On Wednesday morning, I’m in the kitchen when I see the squirrel through the window, sitting in a crook in the big tree. He’s eating one of my tomatoes, as usual. I open the back door and step outside.
“How dare you,” I say. The squirrel looks down at me for moment, then turns his back and continues eating.
“Shouldn’t you be hibernating by now?” I say.
But then I notice how warm it is, and remember how warm it has been. There shouldn’t really be any tomatoes left for the squirrel to steal.
The lawnmower is leaning against the house where I left it a week ago; on a whim, I push it across the grass to my office door, where I sit down at my computer and work. When I return to the kitchen half an hour later, I push the mower back to its old spot. Then I push it back to my office with a coffee in one hand. At lunchtime, I push it back to the kitchen, where my wife is unloading the dishwasher.
“What are you doing?” she says.
“Harnessing the energy of my journey to and from work,” I say.
“I’m already sorry I asked,” she says.
“From now on, each time I go to my office, I push the mower there,” I say. “Whenever I return, I push it back.”
“You’re allowed to help,” she says, handing me a stack of hot plates.
“As long as I take a slightly different path each time, the lawn is effectively self-mowing,” I say.
“And the lawnmower never gets put away ever,” she says.
“Not under this new system,” I say. “Anyway, I shouldn’t even have to mow the lawn now. What happened to autumn?”
“If you’re in the mood for maintenance, you could fix that,” she says, pointing to the blinking ceiling light above the oven.
“You need to get Kitch for that,” I say.
“Am I really going to pay an electrician to change a lightbulb?” she says.
“It’s not the bulb,” I say.
“How do you know?” she says.
“Because that’s a new bulb,” I say.
“But it’s flickering,” she says.
“It’s not flickering,” I say. “It’s flashing in a precise pattern.”
“What?” she says.
“Look,” I say. “Blink blink blink, five-second interval, blink blink blink. It’s sending a message.”
“What message?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m not an electrician.”
The next afternoon, it’s so hot in my office that I have to open the door and all the windows. I hear the squirrel crossing the roof over my head, and turn in time to see him leaping into the middle of the tomato vines.
“You bastard,” I say.
The next evening, I come back from the shops around sunset. “This hot weather is getting weird,” I say to my wife. “The man at the wine shop says people are buying rosé again.” My wife does not answer; she is staring up at the ceiling, phone to ear, talking to Kitch.
“He claims it’s not the bulb,” she says. “He says it’s a warning from space or something.”
“I did not say that,” I say.
“It doesn’t matter what time,” my wife says to Kitch. “You know him, he never goes anywhere.”
“That’s because I work here,” I say.
“Now he’s going to say he’s a businessman,” she says.
“I am a businessman,” I say. I put down my bags and push the mower to my office.
On Sunday night, I am woken at hourly intervals by the pounding of rain against the skylight, and again just before 6am by a piercing burglar alarm.
“Is that us?” I say. I realise I’ve never heard our alarm.
“It’s the school,” my wife says. The cat stands on my chest and stares at me.
“I guess I’m getting up,” I say.
The kitchen is cold and dark. I turn on the tap for the cat. In the garden, the mower is leaning against the house, dripping with rain. The tomato plants beyond are bare and yellowing, and the squirrel is nowhere to be seen. I stand there, arms folded, contemplating the forbidding commute ahead of me, while the light above me blinks three times, waits, then blinks again.
