The first sign of neglect in Mr Vane’s garden was the dogwood. It was nearly the end of April, and the spindly shrubs had obviously not been pruned for at least a season or two. Of course, there were other more pressing matters for Steve to attend to, such as the tough, thorny stranglehold of fruitless blackberry creepers, the brown parchment petals of unpruned hydrangeas and the feral twining of unchecked convolvulus. But it was the absence of fresh, bright, crimson stems shooting up eagerly from the hearts of the many dogwood shrubs that initially caught his attention, so much so that he began clipping the overgrown stems before he had even introduced himself to his customer.

As soon as Huntley Vane answered the door of the suburban semi, it was clear he was not a well man. But whatever his ailment, he seemed spry, alert, and smartly dressed in blazer, cravat and slacks. He greeted Steve with a cheery, plastic grin, the false teeth shining brilliant white against the grey, emaciated skin of his prematurely ancient face, where sunken yellowish eyes hung loose in their sockets.

“Hello there,” rasped Huntley. “You must be Steve. Don’t let the draught in!”

“Sorry,” he replied. “I’ll just get on with doing the garden, and leave you to it…”

He broke off, noticing flakes of desiccated skin powdering the lids of the sunken eyes.

“What’s the matter?” challenged Vane good-naturedly. “Never seen a cancer patient before?”

“What?” he said. “Oh. Right. I’m sorry…”

“Oh, it’s not too bad. Can’t complain! Anyway, better go back inside before I catch a chill. Mustn’t keep my chiropodist waiting, must I?”

He limped eagerly inside and shut the door, leaving Steve alone to work.

However, it wasn’t long before Steve realized that he would need more than the secateurs, shears and other hand tools that he had brought with him on his bicycle. The lawns, both back and front, were extensive and over-grown, and he did not relish the prospect of attempting to tackle them with a pair of garden shears. He found the garden shed secured with a rusty padlock. He didn’t want to disturb the frail, terminally ill pensioner, and force him to hobble to the front door, so he did as much as he could with his own tools. He continued hard-pruning the dogwood, thinking of the delight the spurting forth of the coming season’s new growth would give its owner, then dead-headed the hydrangeas. Then he yanked out the snaking tendrils of bind weed – the arduous task of digging out the spindly, cancerous white roots could come later.

He had made such good progress that it seemed a shame to leave the lawn unkempt. He was just about to forget his qualms about bothering the old man and ring the door bell, when a new arrival saved him the trouble, in the shape of a glowering young man brandishing a key.

“Hi, I’m Derek Vane,” he introduced himself. “Huntley Vane’s son.”

“Oh,” replied Steve. “He didn’t mention he had a son.”

“No,” agreed Derek Vane grimly, “I don’t suppose he did.”

Steve explained his problem.

“Here,” offered Derek with an odd smile, “come in a minute, and we’ll see if we can find the key to the shed.”

“But I don’t want to disturb Mr Vane,” protested Steve. “He’s with his chiropodist.”

“Oh, really?” said Derek, his eyebrow twitching ferociously. “Don’t worry about that.”

“You’re probably right,” he agreed. “They must have finished by now!”

“Not necessarily.” Derek’s voice was shaking slightly, as though struggling to control a violent emotion.

They entered the front door. As he followed his employer’s son towards the kitchen, he noticed that the door to the front room was ajar. Through the chink he glimpsed a woman’s hand manipulating small mechanical brush to clean dried skin off two ancient, wizened feet, spraying a snow-cloud of flakes onto the carpet. Some of the skin fragments also alighted on the smooth, toned skin of a pair of deliciously curved white legs under the blue hem of a uniform skirt, with (he noticed) exquisitely tapered ankles. With each stroke of the whirling brush the withered feet quivered and their owner chortled with mirth, while the white legs trembled and their owner giggled with delight.

Perhaps Derek had noticed all this as well, for his face was like thunder as he searched the kitchen for the keys, and with his hand clamped to his forehead, he muttered distractedly to himself.

“If it had been anyone else… Anyone else… But no! no! It had to be Kitty, didn’t it…”

He addressed his next monologue to the gardener.

“I suppose he’s told her he hasn’t got long to live, eh?” he sneered bitterly. “I suppose she’s flattered by the attention! But he’ll outlive her, he’ll outlive us all, oh, Christ, yes!”

He groped like a blind man for a set of keys hanging from a hook and, with eyes staring intensely and one hand still clutching his brow, thrust them at Steve, who was glad of the excuse to exit the building and resume his green-fingered labours, while Derek endured the torments of the green-eyed monster. The lawnmower was noisy and temperamental, bucking and groaning in protest as it struggled with the over-grown grass. He could hear raised voices from inside over the whine of the motor, and was pushing the machine to its limits to avoid being an involuntary eavesdropper, but when wisps of smoke started to filter out of the mower, he knew he would have to stop it and do some maintenance, even just to change the blade to a higher setting. As the spinning blade whirred to a halt, a brief snatch of the father and son argument reached his ears.

“You’ve really done it this time! Why couldn’t you have fastened your filthy, old claws on someone else?”

