The New Neighbors

by Simon Lelic

  I’d intended to ignore Elsie’s father if he opted to speak to me. “What are you talking about?”

  He swiveled on his stool. “That mark on your face,” he said. “Looks like you either fell over or someone came at you with a flying handbag. Now, who might have done that? That pretty little lady of yours, by any chance?” He angled himself slightly toward the man seated on the bar stool beside him. “The one who would be pretty if she didn’t have a nine iron sticking halfway up her arse.”

  The man beside him looked down at his pint as though he knew what was coming and wanted no part of it. I touched my cheek where Syd had walloped me. I flinched, as much in surprise as from the pain I felt.

  This time Elsie’s father was the one to snigger. “It was her, wasn’t it? She kicked you out, too, I bet. That’s why you ended up here.” He laughed into his upturned pint jug. He was still grinning after he’d swallowed.

  My hand fell from my cheek, and I picked up my refilled glass. I was halfway back to my seat when it struck me what Elsie’s father had said. What he’d failed to say, rather. Because he surely must have guessed that Syd and I had been the ones to call social services. And yet in spite of what had happened to Elsie since, his daughter evidently hadn’t even crossed his mind.

  “Don’t you care?” I said, turning.

  Once again his chin touched his shoulder, his upper lip cocked halfway to a sneer.

  “Your daughter’s lying in hospital and you’re sitting here . . . what? Celebrating, is it?”

  That sneer of his faltered, and I saw his eyes dart toward the barman. He might not have cared about his daughter, but he clearly cared enough about his own skin to worry about what other people might have been thinking. The pub was by no means full, but in addition to the regulars who’d been here when I’d arrived, a man and a woman were seated in one of the booths now, as well as another couple standing at the bar. And all eyes were focused on us.

  Elsie’s father rose from his bar stool. Slowly, preparing himself, he sipped his drink at me.

  “I would’ve thought you’d’ve learned your lesson,” he said, carefully placing his pint jug down beside him. “I warned you about sticking your beak in where it doesn’t belong.”

  The memory of our previous altercation came back to me, the pain when his knee had struck my groin. I pressed on with my attack regardless. “Have you even visited her?” I said. I was sure that if he had, Syd would have seen him, would have mentioned it to me. “Do you even know what hospital she’s at?”

  Elsie’s father bared his teeth and started forward. The barman reached between the beer taps and caught his shoulder. “Sean,” he said. “I’ve warned you about kicking off in here.” He aimed his gaze then squarely at me. “And you, you should have taken the hint and settled up. Now I suggest you leave. You can come back for your credit card tomorrow.”

  There was a finality to his tone that reminded me from out of nowhere of my father. It bore no ambiguity, left no room for quarrel. It was brusque, businesslike, nothing personal. What he said would simply be done. And that was why with my father it had always hurt so much. It was never personal with him either. He spoke to me the way he would have to a stranger on the street. Politely, when called for, but never affectionately. Curtly, more often, and never with any suggestion he cared.

  I dropped my eyes, sensed them skitter around the room. I slid my drink onto the nearest table and turned to snatch up my coat. I got as far as the door.

  “Poor little lamb,” called Elsie’s father. “Now he’s got nowhere left to go. Why not do everyone a favor and put yourself out of your misery?” He sniggered then, and it was that snigger—gleeful, vindictive, triumphant—that led me to turn.

  “What?” I said.

  Elsie’s father shrugged himself free of the barman’s grip. “I said, put yourself out of your misery. Go take a bath in the Thames.” Another snigger, a satisfied little glance at the other regulars closest to the bar. He wasn’t just laughing, I realized. He was gloating.

  And that’s when it struck me. Because who else had motive the way he did? Syd and I had interfered in his life; now he was interfering in ours. And all at once it made sense why he hadn’t tried confronting me sooner: the man had already taken his revenge.

  “You?” I said. “You did this?”

