Starting as he meant to go on.
He stood without looking at the cushions again – because he wanted to plump those bloody cushions! – and opened the sliding doors. On the terrace, he took his phone from his pocket to capture the view. He’d do a blog post tonight about their first day in the new house, in Woodside, as they had called it.
The air was so clean, scented with pine resin, and as he walked round the side of the house and past the shed, he breathed it into his lungs. Thanks, Bram, his lungs were probably saying. You’ve almost forty years of London pollution to make up for, but it’s a start. He chuckled, imagining what David would say if he knew Bram’s lungs were talking to him.
His smile widened as he spotted Henrietta, the carved wooden goose from his childhood, positioned by Phoebe in a little drift of wildflowers – were they some kind of buttercup? He took a photo for the blog. He’d get a shot of the veg patch too. Or maybe a video of his hand picking the first onion? He switched to video function, angling the phone to get a long-range shot of the veg patch, and started walking again.
‘So,’ he narrated. ‘First day in Woodside and it’s time to pick some onions! Yep, Bram’s much-derided self-sufficiency drive is finally paying off. Let’s harvest those suckers! Let’s–’
He stopped, looking from the screen of the phone to the actual ground.
‘Oh, no! No no no!’
Where the veg patch should be there was just a rectangle of earth covered in shrivelled, dry, yellowing stalks and flopped-over leaves. Stupidly, he looked around for a moment, as if the real veg patch might be somewhere else, before dropping to his knees and examining the nearest plants, a row of Salad Bowl lettuces. They had been succulent lime green and deep purple last time he’d been here but were now a uniform gungy brown, the lower leaves stuck gummily to the soil, already half-decomposed.
Bloody Nora, as Kirsty’s mum would say.
Everything was dead.
Okay so he’d not checked the veg for a few days – he’d been too distracted with the move – and they’d had a very sunny, dry spell. But this was Scotland. Surely it hadn’t been hot enough to kill them? He touched the soil. The top layer was crumbly, powdery between his thumb and forefinger, but when he poked his finger down a few centimetres he hit dampish earth.
He stepped across the row of ex-lettuces to examine the other vegetables. The carrot shaws were withered and papery, but when he pulled up a carrot – a puny specimen at this time of year – it looked more or less okay. But if they’d been hit by some kind of blight, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to eat any of it.
The onions were just starting to fill out, too, the bulbs that were peeping up from the soil fattening nicely. It would have been satisfying to have a few home-grown onions, no matter how small, for their first lunch in the new house.
Oh, well. He supposed these things happened. He wasn’t exactly an expert gardener, but he had grown chillies and peppers and courgettes in their tiny London garden, successfully enough to generate a surplus which he’d proudly offered to the neighbours.
He brushed the soil off his fingers and tapped his phone to start a new video, panning over the dead lettuces. ‘The question I should probably be asking myself is: am I a fit person to have custody of vegetables? I feel like some sort of ban should be slapped on me.’ He zoomed in on the pathetic carrot he’d left lying on the soil. ‘Prohibiting the growing of vegetables for, say, five or ten years.’
He cut the video and pocketed his phone. At least the blog post tonight would be a bit more interesting than usual. A bit more entertaining. He lifted his face as the sun appeared from behind a fluffy white cloud.
And at the exact same moment, somebody screamed.
Phoebe!
He was off and running before the echo from the trees had died away, past the terrace, round the house, and then he could see them, Phoebe and Max, and thank God, thank God, neither of them was hurt, they didn’t look hurt – Phoebe was running across the grass after Max, who was pelting towards the whirly drier, where something, a black cloth, was catching the breeze, flapping as the whirly turned –
It wasn’t a black cloth.
It was a bird.
A crow. Tangled in the whirly, wings flapping.
But before Max reached it, Bram could see that the wings were only flapping because the whirly was spinning round, that the bird was dead, the wind catching its wings, seeming to reanimate it.
‘Daaaad! He’s caught his feet!’ Phoebe wailed as he ran past her. ‘You have to help him!’