Those People

by Louise Candlish

  Well, I’d describe them as chippy. No interest in cooperating with the people around them. They’re a law unto themselves. It’s a form of sociopathy, I suppose, or narcissism.

  No, I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m a stay-at-home mum. There are more parallels between the two than you might think, let me tell you.

  MRS. TESS MORGAN, 5 LOWLAND WAY, HOUSE-TO-HOUSE INQUIRIES BY THE METROPOLITAN POLICE, AUGUST 11, 2018

  Six weeks earlier

  Oh, but the cygnets were beautiful. Still so tiny and soft and trusting. What a joy that their elegant parents had chosen the pond in Lowland Gardens to raise their family, the first time here in living memory. Birds had built their nests on the little island before; there’d been goslings and ducklings, baby coots—did they have a special name? she’d look it up later—but never cygnets.

  Tess was on her way to Isla’s school for morning drop-off, a short stroll down Lowland Way and south through the park. Once considered too close for comfort to the Rushmoor Estate to the north, the lung of green that gave their suburb its name now had the best landscaping gentrification could afford and a vintage beach hut for a snack bar, a pair of posh girls dispensing artisanal flat whites for three pounds a pop. God knew, there were probably kids on the estate who didn’t know what cygnets were (let alone an artisanal flat white) or, if they did, then they thought it a good idea to feed them crisps. Only a minute ago, Tess had politely cautioned a mum and her preschoolers against this very crime.

  Six cygnets had hatched in the third week of May and made their first watery forays—following Mum with a synchronicity worthy of Busby Berkeley—with a phalanx of iPhones behind the railings. Since then, Tess, Naomi and some of the other neighbors had been conducting Cygnetwatch, sharing pictures with the street on the residents’ Facebook page.

  Tess took a quick head count: four, five, six. Good. Everyone present and correct. Dad was patrolling nearby, seeing off the crows. She took her daily picture and then gathered her own dependents, nine-year-old Isla, four-year-old Dex and her golden retriever, Tuppy, plus Naomi’s two dogs, Kit and Cleo, whom Tess had somehow committed herself to walking every morning. The dogs, comically anxious that they’d been abandoned forever, had been tied a safe distance away to prevent their being hissed at by the swans.

  Once, she’d told Finn she loved Tuppy as much as she did their two human children and he’d reacted as if she’d told a hilarious joke. Then, seeing her earnest expression, he’d said, “I know what you mean. Almost as much. But a dog dying isn’t as bad as a child dying, is it? When push comes to shove?”

  Depends what the pushes and shoves were, Tess had thought. A cruel death was worse than a kind one no matter what the species.

  “Mummy, can we have an ice cream?” Dex asked.

  “No. It’s eight thirty in the morning. You’ve just had breakfast. Anyway, they’re not open yet.”

  “I would have chosen salted caramel,” he said sadly.

  “Libby says salted caramel gives her a headache,” Isla said. Libby, Naomi’s eldest, was Naomi with hypochondria, basically, but Naomi had duly banned salted caramel from her kitchen, saying it had reached critical mass anyway and there would surely be a backlash soon. This made Tess picture a slow-moving but deadly golden brown tsunami rising over London and heading where? Wales?

  When Tess had had Isla, Naomi had urged her to keep working, even if only part-time, in order to protect the future employability she didn’t then know she would later want or need, but Tess had not listened. Had she thought it through properly or had she subconsciously sought to defy Naomi? As soon as Dex started school in September, she’d start looking for a job. OK, so she’d been led by the media to believe that all jobs were now being done by automatons or unpaid millennials, but that was surely an exaggeration, and Naomi said she might be all right while she was still in her thirties (she was thirty-nine).

  Why was it that Naomi’s words powered her thoughts like this? As if she had none of her own.

  “Come on, let’s get Isla to school.” But Dex was clinging to the railings near the swan family, sniveling. “Oh, darling, you heard what I said—you’re not having an ice cream.”

  “He’s worried about leaving the cygnets,” Isla explained. “He’s scared the new man will get them. He doesn’t like animals like us.”

