Fertiliser

“Conrad! Conrad, dear, come and have a look for yourself!”

My wife’s voice reaches me as I push the patio door open with my shoulder, precariously balancing a tray of lemonade glasses in my shaking hands.

I pause and glance for a moment at the amusing sight she makes, a plump figure squatting down on the grass, her face partially shadowed by the ridiculous large-brimmed straw hat I insisted on placing over her white curls earlier that morning.

She turns and stares at me. “Don’t you think they’re simply marvellous?” she gasps, her eyes two glittering stars.

I suppress a smile, not quite daring to say something for the fear of bursting into laughter.

I have always been somewhat unable to match her passionate feelings.

Well, how can I, since at this particular moment they are directed towards cucumbers.

Granted, they are excellent cucumbers, long, fat, fresh and of that particular shade of luxuriant green that makes you want to cut them right here right now, sandwich them between two slices of white bread and take a huge, indulging bite.

But still.

Cucumbers.

Biting my lip in a titanic effort to stay serious, I descend the few steps to the small patch of greenery that we call the 'garden', even though it is little more than a misshapen forty-square-foot rectangle thick with messy shrubs.

“I brought you lemonade.”

“I’m not thirsty” she protests, rising up and placing her hands on her large hips, those same hips that had produced children at an alarming rate during the first years of our marriage. Our three sons were born barely eleven months apart, and I am ashamed to admit that more than once I thought about telling her straight to her face that it was too much and I wasn’t going to handle another round of nappies, baby food, paediatric check-ups ever again.

I think she got the message by herself, though, because at one point she just stopped getting pregnant.

“You’re drinking it anyway,” I say, handing her one of the glasses “this midday sun can be merciless sometimes.”

The corner of her mouth rises slightly in a half smile. She drains the lemonade in one long sip, then places the glass back on the tray.

“Speaking of the sun,” she says, turning to face me “do you think it’s all down to this lovely sunlight?”

I follow her gaze down to the garden patch. Five rows of shiny, elongated cucumbers stare back at us, seeming to grow bigger and brighter with every passing second.

I shield my eyes with my left hand. “You know what?” I reply, doing my best to match her excited tone “I think it’s just about possible.”

I watch her give out a pleased sigh, fondly staring at the garden; for some reason, she reminds me of those mothers who sit in the front row at their children’s school recitals, waving their hand and telling everybody that their daughter got the lead part.

She seems to have taken this year’s Cucumber Grow Show particularly seriously. Well, to be fair, it is a pretty serious affair for all of us old folks. Which shows just how unimportant and uneventful life can be for an eighty-something years old couple with crippling backs and failing eyesight.

Every year, in April, you’ll spot dozens of nice elderly ladies with reading glasses halfway down their noses and pleasant-looking old men in tweed blazers swarming around the signing-up stall across the village square. They’ll pretend not to look too interested in the annual Cucumber Grow Show, greeting their neighbours with masterfully feigned surprise, signing the enrolment sheet and paying the two pounds entry fee with an air of content indifference, while in reality they have already memorized the list of their competitors in a single glance.

“Why, Mrs. Pearson! Entering this year?”

“Oh, just a bit of fun, dear, really. After all, we do have a bit of an unused land in our garden and – well, cucumbers are as good as anything, I s’ppose.”

Nonsense, of course.

Mrs. Pearson probably mapped her entire herb garden around the perfect cucumber spot, marking the grassiest, most sunlit spot with yellow tape as if it was the scene of a crime and watering it twice a day in the early hours of morning and evening.

Personally, it seems like an awful lot to go through for a ribbon and a twenty-pound shopping voucher to spend at the local fruit stall, but what do I know, I have never been really into gardening.

Instead, from April to June, the village’s entire life seems to revolve around cucumbers. Weather reports are debated outside church like prophecies. Measurements and cucumber photos fly around the grocer’s like the latest scandal. In every corner of the street, someone’s muttering about parasites and how to annihilate them.

