Plantlife

Clara was no good with plants. She was contemplating suicide (Saturday seemed less predictable than Monday, yet more thoughtful than Sunday) and just to make herself feel even worse she examined her shelf of failed specimens.

It was not so long ago that she’d felt a sense of real hope in that money plant. She’d bought it at a school fair, and all the way home she’d imagined how the 50p she’d spent it on would be magically transformed into a lifetime of good luck, on-time tax payments and expensive holidays.

The plant had looked so compact, plump, glossy-leaved and healthy when she’d first put it on her shelf. Within a week the shine had dulled and the branches had started to soften, like limbs without bones. Within a month the leaves began to fall off and drop into the bone-dry soil.

Fuck! No water. You’d never look like this if you lived with Nora, Steve or Rose.

The Inland Revenue would be after Clara soon and alas, there had been no trip to Mustique. The plant just looked sad. The branches were growing but with droopy arms outstretched – not upwards and proud. By now she could count on one hand the leaves that remained, and there was no sign of any imminent births.

The orchid to the money plant’s right was certainly no better. Clara had been given it as a thirtieth-birthday present by another not-remotely-green-fingered-friend, Claire, whom Clara admired very much for being nonchalant.

Oh, to be genuinely nonchalant

And Claire was dirty under the fingernails. Clara had always counted on Claire when she needed to feel ever-so-slightly-better-at-something-in-life-than-someone-else. Even if it was only for having cleaner fingernails.

Even Claire’s orchid had survived.

I just keep the soil damp.

She’d got it as a BOGOF at Homebase, along with Clara’s present.

I treated myself on your birthday

And just as Clara was almost-certainly set on killing herself (yet as she ran through the options she realised gas was out of the question and the amount of Nurofen in the house would only work for a headache) she focused on the spider plant. It looked like a sick Fraggle. It was growing mutant mini-spiders. It was the plant that was thriving the most, but there was certainly no competition. Nothing so sprouty, ugly or rubbish could ever count as a success.

Clara opened up a bin bag. She picked up the money plant and threw it in. She picked up the spider plant, followed by the orchid and threw them in, pots and all. She took the bag outside and dumped it in the wheelie bin in time for the dustmen who arrived at dawn.

Dear God: don’t ever give me a baby.