The Way We Heard - Rein Me In

The Way We Heard - Rein Me In

Jimmy was becoming increasingly worried about the local snail population. Although it was only a tiny species of snail that was causing the problem, they were invading his territory, both physically and mentally, in their hundreds. He had read somewhere that ducks loved to eat them but unfortunately he didn’t have a duck. Perhaps one of those plastic decoy ducks used to attract real ducks by people who like to shoot ducks would scare off the slimy little intruders. Perhaps the duck shooters could even turn their cruel attention to shooting snails. Surely they’d be easier to catch in their gun sights.

They’re not from round here, he muttered to himself at regular intervals. They were born on the other side of the street in his neighbour Doncho’s garden, or at least the steep bank leading up to his garden from the crumbling stretch of asphalt that marked the boundary separating the immigrants from the native Roma people. However, he had to admire the courage of the brave little gastropods as, although the road was a very quiet one, it would still have been an intrepid journey for them to reach the other side.

He made up a joke that he never told anybody else. Question: Why did the snail cross the road? Answer: It probably didn’t. It probably got crushed under the wheels of a Lada driven at tremendous speed by a joyrider within an hour of slithering off the verge.

Doncho, who at the age of sixty-two had never known anything other than village life, had acquired a wealth of revolutionary gardening tips, and even some counter-revolutionary gardening tips. In conversation he was as awkward as a bag of coat hangers and always had to have a back-up second opinion for use in the event of somebody already sharing his first opinion. It’s impossible to win an argument with a person who agrees.

Jimmy was already feeling irritated before Doncho attempted to speak to him. A couple of days earlier Darina Yotova, a young pop star known affectionately by her fans as Dara, had won the Eurovision Song Contest for Bulgaria. It was the first time Bulgaria had won anything since its war with Serbia in 1885, so naturally the whole country was as proud as Pushkin. Dara’s song, Bangaranga, wasn’t so bad the first time of hearing it, or even the second, but it was being played to death on every radio station, and every house in the street was blasting it out at more decibels than a baby walrus going through its teething stage. Earworms never seem to be nice songs, and Bangaranga was an earworm that had not only wriggled into Jimmy’s ear but had decided to dance like a dervish hooked on Prozac while it was in there.

In fierce sunshine he grappled with herculean weeds on the downhill side of the divide. To form a fence, he’d planted a long row of forsythia bushes that he’d grown from cuttings. They were his precious babies and the weeds were monstrous brutes intent on doing them harm. In his mind they were the Jimmy Savile of the botanical world but really they were vigorously growing wild hops, known locally as hmel. Their stems had the rough texture of a cat’s tongue and were capable of causing skin irritation.

Bangaranga was a cross between Chalga (a high-energy traditional folk music genre originating from within Bulgaria’s Roma community) and Bhangra (a high-energy traditional folk music genre originating from the Punjab region of India and Pakistan). It sounded good on paper but inside Jimmy’s head it felt like his brain was being licked by the rough texture of a cat’s tongue, and no matter how many times he shouted shoo! and shook his fist at it, it just wouldn’t go away.

Doncho, keen to share his wisdom, walked down the bank from his own house, crossed the road littered with snail carcasses and broken homes, and stood behind him with a lit cigarette in one hand and a small cup of Turkish coffee in the other. He then announced that there was an easier method for dealing with these boa constrictor-esque weeds. All the wilting gardener had to do was catch the bus into town and go to the Communist era hardware and gardening shop (which Jimmy called the seedy seed shop) at the back of the open market. There he could buy five litres of Joseph Stalin brand weed killer for less than the price of a fortnight’s holiday in a gulag. In Bulgaria they used the words Round-Up as a generic term for any fluid that would kill any living thing, and this stuff made Monsanto’s original formula of the death juice seem a bit namby-pamby.

Round-Up is a very misleading name for both the American product and it’s more muscular East European cousin. It always made Jimmy think of beautiful black and white collie dogs rounding up plump and docile sheep on wild Donegal mountainsides. Wouldn’t it have been lovely if there had been a product in a bottle that really could round up weeds in this way and secure them in a pen out of harm’s way? Having been an ardent fan of the 1970’s BBC television show One Man and His Dog, he knew he’d have to drastically improve his whistling skills but it was good to have a plan, albeit one of total fantasy.

Doncho insisted that his herbicide was the stuff of gardeners’ dreams. ‘Spray it on the offending vegetation just the once and you’ll never need to use it again. It kills absolutely everything’ he assured Jimmy, smiling as he pointed at his own garden that was a patch of scrub littered with dead plants, broken rooftiles and an abandoned armchair in which slept an equally abandoned dog.

‘You can’t go killing everything,’ Jimmy protested ‘Those chemicals are bad for wildlife, and the water supply, and your garden looks shite. And besides, it doesn’t really kill everything because you’ve got millions of tiny white snails living off all the dead vegetation that they love to eat, and some of them have crossed the road and started tucking into my little trees.’

Dencho’s wife, Radoslava, looked on from her garden gate whilst singing along to Dara’s pop anthem playing on Radio Veronika, the local station. Demonstrating that she had the vocal range of a Tibetan yak, words to the effect that nobody would be able to sleep that night because of the riot flowed from her nicotine-stained vocal cords. Everyone was singing the song in English, just as Dara had done, but none of them understood a single word of the language.

