The Great Allotment Proposal by Jenny Oliver

he’s at the boat yard where they built the torpedo boats.’
    Emily glanced up from the phone to where Martha was working on her corner patch in the distance, dealing with her bees. ‘Have you told Martha all this?’ she asked.
    ‘She knows, apparently. She told me I shouldn’t read them. Let the past be in the past but, well, I found a mention of my granny. Her and Enid were really close apparently and I didn’t know that.’ Jane looked between them all. ‘I don’t have any family left and it’s quite nice to learn about someone new. I never knew her. Do you think that’s bad? Reading when Martha’s said not to?’
    ‘No,’ Holly said from the iPhone. ‘No, I think Enid would want you to do whatever you liked. Keep going. Martha’s just nervous.’
    ‘Yeah, maybe,’ Jane said. Then she looked up from the phone and saw something that made her catch her breath.
    ‘What?’ said Annie, following Jane’s stare. ‘Wow.’
    ‘What are you looking at?’ Holly asked from the iPhone. ‘What’s going on, Emily, what are they looking at?’
    ‘I don’t know.’ Emily frowned and looked from Holly to where Jane and Emily were staring at a person wheeling a barrow full of compost along the path by their allotment. ‘Oh my god!’
    ‘What!’ said Holly, ‘Turn me round. What are you looking at?’
    ‘It’s Jack,’ Emily murmured, turning the phone round so Holly could see. ‘He’s shaved off his beard.’
    Jack glanced their way, the sun bright behind him. When he saw them all staring he gave them a two-fingered salute, a smile spreading across his face. The beard was gone and in its place the smooth line of his jaw. The hair was gone as well, shorn off like he’d cut it himself with the shears, messy and black and half flopping over his eyes. Eyes that still gleamed the palest blue but now even more so because you could see his skin, the angle of his cheekbones and his jaw, and it was suddenly like Jack was back. The cool, cocky character who’d lain on the hay bale at the festival, an aura of calm and a glint of mischief.
    Emily found she couldn’t stop smiling when she finally breathed out.

Chapter Thirteen
    As the day of the show approached, Emily went to see her dahlias every day. Sometimes twice a day. Nurturing it with some hideous smelling Fish, Blood and Bone, and protecting it with a giant bamboo structure that the three of them had built while mumbling under their breaths about Jack’s absent beard. When it rained one night she put her new poncho on and her wellingtons and ran to the allotment with her torch, covering the precious buds with a piece of see-through plastic clipped in place with some flash EHB hair clips because she didn’t have anything else. The last thing she wanted was the water to snap her pride and joy.
    The dahlias grew and puffed. But one of them puffed more than the others. A giant great ball just waiting to explode.
    All around them, the fruit and veg and flowers were ripening. Glossy marrows with giant yellow flowers, cherries so dark they looked like plums, tomatoes ripening on bunches so heavy they snapped their stems, bitter little gooseberries and lines of rich emerald spinach. Layer upon layer of lettuces, beetroots that oozed like blood when sliced, onions pushing proudly from the earth. Growers praying that their carrots with golden crowns just visible hadn’t been decimated underground.
    Word of Emily’s dahlia had spread. Jack would come over and inspect it. Pretend to reach out and touch it as she bashed his hand away. She had started to wear cut-off jeans and old T-shirts to the allotment instead of her normal clothes, her hair tied off her face with gardening string on top of her head. She had cups of tea out of the aluminium kettle with Annie’s mum and flicked through Enid’s diaries with Jane while they kept guard over the dahlias.
    In the early afternoons they swam in Emily’s pool – Matt and Annie, Jane, Jack and River while Buster the