Rob had an answer for everything, and most of his answers were the same. That’s life. It is what it is. Always has been. He was seventy-one, and he said them to the news, the weather and the price of a loaf. He said them on Sunday mornings at the allotment, where his granddaughter Isla helped him mainly by asking questions. She was seven, and she asked about everything.
“Why do worms come up when it rains?”
“They just do.”
“Why do the beans climb the sticks?”
“That’s what beans do.”
“They just do.”
“Why do the beans climb the sticks?”
“That’s what beans do.”
That Sunday a pigeon got caught in the netting. Rob swore at it, then at the netting, then at the council for the state of the path. Isla watched him with her head on one side.
“Grandad, why are you always cross?”
“I’m not cross. I’m just like this.”
“Why?”
The Question
He opened his mouth, and nothing came out. Nobody had ever asked him that. Not his wife, not his doctor, not himself.
He thought about it all week. He thought about his dad coming in from the pit, black to the elbows, saying nothing at tea except to complain. Rob had decided as a boy that this was what men were like. He had never once wondered whether it had to be.
By Saturday he still had no answer. But he had noticed something. Each time he started on the weather or the news, he could hear Isla asking why, and more often than not he stopped. On Wednesday he rang his brother, which he hadn’t done in a year, to see how he was.
On Sunday Isla crouched by the bean row.
“Why do they climb the sticks, Grandad?”
Rob knelt down beside her, knees cracking.
“Do you know, pet. I’ve no idea. Shall we find out?”
The story is fiction. The point of it isn’t.
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