  “Like we do. What new man? You mean the new neighbor on the corner?”

  Having missed introductions on the Booths’ arrival (Naomi had of course picked a time conducive to her family’s schedules, not Tess’s), she’d intended popping by alone, but Finn had said not to bother because the guy was an arsehole. Em’s complaints of a hell-raising couple with no awareness of other people’s feelings—or hearing—seemed to support this.

  “Are they going to be a problem?” she asked Finn.

  He shrugged. “If they are, Ralph and Naomi’ll handle it.”

  Indeed, Naomi had been quick off the mark to post on the residents’ Facebook page:

  Does anyone else have an issue with what’s going on at number 1?

  What is going on? Sara Boulter from number 6 asked. Isn’t it just renovations?

  I have a BIG issue, Em commented. Loud music. We’ve complained SEVERAL times, but they won’t listen.

  Em had spent the whole of their first get-together since the Kendalls’ holiday ranting about the newcomers. “Can you hear their music?” she’d demanded repeatedly. “Did I tell you I rang the police and they say it’s a council issue? Unless we feel threatened, they won’t do anything. And you can be charged for misusing the nine-nine-nine number. Unbelievable.”

  Tess had made the decision not to get personally involved, so long as they didn’t come anywhere near the kids—or the dogs. “Well, it’s good that you don’t feel threatened,” she said.

  “Not yet,” Em said, in the sort of tone people used when determined to be proved right even at their own expense.

  “There’s really no need to be scared of him,” Tess told Dex now. It was a dry, airless summer and the now-familiar heat was rising already. “Sometimes people seem a bit gruff but are really nice underneath.”

  “He isn’t nice,” Isla insisted. “He was very rude to us.”

  “You’ve spoken to him?” Tess said, startled. “When?”

  “When I was with Libby.” She said this with pride, Libby being three years older and an idol to her. “We were walking the dogs and we saw all this rubbish in his garden and Libby said litter should go in the bin, not on the ground, or else he’ll get rats. He got really cross and then he tried to kick Tuppy!”

  Tess tightened Tuppy’s lead and bent to ruffle his chest. “What? He didn’t actually touch him?”

  “No, he only pretended,” Isla explained. “He said, ‘Get that dog off my property!’ And he swore. He said the F word.”

  This last detail at least distracted Dex from his tears and allowed Tess to move the party on. The park’s color seemed a little less vibrant suddenly. “I think the best thing for now is not to walk past his garden unless you’re with an adult. Walk on the other side instead, OK?”

  “OK.” As they neared school, Isla’s thoughts had raced on, but once Tess had bid her farewell for the day and returned with Dex and the dogs to Lowland Way, hers remained fixed on the kids’ remarks about the new neighbors—and her own previous reluctance to ally with Em. What was that famous quote, “To remain neutral is to choose the side of the oppressor”? (Who said that? Nelson Mandela? Gandhi? Not Naomi, anyway.) Suddenly it made perfect sense that on arrival home she should park the dogs in her front garden and make directly for number 1.

  The drive and much of the garden were filled with the apparently growing collection of old cars and discarded pieces of kitchen and bathroom. Though there were no signs of activity, the front door was slightly ajar and Tess pushed the door and poked her head into the hallway.

  “He
llo? Did you know your front door is open?”

  There was no reply. She stepped inside, Dex’s hand in hers, and peered into the living room. She knew from visiting Jean that the downstairs layout comprised a narrow hallway leading to a loo, with the living room through a door on the immediate right. Glass-paneled double doors led from the back of the room to the kitchen. These had been removed, an alteration Tess knew was permitted by the council so long as the frame and load-bearing wall remained in place.

  “It smells horrible,” Dex said, trying to pull her back as she inched farther into the living room. The sofa, a flammable-looking chunk of brown nylon, was strewn with empty lager cans, the floor around it a flotilla of food plates and bowls of cigarette ends—she thought of little Sam on the other side of the wall: Was he at risk of passive smoking? There was a huge TV screen against the center wall, an old-style stereo with speakers—presumably this was the delivery system of the music that tortured Em—and a tangle of cables and gaming consoles. The windowsills were grainy with building dust. While hardly full-blown squalor, it was certainly in squalid contrast to other properties she’d been into on Lowland Way, even those not in Naomi’s league of engineered oak flooring and Christian Lacroix cushions.

