Kickback and Other Stories

by Peter Sellers

  As a result, Kent spent much of his childhood in silence, afraid of being heard. As he grew older, he found himself drawing further into the background and his fear expanded from being heard to being noticed at all. The prospect of confrontation was even worse, leaving him unable to do much more than shake.

  When he first started hearing them, Kent felt embarrassed for his neighbours. They were clearly shameless exhibitionists, and he could only imagine how humiliated he would feel in their position. For a considerable time, he tried to ignore them. Eventually, however, their unrelenting invasion of his peace and solitude brought back memories of times when even the farthest, darkest corner under his bed was not far or dark enough.

  After painful consideration, and many attempts to talk himself out of it, Kent knew he had to do something about the situation. He carefully opened and closed the doors of his own kitchen cupboards until he was certain which of their doors were causing the most irritation. He knew that the adjacent kitchens in all the houses in the subdivision were mirror images of each other. He then calculated how many offending corners there were, and the thickness of the sides of the cabinets. With this information noted on a piece of lined paper, Kent went to the hardware store and selected a package of self-adhesive, circular felt pads of the correct diameter. After double-checking to make sure the package contained a sufficient number of pads, he picked up a second package, just to be on the safe side.

  Kent waited for two days, until the noise became particularly alarming. He no longer wanted to walk around his house wearing noise-cancelling headphones. He drank two bottles of beer, picked up the pads, and went outside. He left his door unlocked in case of the need for a hasty retreat. He was shaking so much that it might have been hard to fit his key in the lock, anyway. The prospect of leaving an unsecured door, even for so short a time, made the trembling worse. He had been raised never to leave an unoccupied home unlocked.

  As he approached his neighbours’ house, Kent could hear raised voices through the front door, which was equally lacking as a sonic barrier.

  Speaking to a group of people at work, whom he knew, was agony for Kent. He always felt something inside him squeezing his lungs, as if he was being physically restrained. He was terrified of the criticism and scorn that was sure to follow the giving of an incorrect answer or the expressing of a dissenting opinion. He always tried to say what he thought the desired response would be but even this frequently brought anger or derision. The more he struggled to sound intelligent or knowledgeable the more he stumbled and floundered. He would feel his face grow red and the shame of that made it redden further. Often it was all he could do to keep from weeping with frustration. The prospect of talking to this stranger next door was worse.

  Kent’s fist trembled as he raised it to knock timidly on the door. When there was no response for several seconds, he started to turn away, grateful that the encounter was avoided. He was about to step off the porch when the door opened abruptly. The man glared at Kent. “What the hell do you want?” he said.

  Kent’s feet would not move. He simply reached his shaking hand forward and offered the package. “For your cupboard doors,” he stammered.

  The husband looked at the package and then looked at Kent. “Fuck off,” he said, and slammed the door.

  Kent did not know what to do. He had hoped for courtesy, which had clearly been a naïve expectation. The man had no consideration for how hard it had been for Kent to do what he did. When he was able to move again, Kent left the package on the doorstep. It soon became clear, however, that the pads weren’t being used. If anything, the banging grew more persistent and louder. It did, at any rate, when the husband was in the house. Kent began to notice that, when his car was gone but hers was still in the driveway, the neighbouring house became silent, as if unoccupied.

  Unfortunately, the husband was most often home when Kent was, too. They seemed to work similar hours. After the failed attempt with the padding, additional noises were added to the banging doors. Music was played louder than necessary. Kent was certain that they turned up the ringer on their home telephone, and waited until the last possible moment to answer it. They even increased the frequency and volume of their arguments.

  The problem pushed Kent to take a step that he had fantasized about for a long time but had hoped would never be necessary. He went to the hardware store again and bought an air horn.

