The Neighbour by Nicholas Hogg / Fiction / Untitled Books

"It was when Kate saw the purple bra from the Marks & Spencers' set that she abruptly threw back the curtains."

Photograph: ©Pixomar/FreeDigtalPhotos.net

The Neighbour by Nicholas Hogg

Spying through the crack between her son's drawn curtains she watched her neighbour peg wet clothes on a plastic line that had been strung by her husband, tied from a hook above the back door to a nail he'd set in the garage wall.

Kate had come into Ben's bedroom to tidy. It was a tip, as usual. Clothes strewn about the room, dirty washing piled in a corner, tennis rackets and day old plates littering the floor. And, teetering in stacks on his desk, pages of scruffy GCSE notes. All watched over by the various pop queens pinned to his walls. And his mother. Though right now she was more interested in watching Janice do her washing. She was about to sweep back the curtains but had caught a glimpse of Janice and her basket and thought it better to wait than reveal herself in the window like that.

Janice was hanging her daughter's swim kit. Reaching up to peg it on the line her t-shirt lifted and showed a bare waist, a sharp pair of hip bones. Kate watched her body. She knew that Janice kick-boxed twice a week, and took a salsa class with friends from the call centre where she worked. No surprise she wore jeans that tight, or walked about the garden in her shorts and bikini top. Kate convinced herself she wasn't jealous. She knew very well that time and life would soon blur that definition. Anyway, what woman would envy another who'd lost her fiancé, father of their only little girl, shot, quite possibly by one of his own platoon, when a mob overran a police station in Basra.

Janice finished hanging her daughter's clothes and pulled out a handful of her own, skirts and socks, a black dress Kate knew was in the sale at Debenhams. And then her underwear.

It was when Kate saw the purple bra from the Marks & Spencers' set that she abruptly threw back the curtains.

Janice immediately turned from the line.

Kate opened the window, smiling. "Should get mine out while the sun's shining."

"Hope it stays this way then the kids are off," said Janice, hand above her eyes to shade the glare.

"Knowing our luck it'll rain all summer."

Janice laughed, her wide smile dimpling her cheeks.

There and then, Kate nearly said something else. That certain acts had nothing to do with luck. But instead she said how she needed to get into town before Ben came back from school and ate her out of house and home.

"I might moan about his room," she added. "But I'll forgive him if he passes his exams."

"Don't they grow up fast," said Janice. "Seems only yesterday I was changing Chloe's nappy."

Kate revolved a cliché about time flying, then said again that she'd better be heading out and closed the window. She picked up the dirty plates and grabbed a bundle of laundry and took it downstairs and stuffed it in the washing machine. Rinsing the plates she again caught sight of Janice through the window, this time taking down the bird feeder. Kate flicked the kettle on, then off, before hurrying upstairs to their bedroom where she pulled the pair of purple knickers from her dresser. These she bunched and put in her handbag. She had a quick look at herself in the hallway mirror and went downstairs into the dining room. Then she took a deep breath and walked out the backdoor and called across the fence to Janice. "Do you fancy a bit of cake when I get back?"

Janice had the empty feeder in her hand. "Yeah. Why not? It's been a while since we had a little chat."

On the short drive to the supermarket Kate recalled the day Janice moved in. No skirts and bright lipstick then. This was the widow and her baby girl. A new start from the base she'd been living with the other soldier's families. Kate had perhaps been over friendly to begin with, a cloying sympathy for the grieving woman who was also battling the Ministry of Defence for her rightful compensation. "We were never married," she told Kate the second time she went round for a tea. "Even though he's Chloe's father they want to pay out half as much because I wasn't his wife."

Watching baby Chloe bounce on her knee, Kate noticed her hazel eyes matched those in the photo on the shelf, the bright young man in a pressed uniform.

Kate soon withdrew from seeing Janice so often, sensing she needed space to rebuild her life rather than the attention of a woman she'd just met. But because next door had been empty for a while it needed various bits and bobs fixing and mending. This is where her husband, Dan, helped out. Clearing a filter from a flooded washing machine, replacing a blown fuse. Man about the house where there was none.
Driving into the huge ASDA car park she thought about a life by herself. Her sister had compared divorce to a bereavement. "Or like losing a limb."

Kate grabbed a trolley and shopped on auto-pilot. A set route along the aisles collecting food for the family, packs of crisps and jumbo cereals. Ben was only sixteen but the size of an adult, loping about like a restless ape, rifling the cupboards after football training and increasingly difficult to rouse from his bed.

It was at the meat counter ordering a cut of gammon for Dan that she again wondered how her only son would cope without a father.

But better him absent than attending the lie of a marriage.

By the time she got to the tills her trolley was stacked with the week's shop. Just as she started unloading she realised she had no cake for Janice. She scooted back down the bakery aisle and picked up a Victoria Sponge reduced to a pound. The box was crumpled, but she'd set it on a plate, anyway.

Then she put the box back on the shelf and picked up a deluxe chocolate cake because she decided that such a cheap occasion shouldn't be cheapened even more so by dry sponge and sickly icing.