  I thought of Bart then. Of what I’d accused him of. My best friend. My only really close friend, apart from Syd. But I’d been wrong. Hideously, hopelessly wrong. Syd’s reaction had said it all. He’s your friend, Jack—remember? And I did, finally—but too late.

  Elsie’s father didn’t say anything. But given the look on his face, he didn’t have to.

  “You, what? You followed me? And Ali . . . Sabeen . . . that was you?” I started toward him from my spot beside the door. “You . . . you cost me my job. My best friend. My girlfriend.”

  I said before, when the policewoman asked, that I don’t get angry. And I don’t. I’m not that type of person. But everyone has a limit, and in terms of what I was willing to put up with (as well as what I’d drunk), I was already well beyond mine. And it wasn’t just about me. It was about Sabeen and Ali and all the rest of them. It was about Elsie. About Syd, in my mind, more than anyone.

  It wasn’t much of a fight. Perhaps if I’d managed to get in one good swing, that would have been enough for me. But the barman was out quickly from behind the counter and had hold of me before I’d even realized he was there. Someone was holding Elsie’s father back, too, I think, although it’s all kind of a blur. I recall trying to hit the bloke and failing, and then getting driven back toward the door. Like in rugby, when one of the skinnier blokes gets lifted off his feet by a forward. Before I knew it I was out on the street, on my arse with the barman on top of me, and screaming the first thing that came to mind.

  So I’m not saying I didn’t say it. I did. I admit it. But the point is, I didn’t mean it. I swear to God I didn’t. I said other stuff as well, stuff I don’t even remember. And that’s part of the point, too: I was out of my mind. All those people can say what they want, can tell the police whatever they like, but there’s no way they can say for certain what I was thinking. I mean, you hear it practically every day. Don’t you?

  “I’ll kill you. I’ll fucking kill you.”

  It’s just, you know. An expression. Just because someone says it doesn’t mean they actually plan to do it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  SYDNEY

  JACK LEFT ME messages. Long, rambling explanations that explained nothing at all. It was all a mistake, he said. A misunderstanding. He mentioned a fight at the pub, some altercation—another one—between him and Elsie’s father. He said that Elsie’s father had engineered it all. The photo, our argument, everything. He said he’d set him up at work, that his getting suspended was Elsie’s father’s fault too. Which to me sounded almost delusional, like Jack’s innate insecurity had morphed into crazed paranoia. And anyway it entirely missed the point. It wasn’t Elsie’s father who’d come between us. It was Jack. His lies. His infidelity.

  I called Bart, told him to tell Jack to stop ringing me. I assumed because I hadn’t let him back into the house that Jack must have been staying with him but Bart hadn’t let Jack in either. Jack had come to him, tried to make some half-arsed apology but screw him, Bart had said to me. If what Jack had accused him of was really what he thought of him, Bart said, then it was good riddance to bad rubbish. Which is pretty much how I’d felt as well at first but even so I was surprised to hear it from Bart. He and Jack must have had more of a falling out than I’d realized. I knew how fond Jack was of Bart and all at once I found myself feeling sorry for him. To the extent that I wondered if I hadn’t been too hard on him. That photo had been pretty fucking compelling but I recognized too that I hadn’t exactly been in the most secure frame of mind when I’d received it. Maybe, somehow, I’d misinterpreted it.


  I made a start on looking through Jack’s stuff. I’m not proud of it. It’s not the type of thing I’d ever thought I would have found myself doing. It made me feel fucking crazy if I’m honest and resentful too that circumstances had brought me to this point where I was behaving like a schizophrenic housewife. But that’s how I found it. I was rifling through the pile of shoeboxes at the bottom of Jack’s wardrobe, looking for, I don’t know, love letters? More photographs? Fucking panties? Anything, I suppose, that would prove or disprove that Jack had been having an affair . . . and there it was, buried beneath a stack of Jack’s trainers.

  —

  HE LET HIMSELF in. I was sitting waiting for him in the kitchen.

  “What the fuck is this, Jack?”

