Windfall

It was twenty-five divine feet of slightly overgrown, lush beauty. Standing on the decking, Demetra watched passionflower and jasmine clamber over one another along the fence to the left. At the back, a wisteria flailed rampant over the playhouse, winding around the spindles of its little balcony, sprawling across the rear fence and waving tendrils over it. In the centre was a daisied lawn, with an old apple tree on the right, surrounded by japanese anemone. ‘That will be full of blossom in Spring,’ she told Tom, as he put his arm around her waist, ‘when the baby comes’.

A few months after they had moved in, the apples were plum-sized bullets and looked like being a bumper crop. She hoped they would taste good but she wouldn’t know for another month or more. The right hand fence beside it was rather bare. She’d planted climbers and ramblers, looking forward to light shining through leaves when they reached the two foot of trellis at the top, but that was not to be. A clematis made it to the trellis, but the next day she came out to find it falling away from the wood, flopping back into her garden.

Demetra sat in a chair on the deck by the French doors to look at it. Why had it fallen? As she sat, she heard a thump and caught something out of her peripheral vision. Then another thump. Her head whipped round to see two more missiles, both of which landed on her lawn.

‘Hey!’ she called. Silence.

Investigation revealed that these were apples. Had her tree been dropping apples into her neighbour’s garden? Surely not - they were still hard and bitter.

‘Hello?’ The silence felt loaded, ready to spring. ‘Is there a problem? With the apples?’ It felt ridiculous, talking to a fence that wasn’t talking back.

Back inside, upstairs, she stepped cautiously to the window upstairs, but there was no one to be seen in the garden of number ninety. She could see that the apple tree was probably overhanging her neighbour’s land, but only by a few inches, no more. Number 90’s garden was strange: crazy-paved, in grey, pinky and yellowish slabs; there were about twenty artfully ‘missing’ pavers, in each of which there was smooth, flat bare earth and a small plant, dead-centre. Nothing seemed to be thriving, though there was no sign of disease, with one exception.