My wife and I are arguing. “It’s not wide enough,” I say. “Nothing here is wide enough.”
“Look,” she says, “this one says it’s wider.”
“That’s not what that number means,” I say.
“How do you know?” she says.
“That number clearly refers to the width of each individual hexagon, in millimetres,” I reply.
“You shut up,” she says.
I suppose a part of me knew that this day would come: at some point, we would be married long enough to have a stand-up row about chicken wire just outside the back doors of B&Q. But I also know that the simmering resentment I am feeling at this moment isn’t really about the chicken wire. It’s about my enemy, the squirrel.
My wife has recently learned a handy summary of the squirrel’s general approach to autumn-planted bulbs: alliums, she says, are of no interest to him; he doesn’t care for daffodils, either, but will sometimes dig them up, just to spite you. I have no reason to doubt this, because I don’t care.
“Tulips, on the other hand,” she says, “are like crack for squirrels. They can’t help themselves.”
“Tell it to Gardeners’ Question Time,” I say.
My personal war with the squirrel ended when he ate the last of my tomatoes. My wife’s war with him began a few weeks later, when he made off with some bulbs the day after she planted them, leaving the flower pots on their sides. Normally I would contend that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but the enemy of my enemy is the reason I’m spending my Saturday morning looking at chicken wire.
“It’s really expensive,” I say. “Let’s just get plastic mesh.”
“Are you mad?” my wife says. “He’ll eat right through that.”
“This isn’t about success,” I say. “This is about the price of failure.”
As a result of not winning this argument, I spend the rest of my Saturday cutting chicken wire and nailing it into place over two raised beds, while my wife replants daffodil bulbs that have been unearthed as a provocation.
“I’m going to win,” my wife says.
“I think if you’re reduced to covering your front garden in chicken wire,” I say, “then you’ve already lost.”
“He’ll get under that,” my wife says. “More nails.”
Faced with my handiwork, the squirrel simply opens another front: he figures out how to prise the lid off the steel dustbin where my wife stores her bird seed. On Tuesday, I watch from my office as she chases the squirrel with a hoe raised above her head. He leaps from branch to branch and disappears over the trellis.
“You need to learn to live in harmony with nature,” I say. “As I have.”
“He’s eaten a whole sack of sunflower mix,” she says.
“You can’t take it personally,” I say. “There is more than one squirrel. It’s many squirrels, working in concert to defeat you. Give up.”
“Never,” she says.
She puts a brick on top of the dustbin and goes back inside.
When I come downstairs the next morning, the flower pot on the back step is on its side, next to a pile of earth. The lid is off the dustbin, lying on the ground next to the brick. Many, many squirrels, I think. But as I walk to my office shed, I see him – the original bastard squirrel – on the garden wall with a tulip bulb in his little hands.
“You,” I say.
I give him a hard stare and he stares back. In a flash of anger, I rush towards him, fists raised. The squirrel runs along the wall for a few feet, weaving in and out of next door’s trellis. Then it stops, turns and faces me again. When it stops, I stop.
“Those bulbs cost money,” I say.
The squirrel doesn’t move.
I take a step closer. The squirrel issues a defiant little bark: breathy, but menacing nonetheless.
“Are you trying to threaten me?” I say.
“Huff!” it says.
“Please,” I say. “You’re a squirrel.”
“Huff!” it says. Its tail flicks once, and then freezes.
“You better run,” I say, so quietly that it sounds as if I am talking to myself.
