Fly in the Ointment

by Anne Fine

  Yet it was not ‘again’, but for the very first time. I look back now and I can count them off: the first professional auburn streaks through my hair; the first bright colours in my wardrobe; the first strappy sandals; the first garden lounger (though there was barely room for it to be unfolded in my small arbour); the first solo holiday (Gerona! With waiters patient enough to listen, and charming enough to commend me on my Italian). I even gathered my forces to ask Mr Hanley for my first rise. (‘Odd you should mention that, Lois. For some time now I have been meaning to call you in.’) And, when I came out, it was mine.

  I even had a fling. It was so odd to find myself in bed with a man again. He had the strangest way of wrapping his legs round mine to pull me closer. He certainly gave me pleasure – far more than Stuart. He brought us little treats to eat in bed. He had a fund of very funny jokes, and he was easy company. One evening he came round in tears because he’d learned the family dog had been run over. ‘Can we watch telly, Lo? It’s all I’m fit for tonight.’

  We watched at least four solid hours of rubbish. ‘Christ, this is crap!’ he kept on saying. But whereas Stuart would have managed to make me feel I was to blame for that, Dan said it happily in tones of growing admiration that one show after another could be so poor. The worse they were, the more the two of us began to enjoy them. Just after eleven he picked up his coat. ‘I’d better be off, Lo. Early start tomorrow. But thanks for a lovely evening. I feel a million times better.’

  I heaped the coffee cups into the sink and went up to bed singing. So when Dan finally admitted how much he felt for me, it was a wrench to have to tell him that we couldn’t carry on. I wasn’t in the mood to let even a shadow of a guilty feeling back in my life. He was relieved. I begged for one of the photos of his three children mucking about on a beach. The youngest had a port-wine stain across her cheek. (‘They’ll have a go at it, but not till she’s older.’) I told him I’d like to keep the photo as a talisman for lonely moments. His children looked so happy, it would remind me of why I’d been so firm in seeing him off.

  But after he’d gone, there were no lonely moments. Oh, I had loved his company. But I liked being alone. I don’t remember ever feeling bored. The days sailed past. And every few weeks I’d take the time early on Saturday morning to drive to the Forth Hill estate. Sometimes I’d park a little way along the street. When the For Rent sign went up in front of the house across the fence from Janie Gay’s, I even took to saving time by driving past slowly, as if I were simply one more house-hunter trying to decide whether to make an appointment to view. A single glimpse of a tall, easy-moving, floppy-haired shadow moving behind the window would be enough for me and I’d be off, back to my plants or my Italian grammar. I didn’t even try to fool myself that I was there to look for Larry. No. I was there to check my living, breathing conscience was in place.

  Guy. The very sight of him lifted my heart. His loping stride. The way he’d race along the pavement, pushing the stroller at breakneck speed, then stop it dead to send Larry into paroxysms of excitement. ‘Again! Again!’ The way, on bright mornings, he wouldn’t bother with the pushchair at all. ‘No wheels today, Larry boy.’ He’d brush the raindrops off the motorbike seat, plonk on the toddler for the statutory pretend ride (‘Brrrrm-brrrm! Brrrm-brrrrrm’), then lift him off and swing him up on his shoulders as easily as if the child weighed no more than air. He’d grip the chubby legs. Larry would plunge his fingers into the mop of marmalade hair that never seemed to grow longer, and off they’d go, ducking under next door’s already leaning For Rent sign, along to the park, or to buy bread, or cigarettes for Janie Gay. I didn’t stay to find out. I’d simply lower the map behind which I’d been hiding, a middle-aged woman in a parked car – who’d notice me? – and drive off home. If Larry had Guy to watch over him, all was well with the world.

  And then, one February morning, my ministering angel was gone. His bike no longer leaned, dripping with chains, against the garden fence. The lights in the house came on, and when I drove past for the third time, the downstairs curtains had been drawn back at last. But though I sat there for a whole two hours, no one came out. I thought about knocking on the door with some excuse or another, but didn’t dare. I went home, spent a sleepless night, and was back first thing in the morning, ready to wait all day if necessary but convinced that Janie Gay would come out some time, if only to buy cigarettes.

