I will tell Carmel tomorrow, like, eventually, I always do. Wow, she might say. No! she might say. And I’ll wait for her to say something else, something characteristic and wise, while that terrible line in her forehead deepens, and her fork moves uneaten cake around her plate, crushing sweetness into failed grey babymush.
Christopher de la Rosa
She’d been sitting at the PC for days. Let’s go for a walk, suggested Finn. Okay, she said, sick of pixels. It was Hallowe’en, a gorgeous cool, quiet morning balancing on that slice-edge between autumn and winter. Sky pale; air hanging over the earth, a blanket about to fall.
The Park felt like some place out of time. Browns and greys, a few last bits of gold. They went to the bandstand, and Finn sang My Way, sending echoes bouncing off the broken roof.
Then she saw him. A figure in a green combat jacket, skulking in the bushes. He wore glasses, an odd woollen hat.
Let’s go, said Finn, though she’d said nothing, hadn’t pointed him out.
They were halfway up the hill when the children appeared, rushing out of the undergrowth like Peter Pan’s Lost Boys. Three of them. Two fair, one dark, all wearing superhero cloaks.
The smallest, the dark one, had large limpid eyes and a grazed chin. The two fair ones were freckled, crew-cut. Brothers, she thought. The oldest wore a necklace made of seashells.
‘Excuse me?’ he said. ‘Have you seen our friends?’ He wasn’t more than nine but spoke with a grave precision that wouldn’t have been out of place on an elder statesman.
What do your friends look like, they asked. Details. No, we haven’t.
The leader shrugged. He didn’t seem that bothered. ‘Can we walk with you? Maybe we’ll find them on the way.’
Finn looked at her. In this day and age, adults, children, health and safety. But it felt okay to her and must have to Finn too, so they said yes.
They walked. Grassland, woodland, gardens. Occasionally the boys left to search in thickets for their friends. No luck. They’d always come running back, fall in line with them again. In the rose garden, she struck up a conversation with the oldest. Christopher. His best friend was a girl, he told her. She was one of the missing ones. He fingered his necklace. ‘She gave this to me.’
Zöe loved that, how he wasn’t embarrassed having a girl as a best friend. How he wore her gift with such derring-do, like a pirate’s treasure.
‘My name’s not Christopher,’ he said suddenly. Finn was a few feet ahead of them, humming to himself. ‘It’s Stephen.’
She could have walked with them for ever. They were sweet. Not like icing. The sun rising, the sound of heather bells, a still Hallowe’en morning.
When it was time for them to go, they left as easily as they’d arrived. No warning, no goodbye, they just took off, running down to the lake in a wild, shambolic chase that only children that age understand. Or maybe lovers know it too, in the early years, when they still define themselves by that verb of intangible doings.
As they walked home, Finn asked if she’d noticed him. She said nothing.
‘The guy in the bushes,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ She was thinking of Christopher’s necklace, and the best friend, the missing one, the girl who he’d said had given it to him, and wondering if she was real, or like his name, a patron saint summoned from his imagination to protect him on his travels. She was trying to remember what Saint Stephen had been martyred for, but couldn’t, and was glad.
Hello My Angel
I am a city boy. I should say man. The walls of my house are thin.
That is not the house’s fault. Or, indeed, a fault of the walls. They’re proper walls. Fired brick, lime mortar. Built, as people often say, to last. They can’t help that they’re only two bricks deep.
It is modest, our house, like all the houses on our terrace. We live in a neighbourhood that was built for workers but is now on the up-and-up. You can imagine what it was like in those early days, at the turn of the twentieth century: a few small rooms behind every front door, grimy uneducated children packed like sardines in the same bed, a chilly outdoor toilet, a patch of earth to grow spuds and cabbage. Now there’s just two or three, or max four people in each house, and we all have indoor toilets, usually installed in the built-on extensions. Some extensions are two-storey. Ours isn’t. Everybody’s extensions are built of concrete, not brick. These walls, too, are thin.
