It’s still light out when my wife comes to me with bad news.

“It’s bin day,” she says.

These days this means dragging the bins up the back steps, through the kitchen, out of the front door and into the street, because our side garden door is fused shut for mystery reasons. When I showed it to Mark the builder he said fixing it would be no problem.

But there was a problem: he was busy. A month went by, then two. My wife’s repeated texts were answered with repeated apologies – Mark was stuck on another job, not nearby.

In the meantime, all the broken things got worse: the collapsing pergola collapsed further under the weight of the wisteria; the rotting raised beds rotted some more; great clumps of ivy are still pulling the garden wall over.

I bump the full garden waste bin up three steps. The middle one, sitting in the kitchen, has to move his chair to let me by.

“Why must life be so hard?” I say.

“I know, right?” he says.

The next afternoon my wife is in the kitchen knifing open a big box when I come through rolling an empty bin.

“This system is unsupportable,” I say.

“I can text Mark again,” she says. “But he’s stopped answering.”

“The thing is,” I say, “we’re reaching the cut-off.”

“What cut-off?” she says.

“The summer cut-off. I have seedlings that need to go in the rotten raised beds, so the repairs will soon have to be put off for six months.”

“I see,” she says.

“The wisteria is already blooming across the thing,” I say.

“The pergola,” she says.

“If you like,” I say.

“What about the ivy? Can you cut that down?”

“I’m afraid not,” I say. “Nesting season is upon us.”

“Well, you can still manage this,” she says, lifting the lid of the box.

“What is it?” I say.

“Our new hose,” she says.

The fox, my enemy, chewed through the old hose just below the tap. There doesn’t appear to be anything fox-proof about the new hose – it’s a like-for-like replacement – but that does make it easy to install: the dangling remnant of the old one has an identical fitting. I’m about to test the new hose’s different spray profiles when I become aware of something moving a few feet away, behind the stack of recycling piled up in front of the fused garden door. I freeze.

The fox, my enemy, is walking toward me down the narrow, covered side return where he has evidently taken up residence. He seems unaware of me until we are almost nose to nose. When he finally notices me standing there with a brand new hose in my hand, I half expect him to raise an eyebrow. Instead, he leaps towards me.

“Jesus!” I shout. Passing close by my head, the fox executes a twisting arc in the air, ending up on the top of the garden wall beside me. Then he turns and disappears over it. Dropping the hose, I take six quick steps forward and push my weight against the garden door. It opens easily.

A few days later my wife finds me out front planting leggy seedlings into a rotten raised bed, soil spilling out between the decaying timbers. Behind me, the garden door is ajar.

“You managed to get that door open?” she says.

“Yeah, I fixed it the other day,” I say.

“Or did it fix itself?” she says.

“No, it was me,” I say.

“Maybe it was swollen shut with damp, and just dried out,” she says.

“I fixed it,” I say. “With tools.”

“You said it was impossible. A mystery.”

“So I solved the mystery,” I say. “The end.”

I tap the bottom of a pot with the handle of a trowel, thinking back to an afternoon in March when Mark and I stood either side of the garden door, pushing and pulling in turn while shouting instructions. We repeatedly worked the stiff latch, did and undid the lock, and shoulder-barged the door with increasing force until I feared it would splinter down the middle.

We had prioritised the garden door’s repair because it needed to be open to effect all the other repairs. Mark spoke solemnly about removing the hinges, repositioning the strike plate and possibly reconstructing the door frame. When he said it would be no problem, he didn’t seem that convinced.

One thing is certain: it wasn’t just damp, and it didn’t fix itself. On the other hand, I did absolutely nothing.

Sliding another tomato plant from its pot, I consider the unsettling possibility that the fox fixed the door.