The Gnomes of Carramar Street

Nobody was quite sure who started it, and after the first month, nobody wanted to be sure, because whoever started it would have to stop it, and by then nobody wanted it stopped. The first move was small. Judy Palmer at number twelve had a gnome by her letterbox, a standard one, red hat, fishing rod, been there since the nineties. One Tuesday in December she came out to get the paper and it was gone, and after a moment of standing on her lawn in her dressing gown feeling robbed, she looked up, and it was on the roof of number seven, sitting on the gutter with its rod dangling over the edge like it was fishing for the Hendersons. The Hendersons denied everything. Greg Henderson got the ladder out and brought it down and walked it back across the road himself, and said to Judy, "Kids, probably," and Judy said, "What kids? There's no kids on this street," which was true. Carramar Street was retirees and one young couple who worked in the city and were never home. Three days later Greg's own gnome, a newer one his daughter had given him, holding a little sign that said WELCOME, was found in the middle of the roundabout at the end of the street, positioned as if directing traffic. After that it was on. By Christmas there were gnomes everywhere. Carol at number three, who had never owned a gnome in her life, bought one specifically so it could be stolen, and was offended when it wasn't for a full week. When it finally went, it turned up in Bill Tan's birdbath at number nine, wearing a small pair of sunglasses that had come from nobody knew where. Bill was seventy-eight and had a bad hip and was widely considered above suspicion, which is exactly why Judy thought it was him. "He's got the look," she told Carol over the fence. "He's too calm." "He's on beta blockers, Jude." "That's what he wants you to think." The young couple at number fourteen came home from a work trip in January to find nine gnomes arranged on their front lawn in a semicircle, all facing the house, as if waiting. They put a note in every letterbox on the street saying "We don't know what this is but we're in," and by the weekend they'd bought a gnome of their own, a very large one, nearly a metre, that took two people to move. It was found four days later on the bus shelter roof. Nobody has ever explained the bus shelter.

The street had a rule, unspoken: the gnomes always came back. You'd find yours on someone's roof, or in a tree, or once, memorably, in the window of the closed-down video shop on the main road, staring out at the traffic, and you'd get it and take it home, and then you'd wait. The waiting was most of the fun. Greg Henderson admitted, later, that he'd started checking the roof every morning before the paper. It went on till March. By then there were twenty-two gnomes on a street of eleven houses, and Judy had bought a security camera, and pointed it at her letterbox, and the very next morning her gnome was gone and the camera showed nothing but a slow pan of a hand in a gardening glove, waving. She stood in her kitchen watching that hand wave for a long time. "It's Bill," she said. "It's not Bill." "Look at the glove. That's a Bunnings glove. Bill's got Bunnings gloves." "Everyone's got Bunnings gloves, Jude. We're in Australia." They never found out. That's the honest end of it. In April the weather turned and the gnomes went quiet, the way things do, and one by one they went back to their letterboxes and stayed there. The big one from number fourteen lives permanently on the bus shelter now, by general agreement, with a little laminated sign that says HE LIVES HERE. Bill Tan died in July. Bad hip, then a fall, then the hospital, then the thing that happens. Half the street went to the funeral. His son gave the eulogy and at the end of it he said, "Dad asked me to pass on one thing," and he reached under the lectern, and brought out a pair of small sunglasses, and put them on the coffin. Judy Palmer, in the third row, said "I knew it" loud enough for the whole church to hear, and then she cried, and then she laughed, and then she did both at the same time, which is what a good funeral does to you. The gnomes started moving again in September. Nobody knows who.