Minted
He breathed in the air, surprisingly fresh and clean here, at the back exit of the supermarket, where the goods yard met the railway line. From here, you could see the station and hear the announcements for the trains to King’s Cross. He liked this break from the routine. The early deliveries were safely loaded, fresh goods to the massive fridges, dry goods to the warehouse shelves. A few more lorries would come before his next break. It was hard, laborious work, shifting the boxes on trolleys but his regular shift – 4am to noon, meant he had little contact with customers. No need to put up with their stares or the racist remarks. His fellow workers were fine, had come to accept his presence. They were mainly students who didn’t stay long and left him to his own devices, which was how he liked it.
He checked that his colleague, today, Andy, the one with the ponytail, was busy with his breaktime cigarette. He could sneak a few minutes away. He went round the corner, clambered over the makeshift stile he had made out of a few old wooden pallets and there it was, a little patch of greenery, nestled in the shade of an old ash tree, down where the railway embankment began. His secret garden. The rosemary, the sage and mint were all doing nicely. He had planted some cabbage and it looked about ready now.
He had started the garden more than two years ago and it was amazing how well it had come on, He had tended it in his breaks, the odd hour after his shift finished, the occasional weekend. A little scrap of ground, sandwiched between the supermarket yard and the railway, marginalised, untended, forgotten. He had been throwing out some of the basil plants from the supermarket, past their sell by date, when he thought of replanting them here. So he dug over a patch of the wasteground, found an old bag of compost and now the garden was a regular source of fresh ingredients for cooking on the tiny stove in his one-room flat.
No-one knew about it at work except the supervisor, the nice one with the blonde hair. She had promised to warn off anybody else who might discover it, but no-one had. They were an incurious lot, he thought. He might consider trying to grow some tomatoes or even strawberries. There was plenty of discarded netting about the place. He smiled, thinking of the little market gardens that grew up next to the railway near his old home in Colombo, where old women sold their harvests to passengers as the trains rumbled slowly past. Now he was a market gardener too.
A shout from Andy interrupted him. “Fasil, shake a leg. Another load on the way,” He chucked his coffee grounds by the mint and raked them into the soil with his hands. He would take a few of the leaves when he knocked off for lunch.