I am standing in the kitchen, a knuckle pressed to my lips, trying to remember why I came in here, when I feel eyes on me. I turn around to see the tortoise in the middle of the floor, gazing up with his usual, vaguely pissed-off expression.
“Well, well, well,” I say. “Where have you been?” This is rhetorical: the tortoise has been lying stone still, legs and head tucked in, beneath the washing machine for the past 40 days.
“Lettuce?” I say.
The tortoise is the perfect harbinger of spring, in that he always turns up prematurely and spends three weeks stomping around the kitchen, the embodiment of disappointed expectation.
I throw a few leaves of lettuce on the floor and make myself a coffee, in case that’s the thing I came into the kitchen for in the first place. As I stand drinking it, the cat walks up and rakes its claws down my trouser leg.
“That hurts!” I say.
“Miaow,” the cat says.
“You’ve been fed,” I say. “We both know this.”
“Miaow,” the cat says.
“Fine,” I say. I feed the cat again. The tortoise plods straight over the lettuce to watch the cat eat. The tortoise really likes cat food, much in the way the cat really prefers dog food.
A little later my wife comes out to my office.
“The tortoise is awake then,” she says.
“What’s he doing?” I say.
“I didn’t see him,” she says. “Just the lettuce. Shall we put the deck chair out?”
“Now?” I say, looking at the sky. My wife has clearly taken the sighting of chewed lettuce on the kitchen floor as an early sign of spring. Too early.
My wife finds the deckchair under some stuff along the side of the house, and lays it flat before me. Every year it takes me a little longer to remember how it unfolds, and how the canvas seat attaches. One year I won’t be able to do it at all, but I’m hoping it will fall apart before then, and we can get one that presents less of a puzzle.
The chair creaks as my wife sits, but it holds together: one more year.
“Nice,” she says. “Do you want a go?”
“No,” I say. “I’m cold.”
“Shall we go to the garden centre tomorrow?” she says.
“It’s winter,” I say.
The next morning I’m at a large garden centre which looks all the more spacious for having so few plants on display. I go inside where it’s warm, buy a packet of seeds, and find my wife looking at the doormats with disapproval.
“They all say things on them,” she says. “Like Welcome, or Hello.”
“And you don’t feel you can stand by any of that.”
“I just want blank,” she says.
“Fine, let’s go,” I say.
“Wait,” she says, pointing toward the aquarium section at the back of the building. “I was just going to buy my dad some fish. Something for him to stare at.”
“Does he want fish?” I say.
“If I ask him he’ll say no,” she says. “So I’m just going to get them.”
My wife disappears into the dimly lit fish department, but I get no further than the entrance where, as usual, I am transfixed by a gallery of faded photos: pictures of men who, for unspecified reasons, are banned from this area.
The gallery has grown considerably since I was last here, and now includes a few women and at least one person who appears to be wearing the liveried fleece of a garden centre employee. Some of the pictures were taken hastily with a phone; others have been pulled from CCTV. In this context everyone looks sinister, and wholly unrepentant.
“What did they do?” my wife says, appearing at my shoulder.
“Unspeakable things,” I say. “Did you get any fish?”
“They didn’t have any good ones,” she says. “Just carp.”
“Perhaps it’s for the best,” I say.
“Is it sexual?” she says, looking at the photos.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe they just have lots of fussy rules.”
“Either way, you don’t want to end up on this wall,” she says.
“That,” I say, “is why I never go in there.”
My wife drops me at home before heading off to another fish place. I walk into the kitchen just in time to see the tortoise upend the cat’s bowl with his front foot, sending dry cat food everywhere. As he turns to track down one of the scattered nuggets, I think: spring is just around the corner.