  Kent stood in his kitchen watching the wall. After no more than forty minutes, a cupboard door slammed. Kent pointed the horn at the wall and fired a short burst. It was louder than he expected, echoing around his kitchen, and, in his surprise, he stopped the horn sooner than intended. There was silence from the other side of the wall. Kent’s ears rang wildly. He was about to leave the kitchen in triumph when two cupboard doors slammed in quick succession. Kent responded with two strident blasts. With the loudness of the horn no longer a surprise, he made these more assertive than the first had been.

  The doors slammed again three times, so hard that Kent was sure they must have been damaged. He pressed the muzzle of the horn an inch from the wall and fired back three times. Kent felt better each time he sounded the horn. The echoing blare released the rage he had never been able to express before.

  His mood changed instantly, however, when his father’s disapproval clubbed its way into his thoughts. Not only was there contempt for the appalling racket he had created, there was disgust at Kent’s cowardice for not being able to take the situation in hand. Kent fired the horn once more, long and loudly, hoping to drown out his father’s voice. The cupboards did not slam again that evening. After an hour, Kent’s ears stopped ringing.

  Kent seldom went shopping in person. Conversations with salesclerks, especially attractive, young women, made him uncomfortable. He ordered most of his clothes online. When an item did not fit as he wished, or the colour turned out to be a disappointment, he shipped it back. For dress clothes, he had gone to a tailor he had known for years and with whom he felt at ease. One day, the tailor was found dead in his shop, stricken by a massive heart attack. Kent never bought another suit.

  When deliveries were made to his home, Kent did not answer the door. He always gave careful instructions that packages were to be left on the porch, and that no signature was required. Once he was sure the deliveryman was gone, Kent would open the door, reach out only as far as necessary, grab the package, and pull it inside.

  Kent bought his stethoscope online, too. While he usually had no trouble hearing what was going on behind the kitchen wall, sometimes the lack of noise disquieted him. Placing a drinking glass against the wall was unsatisfactory. The stethoscope struck him as an excellent alternative but it did not prove to be any more effective. It worked no better than the X-Ray Glasses that Kent had bought as a boy from the back page of a comic book. The glasses were a bitter disappointment, and then his father found them. Kent put the stethoscope in the closet where he kept the other failed purchases that he was too ashamed to return.

  The banging of cupboard doors was not the only sound that came to Kent through the kitchen wall. Occasionally he would hear a particularly sharp and violent sneeze. This made him cautious whenever he sneezed himself, and he stifled his by pressing his face against a pillow when the need arose.

  Often there was music of a kind that Kent did not find enjoyable or soothing, and sometimes other noises that brought back unhappy memories.

  Kent came to know what television shows the neigbours liked to watch. Many of them sports related, which indicated to Kent that the man spent more time with the remote than his wife did. Kent knew when they had sex. He knew when they fought and could hear the occasional smashed dish. He also heard periods of silence that had initially lulled him into a false sense of security, until they were shattered by voice or door or worse. It became so that the silences wore on him just as badly, keeping him on edge as he waited for whatever cacophony was to come.

  Kent had a cat that he cared for very much. The cat died on
e day while Kent was at the office. This followed a protracted illness and many expensive vet bills. Two days after the death, Kent took the day off work and, in the afternoon when he knew that his neighbours were not at home, he buried the cat in his back garden. Over the years he had buried all his cats in the yards of his various homes. There were now seven gravesites in three backyards.

  Kent missed the cat dearly. He asked everyone he knew, and he read the ads posted on bulletin boards in supermarkets, but no one had, or knew of, a cat that needed a home.

  Three weeks after the burial, Kent was on his way to the backyard to check on his rose bushes, and to trim some flowers for his kitchen table, when he heard a soft mewing. He looked around and saw a kitten by the fence, crying out steadily. Kent picked the cat up gently and checked for collar and tag. There was none. He listened for someone calling after a missing pet, but he heard nothing. Before tending his flowers, he took the cat inside. He showed it where the litter box was, and he put out a dish of food. The cat sniffed at the dish warily, and then began to eat with appetite.