Our neighbour’s house, the house to our right when you are standing on the footpath in front, also has a single-story extension, but it’s not designed the same way as ours. I don’t know whose extension was built first, or if there was a time-lag between them. I still can’t tell if they share a wall, or if there are two layers of concrete-and-mortar, snugly running side-by-side. The point is, our indoor toilet is at the back of our extension, while the neighbour’s one is ten feet in. As a result, our toilet is right beside their kitchen. One might assume this was by accident, not choice. But after the trouble started, I was on the loo one evening and the thought struck me: while they eat, they can hear me shit. I had never had the thought before this particular neighbour moved in. It offered some comfort.
We often hear this neighbour. She has a child. She calls at him. Often the call takes on the quality of a yell. More than once I’ve heard her tell him to be a man, that only babies wet their bed. He is three. I don’t listen on purpose. Nor does my wife. This neighbour has a very loud voice, with a deep timbre. When she is agitated it cuts through the party wall like an angle-grinder. I should say, in the interests of fairness, that I also hear them laugh together, this neighbour and her child. Though in the interests of absolute fairness, it must be stated that the laughter doesn’t happen as much as the yelling.
My wife is a country girl. Woman now. She hates the thinness of our walls. The neighbour’s cries and yells make her jump in her skin. But so does the laughter.
The neighbour on our other side, the left-hand-side, doesn’t affect her in the same way. Or me either, I must say. He has always been very pleasant.
Some people.
There was a party once that this neighbour held, the neighbour with the angle-grinder vocal chords and the three-year-old child. Then there were more parties. By parties, I mean loud voices and singing. The kind of events where it sounded like cocaine was involved. I say this not because I’m an expert on contemporary drug usage, but because the voices and sing-songs – and there was a lot of swearing too, and laughter of a raucous quality, and people running up and down the stairs, and the stairs in these houses are wooden, so you hear every step – would start around two in the morning and go on until nine or ten. Usually on a weekend, but not always. It’s hard to imagine people could find the energy to keep up that volume and intensity for so long without the help of some kind of stimulant.
We need to say something, said my wife. She was raging. Pretending to be calm, but underneath that, very angry in the way calm people get.
Look, Fran, I said, let’s wait and see. It might only be the once. Though at that stage there had already been two parties, or maybe it’s more accurate to say two-and-a-half. We hadn’t really counted the very first party. It woke us later than the others, slipped us by, almost. We hadn’t been primed for it. We hadn’t realised this was a thing that would need to be counted. Anyway, everyone’s entitled to a house-warming. Aren’t they?
Before this neighbour, others had lived in that house. People who had fucked at two in the morning – the house next door seems to like that time of night. These were women, the ones doing the fucking, and they went on for hours. One of the women, the one the house was officially leased to, was on the run, according to local gossip. She had a pitbull. That wasn’t gossip. We saw it, and heard it too. The feral cats my wife occasionally feeds didn’t like the dog very much, but they are cats and good at keeping away from trouble. The fucking from the pitbull owner and her various lovers, and their accompanying loud waves of pleasure, used to keep us awake. I was fascinated, I have to say. Tha
t probably puts me in a bad light. My wife giggled at first, but as those nights went on her face adopted a look I couldn’t quite read. Jealousy, or suspicion, or judgement. With a calm overtone, as is her wont. If it was any of those things, jealousy etcetera, I don’t blame her. It’s been years since we went on for hours.
Come ON, says this neighbour now, the one with the child, and calls his name. One of those first names that sounds like a surname, or the name of a household appliance, or a boxer. You’re not a baby. Be a man for fuck’s sake. Though sometimes, the times when she does the laughing, she calls him endearments and baby is one of them.
We let three parties go – or maybe it was three-and-a-half – and then my wife got her way and it was me who stood at their doorstep at 4 a.m. and said, politely – I’m a polite, citified man: Can you please keep the noise down?
