Plants and I have always had a fraught relationship, in that they want nutrients and nurture and I usually let them die. This came to a head one birthday when my boyfriend gifted me a cactus. This prickly green, rather uninteresting stub was meant to represent our enduring love for each other.
Cacti, for the unfamiliar, are evolved to withstand the world’s harshest desert terrains.
This one fell victim to the dark recesses of my bedroom and the equally dark capacity for neglect I hold in my heart. When I left Dublin for the UK to embark on my imagined writing career, I didn’t give it a second thought.
I’ve always been plagued by a sense of self-delusion. In my mind I was destined for success but was just in the wrong place for it. London was where anyone who wanted to achieve anything ended up. My boyfriend and I were long distance and I’d left all my friends, but my mind was set on only one thing: to make it into a big newsroom.
When I landed an internship at a small magazine I jumped at it. I packed up everything and moved. I found the only accommodation I could afford, a Brixton flat share with a deranged couple in their 40s. The first night, I could hear them in the room below me. I curled up in my sheets and lay with my eyes open in the dark. I put up with this only because I was waiting for my life in London to finally begin. I felt like I was knocking on a great oak door. I wasn’t in the building but I was on the right street, waiting and waiting. You think if you’re hungry enough you’ll be let in.
But months passed and I was still rapping my knuckles outside. The city is impossibly bleak when you’re lonely. Everyone has somewhere better, cooler to be. In Ireland, aspiring to high places is often met with pity. There must be something mentally, or emotionally, wrong with you. And maybe we’re on to something.
But in London, it was normal. Everyone I knew was gunning for high places. Where I was once self-congratulatory over my job, I became despondent. I spent my evenings crafting cover letters, only to be rejected over email, if I was lucky. Winter came again and I was still outside and the street was dark and grey. I thought: why the hell did I come here?
Until I got a call to say I’d been accepted into a large UK tabloid. The closed door had finally opened. The door in question was the gleaming turnstiles of the Canary Wharf office. I strode inside, imagining all the important stories I was about to cover.
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But it soon became apparent that alongside my culture content I would be working on stories that drove online page views. These were quick stories designed to inform the reader of how to get rid of slugs and when to mow their lawn. Their headlines were more ominous: “Expert warns against ‘deadly’ garden pest”; “Remove one item from gardens IMMEDIATELY”. But it was the name of the game. I quickly racked up millions of views through no seeming talent of my own.
What seemed like a temporary measure soon became my main focus at work. When people asked what I wrote, I prayed no one looked me up. Googling my name, thousands of these gardening articles would come up. I appeared bylined on syndicate sites. At night, spectres of dead plants I had owned over my life came to haunt me. I was Almha Murphy: slug killer, hydrangea pruner, restorer of dead lawns. I was a lie.
In spare moments I would glance out the window and see the London skyline from hundreds of feet above. In the mornings the skyscrapers would swim in grey cloud, then sunlight would break through and scatter from the black windows and I would see the remnant of the old city in between, standing staunch and cold, grey as stone. And far, far beneath were hundreds just like me, waiting for tube carriages, breathing in smoke and dust, sweating in their spring coats.
Months later, I was informed I would be let go. Back home, I sat in my room and stared at the wall. Every spare second in my brain had been filled until now with news cycles, trends, incendiary quotes and plants, always plants. But now I was staring at a blank wall and it was empty.
Then I thought about the cactus. I wondered where it was. I looked around my room and couldn’t see it. I figured it had died and had been cleaned up. I mentioned this to my boyfriend and he laughed. “You finally thought to ask. The cactus is alive. I rescued him.”
I was surprised to realise I felt relief.
Now in London there are things I still miss about Dublin. The laughter cobbling outside the pubs, the natural lightness to the conversation. Even the talent for making small observations that cut through to the soul of you, which I think is what I ran away from in the first place.
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But I knew, sitting there, how the warmth would fade in some days and the hunger would return. I’ve begun to nurture a different garden now. It’s not quite as hardy; sometimes it even disappears from sight and I have to screw my eyes tight and will it back into being. I just hope my cactus is still alive when I eventually come back.
Almha Murphy is a freelance journalist from Dublin. She has lived in London since 2023.
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