by David Jester
9
The Feline, the Fuckwit, and the Full-Blown War: Part Two
I wasn’t exactly looking forward to telling Lizzie about the cold war I had started in our neighborhood. I hoped that I wouldn’t need to—adhering to the typically male attitude that it would all blow over—but the neighbors remained gathered outside my house for most of the day. There were only a handful of them, lounging in the yard across the street, but they outnumbered me, even if I roped Ella in for support. Lizzie often said that when faced with adult situations, I reacted in childish ways. That was the main reason I didn’t want to tell her, but the shouting—and the power she had over my sex life—were also valid reasons. I wasn’t childish, of course; if anything, they were the childish ones. They started it.
As I watched from behind a twitching curtain, drinking a cup of tea and feeling like some noir detective as the steam shrouded my face, I realized what an ugly little bunch they were—devious and conniving like a villainous cluster of hideous imps. One of their children, who looked like he had been severely beaten with a tennis racket, saw me watching and called to the older freaks who all looked up. Realizing I was caught, I put down my cup of tea and pretended to clean the windowsills.
The bald thuggish one pointed and said something, then his deformed offspring decided to ring the bell again. They held onto it for a number of minutes as the others watched and laughed, but I ignored it and remained by the window, pretending to be admiring the view. After a while, and after thinking of something sufficiently cocky and amusing to say, I opened the window and prepared myself. What I hadn’t prepared for, or even noticed, was that I had left my tea in the way, and when I moved to lean out of the open window, I knocked it out.
I cringed as I watched it fall, the front door and the imbecilic child directly beneath it. It was a heavy cup, and although there was little chance that the kid would receive any noticeable brain damage—on account of him being sufficiently damaged in that department already—I was still relieved when I heard it hit the ground. I was less relieved, however, when I heard the kid scream.
The tea was no longer hot, but the fact that half the street had just watched me “throw” a cup at a small child who was now in tears wasn’t going to do me any favors. On the upside, he had stopped ringing the bell; on the downside, his father was preparing to take his place.
“I understand your anger!” I yelled as he tried to kick my door down. “But you’re going about this the wrong way.”
He took a step back and glared up at me. “Come down here, right now!” he ordered.
“Why?”
“So I can kill you, that’s why.”
“That’s hardly an invitation I’m going to accept now, is it?”
“Down. Here. Now!” he yelled, as though spelling it out and using fewer words would make it a more tempting offer.
“I have a kid in here,” I told him. “I suggest you be quiet. You’re upsetting him.” Ben was actually sitting behind me playing with one of his toys, completely oblivious to what was going on around him. The cat, the cause of all of this, was sitting next to him and watching his every move. “He’s crying now,” I added, turning back.
“And what about my boy?” he demanded. “He’s crying.”
“He’ll be fine. It was a bit of warm tea, never hurt anyone.”
“Do you think it’s normal to throw tea at a child?”
“I don’t know. Do you think it’s normal to let your ugly little brat hang on someone’s doorbell?”
“Come here now!”
“Fuck off!”
I slammed the window and went back to hiding behind the curtain while apologizing to Ben for swearing. He didn’t seem to mind. He also didn’t seem to mind the sound of the door being banged off its hinges downstairs, as the thug neighbor pounded his distaste and then went back to the yard across the street.
The boy had stopped crying, and his dad wasn’t even paying attention to him, more concerned with his own anger. After a few minutes and many stares in my direction, the neighbors went to their respective homes, but I sensed that that wasn’t the end of things.
Ben was asleep on the couch. He’d had a long day; not only had he managed to figure out a new puzzle, but he’d also learned how to undo the child catch on the stair gate just before I managed to catch him and stop him from bouncing to his death. I was asleep next to him. I’d also had a long day, but the less said about that the better. The cat was perched on the top of the sofa above us, purring like a mini-motorbike.
I awoke to the sound of shouts. I listened for a bit, still unsure if I was dreaming or not, and then I recognized one of the voices as Lizzie’s. I ran to the door just as she walked through it. She looked annoyed and ready for a fight, so I shrank back immediately, wearing my most innocent expression and waiting for her to make the first move.
“That bald prick neighbor of ours has just confronted me outside,” she said.
“Oh?”
“He told me everything.”
“Oh.”
“But I don’t believe him,” she added. “He said you called his kid ugly, threw tea on him, and then slammed the door in his face. Is that true?”
“No, of course not.” I paused, decided that lying wouldn’t do me any favors and then said, “I mean yes, but it didn’t happen in that order.”
Lizzie sighed. “Kieran?”
“Okay, I’ll explain.”
I told her everything, from the moment I woke up to the sound of the incessant bell, to the incident with the door, the neighbors, and the tea. I waited to be told that I was overreacting, that I was in the wrong, that I had acted childishly or stupidly—all things I would have gladly accepted. Instead she agreed with me.
“Who would let their kid do that?” She was appalled. “Which one was it?”
