I spontaneously call my sister, which I was never able to do before. This has confused her immensely and when I’m with her she constantly asks what time it is, as if I’ve upset her body clock. I Christmas-shopped with time to spare. I bought actual Christmas cards and posted them on time – all two hundred of them. I even took over my dad’s shopping list. I am ultra-efficient, always have been. Of course I can be idle – I love a two-week holiday, I love to lie on the beach and do nothing – but only when I say so, on my terms, when I know I have something waiting for me afterwards. When the holiday is over, I need a goal. I need an objective. I need a challenge. I need a purpose. I need to contribute. I need to do something.
I loved my job, but to make myself feel better about not being able to work there any more, I try to focus on what I won’t miss.
I worked mainly with men. Most of the men were cocks, some were amusing, a few were pleasant. I did not like to spend any hours outside of work with any of them, which might mean my next sentence doesn’t make sense, but it does. Of the team of ten, I slept with three. Of the three, I regret sleeping with two; the one I don’t regret sleeping with strongly regrets sleeping with me. This is unfortunate.
I will not miss people at work. People are what bother me most in life. It bothers me that so many lack common sense, that their opinions can be so biased and backward, so utterly frustrating, misguided, misinformed and dangerous that I can’t stand to listen to them. I’m not pointlessly prickly. I like non-PC jokes in controlled environments where it is appropriate and when it is obvious that the joke is at the expense of the ignorant who say such things. When a non-PC punchline is delivered by someone who genuinely believes it to be true, it is not funny, it is offensive. I don’t enjoy a good debate about what’s supposedly right and wrong; I would rather everyone just knew it, from the moment they’re born. A heel-prick test and a jab of cop-on.
Not having my job has made me face what I dislike most about the world, and about myself. In my job I could hide, I could be distracted. Without a job, I have to face things, think about things, question things, find a way to actually deal with things that I have been avoiding for a long time. This includes the neighbourhood that I moved into four years ago and had nothing to do with until now.
It also includes what happens at night: I’m not sure whether I somehow managed to ignore it before, whether it has escalated, or whether my idleness has led to me become fascinated, almost obsessed by it. But it is ten p.m. and it is a few hours away from my nightly distraction.
It is New Year’s Eve. For the first time ever, I am alone. I have chosen to do this for a few reasons: firstly, the weather is so awful I couldn’t bring myself to go out in it after almost being decapitated by the door when I’d opened it to collect my Thai takeaway from the brave man who had battled the elements to deliver my food. The prawn crackers had practically dissolved and he’d spilled my dumpling sauce in the bottom of the bag, but I didn’t have it in my heart to complain. His long forlorn look past my front door and into the safety and warmth of my house stopped me from mentioning the state of the delivery.
The wind outside howls with such force I wonder if it will lift the roof off. My next-door neighbour’s garden gate is banging constantly and I debate whether to go out and close it, but that would mean I’ll get blown around like the wheelie bins that are battering each other in the side passage. It is the stormiest weather this country – Ireland – has seen since whenever. It’s the same for the UK, and the US is being pounded too. It’s minus forty in Kansas, Niagara Falls has frozen, New York has been attacked by a frigid, dense air known as a polar vortex, there are mobile homes landing on clifftops in Kerry, previously sure-footed sheep on steep cliff faces are being challenged and defeated, lying beside washed-up seals on the shoreline. There are flood warnings, residents in coastal areas have been advised to stay indoors by miserable saturated news reporters with blue lips reporting live from beside the sea. The road that takes me most places that I need to go has been flooded for two days. At a time when I’ve wanted, needed to keep busy, Mother Nature is slowing me to a standstill. I know what she’s doing: she’s trying to make me think, and she’s winning. Hence all thoughts about myself now begin with Perhaps … because I’m having to think about myself in ways I never did before and I’m not sure if I’m right in my thinking about those things.
