The Line Between Us by Kate Dunn

placed it in your palm.
    “Thanks,” you said carelessly in front of your friend, who looked at me, then looked at you and simpered.
    I nodded, turned on my heel and headed back down to my work. A few minutes later the ball sailed in my direction. It landed several feet away.
    “Ifor …?”
    I snipped away at the vine in front of me.
    “Our ball.” Your voice had a trill in it that I didn’t recognise. “Do you mind …?”
    I tucked the shoot between the wires, and then lay my secateurs on the ground with a tense deliberation of which you might have taken heed. I found the ball and with a steely swing I threw it back up the hill. Your friend giggled as you caught it and I couldn’t decide if it was me that you were showing off to her, or your power over me, which was a different matter.
    I picked up my secateurs and moved on to the next vine, trimming away more curtly than before. Within minutes there was an eruption of laughter as the ball came flying through the air at me.
    “Ifor …?”
    More laughter which, poorly suppressed, fed upon itself. I didn’t want to hear it. I clipped at the vine until it was almost shorn.
    The two of you were helpless with it.
    “Ifor …? Will you get our ball?”
    I thought about the eight hundred thousand men locked out of their workplace for asking for a living wage, and the degradation of that, and my own small humiliation seemed, in that instant, to be of a kind. I bent down and placed my secateurs on the ground with all the slow defiance I could muster. When I straightened up, I folded my arms across my chest and shook my head.
    Your laughter slowed to a trickle and then stopped. “Ifor …?”
    I didn’t answer. I clasped my arms more tightly as though to emphasise the position I had taken, while you fiddled with the strings of your racquet. You turned the leather-bound handle over in your hand.
    “Make him get it,” your friend said, less coy now. “Go on, he’s your servant. He should do what he’s told.”
    You cleared your throat, not looking at me. “Fetch the ball, will you, Ifor?”
    I stood stock still, the anger glinting off me, staring up at you. I would not be a dog to fetch and carry, not for anyone.
    “This is the most frightful bore,” I heard you say and you came traipsing down the hill towards me, tripping on a tuft of the rough grass which only made you crosser, so that by the time you reached me, the incident had become more than it was meant to be.
    “When I ask you to do something …”
    I wouldn’t upset you for the world, not for the world, but I had no option other than to stand my ground. “I’m nobody’s servant,” I said. “I garden here, and I tend your vines. But not this afternoon. This afternoon I’m out on strike.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous.” I could see the unease in your face as you wondered how far you should push this. “Just get me the ball.”
    I shrugged. “I can’t.”
    “You mean you won’t.”
    “Alright, I won’t.”
    “That’s that, then.”
    “You can sack me if you want to,” I said as wretched as I have ever been, and there was nothing left for me to do, but to turn on my heel and walk away, leaving my secateurs lying discarded on the ground.

 
     
    CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
     
    I remembered the walk back to Morwithy after that, a terrible incantation of regret going round and round in my head: what have I done, what have I done, what have I done? Ma was pegging out some sheets in the yard when I got home, a gathering breeze twining them round her in a damp cotton embrace.
    “Ifor?” she called, but I wasn’t about to do her bidding either. The shame of what I had done made me feel too complicated for my own skin.
    “Yes, Ma,” I stood at the back door, slumping against the jamb.
    “Watch out, or the wind will change and you’ll be stuck with that face forever.”
    I didn’t answer. I chewed at some skin inside my mouth. She busied herself pegging out a row of pillowcases with lace around