Sunday morning and the beet bed.

He woke before five and lay for a while and then didn’t. The garden is still in shadow when he arrives. The signal gantry is a dark shape to the east, blacker than the sky. He doesn’t need the lamp.

He fills the watering can from the standpipe and goes to the south end first to check the sweet peas. Overnight they’ve put out another tendril or two — he can’t be precise in this light, but the outline is different from yesterday. He watches for a moment and then moves on.

The beet seedlings came up this week. Two rows fully, the third row patchy. They’re small yet — two centimetres, the first true leaves just opening, barely distinguishable from each other. He crouches at the first row and begins to thin them.

This is work that cannot be done quickly. He holds each seedling between two fingers and considers it, then takes the weaker or the crowded ones and sets them aside. The idea is room: what stays will not have to compete. He understood this a long time ago and applied it in a very different context and has thought about it infrequently since. He is not thinking about it now.

The morning arrives while he works. First, light at the top of the walls. Then the gantry clarifying from black to grey to steel. The compost bins. The shed roof. The colour that comes last, once the sky decides.

He works through the first two rows. At some point he has been crouching for longer than he realised, and when he moves to stand he does it differently — a hand on the ground, a beat, then up. His hands are fine. His knee is fine. There is something lower in the torso that has been different for some weeks now. He does not pursue it.

The rejected seedlings go into the left compost bin. He does not look at them again.

He goes to the bench and sits. The coffee was hot when he left the room at five; it is not hot now. He drinks it anyway.

Sunday-quiet. No trams yet — the Sunday schedule doesn’t start until eight. Somewhere past the north wall, children: the particular high argument of children who aren’t yet fully awake. Then silence.

He looks at the climbing rose. From here, at the bench, he can see it has put out a new stem along the gantry’s upper strut — forty centimetres at least, going straight up and slightly north. He planted it without reading the label. He has never known what it will do next.

He helped write the procedure. He knows the sequence: secondary review, remediation recommendation, notification window, appeal. He knows where they are in that sequence. Approximately. He has not tried to be more precise than approximately, because precision would not change what he does in the morning.

He sets down the cup.

He goes back to the rows.