I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)

by Peter Gifford

This little tale is inspired by the following song, the Peter Gabriel-era Genesis tune I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) from the album Selling England By the Pound. It’s an old favourite of mine.

It’s one o’clock and time for lunch. Dum de dum de dum.
When the sun beats down and I lie on the bench I can always hear them talk.
There’s always been Ethel. “Jacob wake up you’ve got to tidy your room now.”
And then Mr Lewis. “Isn’t it time that he was out on his own?”
Out on the garden wall. Two little lovebirds. Cuckoo to you. Keep those mowing blades sharp ...

I know what I like, and I like what I know. Getting better in your wardrobe, stepping one beyond your show.

Sunday night, Mr Farmer called. Said “listen son, you’re wasting time. There’s a future for you in the fire escape trade. Come up to town.”
But I remembered a voice from the past. “Gambling always pays when you’re winning.”
I had to thank old Miss Mort for schooling a failure. Keep those mowing blades sharp...

When the sun beats down and I lie on the bench, I can always hear them talk. Me, I’m just a lawnmower, you can tell me by the way I walk.

“Jacob, pass me that punnett of pillocks will you boy?’

I looked through the back of my eyelids at the red glow, Mr Sun telling me to sit down, shut up, soak me in. Mr Lewis didn’t figure in my book. He was a fatty old man with a chip on his shoulder and a bunion on his big toe. Get up from the bench? Why bother? It wasn’t going anywhere.

“Jacob, you lazy lubber, hoist your mainsail and beat to quarters!”

Mr Lewis had a naval background. His speech was peppered with At Sea-isms and Naval-type terms of all types and descriptions, most of which probably meant a lot when chasing the Roaring Forties around the Cape in a high gale, but not much when you were lying in the garden on a sunny afternoon with the bees buzzing. Pre-punnett or post-punnet, I’d not be rising from my slatted bed just yet. I turned my lubbery body away and faced the back of the bench like a Sunday roast getting done to a turn.

Mr Lewis grumbled, I heard him grumble like my belly before it’s got a pie in it. I let him, and slipped back into my sun-roasted reverie. The low drone of Spring goings-on lulled me off to a fuzzy doze and time walked sideways, looked backwards and generally gave up on the whole idea of moving forward. Suited me just fine. The long grass whispered under the bench and the clouds were quiet and Mr Lewis was long gone, off to work on his 16th scale model of the Lord Nelson, I’d guess.

A snatch of birdsong dragged me back like a hooked fish to the real world, but I kept my eyes closed. They were happier that way, warm and glowy. I thought of the Girl, as I often did when my thoughts were set to thinking, with her rosy red cheeks and her big smiley smile. She had hair that was lit with gold and strawberry and she wore it shoved into something like a bun that bobbed at the the back of her neck, always promising to fall in a cascade but never quite doing it. Whisps of hair floating around her face like snippets of song. She liked my funny ways and I liked her, and she said I was lazy and good for nothing but nothing, but she smiled when she said it.

Spring passed like flickering picture-show scenes when we lay on her big bed in the yellow and glow-filled afternoons and laughed. She pranced and posed in the different costumes she pulled from the big old wardrobe, showing off as I lay back with my hands behind my head and pretended to be all judge-like. Truth was, she looked good inside and out of them all. She was slim and annoying and she danced in and out of the wardrobe flinging fabric to the left and right, and shafts of sun filled with dusty motes cut the room into slices.

She said I’d never amount to nothing, but nothing is something, that’s what I say.

Mowing a lawn ain’t the simplest thing in the world, not by far shot with a long bow. Nobody ever said ploughing a field was easy, and what I do ain’t much different, only a little less deep, if you know what I mean. I like those clean long lines of light green, I like turning the grass into a soft patterned quilt that you could lie on and close your eyes and drift away on. I know what I like. Mowing is the thing I do and I do it pretty well, when I get a mind to be doing it. Only the bench calls me about noon when the sun is high in the sky and the birds sing a little lullaby just to me.

Dum de dum de dum.

Time comes when the shadows come crawling over the bench and I gets up and heads home. It’s only a little walk but I work up an appetite, and by the time I get home Ethel has a steaming pie all ready for me on the kitchen table and it goes down well. Ethel takes care of me, she does, and though she sometimes talks at me instead of to me, I don’t mind. I’ve got a nice place here and why should I move on when I’ve got all I want? Seems to me I’d be asking for trouble, and there’s plenty of that ready to be given if you go asking. Mr Farmer came over for tea one evening and he started eyeing me as I ate my pie and he said “Jacob’s a big strong lad, he should be looking to his future now. And then you could look more to yours Ethel” he says then, and eyes Ethel with that sugary look which he tries to stir into his face but which always sinks to the bottom. Ethel looks away and giggles like a little girl, not like a mum who looks after a big strong lad.

“You should come up and see me in town Jacob, there’s opportunities for lads like you in the fire escape trade” he says. I like my buildings small and close to the ground though, says I. And with big lawns that need cutting around them adds I. Mr Farmer looks at me like he’d like to throw me off one of those fire escapes and wraps his thin lips around another piece of pie. “You’ll never amount to anything with that attitude young man” he says. “That’s just what old Miss Mort used to say” says I, happily.

The next day I’m back on the bench with my old friend the lawnmower leaning his handle just-as-you please against the end and the day feels just like yesterday and maybe like tomorrow too, if I’m lucky. Maybe I’ll go see the Girl or maybe she’ll come see me. Right now the sun beats down on my head so I take a page of newspaper and rest it in a peak over my face and get myself all comfortable. It’ll always need mowing so why be in a hurry to mow it? It won’t stop growing on my account. That ain’t in its nature.

Two little lovebirds are singing in the sky. “You just lie yourself there Jacob” they call. “Rest that funny head of yours on the bench, and drift off and dream of the Girl. There’s plenty of day left and plenty of days left after that”

Dum de dum de dum.