I’d massaged my request with a few qualifiers: e.g., I know what it’s like to be your age and needing to let off steam and so forth. I’m older than this neighbour, but not that old. My work often puts me in contact with younger people. I do guided tours of the local attractions as we live in a historically interesting area and I get a lot of younger people on the tours, sometimes even from local schools. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to talk to just about anyone.
Only having a few quiet drinks, said this neighbour now. Crossing her arms against my polite request and looking down at me from her step. No law against that in my own home. She seemed very certain.
It’s my fault, said my wife. I should never have welcomed her to the area. That’s what she’d done, the day this neighbour arrived. Knocked on the door and said, Hi, I’m Francesca, welcome to the area.
This neighbour just looked at her and said: I grew up round here.
Oh, said my wife, and gave one of her charming smiles. We must have seen you so, when you were little. We’ve been here for twelve years.
This neighbour said nothing.
There were several more parties. Four, to be exact. By then we were very good at counting. The landlord was called. It was at this point I began thinking of events and actions pertaining to next-door on the right in the passive voice.
I hate this house, my wife said. She had loved it when we’d moved in. Now the rooms were too small, the door too ugly. The garden, Kevin, she said. You call that a garden? Though she was the one who had done all the planting and made it beautiful.
These walls, she said. They’re like paper.
Which was not completely fair, I thought. Not to mention inaccurate.
She began to speak about sound-proofing.
One afternoon I found myself stroking the plasterwork of our sitting-room, near the junction between the original brick wall and the concrete wall of our extension. There was a crack in the corner; it went all the way up the wall to the second storey, right to the ceiling of our bedroom. Rising damp. Or maybe it was to do with a leaking gutter and was the falling sort of damp. Perhaps, I thought as I stroked, the noise was coming through the crack. Perhaps it was a fault of the plaster, not the structure. I stroked again, and the emulsion paint flaked beneath my finger. I wondered if it should be filled. But I am not a plasterer. I am not very handy. My wife, believe it or not, is more adept with power tools. When we’d moved in, I had done some bits and bobs. I had removed the exterior paint from our front wall and I had allowed myself to have some ideas about lime-rendering which had felt quite exciting at the time. The prospect now of filling the crack with a synthetic substance had a disappointing flavour to it. It seemed disrespectful to the house, like careless stitching on a wound. Though would it be, I wondered, as drastic as sound-proofing?
Other neighbours in that house had been loud, not just the woman with the pitbull. A family from Romania with a sick baby girl, who, my wife said, never stopped crying. I had been working with the newspaper then. I used to be a printer and on Saturday nights I worked very late shifts. There was also a trio of Chinese students, all girls and very quiet. And a refugee from Algiers who had two small boys who would wake in the middle of the night and howl in unison.
She didn’t tell her kids to be men, said my wife, meaning the refugee.
But, I said. Come on, Fran.
Live and let live, I meant.
After six months of relative party-less harmony following our initial contact with the landlord, the arguments began. A boyfriend. We were woken, again in the wee hours, by shouting, and could not make out the gist of what was being argued about, though we could identify certain swear words, in a pattern, almost like music. We didn’t care that we couldn’t make out the gist. We didn’t want to know. Over several weeks, there were further instances of swearing, shouting, and the banging of doors.
You see, said my wife. She was losing weight and I wasn’t sure if it suited her. Shadows were crawling under her fine grey eyes and her skin had taken on a translucent, rather gorgeous quality. At moments I fancied I could see her bones underneath, a coral reef prodding through the sea of her humours.
The Algerians never did this, she said, and they were refugees. It seemed to me that her voice was losing mass too, becoming frail and wobbly. I would never use the word screeching about my wife’s voice – she has a beautiful voice, rich with a burr of Galway about it, it was one of those things that initially attracted me to her, along with her magnificent hindquarters – but if you could imagine something like a screech that wasn’t actually one, then you’d understand what that once-attractive voice was starting to sound like.
Sound-proofing, said my wife. She brandished a file I hadn’t seen before. Purple plastic with popping buttons. In it were brochures and even one or two quotes from manufacturers.
