The following Wednesday morning Alec Monkman began to clean his garden. When he started the job the air was keen and thin, so keen and thin that the only smell it could float was the itchy, prickly one of tomato bushes and even that smell drifted in and out like radio reception from a distant station – despite his carrying armfuls of frost-blackened tomato plants directly under his nose.
By nine o’clock the sun was shining with a cold, untempered brightness and the sky was the palest blue, an exact match for the colour of Monkman’s eyes, which seemed intent on reflecting the season. However, Monkman paid no notice of the sky. He was too busy pulling up tomato plants, wrenching stakes out of the obstinate earth and throwing them in a pile in the middle of the garden. In no time at all even this easy work made him grow flushed and warm. It was because he had let himself run to fat, he told himself, prodding his middle. When he turned to the corn patch he was already slowing, visibly tiring. He cleared it as a child might, uprooting each stalk and bearing each singly to the rubbish heap upright in his fist like a withered staff of office, its roots dribbling earth onto his shuffling boots and the drab leaves rustling alongside his ruddy, sweaty, dirt-streaked face. Having deposited a stalk with the rest, he turned mechanically on his heel and trudged back to pull up another. The corn on the rubbish heap stood stacked higher than his head before the plot was eventually cleared and at the close of that task he was sweating so freely that he removed his jacket and, without thinking, tossed it up on the pile, repeating the same motion that had disposed of the last of the corn. The jacket was soon covered by his next load, pea vines, and forgotten.
Clearing was nothing like planting had been. He had gotten confused planting. He hadn’t remembered certain things. But clearing was easy, there was nothing to be confused about. You just took everything up. You worked until all was bare, empty.
Alec worked blindly on. At mid-afternoon, as he approached the last of it, what was left of the cucumbers and beans, the pain in the small of his back grew so sharp that he was obliged to breathe quickly and shallowly through his mouth. Something else. There was a loud, windy roar in his ears whenever he bent over. But he disregarded the pain and the roaring and stumbled about his garden with his nose to the ground like a dog, swinging his head from side to side, suddenly stooping to seize a single parched leaf, a broken twig, the smallest scrap of waste he had earlier overlooked. Back and forth he went, racing the approaching dusk, his breath coming faster and faster, stiff fingers pecking at the dirt, pinching up this or that.
The supper siren wailed from Connaught’s town hall, the dim light was failing. It was time to give up. He could no longer spot the last tiny shreds of refuse and his hands trembled so violently that the only way he could control them was to stuff them in his trouser pockets. The garden was as clean as he could make it. He went into the house and closed the door.