  The stray was a lovely reddish colour. A search on the Internet convinced Kent that he was at least partly Abyssinian. He had owned cats all his life but they had always been of mongrel blood, tabbies or some type of alley cat.

  The next day, Kent took the cat to his vet to be checked over, and to make sure its shots were up to date. Kent kept his cats indoors, but you could not be too careful.

  Kent drove slowly at all times. He gripped the wheel tightly at ten and two. He did not take his attention from the road even long enough to change the station on his radio. He would set both station and volume before he began to drive and so it would remain until he reached his destination. It was, therefore, unusual that he turned his gaze towards the poster on the drive home from the vet.

  Despite some decline in the condition of his body, his eyes remained sharp and his vision clear. He was at a fourway stop when an image teased the edge of his sight. Taking a quick glance he saw a picture of his new cat stuck to a lamppost, the word MISSING in large letters at the top of the page.

  For a moment, Kent remained still. He looked at the poster and then at the cat peering out from his cage on the passenger seat. There was no mistake. The poster glared at him accusingly. Only when the driver behind him honked did Kent move forward and home. In his driveway, he sat for some time in agitation, before taking the cage and skulking inside.

  After an hour’s contemplation, Kent walked to the corner where he had seen the poster. He walked hunched over, with his collar turned up, as if anyone who recognized him would know him instantly for a catnapper.

  The cat on the poster was definitely his newfound companion. His name was Buster. He was much loved and horribly missed. A reward was offered. A phone number was given. Kent took a picture of the poster and slunk home.

  Kent went online and did a reverse look-up on the phone number, hoping it was a landline and not a cell. He was shaken when the address that popped onto his screen was that of his kitchen neighbours. He’d had no idea that there was a cat in their house. Clearly, it did not have a calming and unifying influence on them.

  At first, Kent felt vindication. This was retribution for their abysmal behaviour. Then he began to feel less sure. He would be caught, as he always was. There would be a price to pay. He would suffer.

  Buster was unlike any other cat that Kent had owned. When Kent lay down on the couch to read, the cat nudged against the book, and curled up on Kent’s chest and shoulder, falling instantly asleep. He was playful and friendly in a way that Kent had never known. After several days, Kent decided to keep calling him Buster.

  At least once a day, Kent checked to see if the poster was still on the lamppost. It became battered by rain and wind but the cat’s face, the phone number, and the words MISSING and PLEASE still stood out clearly.

  For several days after he saw the poster, Kent noticed the woman in her front and back yards vainly calling the cat’s name. The sound reached faintly into Kent’s house but, if Buster heard it, he remained unmoved. The sadness in the woman’s voice affected Kent. He put on his headphones and sat in silence until he was sure she had stopped calling.

  The man blamed his wife for letting the cat escape, and still mentioned this in his braying manner weeks after the loss. It was just as likely to be his fault, as Kent had observed how careless he was with his possessions. He left perfectly good gardening tools out in the rain to rust, which caused Kent to feel something very close to pain. He was always late putting away his garbage and recycling bins, which he often forgot to put out until they were overflowing. Kent knew they attracted raccoons, and was sure that rats would soon follow. His car always needed a wash and Kent shuddered to think of the condition the interior must be in.

  No matter who allowed Buster to escape, Kent knew how it had happened. One evening, shortly after Buster came to stay, Kent arrived home from work and gathered his mail from the mailbox on the porch. As he unlocked the door, the slim bundle of bills and flyers slipped to the ground. The door opened a crack as Kent bent to pick them up. Much to Kent’s surprise, Buster was at the door, his face pressed against the narrow opening as he tried to squeeze his head through. Kent gently nudged the cat back with his lower leg and slipped inside. From then on, every time Kent arrived home he had to open the door a crack and fill the gap with his leg, turning sideways and easing his way in so that Buster could not flee. Clearly, one of his neighbours had not been so careful.

  Escape must have been constantly on Buster’s mind. The screens in Kent’s windows and sliding back door were riddled with small tears from Buster’s claws. He would cling to the mesh, and climb it repeatedly, looking in vain for a gap he could squeeze through.

