The Ladder Is Mine
(Two identical green sheds, twelve feet apart, at the bottom of two gardens on Ashfield Road.)
Boris: Linda. Your lawnmower is in my shed.
Linda: I know. Your coffee machine is in mine. In a shed. Who keeps a fancy Italian coffee machine in a shed?
Boris: Someone whose wife said it was too big for the kitchen. Look, both trucks came on the same day and the sheds are identical, so they filled the wrong one.
Linda: Right. So my shed now consists entirely of your possessions. Twelve boxes, a mower, and a bag of birdseed the size of a small child.
Boris: Ninety pounds. Good price, actually.
Linda: There’s also a bicycle wheel. One wheel. No bicycle.
Boris: That’s mine. I’m keeping that.
Linda: Obviously.
Boris: Okay, let’s do this properly. You give me the mower, the boxes, the birdseed and the wheel. I give you everything of yours that’s in mine.
Linda: Everything?
Boris: Everything except the ladder.
Linda: The ladder is mine.
Boris: The ladder is in my shed.
Linda: The ladder is mine, it’s three years old, and it has my father’s name written on the side of it.
Boris: Then I’ll take it in winter. You take it April to September.
Linda: You want a ladder timeshare.
Boris: And the wheelbarrow.
Linda: What wheelbarrow?
Boris: The blue one. At the back, under the sheet.
Linda: Boris, I have never seen a blue wheelbarrow in my life.
Boris: Nor have I. It didn’t exist last Tuesday. But it’s in a shed, and that shed is on my side of the fence, so.
Linda: Fine. You take the ghost wheelbarrow, I take the birdseed.
Boris: You don’t have birds.
Linda: I’ll get birds.
Boris: Deal. I’ll write it all down. On paper, so there’s no argument in March.
Linda: Boris.
Boris: What?
Linda: The sheds are twelve feet apart. We could carry all of it across in about ten minutes.
(A long pause.)
Boris: We could.
Linda: We could.
Boris: I’ll bring the paper.
Linda: I’ll bring a pen.