"No, I never touched the soil on Fourteen. Whatever you heard, that's not how it went."
Ray said that before I'd even got the lid off my flask. I'd only wanted to know why the plot next to mine was always turned over black and fine, no bean pole or netting on it, when every other square inch of the Marsh Lane allotments was crammed with runner beans and rhubarb forcing pots. Ray had held plot twelve since before the site had running water. Seventy-eight years old, and he wore the same waxed jacket in July as he did in January, the collar gone shiny with age.
"Nobody's worked Fourteen in nine years," he said. "Not since the Hallidays gave it up."
I said I didn't know anything about the Hallidays. Ray looked at me the way you look at someone who's said something a bit stupid without meaning to.
"No. Course you don't."
He told me the committee had let the plot lie fallow on paper, but somebody kept the soil turned. Every March it came up dark and crumbled fine between your fingers, no couch grass, no bindweed, nothing that should grow wild in nine years of neglect. He said it in the flat voice he used for the price of seed potatoes, not looking at me, working a bit of twine between his fingers the whole time. My kettle at home has a chip in the spout I keep meaning to get seen to. That's not relevant. I just think about it whenever I'm waiting on something to boil, which I was, that morning, at the tap by the shed.
I asked him who turned it, then, if nobody worked it.
Ray didn't answer that. He asked if I'd heard anything at night, out past the far hedge where Fourteen backs onto the old sewage works land. I said no. He nodded like that was the wrong answer, or maybe the right one, and went back to his beans.
It took me three more Saturdays to get anything else out of him, and even then only because I'd brought a second flask and poured him a cup without asking.
He said the Hallidays' boy had dug something up. Not a body, nothing like that, he was quick to say, though nobody had asked. A box. Tin, the size you'd keep a First Aid kit in, and inside it a fistful of hair tied with wire and a name written in pencil on a strip of paper gone soft with damp. The boy had been eleven. He'd shown it round the allotments like it was a fossil, and within a fortnight the family had given the plot up and moved to Kettering, or somewhere near it, Ray wasn't certain. Wellingborough, maybe. He said the box had gone back into the ground because nobody wanted it in a house, and once you put a thing like that back, the ground doesn't let anyone else disturb it.
"It keeps itself tidy," he said. "That's all I know. Whatever's under there does its own weeding."
I laughed, because it was a strange thing to say and I didn't have anything better to put against it. Ray didn't laugh. He looked at the fence between our plots the way you'd look at a dog that's growled once and gone quiet again.
That November I lost a trowel over the fence onto Fourteen. Small thing, plastic handle, nothing worth the fuss, but I climbed over for it anyway, at dusk, because I didn't want it rusting through the winter. The soil gave under my boots like it had been dug that morning. No leaf litter, no frost crust, nothing. I found the trowel maybe four feet in, lying on the surface as if it had been set there rather than dropped, handle pointing back at my own gate.
I didn't go back for anything else after that. Ray never asked what I'd seen, and I never told him. Some mornings, though, walking up past Fourteen with my flask, I notice the turned earth is patterned. Not rows. Something more like combing, fine lines all running one direction, and every week the direction's different, like whatever does it is trying to get the ground to lie a certain way and hasn't managed it yet.