  Buster continued to do things that were un-catlike in Kent’s experience. On three occasions, as Kent lay with Buster on his chest, the cat fixed Kent’s eyes in an intense gaze. Then, very slowly, Buster moved his face towards Kent’s, turned his head on a slight angle, opened his mouth, and closed his jaws on the bridge of Kent’s nose. He never bit down, but simply held the points of his teeth against the nose, and held his eyes locked on Kent’s. Kent never found out how long Buster would hold this position or the reason behind it. After a minute or two, the cat’s scrutiny became too intense, and Kent gently pried him loose and set him on the floor.

  One winter morning, Kent awoke and felt something unusual under the covers by his feet. Too groggy to be alarmed, Kent nudged the soft, warm presence with his toes and felt it stir and begin moving towards him. The bulge under the covers flowed up to where the duvet nestled Kent’s chin, and Buster emerged. He blinked twice and looked at Kent with an expression that Kent took to mean, “What?”

  Every night that winter, Buster crawled under the covers to sleep at the bottom of the bed. Kent looked forward to that each evening.

  The man next door kept punishing his wife for losing the cat. The noises through the wall grew worse. There was an increase in cupboard door slamming as if the man was taking his anger out on the kitchen. The banging, happening at unexpected times, kept Kent on edge and nervous. He found himself shaking in an unaccustomed way while at home. It had long seemed that his sanctuary was being invaded, and that feeling intensified after Buster arrived. Sometimes he wondered if Buster had been sent to him by the neighbours to give them an excuse to batter Kent’s senses even more aggressively.

  The yelling became so bad that, even when he put on his noise-cancelling headphones, Kent was still aware of the sound. He could feel it through the wall. Sometimes he used the air horn to drown out the noises. Other times he lay on the floor beside his bed, curled up, knees to chest, humming to himself as he used to do.

  Kent did not plan what happened. The opportunity presented itself to him and for once he chose not to fail. He was in his car, approaching an intersection with his usual caution, when he saw his neighbour walking towards the corner. This was unusual, as Kent had never known the man to walk further th
an the driver’s door of his car.

  The man looked in Kent’s direction but did not seem to recognize the vehicle. Kent watched as the man took a sheet of paper from the bag he carried and taped it to a lamppost. It was a fresh plea for Buster’s return.

  The man turned and began crossing the street at the next corner. He noticed Kent approaching the stop sign but carried on, obviously assuming the car would stop. Moving so slowly, how could it do otherwise?

  Kent thought about the distress this man had caused him, and the anguish he brought to his wife, and he did not stop. He did not speed up, either. He simply drove at the speed limit, ignoring the stop sign by unaccustomed force of will. By the time the man realized that the car was not stopping it was too late. He tried to move out of the way, but Kent veered slightly to the left, knocked him down, and then drove over him, feeling the left wheels of the car bump up and down, up and down, as they passed across his body. It all happened in silence. Kent later reflected on the irony of that.

  On the far side of the intersection, Kent stopped the car and looked in the rearview mirror. The bag the man had been carrying had emptied and the posters fluttered in the lamplight. The man lay still. Kent drove home, hands shaking on the wheel. He was afraid but elated at the same time.

  Kent backed into his garage carefully and closed the door. He went into the house and had a drink, and then another. Although he was shaking more than usual, he felt good and relieved. He had solved the problem easily and neatly. He was certain that he had not been seen and that it would be impossible for the incident to be traced back to him.

  To be on the safe side, he would leave his car in the garage and call in sick for the next several days. This would not appear unusual in any way.

  There would be no need even to go shopping. A few years earlier, with the Millennium approaching, Kent had anticipated the worst. He had stocked up on canned and freeze-dried food and bottled water. He could stay inside indefinitely if the police search was prolonged. His only disappointment now was that he would not be able to accept the wife’s thanks for freeing her from her dreadful situation.