The New Neighbors Read online

  I don’t usually swear like that, I promise. I swear, more than most people my age (more than most paratroopers, probably), but not, what? Let me count. Four f-bombs in just the first few paragraphs. It’s just . . . I’m nervous. I’m freaking out, in fact. Soon enough you’ll understand why.

  But what I’ve decided is, maybe I’m overreacting. To what Jack wrote, I mean, not to what’s been happening to us. In those circumstances I think I’ve been pretty fucking calm. (OK, that’s it, I promise. No more swear words for the rest of this entry. Breathe, Sydney. Think yoga.)

  My first reaction was, this isn’t a confessional. How dare you talk so glibly about my past? How dare you be so bloody judgmental? (Is bloody a swear word? My rule’s going to be, if I’ve heard it on EastEnders it doesn’t count.) Like the drugs: there’re certain people they affect more than others. What Jack means is, how could you have been so stupid, Syd? After everything that happened to you, how could you have allowed yourself to fall into that trap? What Jack doesn’t understand—what I’m not sure he’s ever understood—is how desperate I was to feel something other than what I felt. For a way out. Any way out. When you’re caught inside a dungeon, even the faintest flicker in the dark is like a promise of daylight. And if it turns out not to be, if it turns out instead to be a burning staircase . . . Well, you take your chances anyway.

  Do you understand now, Jack? That feeling of any out will do? I would have thought that, given recent events, you’d at last be getting a taste of it. That after this you’d—

  I’m getting worked up again.

  Breathe, Sydney—remember? Observe your breath.

  And anyway, what am I talking about, after this? Like it’s over already. Like what’s happened is anything but the sodding beginning.

  What I started to say was, maybe my initial reaction was wrong. Maybe a confessional is exactly what this is. A chance to say all those things we’ve been thinking but were always too polite or too repressed or whatever to voice. Halfway through that second cigarette I started thinking, this could be like one of those spaces. You know, like a psychiatrist’s office or something, where everything stays in this room. Somewhere you get to be honest but also feel totally safe.

  A safe place. A haven—the very thing your home’s supposed to be. I must admit I like the sound of that.

  I’ve also been thinking about what we agreed. What we said was, we wouldn’t just write down what’s happened but also what we thought and what we felt. For authenticity—that was the word Jack used. (So there’s a chance that whoever ends up reading this will actually believe us, is what he didn’t say.) So maybe that’s all Jack was doing, precisely what we agreed to. Plus, it’s not like what he wrote came as a surprise. I know he thinks I’m being hysterical and I know he sometimes thinks I’m not all there. It’s just, when you see those things written down like that . . . it’s like . . . like just because you know your boyfriend takes a shit every morning doesn’t mean you want to see him on the toilet.

  Oh, my God. Where did that come from?

  All I’m really trying to say is, I’m not so angry anymore. Or that I am but that probably all the things I’m angry about, I was angry about them already. And not just them. I’ve had enough therapy in my life to recognize my mind’s all fuc— all frigging over the place. The way I reacted was just a release. And you know what? I do feel better. I’ve never been much of a writer. I’ve never even kept a diary (if only; I could have made a fortune cashing in during that misery-lit boom), but I’m beginning to see the attraction. One of my counselors even suggested it once (Don’t ask me which one. I’ve seen so many different therapists over the years they’ve morphed into one cardigan-shaped blob): keeping a journal. Recording my thoughts. It might help, she/he suggested. I pooh-poohed her, told her I’d try it and then didn’t. Huh. Maybe I should have taken the advice after all.

  God, my hand hurts.

  I’m going to stop now. I’m rambling, for one thing. And it’s not just my hand that’s getting tired. Jack won’t be happy with what I’ve written. We’re no further on than when I started. But at least we haven’t gone backward. Right, Jack? And I’m convinced now. This does help.

  Just not in the way you’d imagined.

  CHAPTER THREE

  JACK

  I SAID. DIDN’T I? Right at the start. I don’t process things the way you do. And the whole point of writing this, I thought, was the two of us trying to understand. I mean, I know you’re scared, Syd, and I know you’re upset, but it’s just possible none of this is what you think it is.

