Judgment Day Read Free

garden. On the night after the bulldozers had moved in he had woken shouting from a nightmare, and had gone to the window to see, in the moonlight, the shattered windowless shells of the few remaining cottages. In the morning, at the office where he then worked, they had been surprised to see him shaking. He wasn't, you'd have thought, a nervous man; a bit close, perhaps, but not nervous. He'd been away for a week or so after that, flu or something, people said, and thereafter appeared his usual self, quiet, composed, reserved.
    The new houses rose from the rubble of the old. The raw earth of their fenced gardens sent forth lawns and paving from the garden center and neatly spaced and labeled shrubs and, in summer, padded and canopied seats and hoses with sprinkler attachments. Sydney got to know their occupants by name: the Marshalls and the Haddows and the Coggans.
    And the Bryans, next door. Keith and Shirley. And the child, Martin.
    The Bryans did not have a lawn with a sprinkler, or labeled shrubs. Their garden plot remained much as the builders had left it: things seeded themselves and grew haphazardly, rank clumps of grass, groundsel, and chick-weed. The boy played in it, alone. From time to time someone planted lobelia or african marigolds, forgot to weed or water, and the flowers shriveled or were smothered.
    Sydney Porter, his morning already planned—hoe the seedbeds, cut the grass, tie back the climber if time—came out of the house and went over to the potting-shed. There, he selected a hoe from the row of garden tools. The tools,blades and tines wiped clean of earth, hung in gradation on the wall, orchestrated from long-handled fruit-tree pruners to wooden bulb dibber. Flower-pots were stacked in columns; hanks of twine were ranged on hooks; sprays and fertilizers were lined up on a shelf. Sydney went over to the vegetable plot and set to work.
    “I can never see what people get out of gardening. You're always at it, Mr. Porter, aren't you?”
    She seemed to be forever yawning, Shirley Bryan. Yawning and scratching an armpit. She stood at the fence now, doing just that, a fluffy-haired girl with a bad complexion.
    Sydney paused. He thought. Eventually he said, “It's having control over something, I suppose. Knowing what will happen.”
    “If I try to grow things they just flop over and die, or something eats them. You can't win.”
    “You get the odd bother,” said Sydney smoothly. “Not enough to put you off altogether.” He went back to the hoeing: thrust and back, just deep enough to clip the seedling weeds, a wake of tiny wilting shoots behind him, french beans pushing up nicely to right and left. Shirley Bryan continued to watch, arms akimbo along the top of fence.
    “Keith's got his promotion.”
    “Very nice.”
    He wished she'd go away.
    “Five hundred and a Granada at the end of the year.”
    “Ah.”
    “Not that much of it'll come my way, I daresay.” She yawned again. “Hey, there's Martin's ball under that bush of yours. He was on about what had happened to that lastnight. D'you mind chucking it over, Mr. Porter. Thanks a lot.”
    The boy, over the years, had left infancy behind, topped the garden fence, acquired footballs and guns. He was a thin, pale-faced child, quiet, to Sydney's relief. Quiet and rather solitary, playing mostly by himself, strange furtive games along the fence and among the bushes and saplings that, eventually, had grown and furnished the end of the Bryans' garden.
    He did not play with the Coggan children, next door on the other side, the two tidy, fair-haired little girls. Neither did the Bryans consort much with the Coggans, Sue and John. John Coggan of E. J. Coggan & Son, Estate Agents, 14 High Street, Laddenham. A different type of family, Sydney could see, more homely people, the garden spruce, Sue Coggan regular as clockwork trundling her pushchair along to the shops, in later years hurrying the girls to school, off to collect them at three-thirty.
    Martin