Anxiety was felt in me. Exactly like that, in the passive voice.
Let me have a word with the landlord first, I said. I texted the number. The house had been sold, came the reply. To this neighbour. The one with the child.
Well, I said.
Okay, said my wife.
I wasn’t imagining it. Her bones were definitely showing through. When she turned from me suddenly, or if I came into a room without warning, I sometimes did not see her.
I could tell what was happening.
The parties started again. Though really, it was only a few voices and, although they were loud and began at three in the morning and went on till nine, and included sing-songs and took place on week nights, not weekends, they only happened on two nights before we did something, albeit two Monday nights in a row, which felt like the commencement of a new pattern, and with no recourse to the now-defunct landlord, and being unsure of our rights and also hesitant to contact the Private Residential Tenancies Board because we assumed they would be unlikely to help in the case of a house that was occupied by an owner, not a tenant, and besides, with the current homelessness situation and news stories about young families on the street, you could understand the growing anxiety that was building on our side of the wall and my wife wanting quite fervently to nip things in the bud. Sound-proofing was being suggested again, more than once. At this stage all the materials in the purple plastic file had been read and it had been established that a professional job would result in, at the very least, a two-inch membrane being layered over our wall. Besides interring the original bricks and plaster under an arguably less attractive surface and blocking them from access, rendering stroking and other acts of contact impossible, such an installation would eat away at our already constrained space, present a health and safety risk in the narrow stairwell, and prevent the erection of bookshelves or any structure that required fixing with a screw, nail, rawlplug, or other penetrative fitting.
Besides, the money was not there.
We could try to ignore it, I said. I mean—
I’m going to talk to them, said my wife. Her jaw was set in that way of hers. There was no option but to agree.
Invitations were offered. A knock on the door. Come round for a chat. My wife essaying a friendly tone. No, I’m busy. Reasons were presented for th
is neighbour’s unavailability: work in the morning, a bath, the need to put the child to bed. Then we left a note. Again very friendly. A chat and a cup of tea. Our first names, shortened in a friendly way – Fran and Kev. Our mobile numbers. The invitation was not responded to. At least not directly to us, by this neighbour. Instead, loud voices were heard raised in anger, with much swearing, through the walls. By this point, I did not want to take it any further. Come on, Kevin, insisted my wife, I’ll explode if we don’t do something. I could see by her growing insubstantiality that explode was not quite the word, but that a transformation was imminent, and if I wasn’t to lose her, action must be taken.
Therefore it was not altogether unexpected that an argument was had on the doorstep of this neighbour’s house. It was a Sunday afternoon. I am reluctant to say who started the argument, but if you must know, it was my wife. She drew herself up very tall, Fran’s a tall woman, and the March sun shone through her exoskeleton as she stood at their doorstep and asked, again, to have that conversation. I ducked and shied behind her. I grew up in a city. I know this type, this neighbour’s type. This is not the type one can have a rational discussion with.
I am sick of the pair of yous, said this neighbour. I have nothing to say to yous. Closing the door. For Christ’s sake, Kevin, be a man, said my wife, and I looked at this neighbour’s child, the child with the surname-firstname, clinging to the hand of his mother who by then was starting to raise her loud deep voice and make accusations.
Because my wife had placed her foot on the doorstep of a house that wasn’t hers.
What followed included further accusations and much finger-pointing. Oh, you’ve dirtied your bib now, said this neighbour, and – though do not take my word for this – there might have been glee in her eyes. To her credit, my wife did not point any fingers, though she had started the argument by insisting on communication with someone who did not want that and had then stubbornly exacerbated things by placing her foot on another person’s doorstep, though admittedly not bringing the mass of her entire, if increasingly insubstantial, body along with it. Now communication was being forced, she was content to spread her hands and say in a reasonable and calm tone of voice, more than once, that all she wanted was a conversation. As we were going to be living next door in the long term. Indefinitely. Just a chat. All we want.
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