  And ish. What you said about us being happy(ish). We were happy. We are. OK, maybe not happy right now, but I know we can be again. We just need to . . . we need to get past this. OK? Which is what writing this is all about. Not snapping at each other. Not sniping. The way we’ve both been acting toward each other recently—I thought we’d agreed to put all that behind us. To do this jointly, you and me. Together.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SYDNEY

  WOW. SHORT AND sweet. I feel like I’ve been sent home with a note from the headmaster. Sydney hasn’t been taking her school assignments seriously. Her attitude is impacting on the work of others. In fact I think I may have that note somewhere. Or my mother does, probably. She kept them all. In a little (not so little) green shoebox, together with my equally unglowing school reports. Going through them was a way of chastising herself. After the other marks I’d borne had finally faded, they were a reminder that the scars she’d let me suffer were all still there.

  But I deserved it. Then, now. Because Jack’s right. With everything that’s been happening, I’ve lost sight of the fact that none of this is his fault. Even the house, for example. It’s true what Jack said: he never wanted it. Not to the extent I did. I fell in love with the place right from the start. In spite of the junk and irrespective of the decor and never mind that we couldn’t actually afford it. I just thought . . . I don’t know. Or maybe I do but I realize that it sounds cheesy. But honesty, right? The truth, the whole truth and nothing but. Honestly then, what I thought when I walked into the house was that it was somewhere Jack and I could be together until we were old. A “forever house,” that’s what they call it on the property shows, which when I hear it always makes me want to puke. But that didn’t stop me thinking it even so.

  Which I suppose more than anything makes it my fault. The house, everything that followed, it’s down to me. So that’s something else I should be apologizing for: that I dragged us both into this in the first place.

  —

  BUT THE STORY. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Syd, and get on with the story.

  The smell then. Should I start with the smell? Or is that me jumping too far forward?

  Maybe it is, because I honestly can’t recall when we first noticed it. I remember precisely the moment we first discussed it but I can’t be sure if it was there right from the start. There was so much, you see, that was strange about the house. That was part of the reason I so adored it. There was a richness to it, a complexity, in terms of its history and its atmosphere and, yes, its odors. There were smoke smells on top of drain smells on top of book smells on top of something coming from somewhere that was vaguely floral. The jasmine, possibly, from the overgrown garden. And remember, it wasn’t as though we’d moved into an empty box. You know that smell when you walk into a library? Or a museum full of curios but empty of people? An old place, not one of those Millennium-branded buildings. It was like that, like a thriving marketplace of memories, where all the good smells mingle with the bad. The sweetness with the sweat, the sewage with the sage. Everything seemed . . . interconnected. The way an ecosystem is. So the point is, I really can’t tell you when I picked that one smell out from all the others, when I first noticed that coming from somewhere in the house was the scent of . . .

  Wait.

  Do you know what? I’ve been thinking about the other
thing Jack said, about us being happy. And I think actually I’m going to use that as a starting point. Because it’s important that whoever reads this understands that when all this began we really were.

  We’d got what we wanted, after all. Against all odds. Evan, the estate agent, he said the owner of the house wanted it to go to a couple. A potential family. (Just as an aside here—a mother? Me? HAHAHAHAHA!) So that’s how/why it came to us. “Just lucky, I guess,” is the way Evan put it, like he didn’t quite believe it himself (and, quite possibly, like he was rueing his lost commission). The owner—one Patrick Barnard Winters—had requested to see the full roll of bids and, reaching the bottom of the list, had decided just from our names that he liked the sound of us. Mr. Jack Walsh and Ms. Sydney Baker. Personally, I couldn’t think of a name much less inspiring than Sydney Baker—that was part of the reason I’d chosen it.

  But maybe the seller had a favorite uncle called Jack. Maybe his mother’s maiden name was Baker. Who knows? Whatever it was, it must have been something fairly compelling to convince him to forsake twenty grand. Minimum, Jack reckoned. Some of those City types, he said, they’d probably opened their wallets even wider than that.

