Do Worms Have Souls?

When my neighbour Harris was thirteen he stopped talking to his best friend when he caught him cheating at Snakes and Ladders. They still live just a few doors apart, and the long sulk is a comical sidestepping farce.

He’s in his late seventies now. Yesterday he told me that all good people eventually learned to hate everyone. ‘It’s the only sensible conclusion,’ he said.

‘Everyone?’

Harris gave me the fisherman’s side-eye.

I watch out for him; run errands and drink brandy in his kitchen, which smells like the inside of a biscuit barrel. A couple of years ago he asked for my help in IKEA, the emporium of Scandi restraint that had managed to convince him that he couldn’t live without a Rådmansö bedside drawer. I remarked that it seemed too long in the leg and too short on storage capacity and he said that’s exactly why he wanted it - because it reminded him of me. After he paid he insisted that we eat their meatballs before we had to remember where we’d parked the truck, and we had a little back-and-forth about that. About the meatballs, not the truck. I told him that any gooner could make a meatball and that IKEA’s were no better than anyone else’s, but for a curmudgeon he was remarkably gullible, and so there we sat in the unsettling light, munching away while he complimented the cynically rolled balls of minced meat. The truth is that the nightmare of IKEA must be separated into two distinct parts; the before and after of a long dream where you must take a toilet break in the middle; the selection and payment, and then the carpark. Naturally they offer meatballs in between. He sat with his legs open and his jeans were so threadbare at the crotch that one of his own balls had slipped out and was glaring at me, like the accusatory eye in The Tell-Tale Heart. I was going to mention it but then I thought, no. Fuck him.

Last night, as I was closing the curtains, I saw him in his front garden. He was wearing pyjamas and digging up the wet spring soil with a trowel. Every now and then he set the trowel down and picked up a magnifying glass. His eye bulged through the convex lens in a way which reminded me, unbidden, of his left testicle. One thing you’ll never hear a woman say is, ‘My! But that’s a lovely scrotum.’

I went out to him, me in my nightie and dressing gown. I had a pair of my granddaughter’s old wellingtons on my feet, the ones she refused to wear because they were bright yellow and had that smiley face on them; the druggie thing. Those Indian stallholders really do know how to take the piss. Fair play.

‘What the hell are you doing, Harris?’

He didn’t turn. ‘I’m wondering whether worms have souls,’ he said. ‘Did you bring a hip flask?’

‘Sure,’ I said. I stooped down and looked at them dancing and swaying in his old man’s hands.

‘They are arguably more useful than you,’ he said, cocking his head and paying close attention to one particular worm that was as big as a conger eel. ‘They aerate the soil and feed the birds.’

‘Thank you, Harris,’ I said. ‘I really didn’t know that! Oh, wait a minute! Yes I did! Biology, 1976.’

Three doors down I could hear Micky coughing through his kitchen window. Harris pretended not to hear.

Cancer’s a whimsical foe. Some reasons are obvious, I suppose; chain smoking, breathing asbestos, a diet rich in processed food. I’m a smoker and if there’s any justice in the world then I should die of it, but I bet I don’t. With Micky I think it happened when his wife died a couple of years ago, when he was way down in the trenches and those cancer cells were waiting like snipers to shoot him down. As much as I try to provide company, to be a companion-in-arms, what he really needs is his old boyhood friend back, but it doesn’t matter what I try selling to Harris, he’s not buying. He’s a coward who won’t look death in the face, and maybe he isn’t wrong. He never visits the doctor because he reasons that if you find out you’ve got cancer it’s bound to kill you, so what you don’t know can’t harm you. God forgive me, but he might even be right about that. What the hell do I know?

‘Sooo, thought of any names for them yet?’ I said.

He put the magnifier down and looked at the escaping worms through his milky cornflower eyes. ‘Nah. They ain’t worth it.’

‘Micky’s home from the hospital,’ I said. ‘Still dying.’

‘Huh.’

‘You should go and see him.’

‘He’s a cheater,’ he said. Unequivocal.

‘It was sixty five years ago, Harris!’

‘Bred in the bone.’

Tonight, not too late - still in the gloaming - Harris fetched up at my door holding an oblong box with late-fifties artwork on the cover. Rosy-cheeked kids in fair isle tank tops, Day-Glo snakes and trustworthy ladders. And don’t forget that Ovaltine is very good for you! The colours were still vivid, like it was yesterday again.

‘Do you ever wonder what you’d look like, Harris, if you’d shut yourself away in a Welsh dresser for sixty-odd years?’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ It was rhetorical. ‘Get your shoes on Lady Lou,’ he said, ‘You’re coming with.’

‘To Micky’s?’

‘Yes, to Micky’s’ he said.

It was a short walk but it felt long. At the gate, Harris stopped me and said, ‘I’ve spent six decades hating that fucker.’

I said, ‘No, Harris. You’ve spent sixty missing him. What’s your problem with cheaters anyway? Who gave you the right to hate a kid over a game of Snakes and Ladders? Maybe you miscounted, ever thought of that?’

He hit me on the arm. I hit him back, standing at Micky’s gate, which needed sanding down and repainting. He used to do those things before his wife died and someone told him that he was shortly going to join her.

Down the cracked path Harris said, ‘Maybe, maybe that’s so, Lady Lou. Maybe you’re right about everything.’

A few more steps and he stopped me. ‘But you’re mistaken about one thing.' A couple of further steps saw us standing at Micky’s front door with my finger hovering over the doorbell, the one that used to be white and was now yellow.

‘And what’s that?’ I asked.

‘I don’t need you to be Little Miss Buffer, Lady Lou.’

‘Then what the hell am I doing here?’ I asked, pressing the bell.

Harris shook the Snakes and Ladders box. ‘You're the umpire,’ he said.