Heaven's Edge by Romesh Gunesekera

innumerable conferences. Blackbirds were chi-chi-ing incessantly and the maroon roses on the straggly branches, too high up the neighbour’s wall for my grandfather to reach, blossomed where the sun had warmed the buds into heavy blooms with ball gown pleats and voluminous petals. My grandfather was resting on his rustic oak bench, feasting his eyes on the butterfly florescence of a deliciously yellow laburnum tree. It was mid-afternoon. The garden was a riot of colour. Eldon, nearly eighty years old, seemed completely at peace.
    â€˜Granda, are you going?’ I asked.
    â€˜Where?’
    â€˜To the show.’
    He had been looking at a newspaper article on the Chelseaflower show. ‘I don’t think so. It’s not for people like me. Anyway, the crowds will tire me out.’ He sighed, as he often did, and lit another cigarette. He turned the page to the cricket which was his other restorative. His team – the old home team – was on a roll.
    â€˜You want to play with the hosepipe?’ He pointed a crumpled cigarette at a spool of green plastic tubing by the fence. ‘Those roses need water.’ His tone suggested that the sight of the spray would revive him too: a gushing pipe in warm, still air. ‘Pull it out.’
    On my way over, I spotted a mound of crumbly brown earth at the border of the lawn. I plucked a dandelion and poked at it with the furry stem.
    â€˜What have you found?’ Eldon called out. ‘Don’t you want the hose?’
    I reluctantly left the colony of alarmed ants and got hold of the pipe.
    â€˜Turn the tap on,’ he instructed from his resting place. ‘There is a control on the nozzle.’
    The tap squeaked in my hand and bubbled. Stepping over a line of seedling cabbage, I unwound the hosepipe. A dribble from where the crosshatched plastic was locked into the red ring wet my feet. ‘It’s coming, Granda,’ I shouted holding down the trigger with both hands and tracing a silver line to the edge of his oval lawn. Water poured into the dry earth of the flower bed like a river. A muddy puddle quickly formed and a rich gurgle filled the garden.
    â€˜Turn it some more so you get a proper spray.’
    I wanted to run the water to the ants. A little trench quickly filled; a dark foaming head slithered towards the nest.
    â€˜Do the roses, Marc. The roses. Give each bush a goodminute and a half. Count to a hundred, then move to the next.’
    All of a sudden my arms went limp. I wanted to cry. ‘Granda, do ants drown?’
    For a moment he looked blank, as though he was trying to work out whether ants breathed. Whether they had noses and nostrils. Lungs that might fill with water. Whether their tiny legs would flail, splashing about, before they sank down beneath the surface. He gazed at me as though I was somebody else. ‘Yes, son. Yes, I suppose they do.’
    â€˜Have you ever killed an ant, Granda?’ I wanted his hand to give mine the strength I could not find.
    â€˜You mean deliberately?’ He hunched his shoulders as though he was in a fighter plane, like my father, swooping down, with the gun muzzles on the wing blades jabbering neat lines of dust-puffs to match the spasms of a dying column. ‘I never flew even the Hurricanes,’ he muttered.
    I didn’t understand. ‘What hurry cranes?’ I asked.
    â€˜I mean not into combat,’ he added absently. ‘But what did you ask?’
    â€˜If you ever killed an ant.’
    â€˜No, never. Never deliberately.’
    I was wondering about accidents when Grandma Cleo called out, ‘Eldon, telephone.’
    He heard her, but it took him some time to return from his reverie.
    â€˜Eldon, telephone for you.’
    â€˜Right.’
    I watched him stub his cigarette out on the side of the garden bench and slowly struggle to his feet. I followed him into the house.
    â€˜Who is it?’ he asked.
    Cleo shrugged, spooning sugar.