This goes on until the last Sunday in June, when a panel consisting of three “experts” – Mrs. Kendall, the librarian, Doctor Trewytt, the ninety-years-old retired paediatrician with a hearing aid, and Mr. Lloyd, the self-proclaimed botanist who dropped out of Natural Sciences to run the family dry-cleaning business – tour the participants’ gardens one by one, taking measurements, comparing size and colours of the vegetables, cutting them and tasting them on slices of rye bread, freshly baked for the occasion.

Every year, my wife enters the contest with the same fierce determination she once brought to lecturing halls — only now, her students are cucumbers. She studies soil and sun like syllabi, takes notes in the margins of gardening books, frets over weather forecasts as if they were exam timetables.

And every year, something goes wrong.

One summer, the plants shrivelled up because the soil was too dry, the next one she overwatered them and the leaves rotted. Then there was the year she planted the seeds too low in the ground and the plants didn’t grow at all. Another, aphids infested those few blossoms that had painfully broken through the surface.

I watched her, summer after summer, staring helplessly at her disastrous attempts at horticulture, getting frustrated and holding back tears when our neighbours dropped uninvited by our home and shot pitiful glances at our disgraceful, unappealing patch of sparse bushes.

But this year she has a real chance of winning, if I do say so myself.

I don’t know how many times she has watered them, or what she has added to the soil or what kind of pesticide she has used to get rid of the parasites, but this year, for the first time, our – her, really – cucumbers are long, green, lushly hanging in happy pairs or triplets among the late yellow blossoms.

This year, for the first time, she has a real chance of becoming Doctor Mrs. Effie Ellis (née Vaughan) Ph.D., First Prize Winner of the Annual Nestonfield Cucumber Grow Show.

“They’re beautiful.” I add for good measure, while she is already walking back towards the patch, aimlessly adjusting the rudimentary picket fence I tentatively put up three months ago, after what we still call the hedgehog affair. One night, just before we sowed the cucumbers, we heard rustling in the garden, as if some animal were nosing around. Effie begged me to put up a fence, worried rabbits or hedgehogs might chew the shoots. I knocked together a few planks and, against all odds, it seems to have worked.

“I still can’t believe how gorgeous they are this year, Conrad. Don’t they just look spectacular?”

“Definitely.”

“So many of them. And so perfect, look! Not one parasite, not one dried out stem! I have never seen anything like this before!”

“Mrs. Dobson will have real competition this time.”

“Oh, Conrad. I don’t think she will be entering the contest this year. Not unless – ” she abruptly stops herself, but I know that what she was going to say is “Not unless she has news from Harry.”

Mrs. Dobson is the seventy-five years old tenant of the cottage up the hill, some hundred yards from ours; she has been the undefeated winner of the Nestonfield Cucumber Grow Show for almost every year since it started, and Effie and I used to joke that all the skill she has in vegetable growing, she obviously lacked in child-upbringing.

Her son, Harry Dobson, is the disgrace of the village.

When he was little, he ditched school to go throw stones in the lake, during his teenage years, he used to smoke sitting cross-legged on the cemetery’s tombstones, as an adult he has spent more time in prison than out, possibly dealing drugs in-between and being bailed out every now and then by poor Mrs. Dobson herself.

I glance at my wife, instinctively knowing what’s on her mind as she absently rubs a cucumber leaf between her thumb and index.

Harry Dobson is the same age as our eldest, Mark, and they went to school together up until they were thirteen. By that time, Harry had already been held twice in juvenile detention and the local high school refused to take him in. That’s when Mrs. Dobson hair turned grey, from one day to the next, despite her being only thirty-eight.

In the past months, after being released for the umpteenth time on probation, Harry Dobson dissolved into thin air. One morning Mrs. Dobson found his bed not slept in and his phone switched off. As he had always done before whenever he had an important drug deal, he had wiped every trace of his presence on the surface of the earth and just left for whatever place he had “business” in. From that day on, Mrs. Dobson has been seen walking silently among the village streets, occasionally giving out heavy sighs, her eyes fixed downwards, her slim little figure hunched, almost crushed over the weight of her son’s sins.