After filling the boot with the shopping she set her mobile on speaker mode, slotted it into the holder by the steering wheel, and called Dan.

He'd been working in Derby all week, fixing a crane at the bottom of a quarry. There was no reception in a hole the size of meteorite crater, but Kate guessed he'd be popping out for his lunch around one.

"Yes, darling," he answered, a Friday smile in his voice. Though Kate now suspected other lifts to his mood than the end of a working week.

"You still finishing early?" she asked, confirming that he'd be back in time. "Well don't go stuffing yourself with chips because I got you a bit of cake when you get in."

He promised to eat all his lunch, including the salad. "So I'm allowed to have me puddin'."

When she held back a laugh from his little joke, she felt such a pang of sadness in the pit of her stomach that it felt like a knife.

And then she missed her turn and had to circle the roundabout again.

To remove that twisting blade she thought of something she'd read in a women's magazine, how that focusing on the negative points of a relationship could help reduce the anxiety of a break up.

Yes, she'd think of that. Although she'd forgiven him then, nearly ten years ago, a week after the trip to Munich, the scar remained. Dan and a gang of his mates from the garage had spent three nights getting drunk at wooden tables in a German beer hall. She could handle the thought of him merry and lewd, and had imagined a kind of Benny Hill slapstick to the bawdy evenings.

But my god, going to a brothel and paying for it.

"I was that pissed I had to be told it even happened," he confessed, kneeling at the end of their bed in the dark, begging, explaining why he wouldn't have sex with her until the all clear from a doctor. She made him sleep on the sofa for a month, and partly took him back because she was sick of watching him slink about the house like a stray dog afraid of being hit.

By the time she got to the High Street the sharp dart of pain in her stomach had faded.
Instead Kate shook her head and ground her teeth as she drove back to the house.

The two semis joined at the hallway and the box room, and it was a good idea to keep your voice down on the stairs unless you wanted to share the conversation. When Chloe was younger her cries would pierce the thin walls and wake Kate. In the first few months she'd hear Janice crying, too. Deep sobs in the dark, a face buried in a duvet. And then mother and baby quietened, began sleeping through the night. It was perhaps a couple of years later, once Janice began dating again, that she heard another kind of cry. Gasping screams, the drowning woman who'd been holding her breath finally rising and desperate for air.

Kate pulled onto the driveway. She lugged the shopping into the kitchen and tried very hard to think of something beyond the next few hours. But she failed. As she walked back and forth between the car and the cupboards she again had the horrifying vision of slapping Janice. She'd hit Dan before. Not the night he told her about the prostitute but at breakfast the next morning, when he had the gall to glance at the back page of the paper.

Yet Kate still pictured herself at the showdown with steely resolve, hair and make up immaculate, the wronged woman proud as the adulterer and his mistress melted before her.

The truth was that she had no idea how she'd react. She knew this when she was slicing the cake, the bread knife clutched in her white-knuckle grip.

When Janice appeared in the window she was setting plates on the coffee table.

"You gave me a fright," said Kate, opening the front door.

"Oh, sorry," Janice smiled, carrying in a tin of biscuits and trailing a waft of perfume. "I was just going to pop round the back and knock."

Kate told her to come in. "I like your top," she said, hating herself as the words came out by force of habit. "And you brought biscuits," she added, taking the tin with both hands and showing her into the front room.

"But you baked a cake."

"You mean I bought one," said Kate, stood behind her now, and quite close. Near enough to admire her slender back, the silky hair.

"Ooh, looks like a nice one, too."

Before they sat down Kate wondered if Dan had ever bitten her neck, or taken a handful of that hair and pulled it hard when he came, like he still did with her.

"Tea or coffee?"

The kettle steamed and gurgled. Kate stood at the counter and waited for it to heat up. From the window she could see the purple bra swinging in the breeze. She wanted Dan here. She was afraid of coming to boil herself without him back, wasting the moment on Janice and having to do it all again with her husband.

"What time do you pick Chloe up?" she asked, walking back into the room with a pot of scalding water, again, the terrifying thought that she might not be able to stop herself from 'doing something.'

"Quarter past three I have to be there." Janice checked her watch and smiled. "Time to relax yet."

Kate poured, noticed her shaky hand.

"I was so worried when she started school," said Janice.

"Worried?"

"Well, I suppose it's natural, but you know they're going to change once they're in a classroom. Get a different personality."

"You're right," said Kate, briefly losing herself in talk of children. "I can hardly guess what Ben gets up to these days, let alone thinks."

"He's quite the man all ready," said Janice, blowing on her tea and sipping.

Kate sat and let her talk, watched and waited. She smiled through her thoughts of murder and wondered who she'd suddenly become.

By the time he pulled onto the driveway the cake was cut and the kettle on for a second time.

"Oh no," joked Janice. "We'll have to share the rest with Dan."

Kate only heard something about sharing Dan. She wished Janice had said that once he was in the room so she could tell her to help herself to the lot of him.