  Jack checked his watch. He was early and he must have assumed I was having a go at him for that. He didn’t appear to have noticed the shoebox, which I’d placed on the kitchen table.

  “I’m sorry, Syd. I thought . . . I mean, I didn’t think . . .” He looked at his watch again and I shook my head at him dismissively.

  “I don’t mean the time, Jack. I mean this. This . . . whatever this is.” I shoved the box so that it slid across the surface toward him.

  Still Jack didn’t comprehend. He saw the box now but showed no sign of having recognized it.

  “Listen, Syd . . . whatever’s inside that, I swear to you I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  I started to speak but Jack talked over me.

  “It’s Elsie’s father. Sean ‘Begbie’ fucking Payne. He’s a nutcase. A mentalist. Everything that’s been happening is because of him. Like that photo,” he pressed before I could interrupt. “He took that. The same way he told work about Sabeen. He’s mad at me. At us. Because of Elsie. Not because of what happened to her—I mean, he doesn’t give a shit about that—but because we interfered.”

  Jack had moved closer as he’d been speaking and was now gripping the back of one of the dining chairs with both of his hands. He looked a mess, I realized. The way he had the day I’d first met him, when he’d blown weather-battered through the doors of that hotel lobby. From the look of him he hadn’t shaved since the day I’d thrown him out, and I was fairly sure he was still wearing the same clothes. I wondered where he’d been sleeping. There’s no way he would have gone to his parents’ place, not in such humiliating circumstances, and seeing as Bart had refused to put him up, he’d most likely been staying in some cheap hotel.

  “Jack—”

  “I’m begging you, Syd, please.” Jack’s knuckles, around the chair back, were bulging white. “You have to believe me. Elsie’s father, he practically admitted it.”

  “Jack—”

  “I mean, for Christ’s sake, Syd—he even broke into our house!”

  I’d been pressing my fingertips to my temples but at that my hands fell away. I looked up.

  “He did what?”

  Jack was pacing now, two steps one way, two steps back, traversing the width of our kitchen.

  “I can’t prove it was him, but someone was definitely in here. More than once, I’m thinking now. This one time I heard a noise and I went downstairs, and when I didn’t find anything I came back into the bedroom. And you, you said . . .” Jack stopped then and looked at me. “I mean . . . I just . . . I had this feeling, that’s all,” he went on and his eyes skidded away from me. “And I’ve been thinking about it, is the point, and I reckon he must have got in through the kitchen, through one of the windows, maybe, or even the back door if we left it unlocked. And then, when I came back upstairs, when I went to the toilet, I expect, all he would have needed to do was sneak past me and let himself out the same way.” He looked at me urgently. “You see?”

  What I saw was that Jack was even more of a mess than I’d realized. I’d already gathered from the messages he’d left me that he was convinced Elsie’s father was out to get him. That he’d hatched some elaborate plot and was intent on sabotaging Jack’s life. Elsie’s father. The same man who, when he’d had a problem with Jack before, had opted to simply knee him in the bollocks. Clandestine surveillance, to my mind, didn’t exactly seem the man’s style.

  “Jack, listen to me—”

  “I’m telling you, Syd,” Jack persisted, “he’s a lunatic. At the pub he—”

  “JACK!”

  He’d been pacing again and he stopped short, midway between the back door and the oven.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Don’t you get it? All this . . . paranoia, it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t alter what you did!”

  “But that’s the point! I didn’t do anything! I mean, yes, the work stuff I’ll admit to, but in the circumstances, you would have done exactly the same thing. They were destitute, Syd. About to be kicked out onto the street!”

  I turned away then and Jack must have realized that he was losing me. That once again what he was saying was beside the point.

  He raised a hand and shook it frantically.

  “The photo,” he said. “I get it, Syd. I do. What it looks like. What you must be thinking. But I swear to God, it’s completely innocent. Amira, she’s just a kid. And that photo. I remember now when it was taken. Amira’s brother was standing right beside us. It’s just been cropped to make sure he’s out of the shot. I told you, it . . .”