Sure enough, Effie raises her misty-eyed glance at me “Eighty-four days, Conrad.” she says in a choked voice “Could you imagine not having heard from Mark, or Peter, or Brian for that long? Doesn’t he realize he is killing her? ”

“He’s doing what he wants to do.” I reply evenly, cutting her mid-sentence.

I hand her back the lemonade tray “Here, bring this inside.” I ask her to take her mind off things “And see if we need anything else for lunch. I suppose I could pop around the store just in time before closure.”

I watch her totter towards the back of the cottage, and I turn around to shoot one last, fleeting glance at our glorious cucumbers before joining her inside – when I spot a dark-clad figure at our iron gate.

Taking my time, I stroll towards the end of the gravel path, and, sure enough, I begin to recognize the outline of a uniform.

Of course.

It’s the new police officer – whatsisname – PC Andrews – or – was it PC Newman?

I have never been good with names.

A local kid freshly thrown out of basic training, he has been strolling around the village streets like he owns the place for some weeks now, though he’s a twenty-something good-for-nothing boy who used to break car windows playing football in the parish playground.

“Mr. Ellis.” he greets me raising his hand to his police hat.

“Hello, there, officer.” I push back the gate, and it opens with a squeak. “It’s hot today, eh? Hardly believe it’s still June. August, more likely. Can’t say how are we going to survive if temperatures keep going up.”

He nods and steps in, pushing his hands in his pockets. We walk in awkward silence, side by side, until we reach the end of the gravel path, stopping simultaneously right in front of the garden.

“Can I offer you anything? Lemonade, perhaps?” I ask to break the ice “Do come inside, I think my wife is rustling up a quick lunch, if you fancy a sandwich.”

“No, thank you, Mr. Ellis.” he is still with his hands deep in his trousers pockets, his gaze fixed downwards.

“Oh. Then – what can I do for you, officer?” I ask.

I don’t know why, but a cold shiver begins to run down my spine, despite the stifling air.

He sighs, then raises his head and fixes his eyes in mine. “It’s about Harry Dobson?” It sounds more like a question than a statement “The one gone missing about three months ago?”

“Of course, of course. What – what about him? Have you found him?”

“In a way – yes. You could say we have.” he glances inside the cottage window, where Effie’s profile is just visible behind the glass, chopping up some vegetable or other to put inside the sandwich. “We have reason to believe, Mr. Ellis, that Harry Dobson is -” he clears his throat “– well, dead.”

“Oh.” I say again, scratching the back of my head, less shocked than I would have expected. “Have you told Mrs. Dobson yet?”

“No, Mr. Ellis. You see – there’s the matter of the body.”

“I don’t follow.”

“We’re still not sure” he says “but we’ve got a tip-off. From someone Harry used to hang around with. A pretty reliable source, actually.” He scratches his temple, like he’s not sure how to go on. “They say it wasn’t an accident. It was… murder. A proper execution, planned out. Happened in Manchester.” He shifts his weight. “Apparently someone higher up — someone big — wasn’t happy him, with his – shall we say services? – anymore. They say the body was moved. Far. Hidden somewhere rural.”

“It’s all very sad.” I peer at his lean, freckled face, confused “But what have I – or my wife – got to do with any of this? Shouldn’t you be telling this to his mother?”

PC Andrews — or maybe it’s Newman — sighs again. “We will, Mr. Ellis, we will. As soon as we dig up the body.”

I follow his gaze.

The cucumbers stretch before us in perfect rows, fat and glossy, soaking up the sun like never before.

A breeze rustles the leaves. One of them twitches.

I swallow, my mouth suddenly dry.

“Well,” I say. “That might be difficult. They’ve never taken to the soil quite like this year.”