The People at Number 9

Sara glanced casually across. Got up in a boiler suit and headscarf, like Rosie the Riveter, the woman was struggling to steer a wheelbarrow of debris down the front path.

“She’s seen us,” murmured Carol. “Smile. Wave.”

Sara did so, regretting the aura she knew they must project, of complacency and cliquiness. The woman acknowledged them with an anxious smile.

Her house was the semi-detached twin of Sara’s. Bay windows, stuccoed porches, steep gables mirrored one another brick for brick and tile for tile, but while Sara’s house exuded bourgeois respectability, number 9 was a mess – peeling paint, rotten window-frames, sagging gutters. Still, they were doing it up now, and as noisy and dirty as the process continued to be, it was to be welcomed. As were the neighbours themselves. On an impulse, Sara left Carol to mind the boys and crossed the road.

“Looks like hard work!” she said, opening the gate. Her neighbour trundled the barrow out onto the street, up a makeshift gangplank and tipped its contents into the skip. She reversed back down and lowered the wheelbarrow to the pavement, before holding both hands out in front of her as if about to play an imaginary piano. It took Sara a moment to realise that she was demonstrating a tremor brought on by the exertion of pushing the barrow.

“Goodness,” said Sara.

“I know!” said her neighbour, then, after wiping her palm clean on her overalls, she held it out.

“I’m Lou.”

“Sara.”

Saah-ra. The syllables seemed to ooze like syrup, speaking of bedtime stories and ballet lessons. Not for the first time, she wished she were called something else.

“And can I just say, I feel terrible,” she added.

“Why?”

“Well, you’ve been here, what, a week…?”

“Two.”

“… And we haven’t been round to say hello. I kept meaning to, but you always seemed so busy.”

She was sounding like a curtain-twitcher now.

“Oh God, it’s me who should apologise. We’ve had our heads up our arses. The building work was meant to be finished before we moved in but,” she shrugged apologetically, “you know how it is.”

“Oh, totally,” Sara said.

“And then, just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse, the art-handlers fucked up and we had to store a million quid’s worth of Gav’s artwork, with half the house hanging off!”

“Gosh,” was all Sara could think of to say.

“Anyway,” Lou made to pick up the barrow again, “we’ll sort something soon…”

“Pop in later if you want,” Sara blurted. “It’s just me and the kids.”

Lou arrived on a waft of expensive, grassy perfume. Her hair was damp and she had changed into an embroidered shirt and jeans. There was something equine about her, Sara thought – a wariness that invited soothing. She had only brought one of the children – an angelic-looking child with shoulder-length, white-blond hair.

“Sara, this is Dash.”

“Hi, Dash,” Sara said, and was treated to a sunny, yet slightly unnerving, smile.

“Patrick! Caleb!” She then called over her shoulder. The trill and clatter of the Xbox continued unabated. Sara turned apologetically to Lou, “Perhaps she should just go through. They’re pretty tame.”

“He,” Lou corrected her.

“Oh!” Sara recoiled in embarrassment, “I thought… the hair.”

“It’s Dashiell,” said Lou, “as in Hammett.”

“Of course. Gosh. I don’t know how I… obviously you’re a boy, Dash. Sorry. It was only because of the…”

“… Hair. Yes, it does confuse some people.”

Lou’s neutrality on the issue, her complete lack of embarrassment or rancour only made Sara feel worse. Her own two children had by now appeared, Patrick, the younger one, skidded to a stop in his socked feet, ahead of Caleb, who followed with the world-weary lope of the pre-adolescent.

“So this is Dashiell,” Sara said, the colour still high in her cheeks. “He lives next door. Dashiell, these are my boys, Caleb and Patrick.”

Sara led Lou to the kitchen. It was the best room. The only room really, that she felt truly reflected her taste. Neil had wanted to economise on the re-fit, but egged on by Carol, Sara had gone all-out, sourcing artisanal tiles to set off the cherry-red Aga and agonising over subtly different shades of sustainable hardwood flooring. She had been vindicated, too. Eighteen months on, the stainless-steel work surface had acquired the odd dent and the cupboard fronts were scuffed, but the room still had a warmth and integrity to it. Even today, with the sink full of dirty dishes and the boys’ lunch boxes spewing rubbish across the table, it looked lived-in rather than squalid. So accustomed had she become to fending off compliments, in fact, that it came as something of a surprise when Lou offered none. Instead her visitor cast an appraising eye around the room before meeting Sara’s, with an inscrutable smile.

“Well,” Sara said, “what can I get you?”

She had been about to list a variety of herbal teas, when Lou shrugged and declared herself equally happy with red or white. They were soon installed at the kitchen table, a bottle of Shiraz nestling among the empty pasta bowls. While Lou knocked back wine like Ribena and enthused about the vibrancy of the neighbourhood, Sara studied her guest’s appearance. She was not quite beautiful. Everything was just a fraction off; the eyes too wide-set, the nose a tad flared. Yet she had managed to make a virtue of these defects – a flick of eyeliner, a discreet silver hoop through one nostril – so that mere beauty no longer seemed the point. Her hair, now almost dry, had resolved itself into a short mop of corkscrew curls, which she thrust around her head as she talked, as if the weight of it irked her.

When their kids hadn’t turned up at Cranmer Road, Sara had assumed they must have sent them to a private school, but Lou told her this wasn’t the case.

“We thought we’d wait for the new school year, rather than pick up the fag end,” she explained. “Where they were before was so tiny, and the curriculum was so different. I say curriculum…” She laughed and shook her head.

“Where was that?” Sara asked.

“Oh, didn’t you know? We were living in Spain. A little village in the mountains, not far from Loja.”

“Sounds idyllic,” said Sara.

“It was,” agreed Lou, with a wistful sigh. “I pine for it, but Dash is starting Year Six in September, so we had a decision to make.”

Sara wondered if they had made the right one. She knew plenty of local parents who, faced with the scramble for places at the mediocre state secondaries in their borough, would have considered a mountain shack staffed by a goat-herd to be a better bet.

“I’d love to live abroad,” she said, “but Neil’s job isn’t very portable…”

“Oh there’s always a reason not to do things.” Lou tugged a tendril of hair in front of her eyes and examined it, before letting it spring back into place. “What you have to do is look for the reasons to do it.”

“That is so true. I’m just a bit of a ditherer, I suppose. It’s such a big leap, isn’t it? And I’d be worried about not fitting in.”

“Mmmm…” said Lou ominously.

“Was that hard, then?”

“Yes and no. They’re very straightforward, the Spanish. If they don’t like you, they tell you to your face and their kids throw stones at your kids.”

Sara clutched her cheeks in mute dismay.