Looking Up: City of tiny lights

The ups, downs, challenges and triumphs of a prison leaver’s journey

Overcourt Probation Hostel looked amazing. Its garden, tended meticulously by former resident Jason, had bloomed into something that even surprised him. Straggly skeletal nests of twigs had exploded into giant pom-poms of pink and white, bubblegum fragrances heavy in the warm air, whilst two new hostel residents sat like statues around the perimeter, as if sedated.

Jason paused at his shed door, hesitant, half in shadow, a packet of seeds in his hand. He’d harvested them from the stony hillside he’d scrambled up in Turkey, on holiday a week earlier. Paranoid about being searched, he’d stuck them in the treads of his trainers to avoid Customs. He waited for the residents to go back inside to the compulsory morning meeting instigated by their new ‘Governor’, before creeping out to the vacated benches.

Ahead of him lay a jumble of shrubbery, sculptures, ornaments, solar lights and knick-knacks he’d collected from other garden work he did for cash in the area, all done with machinery borrowed from the hostel. He’d rescued all of them from the tip, given them a new home behind the hostel’s recently opened gender-neutral annexe, the broken and faded cast-offs all huxter-mugger under the same sun, seen only by a handful of residents and staff.

Wow … I’ll bet the Governor curses your name every time he has to send someone out to pluck them dandelions.

Laughing Buddhas sat next to giant frogs, peeling gnomes, weeping angels, Catholic shrines, bridges, dream-catchers, windmills … Sue jokingly calling it ‘The Garden of Cultural Appropriations’, smiling as she and her miracle son, little Francis, had strung recycled solar lanterns around it. At night, it became a miniature city of tiny pulsing lights, a world of its own. Once, when Jason had snuck in late to borrow some tools, he’d even spotted Owens, the hostel governor, sat in silence there, eyes closed, whisky glass in hand, softly glowing in the rainbow garlands, serenaded by a small orchestra of wind chimes.

‘Hello Jay.’ He turned, finding Sue and her son little Francis at his side.

‘Hello you two! Nice surprise.’

‘Garden’s looking amazing Jay … looks alive.’

‘Here, take a seat, Francis can play in the sand-pit. What brings you here?’

‘Fire alarm checks, remember Amrita’s contract she gave us, before she ran off to the Canary Islands with George?’

‘Oh…. aye.’ The scandal of the year … Amrita, the old hostel’s extremely prim manageress, eloping with former resident and gangster ‘Gorgeous George’ Hansen.

‘Look Sue, I brought some seeds back from Turkey, them little yellow flowers that smelt of mustard. Weeds, like, growing all over that desert behind the hotel.’

‘Technically not a desert then, Jason love.’

‘You know what I mean … near that big radio pylon.’

‘Probably illegal Jay, non-native species, could run riot all over our country. Think of the havoc, like Japanese knot-weed.’

‘And Himalayan Balsam, yes Sue, I am a gardener.’

‘Well then …’ She frowned at the seeds in Jason’s palm, like little feathers.

He shrugged. ‘I was in the Woodhill block once Sue, on a laydown; middle of summer, concrete yard, cement walls, tarmac, the usual … boiling hot, like, but always really quiet. One day I spotted these marks on the wall, like a windscreen wiper would make, about knee-high. It was tall weeds Sue, grown out of the tiniest cracks, wind blew them to and fro against the concrete, left their mark, even after they all got plucked out.’

He paused, letting the wind make the tiny seeds twitch in his palm. ‘There was one weed they’d missed though, like a really tall dandelion, seeds just about to bloom, or whatever they do. I knew it would be gone next day, so I nicked it, hid it in my cell in water till it bloomed, like cotton wool, smuggled all the seeds back to Full Sutton when I got transferred. Soon as I got on the wing, I let them all blow out of the window, onto this big lawn we weren’t allowed on.’

‘Wow … I’ll bet the Governor curses your name every time he has to send someone out to pluck them dandelions.’

‘I hope so.’

Sue laughed, leaned on his shoulder. ‘My little Francis was conceived here, you know. Me and Kevin, under the willow tree round the corner. They said I was sterile. Doctors, years ago I mean.’

Little Francis, four years-old, playing happily amongst the appropriated cultural relics, picked up a ceramic hedgehog, balanced it on a Buddha’s laughing head, and drove a small transformer robot over his lap.

Jason held up his hand, a light breeze tickling his open palm, closing his eyes as the tiny feathers lifted away, one by one, until Sue closed her hand over his, and drew it to her chest.