He Knocked, the First Time. That Matters, Because of How It Was Described Later.

The storm was in the February and it took out about eleven metres of fence along the boundary, plus a shed roof two doors down and most of a tree on the green.

Tony had it replaced within a fortnight, which everybody agreed at the time was efficient of him.

Colin noticed in the April.

---

He noticed because of the apple tree.

There had always been about a metre of grass between the trunk and the fence — enough to get the mower round, which he did every ten days from March, and had done since 1998. That April he could not get the mower round.

He measured it. Then he measured it again with a proper tape rather than the retractable one. Then he got the deeds out of the folder in the desk, and then he went out and measured it a third time and wrote it on the back of a seed packet.

Eleven centimetres.

---

He sat on that for nine days.

This is a detail Colin has always insisted on, and which was not included in any of the four solicitors’ letters that followed. He did not go round the same afternoon. He did not take photographs. He did not ring anybody. He sat on it for nine days and hoped, genuinely, that he had got it wrong.

Then he knocked.

---

He knocked. That is worth saying, because of how it was described later — and it was described later, repeatedly, by Tony, as “he came round making accusations”, which is not what happened and which Colin has never been able to correct without sounding like a man who keeps a file.

Deb answered with a tea towel over her shoulder.

“Sorry to bother you, love,” said Colin. “Is Tony about?”

“He’s at the football with our Ryan. Anything I can pass on?”

“It’s nothing, really.” He shifted. “It’s just — I think when the fence went back up after the storm, it’s gone back a bit out. Towards our side. Only a few inches.”

“Oh,” said Deb. “Right.”

“No rush at all. Just when he’s got a minute.”

And that was the entire first conversation. Forty seconds, on a doorstep, with a tea towel.

---

Tony came round two days later.

He did not knock. He came down the side and into the back garden, which he had done perhaps twice in eleven years, and stood on the lawn with his arms folded while Colin came out of the greenhouse.

“Deb says you’ve got a problem with the fence.”

“Not a problem—”

“Because the fence is where the posts are,” said Tony, “and the posts are where the old posts were, and the bloke who put it up put it up in the same holes. So if you want it moved, you can pay for it.”

---

Colin has described what he felt at that moment as “a sort of click”.

He is sixty-nine now and was sixty in that garden, and he says he made a decision in about two seconds which he then spent nine years failing to revisit: that he was being treated as a man making a fuss, and that he was not going to be a man making a fuss, and that the way to not be a man making a fuss was to be extremely precise.

Extremely precise is, it turns out, its own kind of fuss.

---

“I’m not saying anyone did anything,” said Colin.

“No,” said Tony. “You’re just measuring my fence.”

“It’s not your fence. That’s rather the point. Nobody knows whose fence it is.”

“It’s my fence. I paid for it.”

“You paid for it,” Colin agreed, “on a line that’s eleven centimetres onto my garden.”

Tony looked at him for a moment.

“Right,” he said, and went back down the side.

---

Shona asked him about it that evening.

“What was all that?”

“He’s measuring the fence.”

“Measuring it how?”

“With a tape,” said Tony. “Like a man with nothing on.”

Shona said, “And is he right?”

And Tony, who is not a liar, said: “I don’t know. Probably. It’s eleven centimetres, Shona. Eleven centimetres.”

“So say that to him.”

“I’m not saying that to him now,” said Tony. “He came round the back.”

---

That is the whole thing, in miniature, on the first evening.

Both of them privately suspected Colin was right about the measurement. Neither of them was ever going to be able to say so, because within forty-eight hours it had stopped being about the measurement and had become about the manner.

There were nine years after that.