At this time of the day the garden is full of sharp scents, the early morning autumn cold reducing rich clouds of late summer perfumes to thin lines. A vinegar edge hangs around the rotten fruit under the large yellow vine leaves. Strident silver notes from the long dry fingers of potted lavender reach as far as the swing from the far end of the garden. Clean bright tones of mint in the earthenware planter by the back door stretch back from the other. Overlaying them all is another, sharper, rustier smell, with an instantly familiar acrid bite. A fox has walked through here not long ago and the pungent whiff of territorial marking hovers above everything, trapped in the garden between the wall of the kitchen and three sides of tatty wooden fence.

The tiny garden between the stubby green mint, and the lavender’s long silvery tails is a quilt of concrete squares, cheap, not so cheerful anymore, but resilient, square and sharp-edged, tougher than the weathered cement grout between them. Here and there the filler hangs on, but mostly the runnels between the slabs are gat-toothed, and blown headless dandelions and soggy yellow grass sprout from some of the empty spaces. The grid of rogue plants is at the autumn end of things, withering, rotting, and the odd dead brown forget-me-not is leaning onto the concrete. Two or three patterns repeat in the grey slabs, textures of sand under water. Under the swing at the mint end of the garden the new squares are pale yellow and clean, but the rest of them fan out to the corners in shades of old wet gravel. On the dirty paving at the far end, dainty little feet have left a trail of even dirtier muddy footprints leading round the side of the lavender bush to a hole in the mouldering green fence.

A slug has crossed the edge of one of the slabs poking out from under the swing, leaving a trail of disconnected silvery slime beads that heads towards somewhere in the centre of the garden, then stops. On it’s way to oblivion the slug has circled a jam jar in the middle of one of the dark squares and nibbled on the label, leaving circles in the faded paper. Screwed on tightly is a lid with a large hole, sealed with a piece of tape. The hemp string that held it to the hook from the vine above, has been cut. The jar is full of a thick, dark strawberry glue bulked up with dead wasps, little sparkles of yellow pressed up against the opaque coffin. A few flies are laying eggs on surface of the jam, buzzing as they cover it in layer after layer of little white ovals, neatly stacked. This is a cruel trick – death by sugar – for unwanted wasps gathering under the vine, stabbing at the perfect green globes and leaving them broken. In the ruby black jam there are about twenty jaspers and one hornet, not quite dead, lumbering over striped corpses, trying to flap his jam-smeared wings, his red eyes fixed on something beyond the glass.

Poking out from one of the runnels near the jam jar, a little tiny figure no bigger than the hornet, a green plastic soldier, feet in the air. His plastic body has softened over the years and his mini gun, worn away at the point, is bent towards his head. His feet are bootless, his hat flattened. Pushed skywards from his trench by worms, he is not alone and all along the same trench more little pairs of worn out feet and little tiny heads, some grey, some green, some blue, are sticking up from the dark chasm, several armies of little soldiers stuck in the cold black clay between the plants. Their trench warfare has been distrupted, their strategic positions sabotaged, their slowly blurring bodies moved up and down by worms, weed pluckers, rain, children. And now they in the open, frozen with their useless guns, helpless as a brown gelatinous shape creeps over the edge of the trench, squeezing itself between the dark edges of the runnel, pushing them further out onto the barren concrete of no-man’s land.

The terracotta mint pot has its own lace necklace of slug trail running round the side and over the lip of the rough red earthenware, and hanging motionless under the pale, slightly drying leaves of the fragrant plant the trench monster’s entire extended family is hanging, motionless, their fanned out orange underskirts splayed under the foliage, slime umber plumpness, waiting. Further up the wall above the mint, hanging in mid air, a tiny pale grey sliver of snot is creeping up a tendril to the hanging basket, an old shiny aluminium colander overloaded with a late summer crop of broken bright red jewels, strawberries full of holes. A solitary wasp dips in and out of the flesh, then darts back and forth from the gaping fruit to the bunches of grapes turning grey above the swing, splitting, dripping sticky juice onto the cushion below.