Ivy, Blackbirds and Birthday Surprises

It wasn’t until you got right on top of it that you noticed the old garden shed. Hidden behind dense shrubbery and tucked against the red brick garden wall, over the years ivy and honeysuckle had crawled unhindered over its corrugated tin roof and weather twisted wooden sides, covering it with an impenetrable blanket of twisted stems and the thick, glossy leaves.
In spring blackbirds reared their young on the shed’s south facing side and John had lost count of how many generations of wobbly young he’d seen testing their wings as they made ready to join the world beyond the garden walls. He’d watched blue tits hustle and bustle as they plucked juicy caterpillars from the honeysuckle leaves and lost track of time whenever he sat in a battered armchair inside the shed and dreamed about the past.
Today he needed to slide another sheet of corrugated iron onto the roof due to a nasty leak that had developed over where he sat.
‘Sorry old chap. I won’t be long.’ John apologised to a large black spider as it scuttled indignantly to safety. Fighting the ivy that had wormed its way between past layers of rusting iron, John was sweating by the time he’d pushed the new panel in place and had, as best he could, pulled the ivy back into its original position.
Inside the shed, spots of winter sunlight danced over cobwebbed walls and flickered hypnotically over the back of John’s armchair. Sinking gratefully into its dusty embrace, he wiped his forehead and breathing in the shed’s own particular smell, an ancient mixture of sawdust, creosote, damp earth and linseed oil, closed his eyes and sank into that half way zone between dreams and hazy awareness that any sunny afternoon lends itself to so readily.
At the top end of the garden, the roomy Edwardian villa John had inherited from his grandparent’s had been ruthlessly modernised by his wife Emma.
Thankfully, her passion for gutting perfectly comfortable rooms and slavishly imposing the latest interior design fads on them didn’t extend to the garden.
John paid a pensioner for a few hours work a week to keep the lawns and shrubbery tidy, and prayed that when she ran out of rooms, Emma wouldn’t be seduced into bringing the garden into the house, or some such rubbish that he’d seen on TV only the other week.
As it was, he tried to ration his shed time to coincide with when she was out of the house, or at night while she slept, in order not to draw her attention to it.
If you passed over the threshold of his hideaway, you wouldn’t find mucky magazines hidden under a heap of potato sacks, or a portable radio to help while away the hours as he repaired a piece of furniture. There wasn’t even a tiny primus stove to make a welcome cup of tea between bouts of labouring in the garden, because John didn’t do any of those things. Orphaned and brought up by his doting grandparent's the shed was his only contact with the past. It was the last visual touch of childhood. To disturb the row of chisels hanging from a dusty board, or move the glue pot one inch from its place on the battered workbench, or take down the pine kitchen chair hanging from a beam, its replacement leg still clamped in the teeth of a rusting vice, would be sacrilege. In here, time as they say, stood still.
He came to with a start, checked his watch and sighed. It was time to get changed. Emma had invited the neighbours around to celebrate his birthday. He rubbed a finger on the tiny window pane that looked out onto the shrubbery and longed for the one present he knew Emma, his well meaning, but butterfly brained wife twenty years younger than he, could never give him. To turn back the clock and once more stand by his grandfathers side as he worked at the bench.
An hour later, desperate for a pee, John broke into his neighbour Sheila’s interminable monologue about the school she’d selected for her moronic son and throwing apologies over his shoulder, locked himself in the downstairs cloakroom.
Too late! Emma had followed him and rapped on the door.
‘John, hurry up, we’re about to cut your birthday cake.’
He groaned. ‘Do we have to?’
‘Yes we do. Now come along. Reaching fifty five isn’t the end of the world, and besides you have presents to open.’
Forcing a smile as he laid aside Sheila’s gift of a chrome desk tidy, John bent over to gather up the pile of discarded wrapping paper.
‘Wait a minute Darling, there’s one more.’ Emma handed him a large envelope. ‘From me to you. Go on, open it!’
The card said, Congratulations on becoming the proud owner of a brand new garden pavilion.
‘It’s all arranged,’ Emma said. ‘The men will be here at eight tomorrow morning to pull down the old shed. By the time you get home from work, the pavilion will be up. We shall have such fun with it once that depressing shrubbery’s been cut down and paving laid. It’s a shame your birthday’s so near Christmas, otherwise we could have held a barbecue to christen it.’
Speechless, John stared at the card and then ripped it to shreds. ‘You couldn’t even make it a plain old garden shed could you,’ he shouted. ‘Oh no, we had to have a bloody pavilion. Well, I’m warning you; anyone who touches my shed is dead!’
He stormed out of the house, pushed the shed door open and slammed it shut.
Above his unsuspecting head, the rotten roof timbers, loosened when John repaired the roof, began to sag and the new, sharp edged metal so lovingly put in place earlier that day, unfettered by clinging ivy roots, slid gracefully down and sliced cleanly into his neck.