  In the kitchen, a portion of the left-hand wall was bare and scarred where units had been torn away, and she was disturbed to see a flame on one of the hob rings. That couldn’t have been left on all night, could it? With the front door ajar, it might easily have blown out. She turned it off.

  “We’d better come back later,” she told Dex, returning to the hallway. But at the bottom of the stairs, she paused, compulsively drawn up Jean’s old blue stair runner, now gray with trodden dust. “You sit here on the stairs, sweetie. I’ll be half a minute. Don’t touch anything, OK?”

  As she tiptoed up, past the dark rectangles on the wall where Jean’s pictures had been removed, and past the bathroom, where renovations appeared still to be at the demolition stage, a sickening instinct began to swell inside her. Something was not right here. Was domestic violence a factor? Drug abuse? And that open door: Might an intruder have come in and murdered these people in their bed?

  Don’t be ridiculous.

  She sneaked along the landing toward the open door of the bedroom at the front, smelling sweat and exhaled beer breath before she actually saw Booth. He was lying on his back on a double bed, alone and fully clothed. Asleep, not murdered. By the door stood his boots, the same ones likely that had lashed out at a defenseless animal. Having arrived in a spirit of indignation, Tess suddenly felt irrational hate. I could kill him, she thought unexpectedly. No one saw me come in.

  “Mummy! Mummy!”

  Startled, she dashed to the top of the stairs. Below, a middle-aged woman in frayed black jeans and the sort of clinging white top Tess had stopped wearing in her mid-twenties was looming over Dex, her expression understandably disgruntled as she spun to face her intruder.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  This, evidently, was Jodie. She had a blue plastic bag in her hand, indicating an outing to the corner shop at Portsmouth Avenue and Crofton Road, which would have taken at least ten minutes from Lowland Way. What kind of a person left the front door open while they went shopping? And a gas ring alight?

  “What are you doing up there?” she demanded. “Why are you in my house?”

  Descending at speed, Tess reached for Dex and drew him toward her, instinctively covering his ears. Though he seemed more confused than scared, she was horrified: What had she been thinking, leaving him by an open door like that? “I’m so sorry. I was looking for you—if you’re Jodie? I’m Tess, from a few doors down. I thought something was wrong because the door was open.”

  “Don’t mean you just walk in and start nosing around,” the woman snapped, not without a point. She was not unattractive, Tess saw, under the smudges of her hangover, and her eyes had a quickness to them. Not stupid either, then.

  “You’re right. I thought I smelled gas,” she lied. “I turned your hob off. I hope you don’t mind. You’d left it on. You are Jodie?” she tried again.

  “For my sins.” Jodie half bared her teeth. The upper ones were perfectly straight but the lower excessively crooked, as if they belonged to two different mouths.

  Tess remembered her original mission. “Well, look, the reason I came round is I wanted to have a word with your husband about my dog. I heard he tried to kick him? I didn’t see it myself, but my kids were quite upset about it, so if you wouldn’t mind passing on the message . . .”

  “What message?” Jodie tore open her cigarettes and plucked one out with sharp fingernails painted petrol blue. Tess hoped Dex would not see the photo of diseased lung tissue on the pack.

  “That Tuppy’s completely harmless and it’s not acceptable to lash out at an animal, if that’s what happened?”

  “Tuppy? Is that a name?”

  “After the P. G. Wodehouse character,” Tess said. “While I’m here, can I ask how long renovations are going to take? I know these things are hard to estimate, but . . .”

  But at least she could go to Em with some useful information.

  Jodie shrugged. “A few months, I expect.”

  “I heard you’re doing the work yourselves?” In Tess’s experience that meant years, not months.