Together they watched him climb out the van. Forty but fit and a head of hair, a hint of silver in his stubble. He smiled at the two of them through the front window and made his way round to the back door, calling out, "Have you scoffed all my cake?" from the kitchen before he was finally stood there before her.

And her.

Kate had planned a clever speech, how subtly she'd turn the conversation to finding the knickers in her bed. But when Dan bent down and a gave Janice a peck hello on the cheek she exploded. Every vein in her body was fit to burst. Every sinew in her neck revealed as she stood and screamed, "What kind of fool do you take me for?"

Dan and Janice dropped open their mouths.

"Sneaking home from work to shag the neighbour in my bed."

It was their instant denial that brought Kate back to the original plan of pulling the purple knickers from her bag and throwing them in her face. Janice flinched as if she'd been punched.

Neither her nor Dan saw what had been thrown till they dropped onto her lap.

"In my bed," Kate shouted again. "Our bed," she screamed at Dan, finally releasing the tension in her shoulder and whipping out a hand that he blocked with his forearm before grabbing her wrist.

"Whatever you're talking about you're wrong," he said, grabbing the other wrist too, fearing the dervish his wife was threatening to unleash.

"Do not insult my intelligence."
"Love," he pleaded, begged. "I haven't got the faintest idea what you're talking about."

Kate looked down at Janice on the sofa, the knickers in her hand. "And I suppose you don't either. No idea how you've ruined my family."

Janice started crying, then apologising, again and again.

Kate looked back at Dan's baffled face. "And that's the innocent, is it?"
"Sorry for bleedin' what?" he bellowed at Janice, his eyes panicked with confusion, the implosion of his world without his apparent knowing.

It was when Ben came striding across the front lawn that Kate saw it all so clearly. He had the top two buttons of his shirt undone, sports bag slung over his broad shoulders, and a swagger.

But only once he walked into the lounge did Dan let go of Kate's wrists. She sat down and shook her head. Ben just stood there weighing up the scene. Dad speechless. Janice crying and the purple knickers on her lap. And his mam shaking her head.

"Guess you know, then."

"A boy," said Kate, incredulous.

"My god," said Dan, the penny dropping. "He's only sixteen."

Ben just stood and shrugged his shoulders.

And they all listened to Janice apologise again. And again. To Ben and Kate. And Dan, who looked at the scene with such profound bemusement it was as if he were a man who'd come home to the wrong house.

Unlike Ben. Who seemed about a foot taller. "It weren't as if I didn't want to."

"I don't believe this," said Kate, still shaking her head. "I do not believe it. I really don't. Am I supposed to be happy because you're shagging my son and not my husband?" She looked at Ben who couldn't face her glare. Then she said to Janice, "I've a million questions you're going to answer, but the first is why here, in our bloody bed?"

Janice cried intermittently as she spoke. Instead of confessing about Ben she spoke about Gavin, how they met at school when she was only fifteen, a girl. How he walked her home across the park and kissed her under the brook bridge. How time had passed so quickly. "One minute he's slipping me notes in maths class, the next I'm getting letters from Iraq. How scared he was. How much he missed me. He'd press these little white flowers into the folds, talk about where we'd take Chloe on holiday when he got back." She briefly looked at Ben, and then back to Kate. "Not until two years ago had I ever slept with anyone else."

"Well," said Dan, glad he could actually weigh in with something. "We know a bit about that part."

Sniffing between her words, Janice said that sex with other men had freed her from a ghost.

"It helped me forget for a while, let me be another woman. I could lose myself and not feel guilty because I still had Chloe, a part of Gav to go back to." Janice allowed herself a tiny smile. "And the older she gets the more like him she is. But once she went off to school it was just me in the house." Now she took short, sharp breaths beneath the tears. "I miss him so much sometimes, so much. I wanted him there so badly." She looked up at Ben, the boy before his mother. "I'm sorry, Ben."

"Nothing to be sorry about," he said.

"Yes there bloody is," snapped Kate.

"Pet," said Dan.

"Mam," said Ben.

It was very quiet but for the crying. Kate sat for a while. She looked at each of them, the weeping Janice, the stunned husband. Her son at the door, a boy, sneaking looks at the woman who'd taken something from him which could never be given back. This wasn't the scene she'd envisioned. But it was what it was. A half-eaten cake and the flash of a knife, the memory of a man, a father, shot dead in a foreign land.

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Nicholas Hogg's second novel, The Hummingbird and the Bear is published on May 26th. Winner of the New Writing Ventures award for fiction, and prizes in the Bridport and Raymond Carver short story contests, his work has also been broadcast by the BBC.

His short story, Father and Gun, is part of the upcoming Saatchi & Saatchi 'Photo Stories' exhibit he has collaborated on with Notes From the Underground.

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Tuesday, 24 May, 2011

In Character studies

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Issue 44 / May 2012

"It was when Kate saw the purple bra from the Marks & Spencers' set that she abruptly threw back the curtains."