The bark of the dog across the road is barely audible above the wind, I think Dr Jameson has forgotten to take him in again. He’s getting a bit scatty, or else he’s had a falling out with the dog. I don’t know its name but it’s a Jack Russell. I find it running around my garden, sometimes it shits, it has on a few occasions run into my house and I’ve had to chase it around and deliver it back across the road to the right honourable gentleman. I call him the right honourable gentleman because he is a rather grand man in his seventies, retired GP, and for kicks and giggles was the president of every club going: chess, bridge, golf, cricket, and now our neighbourhood management company, which handles leaf-blowing, street-lamp bulb replacement, neighbourhood watch and the like. He is always well turned out, perfectly ironed trousers and shirts with little V-neck sweaters, polished shoes and tidy hair. He talks at me as if he’s directing his sentences over my head, lifted chin and head-on nostrils, like an amateur theatre actor, yet is never blatantly rude so gives me no reason to be rude back, but just distant. Distance is all I can give someone I can’t truly fathom. I didn’t know until one month ago that Dr Jameson even had a dog, but these days I seem to know too much about my neighbours. The more the dog barks over the wind, the more I worry if Dr Jameson has fallen over, or been blown away into somebody’s back garden like the trampolines that have been garden-hopping during the storms. I heard about a little girl waking up to find a swing set and slide in her back garden; she thought Santa had come again, but it turned out it had come from five houses down the road.
I can’t hear the party down the street, though I can see it. Mr and Mrs Murphy are having their usual family New Year shindig. It always begins and ends with traditional Irish songs and Mr Murphy plays the bodhrán and Mrs Murphy sings with such sadness it’s as though she’s sitting right in a field of dead rotten black potatoes. The rest of their guests join in as though they’re all rocking from side to side on a famine ship on stormy seas to the Americas. I’m not sad that the wind is lifting their sounds away in another direction, I can however hear a party that I can’t see, probably from a few streets away; a few words from those crazy enough to smoke outside are blown down my chimney, along with a distant rhythm of party music before it gets swiped away again; sounds and leaves circling in a violent frenzy on my doorstep.
I was invited to three parties, but couldn’t think of anything worse than party-hopping from one to the other, finding taxis on New Year’s Eve in this weather, feeling like this. Also the TV shows are supposed to be great on New Year’s Eve and, for the first time ever, I want to watch them. I wrap the cashmere blanket tighter around my body, take a sip of my red wine, feeling content with my decision to be alone, thinking that anybody out there, in that, is crazy. The wind roars again and I reach for the remote control to turn the volume up, but as soon as I do, every light in my house, including the television, goes off. I’m plunged into darkness and the house alarm beeps angrily.
A quick look outside my window shows me the entire street has lost electricity too. Unlike the others, I don’t bother with candles. It is further reason for me to feel my way to the stairs and climb into bed at barely ten o’clock. The irony that I am powerless is not lost on me. I watch the New Year’s Eve show on my iPad until the battery dies, then I listen to my iPod, which displays a threateningly low red battery that diminishes so quickly I can barely enjoy the songs. I turn then to my laptop, and when that dies I feel like crying.
I hear a car on the road and I know it’s action time.
I climb out of bed and pull open the curtains. The lights are out on the entire street, I see the flicker of
candles from a few houses but mostly it is black, most of my neighbours are over seventy and are in bed. I’m confident that I can’t be seen because my house, too, is black; I can stand at the window with the curtains open and freely watch the spectacle that I know is about to take place.
I look outside. And I see you.
3
I am not a stalker but you make it difficult for me not to watch you. You are a circus act all of your own and I cannot help but be your audience. We live directly across the road from one another on this suburban cul de sac in Sutton, North Dublin, which was built in the seventies and was modelled on an American suburb. We have large front gardens, no hedging or shrubs to separate the pathway from our gardens, no gates, nothing to stop a person from walking straight up to our front windows. Our front gardens are larger than our back gardens and so the entire street has taken pride in maintaining the front, each one pruned, groomed, fed and watered within an inch of its natural life. Everybody on our street, bar the occupants of your house and mine, is retired. They spend endless hours in their gardens and, because they are outside, in the front, everybody knows about who comes and goes and at what time. Not me though. Or you. We are not gardeners and we are not retired. You are probably ten years older than me but we have lowered the age of the street by thirty years. You have three children, I’m not sure what ages they are but I guess one is a teenager and the other two are under ten.
You are not a good father; I never see you with them.