  And I guess that’s why Jack went along with it, because he realized we were getting a bargain. And I know Jack wouldn’t mind me saying this but it’s a fact he’s always liked a bargain. It’s his dad in him. Roy Walsh, who’d hoarded dishwasher tablets even before he’d coughed up to buy a dishwasher, just because he’d found them two-thirds off one day at the Co-op. And who’d once—in my presence—haggled for ice cream.

  So yes, we were elated. House-hunting in London; it’s like you’re bleeding. Slowly at first, almost unnoticed, but every disappointment is another paper cut. The excitement, you eventually realize, is really just giddiness and after a while all you feel is cold and numb. I’d lost count of the number of places we’d viewed but we’d made offers on—and been outbid on—twelve.

  Yup. Twelve.

  And half of those weren’t even that great. When we’d started looking, we had a list of requirements a sheet of A4 long. A wish list, they call it on Location. Nothing outlandish. Nothing, we thought, unreasonable. A bit of character, some outside space. Just the usual. After three months of looking, we’d cut the list in half. After six we were down to a single word.

  London.

  Though probably we’d have settled for Croydon too.

  I stayed positive. I got excited whenever we went to see somewhere new, still imagining that this next place could be the one. Partly that’s just me. My “training.” (Conditioning? Whatever the hell you call a decade and a half of therapy. Psychological warfare, maybe.) Partly—mostly—it was because I knew that if I showed Jack how disconsolate I was becoming, he would have suggested we reevaluate. Consider waiting. Give up, in other words. And that’s something I never do. Not because of my training. That part’s just me.

  You see, having a place together is something we’d always dreamed of.

  Actually, scratch that. You dream of flying. Of winning the lottery. Owning somewhere to live, a home that’s yours and no one else’s—that’s not a dream. It’s a right. Not just ours but God knows we’d earned it as much as anyone. Jack reckons I had a tough childhood but his wasn’t exactly an episode of Happy Days. And we’d saved, scrimped, begged, borrowed—done all the things you’re supposed to do and then some. So for us to then struggle the way we did just to find somewhere worth offering on . . . and then to be gazumped every time . . . it was torture. Which is perhaps a bit melodramatic but all I’m really trying to say is, when we got this place, it was a relief.

  Imagine . . . imagine you’re a smoker. Maybe you don’t have to imagine. But imagine being a smoker and boarding a twelve-hour flight. Which is delayed. Which, when it finally reaches its destination, is made to circle for another three hours. And then there’s taxiing and passport control and baggage reclaim and customs, and then, when finally you find a place where you won’t get arrested for lighting up, your Bic doesn’t work. And then someone walking past offers you a match.

  It was that.

  We had sex in the hallway. Jack and I, almost the instant we walked in. This sodding owl staring at me the entire time. “Bloody owls,” Jack said when I pointed it out. “Bloody perverts, the lot of them.” Which was exactly the right thing to say because instead of freaking out I just started laughing. Jack had to drag me to the bedroom in the end. I was laughing so much I couldn’t even stand.

  So, yeah. We were happy. No more sleeping together in a single bed. No more flatmates (or, in my case, housemates—three of them, all as damaged and as fucked up in their own way as I am). No more wasting Saturdays studying cracks and checking for mold. We could (and would, we’d promised each other) have friends over anytime we felt like it. We’d leave the washing up for as long as we pleased and deliberately waste the hot water. We’d sing, dance, watch TV, cook breakfast together, all naked. Just because we could. We’d live our life rather than sit around for another year waiting for it to start.

  So I take it back. That ish, Jack? I’m sorry. I do. I take it back.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  JACK

  IT’S THE WAITING. That’s what’s getting to me, way more than I thought it would. It’s like the time I went for blood tests, after this trip to Kavos I went on with my mates and ended up on the beach with this girl. Which happened way before I ever met Syd, by the way, and which is something I never, ever did again.

  And the sale itself. Waiting for the house to go through. That was incredibly stressful, too, even though there was nothing for us to do. Because of that, probably.

  It wasn’t like this, though. Neither one of those things was like this. This is worse—much worse—mostly, I guess, because I still don’t know what exactly I’m waiting for.