“It was the little kid with the wandering, twitching eyes and the vacant expression,” I explained. “You can never quite tell if he’s smiling at you or winking at the person next to you.”
“That’s horrible,” she said uncertainly.
“But true,” I was quick to add. “He’s one daddy issue away from turning an AK-47 on all the classmates that have ever looked at him funny, which as far as he is concerned, is probably all of them.”
Lizzy furrowed her eyebrows and frowned at me before saying, “I don’t think that’s how a lazy eye works. I’m sure he can see fine.”
“You don’t know that.”
“The horrible little bastards,” she said, shaking her head. “What kind of messed-up parents let their kid hang on someone’s doorbell at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning?”
I had embellished the truth a little, but I didn’t change the important parts.
“Exactly,” I agreed. “But now they’ve created some sort of war out there. Them against us. And they outnumber us.”
“But they don’t outsmart us,” she said, tapping her head and grinning. I grinned as well, although mainly because she thought that I could outsmart someone. “Most of them won’t care; it’s just the bald idiot that we have to worry about, but he’s an easy target.”
For the rest of the night, she wore a determined and somewhat evil expression on her face as she pondered a plan of action. I had never seen her in that state of mind before, but I liked it and I couldn’t wait to see how things turned out.
The next morning, Lizzie got a taste of the kid’s vile manners for herself when he hung on the doorbell again. It really was around eight o’clock this time, and the fact that it was Sunday drove both of us crazy with indignation. Lizzie was the one who answered it, and she did so just in time to see the little rascal running away, his high-pitched laughter echoing down the street. It stopped being about the cat, although I had my doubts that it ever was. We tried to encourage Ella to go outside at night, thinking she would go home, but whenever we left a door or window open, she would rush back in.
Lizzie tasked me with dealing with the buzzer issue. She told me to buy some
equipment. She meant CCTV equipment, so we could catch the little devil, or his father, in the act. I went down another route, replacing the bell with one that would give anyone who touched it an electric shock. I even paid the man who installed it a little extra to increase the voltage. “Nothing deadly,” I told him. “I just want to scare someone, not kill them.”
Unfortunately, I didn’t anticipate that the kid would be at school the following morning and that the first person to press the buzzer would be the postman with a package. He received such a shock that he dropped the parcel and nearly tripped over his own feet in an attempt to get away. I had been on my way to answer the door, but when I heard the buzz, the pop, and the scream, I ducked below the windowsill and watched as surreptitiously as I could. Lizzie hadn’t seen it, so I quickly dragged the package indoors, disconnected the doorbell, and pretended nothing had happened.
She woke an hour later. The cat was in the yard by then, curled up in a ball by the fence, no doubt sleeping with one eye open so she could keep the other trained on any innocent animals that dared to cross her line of sight. Lizzie, who was wearing nothing but a nightdress, went straight to the kitchen and, after listening to her rummaging around in the fridge for a while, I heard her scream.
The kitchen door led out onto the side of the house, right next to a fence that stopped any intruders from sneaking around to the back door or the backyard itself. As I entered the kitchen, Lizzie was standing by that back door, in the process of shouting at our first intruder.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she barked.
I peeked over her shoulder to see Fuckwit, the small-minded, big-headed father of the inconsiderate child who had woken me up on Saturday morning, holding the cat in his arms and hurrying away. He had ducked in unannounced and taken the cat before trying to leave as quickly as possible.
“I’m taking my cat!” he yelled.
“Your cat? I said. “You mean the animal currently trying her best to get the hell away from you?”
He held Ella by the throat to stop her from squirming. She looked like she was ready to claw him, and he was aware of the fact, tilting his head back and keeping her at a distance.
“You’re hurting Ella,” Lizzie squealed.
“Who the hell is Ella?”
“The cat!”
“The cat’s name is Mr. Tibbles.”
Lizzie and I looked at each other. It was an incredibly stupid name for a cat, there was no denying that, but unless it was also an ironic name, then it probably made much more sense than the one we had given her. Or him, as it turned out.
“You can’t just waltz into someone’s garden and steal stuff,” I told him.
He looked confused. Whenever we spoke to him in long sentences, there seemed to be a delay. English was clearly his second language, but I didn’t speak the Inaudible Grunt he was so fluent in.
“Just watch me!” he spat eventually, hurrying away.
“Now what?” I asked Lizzie.
I don’t know what I expected of her. I knew she would be angry that this idiot had just walked onto her property and taken something she liked, and I also knew she would be angry about the way he had treated the cat. What I didn’t expect was what happened next: she ran after him.
He made it into the house before she got to him, her bare feet slapping the concrete violently and her nightdress blowing up and exposing things she didn’t want to expose to people she didn’t want to expose them to. She was a woman on a mission, and he was a little man two paces short of shitting himself.
I quickly climbed into my shoes and followed her, keen to stop her from killing him and equally keen to watch her kill him if I failed with my first mission. By the time I arrived at the house, she was banging on the front door, her hands balled into fists, her mouth open wide as a cacophony of hellfire spewed forth.
