The Plot – Chapter 5
Things That Go Bump
Dima parked his Tesla X outside the locked gates. He wasn’t quite sure what he was doing here, at ten thirty-five on a Friday night.
It had been a sudden impulse. Instead of following the tail lights up the Eastern Freeway – home to a warm bed and sleepy wife – he’d taken the Donvale exit. Now here he was at Orchard Vale estate, outside the chainlink fence of what would soon be another ConStruct boutique housing development.
It had been a frustrating meeting in the City and had run late. The UAE consortium for the Altona redevelopment was turning out to be a pain in the arse.
Perhaps that was it: a need for self-validation. Here was a project he could be proud of, one of those rare ones where everything had gone right.
Orchard Vale was personal for him. Erasing the hated memory of Unity Textiles, the mill which had blighted his family and brought Tată to an early grave. Providing quality housing for the up-and-coming residents of the City of Corymbia.
Melbourne’s newest metro council encompassed a patchwork of industrial estates, sleepy outer suburbs and greenfield developments on the northeast urban fringe. It was a council with a progressive attitude, an eye to the future. A pleasure to do business with.
Phase Five would be the jewel in the crown of ConStruct’s Orchard Vale development. Opulent, stylish, yet compact. Ingenious design with fastidious attention to detail. Ideally placed for regional and metropolitan transport links.
There was no reason ‘medium density’ had to mean ugly little shoeboxes. These townhomes would be sleek like his Tesla. Form and function in perfect harmony.
The only fly in the ointment was this scrappy little parcel of allotments. Twenty-eight objections. Fucking ingrates.
God, how he hated allotments. All that ugly improvisation: rusty rebar repurposed as trellis; crappy little plots of land overflowing with a tangle of plants. Flyblown, canker-spotted fruit. Hipsters and retirees pottering around, fiddling and faffing unproductively. Playing at farming.
They reminded him of his maternal grandfather, the charismatic and loquacious ‘pillar of the community’. After the old man’s death, Mama had confided in him how Pappous really was.
A village tyrant, he’d come home on a Friday night, sodden with ouzo and self-regard after regaling the sycophants at the bar, give his wife a few backhanders, terrorise the kids and spend the weekend hungover, grubbing on his ‘land’, a miserable half-acre of dirt and chickenshit where he grew grapes and enormous, pendulous green phalluses, allegedly cucumbers, beans and squash. The grapes were destined for sour red wine. The vegetables he pickled in jars and stacked on dim shelves like anatomical specimens.
People nowadays had no idea. Two generations removed from the ignorant peasant life, they viewed it through a lens of nostalgia, hankered after the ‘noble simplicity’ of an existence with dirt under your nails, arthritis in your knees, dust in your snot.
Live off the land? Fuck off.
A great green swathe of cropland, no tree in sight; irrigators marching across a geometric landscape of perfectly parallel furrows; row upon row of kilometre-long polytunnels; neatly pruned orchards of near-identical trees. That was the sort of farm that gladdened his eye, warmed his heart. Australian agriculture at its best: hygienic, efficient, cost-effective.
But this? Ugh. Unprofitable, itty-bitty chaos.
Look at that bloody great tree for instance, slap-bang in the middle of the miserable little vegetable beds. Though it was dark, he thought from the profile it might be a walnut. A monster, perhaps twenty metres high and wide. A lone survivor no doubt from the orchards which had lined this valley before the textile factory was built. Didn’t they even realise that a walnut poisons the land? Nothing will thrive under a walnut. Idiots.
They’d probably kept it out of some romantic notion. There might even be a heritage overlay, though it was an exotic. That should be looked into; dealt with.
He gave the gates a contemptuous little kick. To his surprise, the chain slipped through and they swung open. Not locked after all: the closed padlock held a loop of chain in place on one wing of the double gate; the other end had been tucked back through to make the gates appear locked to a casual observer.
Maybe have a mooch around inside? Why not?
He fetched a torch from the glove box.
Vince pumped the spray bottle vigorously, inserted the wand into the foliage, then squeezed the trigger.
Instead of a good, fine mist, a random jet shot out the side. Bugger.
The spray head was blocked. Should have checked before leaving home. He’d have to dismantle, inspect, clean, reassemble it.
That required light, somewhere to lay out the pieces, running water, perhaps a pin to unblock the little hole in the brass nozzle. It wasn’t a job you could do in the middle of your veggie plot at night, with only a pocket torch.
There was nothing for it: he’d have to go to the clubhouse.
After all, why not? It wasn’t against the rules to use the Plot at night. He had every right to be here, turn the lights on, use the facilities. There was no need to skulk.
If the garden really was to be demolished, trashed in two months’ time, that made this last crop of Amish Glory all the more precious. He’d been carefully breeding his tomatoes for size and excellence for a decade. Foolishly, he’d used or given away all his old seed stock this spring. If these fruit didn’t make it to maturity, all would be lost.
It was worth compromising your principles for.
He picked up the sprayer and threaded his way between the beds to the clubhouse, keeping the torch beam on the ground. It wouldn’t do to stumble over a carelessly placed rake or watering can in the dark and fall arse over tit.
Safely arrived at the little porta-cabin he turned the key in the lock, pushed. Resistance: something appeared to have become jammed against the door on the inside. He could feel it give a little, scrape on the floor, stick fast.
How odd.
He set down the sprayer on the ground, gripped the knob firmly and gave the door a good, hard shove with his shoulder.
The something clattered to the floor. He reached around the door jamb and fumbled for the light switch.
A high-pitched voice gave a quavering cry of terror.
Next week in The Plot:
Chapter 6: Stickybeaks and Sticky Ends
Dima goes exploring.
Disclaimer: The people, organisations and events described in this story are entirely the product of the author’s imagination; they bear no intentional resemblance to real-life people, organisations and events. Some locations are based on real places, however the City of Corymbia and its localities are inventions of the author.