  And I was right. I’d barely watched the house for half an hour when a fierce rapping on the glass behind caused me to yelp with terror. I spun around. Sure enough, Janie Gay was leering at me triumphantly through the passenger-seat window. Either she’d been out all the time, or she had suddenly noticed me sitting so quietly in my car and left the house by her back door to sneak around behind me through next door’s garden.

  I’m not a fool. I let the window down less than a hand’s breadth.

  ‘Think we’re all fucking blind?’ she spat at me. ‘Think I’m so fucking thick I don’t even notice when someone like you parks on her arse for hours in front of my house? Think I’m too fucking poor to have a phone, or too stupid to use it?’

  She was grasping the rim of the window with both hands, working up her temper. I thought the glass might break. She was already too fired up to worry I might tip the control button the other way to send the window up and trap her fingers.

  I was in the worst panic. But into my mind came a trace memory of myself storming out in just the same way to accuse Tansy’s boyfriend of spying. It gave me an idea. ‘Don’t be so silly,’ I snapped at Janie Gay. ‘I’m not even looking at your house, except in so far as it’s next door to mine.’

  That rattled her a little. ‘Yours?’

  I pointed at the weather-worn For Rent sign leaning drunkenly against the hedge at Number 144. ‘Didn’t you know? I’ve just signed a contract. I’m simply sitting here thinking about new colours for the paintwork, and whether to ask the agency to take down that ratty hedge and start again or do what you’ve done – put up a little fence.’

  Her fingers slackened on the glass. She drew her face back. I rolled down the window. Leaning across, I offered her a charming smile and stuck my hand out.

  ‘Since we’ll be neighbours, then, how do you do?’

  16

  NOT FOR A moment did I think of what I said as anything other than a way of getting out of there without a face covered in scratches. I was too rattled to drive. Before I even reached the main road, I’d realized that I was a hazard and pulled into Marriot’s supermarket car park to calm down and think. I obviously couldn’t watch the house again. Janie Gay wasn’t daft. This time she’d stared at me so hard she’d recognize me anywhere. She even knew my voice. I’d underestimated her and I had blown it. Wig or no wig, there was no way I could risk coming back to make sure –

  What? That she was bothering to feed Larry properly? Not leaving him alone for hours? Not endlessly slapping and shrieking? I could go back to Sarah Kuperschmidt, but there was nothing new to say. A child of two was living with his mother. The boyfriend had upped sticks and left. No special sob story there. What was it she had said? ‘There have to be a million horrible ways of raising children without crossing the line.’ Poor little Larry would have to take his chances.

  Unless . . .

  No! Absolutely not! I loved my little house. I loved my sunny and sweet-smelling arbour. I’d got to know my neighbours just enough to chat over the fence and feed their cats when they were off on holiday. Why would I want to sell up and move to the ghastly Forth Hill estate? I’d never feel safe. My car would have its wing mirrors torn off just about every week. And the very idea of having Janie Gay as a neighbour filled me with horror. I knew her sort – hair-triggered to interpret every word as a slight and make a hobby out of finding fault. Within a week her insults and litter, garden weeds and God knows what else would be making their way through the tumbledown barrier between our two houses. You only had to look at her to know she was the type to all but encourage her offspri
ng to pull down fences and make holes in the hedge, and treat other people’s property as if it were merely some extension of their own.

  But that, of course, was the point. Larry would need a kind heart looking out for him, and who better than someone who appeared to have moved in next door purely by accident but kept her ears pinned back, listening for trouble? A person who would recognize the signs of misery and abuse, and know at once if anyone violent moved in. Someone who, with Guy gone, could stealthily take over the task of watching out for a vulnerable child.

