‘I know what I’m doing, for God’s sake,’ he growls. ‘Don’t you tell me how to cook a fucking hamburger. They need to be well done. Or do you want to get fucking food poisoning, is that it?’
‘Darling,’ Sarah murmurs. ‘We have a guest.’
‘Oh, have we?’ he replies with withering sarcasm. ‘Is that who I’m doing this for?’
‘Maybe I should go,’ Dennie says to Sarah, and gets up to leave.
‘No—’
‘Yes,’ says Colin. ‘Maybe you should go, and maybe you should stay gone.’
She knows she shouldn’t say anything, that there’s nothing she can say that will help. Sarah has confided in her that Colin received a redundancy letter in the mail earlier this week from the Indesit factory in Blythe Bridge where he’s worked for the past five years making cooker parts. No, anything she does say will only make things worse. But she says it anyway: ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘What that’s supposed to mean,’ he sneers, and she can smell the beer on him even at this distance, ‘is that maybe you should stay the fuck off this allotment and out of my marriage.’
‘I’m not—’
‘Dennie, please—’
‘Like fuck you aren’t. I know why she spends so much time up here rather than at home. Don’t tell me that you two don’t sit here and gossip about me while I’m at work, making shit up. Well, enough. I’m putting my foot down.’ He waves the spatula that he’d been cooking with in her face. ‘Keep away from my wife, you old witch, or I’ll give you the slapping that your dead husband should have given you years ago.’
It is so vicious, so totally and utterly out of order that it shocks her into silence, as is doubtless the intention. Very quietly, trembling slightly, Dennie gathers her things together and goes, leaving Sarah weeping.
Then the present reasserted itself and Dennie staggered a little with the sudden rush of remembered fear and impotent fury. She found an empty chair to sit on while her breathing steadied and her heartbeat slowed.
Obviously she declined when a pork roll came her way, and she wasn’t the only one – she was in a sizeable minority who were enjoying the alternative halloumi burgers and veggie kebabs – and almost regretted it, seeing how obviously delicious it was. People were chewing, lost in savouring the texture and flavour, making little murmuring noises of enjoyment; they moved like sleepwalkers or drug addicts, with their eyes slightly distant as meat juices streaked their fingers and chins. She saw David enjoying one, though Becky politely declined one for herself and Alice. Meanwhile Everett and Ardwyn stood hand in hand and watched with beatific smiles.
Dennie was sure that quite a few of the people queuing up weren’t allotment holders but residents of the neighbouring houses who had heard that there was a free meal on offer. For example, there was Matt Hewitson and his mates; Matt was the youngest son of Shirley Hewitson, whose garden backed onto the allotments. Technically she wasn’t a tenant, though she was close enough friends with Carole and Geoff Bennett, who owned the plot behind her house, that the Bennetts let her use the few yards directly behind her back fence – which in practice meant that Matt and his friends were often hanging out there. There was the occasional grumble about noise and mess, but it all fell into the grey area of the by-laws about ‘guest use’ and was never serious enough for a formal complaint. Matt, his girlfriend Lauren and a handful of their friends – who were very definitely not allotment tenants – were queuing up for pork rolls, but Everett and Ardwyn didn’t seem to mind. They were served as generously as everyone else.
The only crack that appeared in the new neighbours’ façade came during the one incident that cast a shadow over the afternoon. Ironically, it was a heated argument between Matt and Lauren. Matt was nineteen, long enough out of school to have been able to get a job by now, if there had been any going, while Lauren was a few years older with a flat of her own and a job at a travel agency in town, which anybody who paid attention to the local gossip could see put her out of his league – anybody but Lauren, apparently, and her friends had given up trying to tell her and were just waiting for the penny to drop. Apparently it dropped that afternoon, and dropped heavily, because Matt went looking for her and found her behind a shed snogging one of his mates, Darren Turner. Darren was the son of a local farmer, but had a motorcycle and a Deliveroo contract. There were shouts, accusations, and, inevitably, fists. Matt took a swing at Darren, missed, and put his fist straight through a small window – if the shed hadn’t been so old, the pane would have been Perspex and his fist would have just bounced off, but it was glass, and he went straight through up to the wrist. Then there was blood and screaming, and Ardwyn leapt forward with a tea towel to staunch the wound, and that was when Dennie saw it: for a flash of a second, Ardwyn grinned. Probably nobody else noticed it, their attentions fixed on Matt’s bloody fist, and even if they had, would have dismissed it as a grimace. But Dennie knew delight when she saw it.
The fuss attracted his mother, who stopped just long enough to accuse Ardwyn and Everett and the Briar Hill Committee as a whole of unspecified health and safety violations before rushing her son away to Accident and Emergency, and Dennie took the opportunity to establish her own mask a bit.
‘That was quick thinking, there,’ she said to Ardwyn. ‘Poor boy. I hope he’s all right.’
‘I think it was just a scratch,’ Ardwyn replied. ‘These things always look worse than
