The next day, all was quiet next door.
In the sunny morning light, I made a breakfast of warm croissants and sugary coffee for Peter, Mum and the children. Our household was filled with kisses and laughter, and relief.
Still, the niggle of next door would not leave me.
When I was making Rosie’s bed, I heard Mira’s car pull up into their driveway. I peered out. She was lugging a huge roll of wire fencing out of the backseat of their small car. Barry’s pick-up truck was in the drive. Why was Barry not helping her? Why had he not bought the fencing? Why had she squeezed it into their hatchback?
Small anomalies. None of them very serious. None of them adding up.
I could not rest until I had checked on them both.
* * *
Yesterday, Barry had answered the door and I hoped he would answer it today. I braced myself for a frosty reception. I had been hysterical and rude.
The squirrel knocker was half falling off. I wondered if I had broken it. I tried to recollect how hard I had hammered.
Nobody was answering now. I knocked again, feeling a little light-headed. It was surreal to be on their doorstep.
As I turned away to go home, the door swung open.
‘Yes, what?’ Mira barked. An unfitting greeting considering what had happened between us. Her stubby hair was clumped into grimy tufts. Her ruddy, round face was mottled and sweaty, and I noted that her fingertips were black. Everything about her set my teeth on edge.
‘Hello, Mira. After yesterday’s dramas, I just wanted to make sure you guys were okay.’ I glanced over her shoulder, trying to adjust my focus to the darkness of her hallway.
She cranked out a mechanical smile as though someone had pressed a button on her back to turn her on. ‘How’s little Rosie Rabbit this morning?’
A gust of cool wind blew through the house, bringing with it a smell of cleaning fluids and bad eggs. ‘She’s doing really well. Sleeping a lot.’
‘Good, good,’ she replied, nodding absently.
‘Is Barry in? I wanted to apologise to him for being so rude yesterday.’
‘Oh, stuff and nonsense,’ she said. ‘He’s quite over it, believe me.’
‘Is he in?’ I repeated, trying to sound conversational.
‘No,’ she frowned. There was menace in the slice of her blink. Fear crept across my skin.
‘Okay then,’ I began, but then I heard a pattering noise from behind her, and she jumped and swivelled around, plainly terrified. I wanted to turn and run. Before I had time to act, two feathery bombs burst out of the door and beat and bashed and fought in a flurry of noise and pecking at my feet. I screamed in shock. The chickens scampered off around the corner. I held my hand at my chest and tried to control my breathing. ‘Bloody hell!’
Mira hooted with laughter. ‘Scared of a couple of hens, are you love?’
Gathering myself, I realised how stupid I must have looked. ‘Sorry, it was just the shock of it.’
Mira wiped her eyes. It seemed I had provided some much-needed light relief.
‘I’m just fixing up the coop,’ she trilled, but her expression darkened again. ‘Those sly foxes won’t be eating any more of my chickens, that’s for sure.’
‘I’ll be off now then.’ I was desperate to get away, wishing I could run further than next door.
‘Right-o. Thanks for dropping by.’ She waved and closed herself back inside.
I walked away as quickly as I could, fiddling hurriedly with the latch to their five-bar gate. By the time I got home, I was trembling all over.
I charged upstairs, straight to the family bathroom, where I knew I could get a view of her chicken coop.
I stood on the loo seat and pushed opened the small top pane of the window and managed to spy a slither of Mira’s side alley.
Having never seen the enclosure before, I would not have been able to tell if she had upgraded it or not. It was large for only two chickens, about seven-foot by five-foot wide. The double-layer of chicken wire that was nailed to the thick posts would certainly keep out the wiliest of foxes. Within the wire, there was a wooden slatted henhouse and a stone angel statue next to it – an eccentric ornament for a henhouse – and the two chickens, now safely shut away, pecked at the freshly-turned earth.
My neck ached with the contortion, so I pulled back.
I was about to close the window, when the door to the bathroom swung open. I almost fell off the loo seat.
‘Something interesting out there?’ Peter asked.
‘No.’ I slammed the window shut.
‘You weren’t nosing into Mira’s garden were you, Mrs Bradley?’ he asked, raising one eyebrow at me.
‘No! Of course not!’ I jumped down and washed my hands, trying to act normally.
‘For a terrible minute there, I thought you were curtain twitching,’
The memory of Mira’s ruddy face and black fingertips provoked a swirl of anxiety in my stomach. Blood rushed from my head to my toes, a dizzying vision of the freshly turned soil in the chicken coop flashed before my eyes: a shallow grave.
I felt Peter’s hand rub my back. ‘Are you okay?’
My head was hanging over the sink. I opened my eyes and laughed nervously, ‘Sorry, had a bit of a funny turn. I’m fine now.’
The macabre vision appeared again.
‘It’s the trauma,’ Peter said sympathetically.
And again.
I chucked the hand towel into the laundry bin and pressed my fingers into my temples. ‘Maybe we should move house,’ I blurted out recklessly. I wasn’t sure I meant it, yet. I knew I was being reactionary.
Peter groaned. ‘I think I need to sleep for a year to get over it all, first.’
‘When the dust has settled, I suppose. When the police cancel the hearing, and Social Services are off our backs and stuff.’
‘Why do we have to move?’ He glared in the direction of Mira’s house. ‘She should move.’
I sat down on the edge of the bath. ‘Maybe this house has never been right for us.’
‘The bills have never been right, that’s for sure,’ he snorted.
I sighed, agreeing. ‘The mortgage has been a real burden over the last few years, hasn’t it?’
‘And I’ve always said this close is like a ghost town. When I was little…’ he began.
‘Yes, yes, when you were little everyone had orange squash on tap and fairies lived in biscuit tins,’ I teased.
‘They were elves!’ he laughed, and he pulled me into a hug and I buried my face in his neck. I was shocked by what I had conjured up in my imagination, saddened by what the family had been through and grateful for what we could now salvage. With the baby between us and his arms around me, I felt an overpowering rush of love. In this blissful lull, before real life would inevitably creep back in, my thoughts were clear – streamlined almost – where the worries and concerns and aspirations of our previous life became unimportant.
‘What about finding a smaller house in one of the villages further towards the coast? We could both work less, and live a bit more,’ I suggested.
I imagined a village where there was a shop and a church and a pub, where the windows were thrown open in each house, where the fresh air and chatter and good will could fly back and forth through our homes and across our hedges.
‘I never thought I would hear you say that.’ I could tell he was sceptical.
‘I’m serious, Peter. Vics and Jim are always talking of moving somewhere further out. If we moved out, they would follow, I know it.’ I checked myself, put the back of my hand against my forehead. ‘God, do I sound mad?’
His gentle, grey eyes shone brightly. ‘Only in a good way.’
‘I’d still have to think about the commute. I don’t know, we can work it out somehow. Maybe I could work from home more often.’
I could picture the home I wanted already. It would be filled with colourful posters and paintings. It would have an open fire that I would have time to read in front of on the weekends. There would be an aroma of browning onions and homemade plum crumbles – which I would learn to make – wafting from the stove. And there would be lots of extra chopping boards for when my sister and mother visited for Sunday lunch.