Tuesday Mornings (Part 1)

The land on Elm Lane had been a bus depot, then a hole in the ground with a fence around it, and then, for eleven years, a garden. Zara had been there for nine of them. She came on Tuesday mornings before work and for most of Saturday, and she knew the place the way you know a room in your own house: which gate stuck, which bed held water after rain, which apple tree gave fruit you could eat and which gave fruit that was only good for cooking.

There were fourteen volunteers on the list and about six who really came. A retired bus driver who liked to point out that he had once parked a bus on this exact spot. Two sisters from the apartments behind the wall, who grew garlic and gave none of it away. A teacher who brought her class down every June to plant sunflowers and back again in September to measure them. And Declan from number 40, who had lived alone since his wife died, and who had built a greenhouse out of pallets and old windows that everybody said would fall down in the first storm and that had now stood for six winters.

Nobody in the garden discussed anything important. They discussed slugs. They discussed whether the beans had gone in too early, whether the compost was ready, whether the hose would reach the far beds if you pulled hard enough. On a Saturday in April, Zara counted eleven people on the site, four of them children, and two more standing at the gate looking in, which was how new volunteers usually started.

The bench under the plum trees had a small brass plate on it with a name and two dates. Most of the people who sat on it had never met her. That, Zara thought, was rather the point of a bench.

She locked the gate at one o'clock and walked home. The letter from the council was waiting on her doormat, in a white envelope, with the town crest in the corner and her name spelled wrong.