Ernest decided to steal the fork early one morning.
He’d been woken at 4.27am by the magpies on his flat roof. He’d found a fledgling magpie under a bush the day before and tried to save it from his cats. Perhaps the adult birds were its parents and trying to keep it safe. He’d read that magpies eat other birds, they’re corvids, like crows. Beautiful feathers, but they like meat; noisy buggers too with their rattling call.
It was daylight, he couldn’t sleep anymore, and it was time to plant the lettuces; he needed his fork back. He went out the back door, along the alleyway, and down the quiet suburban street. Her house was three doors down, and she’d just had a lovely lawn laid out the front. It was so new and fresh the turf edges hadn’t grown in yet, leaving tramlines of bare earth a couple of inches wide that the sparrows used to catch early worms. They all flew into the hedges as Ernest walked up her garden path, and somewhere a cat wailed to be let in.
The gate into the back garden was hanging off its hinges and made no sound as Ernest pushed it aside. He’d only been in here once last summer when the village held a Garden Safari. That’s when he’d seen the fork, the fork with his initials neatly carved into the neck, the fork he’d been given for his sixtieth birthday, the fork that had disappeared from his shed the same summer his potatoes got blight, his tomatoes spoiled on the vine, and all his lettuces were eaten by slugs. Ernest had waited all through the damp autumn as his vegetables rotted and his perennials were eaten by pests. Through the winter his garden had become an iron grey barren place, yet three doors up no frosts touched the ground, late raspberries grew, and hardy roses bloomed. She had become the chairwoman of the local gardening society and the darling of his little village.
Through the gate Ernest was surrounded by the lazy buzzing of honey bees and the thick scent of climbing roses that formed a lush green tunnel into her garden. He didn’t remember this from last year, she must have had landscapers in; that was clearly against the rules of the gardening society. Ha! He’d got her — a thief and a cheat. The tunnel opened out onto a small square patch of overgrown dewy lawn. The lawn was surrounded by deep herbaceous borders spilling over with lupins, foxgloves, purple flowering chives, delphiniums, fuchsias, geraniums, alliums, and thick stemmed sweet pink rhubarb with massive frilled bitter poisonous leaves. Plant varieties that Ernest had never had success growing in his garden seemed to flourish here in hers.
In one corner of the border on the edge of the lawn stood his fork, neatly sunken into the only bare patch of earth that he could see in this rich ripe garden. The magpies began their rattling calls again, louder and more agitated than before, Ernest must have been close to their nest. The dew had soaked his trousers right up to his knees, but the early morning sun was warm and weighty on his shoulders. His arms became heavier as he reached out for his fork, and his feet steadily sank into the grass sea. Ernest ran his hand down the neck and shaft of his fork as he settled onto the lawn — a small nap, just brief, no one would notice, not in the long, lush grass.
Ernest’s peaceful snores became louder and changed as the lawn wrapped itself around him like a feather comforter until the old man could be seen no longer, and all that remained was a rattling call.
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