The old man’s voice came back faint, feeble and imploring:

“How was I to know, Derek? My feet needed some attention, and–”

“Kitty just happened to be the one you picked – or rather picked up!”

“Good chiropodists aren’t easy to come by, Derek.”

“Oh, nice try, pop! Only it wasn’t just your feet that needed attention, was it?”

By now, Derek was backing out of the front door. Steve dragged the lawnmower round the back, using the pretext of searching for a spanner in the shed to avoid being drawn into the confrontation. However, a slamming door as Derek stormed off, signaled the close of hostilities, at least for the time being.

As he applied himself to adjusting the mower’s blade height, he was interrupted by the back door opening, and a sheepish Huntley Vane shuffling outside. His plastic grin seemed a little ingratiating now, but Steve couldn’t help pitying this antiquated husk of a man, so beset by filial resentment on top of his debilitating illness.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about me, my boy,” replied Huntley, his voice not much more than a hiss. “I’ll be right as rain as nine pence, as soon as I get my new plasma…”

“Plasma?”

“I just have to get my blood changed every couple of weeks – it’s a simple operation, quite routine.”

Steve nodded blankly.

“I didn’t mean to hurt him, you know,” Vane said simply.

He seemed weakened by the row, and he was wearing nothing but a black, silk kimono.

“Even the old have needs,” he went on.

Steve really didn’t want to know about this.

“Why don’t you go back inside?” he suggested. “You’ll catch your death out here dressed like that.”

Vane’s smile was white and shiny.

“Yes, you’re quite right, my boy. Need to get my circulation going again…”

And in he went.

Once he had tackled the lawn, Steve turned his attention to an over-grown privet hedge adjoining the neighbour’s property, and over-looking the front window. At first, he began clipping it with shears, but this process seemed painfully slow, and he remembered that he had noticed a set of mechanical hedge trimmers in the shed earlier. He could use the socket in the shed, and the same extension lead he had used for the mower, to power the cutter. The other advantage of this method was that it would drown out the moans and screams of pleasure he thought he could hear through the double-glazed front window.

However, as the interlocking fangs of the cutters sliced into the tender leaves of the hedge, a young man strode out of the house signaling him to stop with an up-raised hand. Not Derek this time, thought Steve, so he must be his brother.

“Ah,” he said. “You must be… Well, well, Mr Vane didn’t mention he had one son, let alone two!”

“That’s right, I’m Huntley Vane… er, Junior.”

In contrast with Derek and Huntley, who seemed like chalk and cheese, in this case the resemblance between father and son was uncanny. Huntley Vane Jnr. even wore the same blazer. The same cravat. The same slacks. It was as though Huntley Vane Snr. had undergone a face lift and died his hair jet black, ironed out the grey wrinkles and replaced them with full-blooded, ruddy pink flesh, traded in the thin, pallid mouth for rosy sensual lips. Perhaps he was some kind of favorite, which might account for the other son Derek’s rancour.

“So you don’t want the hedge cut?” asked Steve.

“No thanks, if it’s all the same to you. Gives me... us a measure of privacy from the neighbours.”

The young man seemed flustered, ill at ease. His face was flushed – with embarrassment? Steve wasn’t sure, but he was beginning to feel uneasy himself. Maybe it was the oddly familiar, metallic odour that hung about ‘Huntley Vane Jnr.’. It reminded him of a wildly exciting night he’d once spent with a woman in the full flow of menstruation. The taste of her...

There was an awkward silence, which Steve filled by pruning a rose bush whose seed-blown dead-heads stood erect, black and bloated. But when he glanced through a gap in the curtains and saw why ‘Huntley Vane Jnr.’ was so keen to shield the front window from prying eyes, his hand snagged on a thorn and a dark bead of blood flowered on his finger.

‘Huntley Vane Jnr.’ grinned wolfishly, or at least as wolfishly as you can with false teeth, but when he realized the direction in which Steve was now gazing intently there was an edge of panic in his grin.

“My, my!” he exclaimed with forced bonhomie. “I think you’ve done enough for one day! What do I owe you?”

Steve hesitated.

“Tell you what,” continued Vane, advancing towards him and fixing him with eyes no longer yellowish or loose in their sockets, “as you’ve been so industrious, I’ll throw in a little extra for your trouble..”

He held out a plump, wormy fist crammed with ancient-looking notes...

And then Derek Vane leaped out from behind the privet hedge, and lunged for the handle of the crocodile-jawed, mechanical tool that Steve had prematurely downed at Huntley Vane Snr./Jnr.’s behest...

As Steve sits in the hospital, awaiting his tetanus booster, he gazes ruefully at the poster appealing for blood donors. From now on, he will never be able to look at such a poster without remembering what he saw through that suburban front window: the sprawled corpse of Kitty, Derek’s beloved fiancee, a plastic tube protruding from her jugular vein; unblinking eyes already attracting motes of dust; pale, drained flesh now going a bluish colour like her uniform; bloodless lips splayed in a deathless smile of blissful, carnal abandon.