  No! It was a step too far. I simply couldn’t – dare not, even – think of it. The very idea set me shuddering. But they are strange, the things that push our lives down paths we never would willingly have taken. As I sat fretting in that supermarket car park, I happened to see something that might have been choreographed to change the course of my life. Out through the glass doors came a family. The father pushed a trolley piled almost to overflowing. He had a sour look, as if the time spent wheeling it up and down the aisles had more than taken its toll. The mother pushed an empty stroller. Her face was closed against the world, as if the two of them had just been quarrelling and she was in a sulk. Certainly she paid no attention to any of the pretty little girls with tight-looking topknots in their hair, trailing behind her.

  Twice the father turned to order his daughters to catch up. Both times, the elder two jumped to it. Only the smallest – a sweet-looking thing little more than a toddler – kept stubbornly to her own pace.

  Words passed between the couple. I couldn’t hear, but it was obvious the tone was unpleasant and the man was losing the last of his patience. Suddenly he turned and, abandoning the trolley, wrenched the pushchair out of his wife’s hand and marched back, causing the first two daughters to jump aside, until he reached the youngest child.

  There he stood, pointing into the stroller. The child kept up her stride. And then, so fast I wondered if I’d really seen it, the man reached out and snatched the child up by her beribboned topknot. Swinging her up, he took his time to shake her in the air above the pushchair, like a rag doll, before he carelessly dropped her into it.

  The child’s face was a mask of pain, and worst of all was hearing how promptly the poor mite managed to douse her blinding scream.

  Sick to my stomach, I sat paralysed. And by the time I had stopped shaking, the decision was made.

  It was a dingy office in a row of shops headed for demolition. Some were already boarded up, and only a couple of the shopkeepers who were still trading had bothered to remove their overnight grilles. The boy who jumped to his feet seemed startled to see anyone come through the door. ‘You’re lucky to catch me. This branch is closing next week.’

  I told him the address: 144 Limmerton Road. He rifled through a drawer in one of his filing cabinets. ‘The office in Kenton is dealing with all these now. I shouldn’t really—’ Tugging out the file, he saw the photo of the property and broke off. ‘Sure you mean this one? Sure you’ve got the right street?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  He named the rent. I didn’t think that I’d grown up wrapped in cotton wool, but still it had never occurred to me that anything that had a roof on it could be leased out for such a small amount. ‘Sorry?’

  The boy was grinning. ‘You’d have to pay the council tax, of course. And the utilities.’

  ‘Still –’

  He couldn’t contain his amusement. ‘I know! It’s just a heap of beans. It’s all coming back to me now. Some old boy rented the place for years, until his landlord started dickering on about wanting to sell it. One of the old man’s two sons stepped in, put down the cash and bought it for his father. He even registered the house in his father’s name. Then the old geezer pops his clogs, of course. No one can find a will, so now the son who contributed nothing is grasping for his share. Our client’s contesting, of course. But meanwhile he’s happy to do anything he can to spite his brother – won’t sign for any repairs so we can charge a proper rent – “Happy to let it rot,” – that sort of thing.’ The grin was widening. ‘You’ve seen it.’

  ‘Actually, I haven’t.’

  ‘Well, I can tell you this. You’re definitely not going to want it.’ But he was clearly in the mood to take a break from clearing out the office. ‘Want to take a look? We’ll go in your car, then it won’t get scratched or kicked about while we’re gone and I won’t have to feel guilty.’

  All the way there, he pointed at things through the window like an excited child. ‘See that burned-out bike? . . . Look! An Alsation! . . . The pattern on that woman’s coat could scare off crows.’ I couldn’t even remember when I had last had someone in the passenger seat whose company I so enjoyed. I was quite sorry when we drew up outside.

  Mercifully, there was no sign of Janie Gay inside her own house as we went up next door’s path. The door swung open to the most appalling smell of damp and yet another cheery remark from my companion. ‘That stink will take some shifting. I doubt if any of the heaters have been switched on since the old fellow was carried out in his box.’

  I felt a tremor of unease. ‘How long ago was that?’

  ‘Oh, quite a while. There’s been another tenant since, but we could never get hold of him. I think he spent all of his time at his girlfriend’s.’ He pushed open the door to the kitchen. ‘And who can blame him?’