‘But there’s something else you can buy, also in the market, that you can spray on your trees to kill the snails,’ Doncho said, throwing the stub of his cigarette amongst the small bushes and extinguishing it with the dregs of his coffee. He would argue that both discarded items were organic.

‘So you admit the Round-Up doesn’t kill everything!’

‘In Communist times we had one spray that killed everything. It made life so much easier. It would kill weeds, it would kill mosquitos and wasps and snails, it would kill the mould on the wall in the bathroom, it would kill rats if you put a few drops on a corn cob, and some people even drank it to kill themselves when there was no bread in the shop on the bitterly cold days of a Soviet Bloc winter. We probably even used it to win the war against the Serbs in 1885. But now we’ve got this so-called ‘freedom’, we’ve got to have different sprays for killing different things. I’m sure we’re being exploited by capitalist manufacturing companies. You never saw Leonid Brezhnev using two sprays,’ complained the old gypsy.  

Had the snails been the larger common-or-garden variety it wouldn’t have been so bad as they were bigger and only hung out in twos and threes, so they were easier to pick off and relocate over the fence into the forest. Also, every Friday evening the old men would assemble in the village square, each with their favourite snail. At nine o’clock on the dot, Tordor the bar owner would appear with his metre-long eight-lane wooden racetrack painted green to make it look like a racecourse for horses. Onlookers became very excited as starting positions were allocated, bets were laid and the pistol rang out to begin the contest. People of all ages yelped and screamed as the entrants galloped towards the finish line. Anyone caught with a lettuce leaf in their pocket was asked to leave as this was the worst form of cheating imaginable. To a racing snail there is no greater carrot than a lettuce.

Jimmy entered his own snail, Brian, on three or four occasions. Brian was lean and lithe but his owner didn’t possess the training skills that the other owners had, so he never finished anywhere better than in fifth place. Perhaps if I were to carefully remove his shell it would make him more aerodynamic, he thought. So one Friday evening he tried this technical modification. The crowd gasped as they’d never before witnessed such an ingenious tactic, but by the end of the race everyone was disappointed as the lack of a shell on his back had only made Brian a bit sluggish.

With regard to the gangs of small snails, at the roadside Jimmy thanked Doncho for his molluscicidal advice but chose to ignore it. As he hacked away at the predatory vegetation that old song At the Hop came into his mind, but disappeared again as Ivan, the village mayor, pulled up in his car and asked what he was doing. It was difficult to hear Ivan’s words because he had Bangaranga pulsating out from his car radio.

‘Flying a kite,’ he replied, feeling reasonably confident that Ivan, with his limited grasp of the English language, would accept any answer. 

Jimmy’s heart sank as he saw Maria approaching. She lived in a house a few hundred metres further up the lane and had a repertoire of old wives’ tales to rival Doncho’s mental encyclopaedia.

‘What are you doing?’ was exactly the question that Jimmy had expected. He knew that she could see what he was doing so he just smiled at her, wiping sweat from his forehead with his sweaty wrist and wiping it on his sweaty shorts. Maria was sweating too, probably on account of the contents of the small rakia bottle she kept in her handbag. She claimed that it kept her hydrated and sometimes she could even be described as being as hydrated as a newt. She made her own rakia which was always very good, it being double-distilled and allowed to mature for well over a month.

Previous tips Maria had come up with for avoiding catastrophes of nature had included leaving a loaf of bread on the doorstep on the first Tuesday after a full moon to keep lizards away, and putting goat manure in your socks to prevent corns and calluses. Her best suggestion had been to just have a glass of rakia and that would wash absolutely everything away from a troubled mind. But on this occasion her suggested way of dealing with the weed problem was ‘Round-Up! It’s three levs for five litres in the old gardening shop at the back of the market.’

Bangaranga! Bangaranga! Bangaranga! echoed down the valley side from a house on the top road. It wasn’t just Jimmy’s road that had been blighted by Dara’s infernal beat. How long would this go on for?, he asked himself. He remembered being back home in Derry, where local girl Dana’s 1970 Eurovision winner, All Kinds of Everything could be heard somewhere or other at least once an hour for more than thirty years after Ireland’s win. If that was the way that things were going to pan out he’d be 103 before Bangaranga was silenced.

Maria then walked away singing ‘I think I’m going to lose my mind’ which was a line from Bangaranga, or it would have been had she not misheard the lyrics or had her lips to the bottle, or both. Jimmy thought she already had done, and that he was about to join her. He’d certainly had enough of Bulgaria’s invasive flora and invasive Eurovision winner, so he went inside his house to enjoy the coolness of the air-conditioned kitchen. He thought about having an ice-cold beer but it would surely have contained hops and he was feeling very anti-hop by that stage.

Switching on his laptop he clicked on a link to an English radio station. The deejay said that she loved the next record and it was the week’s number one in the charts.

She played Rein Me In, by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean. This is balm for the brain, Jimmy thought as his eyelids began to droop and he drifted off into a dream where all the little snails turned round and climbed back up the hill to Doncho’s naked garden.

Image:

Turlough’s photograph of Doncho’s snails on Jimmy’s shrubs.

Click on the link if you want to listen to the song.

Rein Me In