The lemon tree had had a good summer. It had surreptitiously reached six feet across the fence - I hadn’t realised - and into the neighbour’s yard. To support the weight - it was now fully laden - its almost horizontal leaders, like giant elbows, were resting on the palings. The fence nails were unnailing, vertically distended gaps were showing light; and gratingly clichéd aphorisms about good fences were repeating themselves.
Scene one: the church.
Three o’clock. I had walked the half-mile or so towards the slate-encased red brick spire, still strainingly visible above the rising skyline of new apartments. It was a warm afternoon. The silvery sky tinged with red had suggested either a medieval painting of Calvary, or a 1950s Hollywood biblical epic.
I sat in the south transept as the truncated passion play was read to an half-empty church. Everything is open on Good Friday now; the congregation has diminished with the zeitgeist, if that term can be applied to rushing around shopping malls. At four o’clock, the congregation exited in a silence relative to its size rather than any sense of solemnity. There had been no music: I say that with some asperity, as at the previous night’s supposedly sombre Mass of the Lord’s Supper, the person in charge of music had played Lord of the Dance as the communion hymn. They might as well have sung Lady Godiva; although the alacrity with which some of the volunteers had thrown off their shoes and bared their legs for the ceremonial washing of the feet suggested to me that riding naked through the church on a horse might have had some appeal.
Scene Two: Late afternoon, the garden.
I should not have been shocked at realising the lemon tree’s boughs had grown so rampantly into the neighbour’s yard. (Nor should I have been astonished at the previous night’s music selection; there are worse things to worry about than someone’s bad taste.) The past summer of riotous growth everywhere in the garden had followed endless sunshine and quenching, drenching rain that had hummed at night like a distant interstate train.
I got the saw out of the falling-down shed, and the secateurs from their more accessible spot on top of the electricity meter box, and set to work. The roses take a lot of work, especially the ten-foot climbers and the fence-long ramblers, and inflict the odd scratch or catch on clothes; but their barbarity is nothing compared to the lemon’s almost uncuttable boughs and the menacingly sharp one-inch green spikes that arm its branches. I worked until the silvery grey sky was drained of its light and the pile of cut greenery was a dark defeated mountain, as if growing out of the ground.
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