‘I’m Noel.’ He holds out a hand and I stop rubbing his dog’s ear long enough to shake it. His earth-blackened hand is warm despite the chill in the air, and his rough skin rubs against mine as I slip my hand into his huge one. ‘That’s Gizmo.’
I grin at the name. ‘As in the Gremlin?’ I pull my head back and look at the dog, who’s got gorgeous markings – a white chest and brown sides, and around one eye is a big patch of white that extends over his head, making one side brown and one side white. ‘That’s such a perfect name, he looks just like Gizmo from the film.’
‘Ah, Gremlins. One of the most underrated Christmas films.’ He whistles the song Gizmo hums in the film, and the Gizmo in my arms turns his head to the side and his tail wags like he’s heard the tune many times before. I suppose if you have a dog named after Gizmo, why wouldn’t you whistle Gizmo’s song to him at every opportunity?
‘I’m Leah.’ I realise I haven’t let go of his hand yet and quickly extract my fingers and go back to rubbing Gizmo’s ears. ‘I asked Santa for a mogwai every year when I was little. Never got one though. Can’t imagine why.’
‘Probably because they’re not real?’
‘Oh, really? I had no idea that a race of animatronic fictional creatures from an Eighties’ Christmas film didn’t actually exist. You’re not going to tell me that Santa doesn’t exist next and that reindeer can’t really fly, are you? What about the tooth fairy? It’s not the parents all along, is it? And what of Jurassic Park? Are you trying to say that it wasn’t a documentary?’
‘Hah.’ He laughs but his face shows he has no idea if I’m being sarcastic or not. ‘I’m sorry. You’ve totally thrown me. I expected the person who’d won the auction to be a property developer intending to flatten the place and build something new, not someone turning up and intending to run it as a tree farm again. And you’re seriously telling me that you’re not in the industry and you haven’t got any experience? Do you have any idea how much of a state this place is in? What on earth were you thinking?’
‘I was a little bit drunk, okay?’ I snap, annoyance creeping in again. ‘What’s it got to do with you whether I have any experience or not? I’d just caught my boyfriend cheating with half the office and I wanted to change my life. All right, it needs a bit of work, but I wanted a challenge. What’s wrong with that?’
‘You were drunk?’ His voice goes high with indignation. ‘Didn’t you even come for a viewing?’
‘Look, with hindsight, I realise that not viewing it first was a bad decision, but it was on the spur of the moment; the auction was ending and I had to decide then and there whether to go for it or not. There was another bidder and I didn’t even realise how much I wanted it until I put the very last bid in with four seconds to go.’
‘Four seconds.’ He shakes his head in disbelief. ‘How do you even do that?’
‘I buy a lot of shoes on eBay?’ I offer, hoping it might make him laugh but no such luck.
‘You bought a Christmas tree farm like it was a pair of shoes?’
‘No, I used my experience of buying shoes to win an auction. Not that it has anything to do with you, obviously.’
His eyebrows rise and he has the decency to look a bit guilty. ‘No, of course it doesn’t. I was only trying to figure out how insane my new neighbour might be.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t accost a complete stranger on the road and start telling them what they’re allowed to do with their money and make judgements about how they intend to run their property.’
‘People around here are going to comment, you may as well get used to it.’ He lets out an annoyed huff. ‘You bought a Christmas tree farm, with no experience of the industry, because you were drunk? What did you expect? Did you think you could stand back and watch the trees fell themselves, net themselves, and toddle off to market on their own?’
‘Maybe. Well, apart from the toddling bit. If Christmas trees were going to move independently, it would be more of a leaping sprint, don’t you think?’
I can tell he’s trying not to smile. His piercing shifts as his lip twitches. And then he shakes himself and frowns again. ‘This could be someone’s life, someone’s livelihood. Peppermint Branches was important once, it really mattered to the community of Elffield, and you think you can snap it up on a drunken whim and lark about here until, what, the heels of your designer boots sink into the first cowpat, and then you can sell it on to the next idiot who comes along?’
‘These are Primark, not designer.’
He looks down at my feet. ‘I don’t know what that means.’
I go to start explaining but stop myself. I don’t think a Scottish pumpkin farmer is interested in the pros and cons of high-street brands. ‘I don’t want to sell it on,’ I say instead. All right, it’s not what I expected, but I wanted to do something that made me stop feeling like I was standing still waiting for the grief of my parents death to dissipate. ‘Why can’t I learn how to run a Christmas tree farm? When I started data inputting, I had no idea what I was doing, but I learnt. No one starts a job knowing exactly what’s what. This is a job like any other.’
‘This isn’t just a job. This is a life. Living and working on a place like this is all-consuming. This isn’t an office that you leave behind at 5 p.m. every night. You live it, day in, day out, 365 days a year, and no, you don’t get Christmas off. You don’t get holidays and pensions and medical insurance. You spend every day trying to keep these trees alive. You don’t look like the kind of person who’d be very good at keeping things alive.’
‘I think a séance might be the only way to help these. They’re already dead, look at them.’
He glances towards the area of dead branches on the opposite side of the road. ‘I wouldn’t worry about those, they’re the windbreaker fields. The northern fields are healthier. Marginally.’
‘Northern fields?’
‘Oh, for god’s sake.’ He gives me a withering look. ‘You don’t even know what you’ve bought, do you? You have a northern and southern patch of land. South.’ He throws a hand out towards the patch of dead-to-dying trees in front of us like I’m an imbecile. ‘Road.’ He stamps his foot on the tarmac like I don’t know what a road is. ‘House. Beyond house, trees. Yours.’
‘You Tarzan, me Jane?’ I say in an attempt at humour.
It goes down like a lead brick with an elephant tied to it. Probably just as well. The image of him in nothing but a loincloth is a bit too much for me.
‘You don’t know the first thing about trees, do you?’
‘Well, I …’
He points to a large green thing behind me, one of the only green trees in sight. ‘What type of tree is that?’
I squint at it. Is this a trick question? I pluck a species name out of thin air and hope for the best. ‘Fir?’
‘Cedar.’ He rolls his eyes. ‘Cedrus Libani, actually. But I’m sure you knew that.’
‘Oh, right. Of course. I knew that, I was just making sure that you weren’t bluffing.’
‘And what’s that tree dying of?’ He points in the opposite direction towards a sad looking spindly thing that probably had leaves on both sides once.
It’s another trick question. It doesn’t look like there’s any dying about it, it’s almost certainly already completed the process. ‘Creeping brown deadness?’
‘Aye.’ He gives me a scathing smile. ‘Otherwise known as windburn. It happens when the wind pulls water out of the needles faster than the roots can replace it. I can see this is going to go really well.’