The Keeper

DIY Dean Done

The Truro encounter had shaken Dean. The art materials were a reminder and made him hide them away, like the things he found hard to think about. Instead, he relished his time alone, accountable to no one, thinking for one. There was nobody to tell him to come in for his dinner when he worked late in the garden. He didn't have to put his tools away each night when he was building in the barn. And no one was there to criticise how he worked, which was often for hours on end, sometimes without eating for a day or two. Everything around him took the shapes he saw in his mind.

The garden was transformed. Dean learned more about how to grow things by reading books he borrowed from the library or picked up at secondhand shops, but mostly he learned by trial and error, finding out the peculiarities of his own particular microclimate. Seeds he saved gave him plants that were adapted to his garden. Each year, an expanding range of fruits and vegetables grew better. He had excess to trade with Demelza for things from the shop. He scoured builder skips for offcuts of wood from renovations and old timber from demolitions. The hammock was fraying, so he constructed a proper bed with a workbench underneath that pulled out to give him plenty of space for his bigger projects. On one of his rarer trips to Truro, he bought well-made dovetail-jointed oak drawers from a charity shop and built shelving around them to store all the tools he was accumulating for his carpentry and gardening.

Dean was working on a mezzanine level, where he could keep his clothes and books, and dry some of his excess produce, when disaster struck. He had propped the bottom of the ladder against a big box of tools as he had done countless times before when he was putting in the boards and rails of the mezzanine. All that was left was cutting out the area where the proper steps would go. The ladder was just short of the rafters and Dean was careful as he made his way up it, holding his toolkit in one hand with his other on the rungs. Spring sunshine lit up the roof, and it felt pleasantly warm as he reached the boards. The top of the ladder nudged against something round and brittle, lodged in behind a rafter. His stomach lurched as there was a slight jolt, but the ladder was firmly in its place and he felt secure.

Until the wasps took him by surprise.

He knew the error as soon as he made it, letting go of the ladder to swing with his free arm as the weight of the toolbox pulled him sidewards, letting the ladder be pushed away in an equal, opposite and terrifying motion.

The two-storey drop onto floorboards might have been okay if he hadn't hit the big box of tools with his thigh first. The sickening crack told him what the pain then confirmed.

He had broken his leg. This was going to be tough.