  Certainly not me. The place was a tip. Curtains of black mould sheeted up the walls. Wallpaper peeled down. The ancient vinyl floor was cracked and pitted. Tidemarks of grease flared round the oven. In every room lay broken bits of furniture, and it was clear that, before the damp had finally driven them away, even the spiders had been confident enough to spin their webs from the unshaded bulbs.

  ‘I’ll take it.’

  The boy laughed. ‘It is shocking, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, really. I’m serious. I’ll take it.’

  He looked appalled. ‘You can’t. This isn’t any place for someone like you. I mean, you could be my—’

  He broke off, horribly embarrassed at having so nearly compared me with his own mother, who wouldn’t live there in a thousand years. Knowing how quickly surprise would turn into suspicion, I offered him the simplest explanation I could think of for why a woman like me might want to rent a place like this. ‘There’s someone I’d quite like to give the slip – just till things calm down a little.’ I toyed with the clasp of my handbag. ‘You know . . .’

  The world is stuffed with men who won’t accept that a woman wants to leave. The boy was on the case at once and nodded. ‘Gotcha!’

  I turned my honest face towards him. ‘This is the last place on earth I can imagine him expecting to find me.’

  ‘Not half!’

  ‘And after what I’ve been through . . .’

  He said as gallantly as if I truly had been his own mother, ‘Your secret’s safe with us. We make a point of never divulging any private information at all about our clients.’

  If I’d not taken to him quite so much, I might have laughed in his face.

  So you could argue that the gods were kind. I went into that office prepared to say goodbye for ever to my little house and arbour, and live in exile. Now, with a bit of scrimping and a readjustment of the loan, I’d have two places. One of the things about doing other people’s tax returns is that you learn which builder slaps on any old charge he can, and who’s as frugal in his invoicing as in his life. I phoned one of our clients – seemingly out of the blue – and his replacement of a few missing roof tiles and a cracked downpipe went a long way to sorting out the damp. Neat bleach dealt with most of the mould. The rest got painted over. I carpeted the floors in offcuts that were going cheap, and rooted through charity shops for sturdy curtains that would stop the draughts round the ill-fitting windows. At the next auction I paid a ludicrously small amount for some quite decent furniture. I didn’t worry that none of it matched, telling myself I’d only be there over weekends. A day here, a day there. Simply to keep an eye on things. It
wouldn’t be too awful.

  In less than six weeks, I was in.

  17

  IT IS A Mystery to me how I can ever have become so fond of such a ghastly young woman as Janie Gay. For she was truly horrible. Theatrically volatile, chronically steeped in self-pity and childishly spiteful, she had a blinding need to interpret the whole world entirely in terms of herself. No neighbour ever just happened to walk past her house on their own mission. Rather, it was to annoy her by glancing over the hedge and in through her windows. Shops didn’t close because the owner could no longer make a living. No, it was to make Janie Gay’s life more awkward. Even the street-cleaning schedule hadn’t been arranged the way it had simply by accident. The rubbish trucks came early just to wake her up. And there was to be no argument. Janie Gay was unbudgeably convinced that she was right about everything. All disagreement was perceived as a personal attack.

  I’d sensed how dangerous she was right from the start and hadn’t gone to all that trouble to rent an extra house, and furnish it, to fall at the first hurdle. I was all eyes, all ears. I’d guessed from the almost belligerent way she stood in her own doorway that she wasn’t the sort to accept favours. Suspicion ran too deep. If, that first time, I’d made the error of smiling over the fence and saying something along the lines of ‘You seem to have your hands full. I’d be delighted to babysit the little chap for you at any time,’ her face would have shut like a trap and I’d have heard her muttering, deliberately loudly, ‘You stick to your own damn house. Don’t try to weasel your way in mine.’

  I took a different tack. The second weekend I was there, I listened to her snarls and Larry’s howls reach one of their crescendos, and snatched up a basket of unwashed cleaning cloths to give me the excuse to rush outside. Tossing the first few over the washing line as I pretended I couldn’t hear the poor child’s desperate wailing, I called to Janie Gay casually over the fence, ‘See your boy? Mind if I borrow him some time?’