"Woods Have Gotta Eat" by Stephen Barnard

WOODS HAVE GOTTA EAT

by STEPHEN BARNARD

I know I should be in bed by midnight, but that’s the time Papa likes to visit the allotments. We live in a one-room bedsit with not even a window box to grow weeds in, so we make use of the community garden scheme. Not a plot that we rent personally: we don’t have the money for that. We can barely afford the room – even with its mouldy walls – on the little money Papa makes from cleaning at the hospital. Papa picks the plots that look like they’re hardly visited, and there he grows the vegetables we eat. We visit every night, dig one up apiece, and chow down. He always lets me take the biggest. I’m ten, and have got some growing to do. Papa is nothing but skin and bone, which is a worry.

We get to the allotments and visit a plot where he has planted root vegetables; he expects we’ll eat carrot tonight. We do it right there, rather than go back to the room. He thinks if we eat in that filthy place our food will become contaminated. That’s why he always takes a camping stove with him and an army surplus mess tin. He’s scrubbed it clean and has fresh water in a flask. “All natural,” he says, as we hunker down by the plot. “My boy isn’t going to eat any processed store-bought shit. God provides.” He digs the trowel in to unearth the carrots.

He pulls his out with a tug and a shake. In the poor light it looks like the end of a dinosaur’s tail. He brushes off the soil and nicks off the tip with his knife, popping it in his mouth. “Jasper. Here.” He hands me the trowel and I finish bringing my chosen root to the surface.

The carrot is a peculiar shape. It has appendages, offshoots, which present like limbs. My dinner looks like a little person with leafy, long hair. “Papa, is this okay?”

He’s boiling some water so that we can have a range of texture – crunchy and soft. “It’s fine. It’s the big companies that make you think everything has to be picture-book perfect. So it looks like a little carrot baby… Woods have gotta eat.”

He says this a lot. He means us. He is Jonah Wood and I am his son, and the midnight feast is our only meal of the day. I eat the carrot baby: the arms and legs raw, the torso boiled.

**

Two nights later and we are pulling up some radishes from a different plot when the same phenomenon occurs. Again, it’s my dinner: the radish comes up like a stumpy, pale old man. “It’s a good sign,” Papa says. “Eat of the body to improve the body. You need to put on a bit of weight, Jasp.” I know better than to suggest he spend a bit of spare change on food from the supermarkets; instead I’ll eat every scrap of the radish. Papa himself is looking drawn, and is a little shivery. I ask if he’s poorly but he brushes it off. “Just gotta eat.” He lights the camping stove.

**

When it keeps happening – my food shaped like people – Papa says God is sending us a message. I think he’s running a fever, so not all that he says makes sense, but he is very insistent so I accept everything as Gospel, as a son should. It’s a message, it’s the path we’ve been looking for, we’ll be delivered from our poverty. Papa’s on something called a zero hours contract at the hospital. I’m not sure what that means, except there have been zero hours for quite a while now. We have no money and perhaps won’t make the rent on the room next month.

He’s definitely sick, but says my parsnip baby is the answer. “Woods have gotta eat.” I’m not very enthusiastic as I chew, squatting down by the dishevelled earth under the stars, and I think he sees it. “It’s a sign. It’s a sign we need something else.”

**

The next night on our midnight stroll, we go past the community gardens and head out into the city. I have hopes that somehow he’s found some money and we’re going to buy something pre-wrapped and processed from a store – something with a little flavour – but no, we walk past a number of options without pushing open a door.

Eventually I work out where he’s taking me: we’re heading for the hospital. I’m happy that maybe he has a shift, but also worried because he looks like death and I think that as soon as his supervisor sees him she’ll tell him to go home. Zero hours. Zero money.

But that’s not why we’re here. He has a pass, and he explains he can use it at a side entrance, rather than through the main foyer. I’m surprised when he says I’m coming with him. “It was you dug up all the messengers, after all.”

Messengers? I think he means my oddly-shaped vegetables.

We push along a corridor, pass a few people, but he says as long as we look like we know where we’re going, we won’t be questioned. He has the bright lanyard around his neck so he looks official. I don’t know where we’re heading, but I follow his lead, as always. 

There’s a sign above the double doors he buzzes us through, and I’m not quite sure what the word means. I’m still trying to conjure it in my mouth as he shoves me through in something of a crouch. It’s clear we can’t be seen in here.

We duck into a dimly-lit room, accompanied by the sound of light crying. I say the word as I see the incubators. “Neonatal.” 

“This is the message,” he says. “They ain’t got a hope anyway.” He nudges me closer to the line of tiny babies in their glass cocoons. “Pick one,” he says. 

“Woods have gotta eat.”