Text: The sound of plastic chairs scraping tiled floors is the sound of British springtime. It is garden-centre time and garden-centres are cunningly contrived mazes with plants around the outside and a café in the middle. To reach the café you must purchase a certain number of plants. It is the café, not the plants, that creates the whirlpool of human activity.

Nina's thoughts were bleak, as she pushed plastic chairs back under plastic tables and cleared plastic trays from unlikely places. How on earth, she wondered, could anybody manage to lodge their cream tea detritus in the geranium display. And why?

She had started by working ‘on orchids’, employed for the experience earned during a summer job at Geneva’s Botanic Gardens. Within the centre she had recapitulated her skills, nourishing freckled banks of elegant Oncidium and Catasetum. But she sold very few. She observed prospective purchasers carefully and weaned them from their hopeless choices by describing the complex soil requirements of all Orchidae or the unpredictable flowering of the Mormodes group, deigning to bloom perhaps one year in three, and then only in sublime conditions. She managed to steer unsuitable orchid desirers to Busy Lizzies or pelargoniums. Shoppers appreciated her help, and if they could not plug the void in their lives by purchasing orchids, then at least she shortened the time between anticipation and disappointment by offering them instant ground cover.

She was swiftly transferred to the café, where her language skills (English, French, German) should have been an asset. They weren’t. She found it just as hard to direct fat pastel-clad matrons to cream teas as she had toward orchids. She recommended instead cheese-plates or salads. She was moved again, (the ‘d’ word ­ demoted ­ was never used) this time to stillroom duty: clearing tables, filling milk jugs, layering plate, napkin, plate, napkin, for the customers to collect. She was as low as she could fall without dipping below the contour line of degradation into the oceanography of despair. She was invisible to everyone except the spotty boys who filled the shelves with infant plants. One carbuncular youth had tried to get inside her bra by creeping up behind her and pinning her against the plate-warmer. She had leaned forward, trapping his hands between the warm surface of her flesh and the warmer surface of the hot cupboard. With her right profile flattened against the stainless steel she had enjoyed--in left ear mono--the anguished whoosh of expelled air that followed the connection of her right heel with his patella. It wasn’t until she was given a week’s notice that she discovered he was the owner’s nephew.

Perhaps, for a couple of days, people would have asked what happened to the Swiss girl--had she been Swiss. But she wasn’t: she had lied. The garden centre had welcomed a Swiss student improving her English: it would have rejected a Bosnian refugee living in bed and breakfast land. She was Sarajevan, bloody-minded, resourceful and scoured by the harsh winds of betrayal and unresolved conflict. She had trained not in Geneva, but at the Botanicki Sarajevo. The garden centre owners had lied too. They had said resourcefulness and hard work would be rewarded. Nina decided to take rewarding into her own hands.

She had copied the key to the stillroom in the first week, to avoid waiting outside for the po-faced supervisor to let her in. Hiding was easy enough: at the end of the day she loaded the dishwasher with teapots and hot-water jugs, making enough space to allow her to crouch in the hot cupboard and pull the doors closed.

At ten pm she let herself out, unlocked the door and began carrying plant trays to the main entrance. She started with the orchidae. By the time Behadil and Gulam arrived on the other side with the ropes and the van borrowed from an ‘uncle’, she had emptied ‘Orchids’ and was partway through ‘Azaleas’. She loaded the trays onto the roped boards her brothers threw over the gate. Inevitably there were some losses, especially in the massed abundance of camellias and rhododendrons. Blossom tore and flowers fell, on both sides of the gate.

By three in the morning the van was full and the shelves were denuded. Everything showy was gone. She went back to the stillroom and washed herself, and the soles of her shoes, which were slippery with crushed petals. At six am she crept back into the hot cupboard. At eight the supervisor unlocked, switched on the lights and then went back outside to enjoy a cigarette. Nina emerged into the empty resonance of a new day and began work, first re-loading the silverware into the hot cupboard, then filling ramekins, some with clotted cream and others with jam.

At half past eight the commotion in the centre drew everyone outside--the opposite of the café’s normal effect--and they were ordered to search the aisles, as if the missing plants had strolled off and were likely to be located in an unused corner, possibly having a surreptitious smoke before opening time. At nine-thirty, the other half of the equation emerged. A staff member reported seeing a ‘kind of horticultural display’ outside the Register office on her way to work. Every bride that day walked through a drift of azaleas, every bridegroom had an orchid buttonhole.

Nina worked the rest of her notice and was again an unemployed refugee. Her room in the hostel was filled with cool efflorescence of orchids. Her brothers’ twin beds were flanked by miniature orange trees. Like Sarajevo, there was not enough room to move; and like Sarajevo, the things they sought to preserve were more fragile than people, and more beautiful.