Robert gets everything in order

Robert gets everything in order

All the lawns on Mentone Avenue are mowed on Wednesdays. That’s because Robert owns all the houses on Mentone Avenue.

It was not the way that Robert had envisaged his retirement working out. He made it to the finish line in the Department for Construction with his home paid for, a secure income from his superannuation for life and some untraceable accounts in the Caymans. His wife left him almost immediately, to partner up with a man who apparently offered more excitement and sense of adventure.

Never a keen gardener in the past, growing his own food had now become an obsession for Robert, albeit one with an emphasis on orderliness and strict boundaries.

Of course he could not eat even a small proportion of the seasonal harvests, so he gave most of it away to initially grateful (and then later inwardly groaning and discreetly binning) neighbours. Having used most of the arable land he owned, except for a small front lawn, he took advantage of the street gardening movement to colonise the verge in front of his home.

He grew mostly herbs that he imagined passers-by would gratefully snip off to add to their evening meal. He even had a pair of scissors on a string hanging from a street tree. Robert had failed to observe that most of his neighbours still worked, rarely cooked and never walked anywhere.

When Mrs. Sidebottom at No. 23 was taken into a nursing home, her grandson moved into her house, along with a few of his pals. The parties until dawn started and most of Mrs. Sidebottom’s armchairs and couches ended up permanently residing on the increasingly weed-infested front and back lawns.

Robert had never been comfortable with conflict and, unlike his neighbours, he hadn’t called the police and he had refused to sign a petition that was circulating, designed to have the lads removed.

However, there came a fateful day when a line was crossed and Robert would never be the same again. One morning he was doing his rounds, inspecting his crops, when he stopped in his tracks. He stood gazing in horror at the carnage in his herb bed on the verge, clearly created by vehicles owned by those attending the latest booze-and-drug-driven bacchanal at No. 23.

He walked briskly back inside and began to coldly map out his plan for world domination, or at least that part of the world that comprised the street on which he lived.

When Mrs. Sidebottom’s lawyer was contacted by the representative of an anonymous buyer with a reasonable offer for No. 23, they hastened to accept. The grandson and his cronies vanished from the scene.

Over the next few years, Robert acquired all of his neighbouring houses, one by one. After the party boys came Cactus Man, with his front garden resembling the Mojave Desert and, shortly afterwards, the young people who believed the perfect garden involved red tanbark and gravel and a ‘classic car’ parked on it while it awaited restoration that never seemed to commence.

With each acquisition, he transformed its garden into the orderly and productive space it should always have been. His shelf-company corporation engaged agents to let the properties to people screened for their green fingers and their lack of desire to split asunder what God, or Robert in this case, had put together. Any transgressions were met with instant eviction, encouraged along by men with many tattoos and few teeth.

A decade from the commencement of his search for the Holy Grail of perfect order, Robert felt confident he’d done his bit for humanity. Mentone Street was quiet, ordered, productive and civilised. And all the lawns on Mentone Avenue are mowed on Wednesdays.

Doug Jacquier