“He locked the fucking door!” she yelled. She was frothing at the mouth.
“I see that.”
“What should we do?”
I had no idea. “Try reasoning with him?”
“Reasoning with him? Are you kidding? You can’t reason with these people.”
I shrugged again. “Maybe you should knock down the door and kill his entire family.”
She liked that idea, and for a moment she actually contemplated it, but that moment quickly passed when she let her sanity do the thinking for her. “Middle ground, Kieran,” she said.
“You could shit through his letterbox.”
She didn’t have time to contemplate my proposal because as soon as it left my mouth, Fuckwit shouted through the door. “I’ve called the police, they’re on their way.”
“He called the police!” Lizzie spat.
“So I heard.”
“Can you believe that?”
“To be honest, I’m a little surprised he knew the number.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We could go home and have some breakfast. Oh, and a package came for you this morning. I also made tea.”
She glared at me. “What is wrong with you?”
How long have you got?
“Nothing,” I said. “My wife is standing in the middle of the street on a Monday morning, barefoot, half naked, and with a police car on the way. If there was ever a time to retire, collect ourselves, and plan our next move, this is it.”
She looked down at herself, as though only just realizing that a brisk breeze had been sporadically exposing her bare backside to the neighbors for the last few minutes. “Maybe you’re right.”
Back in our house, she finally dressed, looking a little brighter as she sipped her morning coffee before opening the parcel that had been somewhat haphazardly delivered.
“On the plus side,” I said, making conversation, worried about both the cat and the police, “the kid wasn’t hanging on the doorbell this morning.”
“Did you order the CCTV equipment?” she asked.
“No.”
She paused to stare at me. “I thought you said you’d sorted it?”
I had. But I wasn’t talking about the CCTV.
“My mistake. I’ll order it la—”
“What’s happened to my vase?” Her hand was in the box that the postman had dropped, her eyes wide with horror as she picked up broken pieces of glass.
That was my chance to come clean, to fess up and to save the poor postman’s job. “The feckless little prick,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief, and also in an effort to rid myself of all righteous thoughts. “You should phone them up and complain. The cheeky bastards were probably playing soccer with it back at the post office.”
“You’re right,” she said. “I’ll get straight onto them.”
“Actually, why don’t you let me do it?” I jumped in, worried they would tell her that their driver had been assaulted by our doorbell.
She kissed me on the forehead. “Thanks.”
“It’s the least I could do.”
She stared at me curiously. “Why did you say that?”
Yes, Kieran, why did you say that?
“No reason.”
Idiot.
She weighed me up for interminable seconds. I felt sure I was going to crack. “You’re a weird one, but I love you for it.” She gave me another kiss and then asked, “Should we wait for the police or not?”
“Do you think he honestly called them?”
She shrugged.
“I think he’s probably had a few run-ins with them before and might not want to draw attention to himself.”
“And why do you think that?” she asked, an eyebrow arched. She hated it when I stereotyped people, she hated my cynicism, and she hated that I often judged people who I didn’t like. As far as I was concerned, if I didn’t like someone then I was free to call them what I wanted, otherwise what would be the point in disliking someone?
I pretended that it wasn’t because he talked like an extra from Eastenders and looked like he spent his nights hanging around bus shel
ters selling crack and murdering babies. “No reason.”
“Anyway, you’re probably right.”
A knock at the door silenced the conversation. I could see a smeared silhouette of a tall person in dark clothes standing behind it. The dark shape knocked on the door again and then moved to ring the bell.
Shit.
I felt my heart hit the pit of my stomach. I heard the buzz of the doorbell and then—
“Did they just swear?” Lizzie asked.
“Yes. I think so.”
I opened the door as nonchalantly as possible for a man who had technically assaulted two uniformed men in one morning.
“Your doorbell just attacked me,” a waiting police offer said, a look on incredulity on his face.
I hooked my head around the corner to stare at the bell. “No, really?” I asked.
“Yes, really. You want to get that seen to.”
“Maybe you should arrest it,” I offered, chuckling softly.
He didn’t find it funny.
I cleared my throat. “So, how can I help you, officer?”
He paused to look at his notepad. At that point, I noticed there was a short woman next to him, as wide as she was tall. She had her hair tied back in a ponytail, so tight that it looked like her eyes were about to pop out of her head. An expression on her face indicated she didn’t like me or anyone else in this world.
“Are you Mr. GirlPants?” the male officer asked.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s the name I have on my pad here. This is number 17, right?”
“Yes. But my name is McCall, Kieran McCall.”
“Oh. I had a feeling it might have been a joke.”
With deduction skills like that I’m surprised you haven’t made detective.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
That depends, will you be bringing your Rottweiler with you?
“Of course.”
I stepped back and allowed them both to enter. Lizzie had been standing next to the door when they rang but had disappeared into the living room when I opened it. She was now approaching them with the most insincere surprise I had ever seen. With acting skills like that, it was a good thing she went into teaching.