  —

  SYD’S RIGHT. THE house was a bargain. OK, so it wasn’t exactly my dream home or anything (for the record, that’s a cottage on the north coast of Devon, overlooking the sea, near some woods and an hour minimum from the closest Starbucks), but in my mind the price we got it for made up for a lot. We didn’t need three bedrooms, but it’s like most things, I suppose. No one needs an iPhone. Or a convertible. Or a Dualit toaster. But some things, they’re nice to have even if you’d struggle to justify them if you were hauled up before, let’s say, Jeremy Corbyn.

  Three bedrooms. I could have a study. Or a den? Half a one anyway, and Syd could set up her yoga mat on the other side. As for the spare room, neither one of us had any family that was likely to come and stay (apart from my parents, maybe, at some point—if they could bring themselves to set aside for a night their feelings about Syd), but it would be useful for putting up friends, and, who knew, maybe one day, if Syd ever came round to the idea . . . Well. It was nice to have options, that’s all I’m saying, particularly after living the way we had. I’d met Syd at a conference her firm was running on mental health care. I’d been sent there by Lambeth Council as a delegate, and she noticed my job title and commented on my age (this was four years ago, so at the time I would’ve been twenty-four, the same age as Syd), on how demanding being a social worker must be, and I’d acted like, no, really, it’s not such a big deal, while also trying to convey that actually, yeah, it was, but managing events, that must be pretty tough, too, and . . .

  I’ll spare you the details.

  The point is, since we’d known each other we’d lived a minimum of eleven Tube stops apart. We’d discussed moving in together before, but we knew that if we did it would take us longer to save up for our own place, so instead we decided to tough it out. For a year, we thought, tops. It turned out to be the better part of three. So getting the house, getting the keys . . . it was all exactly the way Syd said it was. The anticipation. The relief. That bloody barn owl. Maybe I never loved the house the way Syd did, but I definitely loved the fact that it was ours.

 
So anyway, we’re in. Still not entirely understanding how we’d swung it, but once the contracts had been exchanged, what did we care? And, for a short while at least, I changed my mind. The house seemed less creepy than it had before and more characterful. Less gloomy, more atmospheric. It was odd, though. The stuff, I mean; all the junk the former owner had left behind. Because before the smell, before what it led to, it already felt to me like . . . I don’t know. Or actually I do know, I’m just wondering how much of what I’m putting down is accurate. Whether things have got twisted. Tinted, in the light of all the stuff that’s happened since.

  But, yes, I think I felt it even then. This new life of ours that Syd and I were both so pleased about—I definitely had a sense that it was something we’d stolen.

  —

  THE SMELL.

  We’d run out of money, so we couldn’t pay for house clearance; besides, we thought it would be fun. You know, going through all the previous owner’s old stuff. It was Syd’s suggestion really. Me, I would have tossed the whole lot in bin bags and taken it all either to charity shops or the dump, but Syd convinced me by talking about all the things we might find. There might be furniture we could use, or books we wanted to read, or inspiration in a stack of correspondence for my elusive, long-gestating novel. Treasure of one kind or another, anyway.

  (I know, I know. Ironic, right? Considering what we did find.)

  We’d got rid of those stuffed birds. Or I had, before Syd would even contemplate moving in. (It won’t take a minute, I’d told her. All I need to do is open a window. But Syd had been too resolute on the matter even to groan.) We’d cleared the kitchen, too, and the master bedroom. The rest, though—we were in no hurry. It’s not like we were struggling for space. Between us the only furniture we owned was my old sofa, plus the mattress we’d had delivered the morning we picked up the keys. So on day five, maybe, or day six, we were sitting on the carpet in the second bedroom going through a mountain of old vinyl we’d discovered. There was a record player in there, too (an actual record player, completely unironic), and as we came across LPs we liked the look of we were sticking them on the turntable. The previous owner, he’d built this seriously formidable collection of movie soundtracks. Nothing more recent than The Godfather, and nothing with lyrics, but as well as the obvious composers (Maurice Jarre, Ennio Morricone, Bernard Herrmann), there were some real, hard-to-come-by classics. An original Max Steiner, for example. Another by Miklos Rozsa. As I said, treasure.