Monday, and the sweet peas need their second tie-in.

He works down the row with the ball of soft jute twine, looping loosely where the stems have reached past the last support — not tight, never tight, just enough to suggest a direction until the tendrils commit to it themselves. Some of them already have. The far end of the row is thick now, a green wall where three weeks ago there was string and air.

He hears the neighbour before he sees her. Mrs. Aldous, from the block two streets north, who sometimes trades him onions for whatever’s ready. She is at the fence gap, not calling out, just standing there in a way that makes him set down the twine.

“They put something on the board,” she says.

He knows which board. The community noticebook by the water point, corkboard under a scrap of plastic sheeting, where people post what they need and what they have. He goes to it most weeks himself.

“What kind of something.”

“A notice. Sector-wide. About infrastructure review.” She says the words carefully, the way you say words you don’t fully own. “It doesn’t say what for. It says residents will be informed of any changes affecting their allocation status.”

He knows exactly what it says. He wrote sentences like it, once, in a different building, for a different purpose, and told himself the passive voice was neutral.

“When did it go up?”

“This morning. Early.” She looks at him for a moment. “You’d know more about this than most of us.”

He doesn’t answer that directly. “Has anyone said anything else? At the water point, the market?”

“Not yet. People read it and keep walking.” A pause. “That’s usually how it starts, isn’t it. The keeping walking.”

He has nothing to say that would help her, so he says the only true thing available. “It usually is.”

She nods, like she expected that, and goes.

He stands at the fence gap for a while after she’s gone. The sweet peas are heavy on the far strings now, indifferent, doing the only thing they know how to do. He thinks about the notice, the careful passive sentence, the ninety days it promises without promising anything.

He thinks about Mara’s document sitting somewhere in a reply queue, unopened or opened, he doesn’t know which.

He goes back to the twine.

By the time he finishes the row the light has moved a hand’s width along the wall. He straightens slowly — a hand at the small of his back, a beat, then up — and looks at what he’s done: forty metres of string, and green finding its way onto all of it.

It will not stop the notice. He knows this the way he knows most things now: without needing to say it out loud.

He waters the beet bed anyway.