Compost

The argument had been going on since Tuesday, and it was now Saturday, and it was about compost. "You can't put citrus in it," Marion said, for perhaps the ninth time. She was standing at the back door in her gardening gloves like she was about to referee something. "It's organic matter," said Doug. He tipped the bucket in. Two lemon halves, coffee grounds, the ends of a bunch of carrots. "The worms don't like it." "The worms don't have a say." They had retired within four months of each other, which everyone had said would be lovely. Their daughter had said it. The bloke at the bowls club had said it. Thirty-one years of passing each other in the hallway on the way to different jobs, and now here they were, all day, every day, in a three-bedroom weatherboard in Bendigo with one garden between them. Doug had taken the garden the way a man takes a hill. Marion had, she felt, been asked to relinquish it. "I've had that heap going for six years," she said. "And now it's got lemons in it." She went inside. He heard the kettle. That was usually how it ended, one of them putting the kettle on, and they'd drink the tea in different rooms and by dinner it would be fine. But the kettle boiled and she didn't come out, and after a while he found her at the kitchen table with the gardening book open, the old one with the cracked spine, and she was reading the page on composting with her lips moving slightly. "Alright," he said. "What does it say." "It says small amounts of citrus are fine." He waited. "Small amounts," she said. "Not half a bloody lemon tree." He sat down across from her. The tea she'd made was one cup, not two, and he noticed that, and then noticed her notice him noticing, and she got up and made another one without saying anything about it. "I don't know what to do with myself," he said, when she sat back down. "That's the truth of it. I get up and there's nothing needs doing. So I go out there and I do the one thing."

"It's my one thing too." "I know." "You could have the front," she said. "The front's all lawn." "So put something in it. Put a lemon tree in it. God knows we've got the scraps for it." He laughed, which he hadn't expected to. She didn't laugh but the corner of her mouth did something. On Sunday he dug a hole out the front, in the middle of the lawn where the neighbours could see, and she came out with a cup of tea and stood over it saying it was too close to the path. It was too close to the path. He moved it. The worms, as far as anyone could tell, recovered.