eye. Beth and Luke had been babysitting me that night. Mum and Dad were going to take me with them before Beth had offered – last minute, as I’d heard it told – to allow them a night out together. A night that had turned out to be their last night alive. A nightI think now must have been filled with awful pop songs, terrible speeches, and mediocre food.

I think about that frequently. About what I’d want my last night on this earth to look like.

It would be us, of course. Caspien and me, someplace warm. A night spent with our limbs tangled together, nice food and wine in our full bellies as we took that other more intoxicating pleasure from each other.

But my parents had been at the wedding of a distant cousin. A ten-second lack of attention by an overtired truck driver and everyone’s lives had changed forever. My mum and dad became a story in the Honiton and Devon News, and Beth and I became orphans.

Ten seconds.

Beth had become a parent and an orphan at the same moment. Luke wasn’t a replacement for my own father, but it felt strange to call him my brother. And so ‘uncle’ seemed like some middle place that suited us both. I’d always been a little difficult as a child, moody and insular, and prone to bouts of deep self-pity. And now I wonder if Gideon and Caspien had smelled that on me. Like sharks in the water. My heart, a soft and fleshy thing that was vulnerable to their poison.

Over the years, that soft fleshy thing has hardened, broken, bruised and scarred over but pierce through the hard outer shell, and there it was. Unchanged at its core.

That day, we pulled up to the gates at Deveraux House before 8 a.m. Another Green’s van was already there, waiting. Luke got out and walked up to the gate, two rusted hunks of metal that looked as though they hadn’t been opened in years. I learned later that they hadn’t. Everyone left and arrived via the service gate on the other side of the estate.

Luke stood around for a bit, chatting with Harry and Ged, gesturing at the gates and looking through it. You couldn’t see the house from here. It was situated at the end of a long, twisting, tree-lined drive, which was a curtain of green at this time of the year. In the end, Luke pulled out his phone and made a call, the recipient presumably telling him to come around to the west side service entrance or simply pull open the gates. Luke decided on the latter. With some effort, he and Harry prised open the large gates before sprinting back to the vans and driving through, Ged getting out to pull them closed behind us.

With the window down, I leaned my head out and then my arm, snatching a handful of green as the leaves brushed the side of the van. The house flickered into view through a break in the trees as we drove, but the moment it was revealed in full, I sat bolt-upright in my seat and gaped at the thing. It was a behemoth of a building. A brownish-red brick mansion with over a hundred windows and a stone-covered wraparound veranda on one side, a large glass conservatory on the other, a turreted section, and around ten chimneys.

It sat slightly raised, as though on a dais of green, with acres of overgrown garden spilling out from its walls. In the heat of the day, it had an almost dream-like quality, a mirage in a desert. There was something unmistakably English in its architecture, something found nowhere else, but it was this same quality that made it distinctly sinister in the darker months. As though some screaming madwoman lingered in its upper rooms, wailing late into the night.

As it was, no women lived in Deveraux House and hadn’t done so for more than fifteen years. The full story of why would turn out to be tragic and fateful, and one I wouldn’t hear until the following summer.

Luke drove the van up to the front, slowing to get a look at the wide, arched entryway. The large double door was closed, so he followed the curve of the stone drive around the house towards the back into a small courtyard. The gravel under the van sounded extremely loud as we crunched around the building. We passed the glass-domed conservatory, dirty and unused, with overgrown weeds in a tumble behind the glass. A few even poked out through a few shattered panels.

Finally we pulled up on the northern side of the property. The courtyard was U-shaped, with a row of low buildings on one side and the house on the other. A single solitary figure stood by a door in the far corner of the courtyard.

“Wait here,” Luke said, giving me a nervous smile before climbing out of the van.

I nodded, happy to be able to stay outside of the thing – the place did not scream ‘visitors welcome.’ As Luke met with Harry and Ged at the back of the van, I glanced in the wing mirror to see that the figure standing by the door was a boy. I couldn’t see him properly from where I was, but I was certain he wasn’t any older than I was, maybe even a few years younger. Bright blonde hair to his shoulders like a girl, he wore khaki-coloured shorts and an oversized, short-sleeved shirt. He stood oddly still while waiting for my uncle as though he were guarding the place.

We were close enough that I heard him speak when Luke approached.

“You are the gardener,” the boy said in a very polite voice.

Luke stuck out his hand. “Luke Green.”

The boy didn’t shake it, and Luke dropped his hand. He gestured to Harry and Ged. “This is Ged Davis and Harry Foote. Um, is your dad home?”

“My uncle Gideon is inside. Follow me,” he announced before spinning on his heel and disappearing inside. Luke glanced at the others and shrugged before following him inside.

It was stifling in the van, even with the windows down, so I opened the door and turned my body sideways so my legs were outside. There was little shade to be found in the courtyard, but I spotted a sliver of shadow on the side near the row of low buildings, grabbed Terry Pratchett, and made my way towards it. I had no idea how long they might be in there talking about annuals, perennials, and pruning, and I wasn’t willing to sit in Luke’s metal sweatbox and wait for death. It was illegal to leave dogs in hot cars, so I supposed it was illegal to leave fifteen-year-olds in there too.

I sat down with my back against the wall and my knees pulled up and opened chapter five. I’d just started chapter six when I heard a soft crunch on the gravel. Expecting Luke, I raised my head from the book.

The blonde boy was walking across the courtyard toward the row of low buildings – toward me. He was no longer wearing slippers. He wore brown leather boots that stopped at his ankles, and white socks pulled up to his knees. I was half hidden between two brick columns, and so he didn’t see me at first, allowing me to observe him as he strode purposefully toward me.