Sun! I prepare a water bottle with ice. Sunglasses, hat. A fiction and a non-fiction, three notebooks and a pen. A blanket to bake on until the sun meets the big tree at 5.30pm.
Rain all summer, you have to be ready at any moment.
Sharply-cut grass poking my back, book aloft to block the sunshine. Trees in the back garden swoop circular above me, the Dublin-Galway train rumbles above as it always has.
Some pages in, from the direction of my feet, I hear a whirring, hard plastic jamming and releasing. A mechanism spins, intonating upward like a question. The bright orange shell releases from its solar source and rubber wheels push it southward.
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I watch its journey, past the blackthorn bush, behind the narrow trunk of the leaning plum tree. It disappears behind the copper beech into the shaded and overgrown end of the garden.
A gust of relief. I once considered that bit of garden large enough for an imaginary pony to be kept and ridden. It will get as lost in there as I did. I picture it zig-zagging the sides like a pinball machine. I twist on to my front and try to focus on the story, the sound of leaves brushing above me.
One of the characters avoids the other’s phone calls. She calls another man, another route to getting what she wants. A buzzing in my right ear. I stay still for the wasp to lose interest. Replaced by a more sinister buzzing. I lower the book. The plastic exoskeleton hiding the sharp, interlocking shears heading straight for me.
On its back is a red STOP button. But pressing it off risks today’s removal of millimetres of grass, and, cumulatively across days and weeks of constant work, the appearance of the lawn.
Generously I push my blanket out of the way, swing my legs around, let it carry on its journey, wielding its shiny implements. I think of the horrifying things that we live alongside, cars driving past us on the road, building sites, ladders. I look involuntarily at my toes.
[ Lawn shaming: To mow or not to mow, and what your lawn says about you?Opens in new window ]
At the dandelion patch under the wall it stops, rotates, moves, and then hits the paving again, triangling the corner. Yes, yes, I think, peering. Now carry along.
It turns about 90 degrees and doubles back in my direction. I move my belongings again and settle, but not long after I’m in its path once again. I’m irritated now, my drape in the sun thrice thwarted. Damn the schedule. I punch STOP.
It carries on, no reaction. In disbelief I follow it barefooted, smacking all the buttons now, the symbols that would suggest it would be ordered to return home, turn, abort mission, all useless.
Its attraction towards my place in the grass was surely more frequent than statistically probable. Its route was meant to be followed randomly, not pursued like a vendetta. I had an out-of-body presumption that I wasn’t getting the gag, up and down in a physical comedy routine for an audience heaving with laughter.
The tree’s shadows had shifted, but there was plenty of lawn soaked in sun. Eventually I stomp inside. I’d written a text plea for someone to use the app to end my torment, with no reply. There are perfect lawns to be dreamed up. What other purpose would grass have?
Its arrival in the house had been puzzling, this sci-fi-adjacent solution. The old lawnmower, the pre-robot tool for a chore I often neglected as a teenager, had rusted away.
[ New beginnings: ‘Gardening, I reason, is a bit like dealing with a break-up’Opens in new window ]
“What about the bees?” I had asked, the bellicose advocate of the family. But the prominent patch of daisies and dandelions in the centre of the lawn survives, implying that my environmental concerns are unfounded.
Or misplaced. Perhaps my issues with the robot are deeper. I return home for a visit now, and it’s the first year the house is empty of my younger siblings, who have departed for the beginnings of adult life just as I did before them.
Leaning on each other in the kitchen, my parents study the app’s statistics, affirming the robot’s constant, reliable work. Mr McGregor, they call it fondly. Named after the aggressive gardener villain from the beloved Beatrice Potter children’s books and television adaptation.
I rewatch Peter Rabbit on YouTube at night. Each scene feels longer than its time stamp, pulled out like taffy from my earliest memories. Heart in my throat, watching Peter’s fear, his twitching nose, his quick heart, hopping around the garden in hope of an escape. An image briefly flashes, of grass tracked onto my pillow, an orange shell reading and sipping chamomile tea.