  “Darren is, yeah.” Jodie turned from Tess into the living room, evidently finished with her visitor. Next thing, her phone was ringing and her manner when she answered it was quite altered, friendly and forthcoming: “That’s right. Do you want to book in for a test-drive? Anytime this afternoon. Darren’s out of action this morning. Let me grab my diary.”

  “OK,” Tess murmured, “well, I’ll leave you to it.” But when she tried the front door she found she couldn’t work out the locking mechanism, a fitting recently installed, judging by the gashes around it.

  Dex picked up on her panic. “Mummy? Are we prisoners?”

  “Of course we’re not prisoners, sweetie. Excuse me?” Tess called to Jodie, and she could hear the overreaction in her own voice. “The door’s stuck. Could you let us out, please?”

  Her jailer ambled forward, the phone call—or cigarette—evidently having improved her mood. “No need to panic, darlin’, just a new lock. Not planning to kidnap you. The sex dungeon’s not up and running yet—know what I mean?”

  Tess frowned. “I don’t think that’s appropriate language to use in front of a child.”

  “You’re the one sneaking around other people’s bedrooms,” Jodie said with a laugh. She unlocked the door and ushered them through. “Why were you upstairs? Don’t think you said. Did you? Bye, then.”

  Back on the doorstep, Tess heard Jodie’s phone ring once more, and she lingered, straining to hear. “That’s Lowland Way—just setting up. Thanks, yeah. It came a bit out of the blue and Darren wanted to sell it straight off, but then we saw what a nice bit of land it was, and we were both sick of our old jobs, so we thought, yeah, let’s give it a go, start up on our own, you know?”

  Start what up? Tess thought. Hang on, what had Jodie said a minute ago about a test-drive? On the far side of the plot, two cars were set apart from the rest and half-covered, the exposed portions of their bodywork gleaming, as good as new. Since the great pile of bricks and torn-out bathroom fittings prevented access from the drive, Darren must have driven across the sidewalk to park them there. Kids and dogs came hurtling around that corner all the time.

  At home, she joined the Facebook discussion about number 1 she’d previously eschewed:

  Are they running a secondhand car business?

  It was a while before the reply came from Naomi, who was at work and very strict about separating business and personal social media during office hours:

  Fairly sure they are, yes. Ralph is investigating.

  * * *

  —

  “I just hope this tension with
the new neighbors is sorted out in time,” Tess said to Finn that evening, closing the feature on the Guardian website that listed bad neighbors as the second biggest obstacle to selling a house (after flood risk). She’d of course recounted to him the unsettling incident involving Jodie and the unattended gas flame, choosing not to include the detail of her inexplicable decision to creep upstairs and stand over the woman’s sleeping husband. (“I could kill him.”)

  “In time for what?” Finn asked.

  “For when we put the house on the market.”

  Finn reacted with the kind of nonreactive expression that took real effort. Sometimes, when she looked at her husband, Tess couldn’t see beyond the resemblance to Ralph—each brother had cropped dark hair, a square jaw and a strong Roman nose—but only when he was feeling confident. Not like now, when he was unsure. “We haven’t a hundred percent decided we’re going to move, have we?”

  She cocked her head, brow creased. “Well, I’ve a hundred percent decided.”

  “Right.”

  But there was only one of her—the nonbreadwinner at that. He didn’t say this, of course, only motioned to the scene in the communal garden: children and dogs, barks and squeals, balls flying everywhere. “I’m not so sure. Look how happy they are with their cousins.”

  Dex was in fact in bed and only Isla was involved, but Tess didn’t split hairs. “We’d still visit. We’d still be close.”

  “Not like this.”

  No, she thought, not like this. That’s the point.

  It wasn’t that Tess disliked Ralph and Naomi, because she liked them very much—most of the time. It was that she worried about being subsumed by them. She worried that Ralph would never stop asking Finn to leave his job as a logistics manager for a corporate events specialist and join him at Morgan Leather Goods and that one day Finn would lose heart in turning him down and agree that his skills were eminently transferable and it would be nice to earn more money, yes. We can’t live next door and work together, was the line, but how long could it hold?