  This time I was the one to hold up a hand. I’d heard enough. About Elsie’s father, about Jack’s precious Amira. Just enough.

  “All I want to know,” I said, enunciating, “is where you got that box. What it was doing hidden away at the bottom of your wardrobe.”

  For the first time since he’d entered the room Jack looked properly at the shoebox on the kitchen table. He’d barely glanced at it before but now when he looked at it he saw it fully. And he recognized it, I could tell. He knew exactly what I would have found when I’d looked inside.

  “Syd . . .” He started forward, his hands spread to try to contain yet another lie. “Syd, that’s . . . it’s just . . . it’s nothing. It’s something I found, that’s all.”

  I scraped my chair back from the table. I stood, picked up the box and tipped it so that its contents spilled onto the surface. I held out the lid so Jack could see it. So he could read what was written on its underside.

  “Syd, I know. I know what it says. That’s why I didn’t—”

  “Jessica,” I read. “My sister’s name, Jack. Written in felt-tip. Like the way a kid would write it. Is this . . . I mean . . . all this stuff . . . is it . . .”

  Is it real? I wanted to ask but all I could do was shake my head. Because I knew. Even though I didn’t recognize the things inside—the postcards, the shells, that fucking Care Bear—somehow, the moment I’d found it, I knew the box and everything in it was real. It felt real. Like . . . I don’t know. Like books. Like the way when you pick up a book that’s been read, you can always tell whether it’s also been loved. And I say I didn’t recognize the things inside. Maybe I didn’t—but somehow I felt like I should have.

  “Where did you get it, Jack? Why were you hiding it?”

  “Syd, please . . .” Jack tried to touch me then and I pulled away.

  “Just tell me! Just for once give me a straight answer!”

  “I did tell you!” Jack said. “I found it! Up in the attic. At the same time I found that dead cat. It was tucked behind the—”

  I’d been looking again at the things on the table. My gaze snapped up.

  “What cat?”

  Jack closed his eyes, pinched them tight.

  “Jack? What fucking cat?”

  It all came out then. All the things Jack had kept hidden. Beginning with the box, how he’d found it, how he’d concealed it from me. The cat too, which as it turned out he’d buried in our overgrown garden. His worries about the house, about how they’d led him back to Evan—and about how, after that, he’d even spoken to Patric
k Winters. They were small things, I suppose. Small pieces, as Jack says, but together they amounted to something bigger. A tableau of lies, just for starters, and the first thing I remember thinking was that I would never be able to fully trust Jack again. But something else was becoming clearer in my mind too. Something darker. It was like I was peering down into a pit, watching the shadows there slowly taking shape.

  “What did I say, Jack?”

  He looked at me blankly.

  “You said I said something. That night you heard someone in the house. You said you came back upstairs into the bedroom and I said . . .” I left the sentence hanging, tried to stifle my dread as I waited for Jack to finish it.

  He swallowed. “You said . . . you said you’d felt a hand on your cheek.”

  “But you . . . I mean, couldn’t it just have been . . .”

  “It wasn’t me, Syd. But you were asleep. Dreaming probably. I figured . . .”

  I was shaking my head again, I realized. Not just to cut off Jack’s explanation but to keep at bay the one dawning on me. The house, this house we should never have owned. The box . . . Jack’s work . . . that e-mail . . .

  The hand I’d felt on my cheek.

  The sob built from my stomach and erupted sounding like a plea. I frisked the air blindly behind me and used the chair back to lower myself down. I’d never before had a panic attack, had never really understood what the term meant. But it feels like that moment you wake from a nightmare, when the only thing you’re sure is real is the terror that has its hands around your throat. Your heart is hammering against your ribcage and you’re so cold your whole body starts to sweat. Even sitting I felt short of breath. I sensed Jack reach out to try to steady me but somehow I gestured him away. I didn’t want him near me. I didn’t want anything near me: the walls around me, the floor below me, the ceiling that was pressing on my head. I felt like I was being smothered, like all at once the air was some noxious gas.