and had stacked them on top of each other to look over the fence. She was wearing a dressing gown and some old slippers, her hair unbrushed. The dressing gown, made of pale-pink fleece, had scraped past a bramble, and a few dried leaves clung to the bottom.
Her ankles were bare for once and the electronic tag was visible. It’s really quite clunky when you see it close up, grey and black, a bit like you’d imagine an early prototype of the Apple Watch to look. I could see the friction had caused an angry rash around the edge of the strap: another flare up of her eczema.
She spun her head when she heard my footsteps. Her lips have a naturally violet-red hue to them but this morning they looked almost blue. She said: ‘I’d like to go next door and mow the lawn.’
‘You know you can’t do that. It’s rented out. Someone else is living there at the moment.’ A French banker on a short-term contract; criminal how little he has got away with paying. At least he’s hardly there. A family would be noisier. I think the sound of children through the walls would kill her. She needs the money. Plus it was part of her bail conditions that she lived elsewhere, a condition suggested not by the CPS, but by her own lawyer. ‘It’ll look better,’ Standling had said, ‘if you’re too upset to go back into the house, if the associations are too painful.’
I didn’t think it was a good time to remind her of that.
‘I want to do some watering. It’s been so dry and the amelanchier looks miserable. It has such a fine root system, very close to the surface. It’s been disturbed so much. It doesn’t need a lot of water, but it needs some. I don’t want it to die.’
‘Shh,’ I said sharply. ‘Keep your voice down.’ I don’t like it when she reveals too much horticultural knowledge. ‘It’ll rain soon. It always does.’
She turned back and, peering over again, cried, ‘What have they done, Verity? Why have they destroyed my garden?’
I took a step towards her. I had a memory then of my sister on a climbing frame, and a second memory, a sensory one that felt like a thud in my biceps: the weight of her small body. ‘They were looking for evidence, do you remember?’ I said. ‘They had to dig it up to take away some of the plants.’
She stared at me. Her eyelids quivered. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I saw.’
She hadn’t, in fact. But she doesn’t like to admit weakness. It’s part of the new power play between us. The medication, the exhaustion of it all, has fuzzed her memory and she resents me for it. I don’t mind. I take it as a compliment. It’s the people closest to us who get the brunt of our irascibility. Fact is she had been at the police station, railing and shouting, the day the men came in the space-age suits. I was the one who watched from my upstairs window as they erected their polytunnel structure and obliterated the garden on which she had lavished so much love and money, leaving heaps of churned earth, jagged holes, gashes of lawn. It had been unsettling, creepy even, the methodology of their progress: starting at the back with the ‘wildflower’ bed, advancing to those ‘mature’ shrubs she’d spent so much money on, only at the end of the day reaching the terrace and the pots of herbs.
‘You didn’t,’ I said. ‘You weren’t here.’
She twisted away from me, craning her neck, but her sightline was restricted by the newfangled trellis she’d put up after she moved in. It’s fashioned from horizonal strips of wood and she had to bend her head at an angle to line up her eyes with a gap in the slats. Maudie was nosing around at the base of the crates and a hazel branch, which had been pinned back by Ailsa’s elbow, sprung forwards and swiped her across the cheek. She wobbled, the crates buckled and, jumping off, she threw out her hand, snagging the flesh of her palm on a thorn.
I like to think it was the shock and the pain that made her mean. ‘I can’t believe the state of your garden,’ she said. ‘It’s so dark. The holly,’ she said. ‘And the apple trees and the hazel. How much nicer your own garden would be if you cleared it and cut them right