You have always lived opposite me, ever since I moved in, and you have always bothered me beyond belief, but going to work every day and all that came with that for me – distraction and knowing that there are more important things in the world – took me away from caring, from complaining and marching over there and punching your lights out.
I feel now like I’m living in a goldfish bowl and all I can see and hear from every window in my home is you. You, you, you. So at two thirty in the morning, which is a rather respectable time for you to return home, I find myself, elbows on the windowsill, chin resting on my hand, awaiting your next screw-up. I know this will be a good one because it’s New Year’s Eve and you are Matt Marshall, DJ on Ireland’s biggest radio station and, despite not wanting to, I heard your show tonight on my phone before that too died. It was as intrusive, disgusting, repulsive, unpalatable, foul, nasty and vomitous as the others have been. Your talk show Matt Marshall’s Mouthpiece which airs from eleven p.m. to one a.m. receives the highest number of listeners of any show on Irish radio. You have been at the helm of late-night talk shows for ten years. I didn’t know you lived on this street when I moved in, but when I heard your voice travel to me across the road one day, I knew instantly it was you. Everybody does when they hear you, and mostly they get excited but I was repulsed.
You are everything I do not like about people. Your views, your opinions, your discussions that do nothing to fix the problem you pretend you want to fix and instead stir up angry frenzies and mob-like behaviour. You provide a hub for hatred and racism and anger to be vented, but you present it as free speech. For those reasons I dislike you; for personal reasons, I despise you. I’ll go into them later.
You have driven home, as usual, going sixty kilometres per hour down our quiet retirement-home-like street. You bought your home from an aged couple who were downsizing, I bought mine from a widow who’d died – or at least from her children, cashing in. I did well, buying when houses were at their lowest, when people were taking what they could, before anything had risen again, and I am aiming to be mortgage free, an ambition I’ve had since I was five, wanting everything that’s mine to actually be mine and not at the mercy of others and their mistakes. Both of our homes looked like an episode of The Good Life and both of us had extensive work to do and had to fight with the management company who accused us of ruining the look of the place. We managed to compromise. Our houses look like The Good Life from the front; inside, we have extensively renovated. I, however, broke a rule with my front garden that I am still paying for. More on that later.
You drive dangerously close to your garage door as usual and you climb out of the car, leaving the keys in the ignition, the radio blaring and the engine running. I’m not sure if you have forgotten or if you are not planning on staying. The car lights are on and are the only light on the street; it adds to the drama, almost as if the spotlight is on you. Despite the wind, which has died somewhat, every word of the Guns N’ Roses song is audible from the car. It’s ‘Paradise City’; 1988 must have been a good year for you. I was eight years old, you would have been eighteen, I bet you wore their T-shirts and had them on your school bag, I bet you engraved their names into school journals and went to The Grove and smoked and danced all night and shouted every word of their songs to the night sky. You must have felt free and happy then, because you play it a lot and always when you’re driving home.
I see a light go on in Dr Jameson’s bedroom; it must be a torch because it is moving around, as though the person holding it is disorientated. The dog is barking like mad now and I wonder if he’ll let him in before some little girl wakes up in the morning to find Santa has left a dizzy Jack Russell in her back garden. I watch the torch moving around the rooms upstairs. Dr Jameson likes to be at the helm of things, apparently. I learned this from my next-door neighbour Mr Malone, who called to my door to let me know that the bin truck was coming and he’d noticed I’d forgotten to put out my bins. I sense Mr Malone and Dr Jameson are at loggerheads over who should be in charge of the management company. I had forgotten to put my bins out because not being at work means I often confuse my days, but him calling to my home to tell me annoyed me. Seven weeks on, it wouldn’t bother me. I find it helpful. Everything neighbourly and anything helpful bothered me then. I had no community spirit. It wasn’t because I turned my back on it, it was because I was too busy. I didn’t know it existed and I didn’t require it.
You try the handle of the front door and appear full of shock and dismay that it isn’t unlocked for you or some masked gunman to freely enter your home. You ring the doorbell. It never begins politely, it is always rude, offensive. The amount of times you ring, the length of time you ring it for, like the burst of a machine gun. Your wife never answers straight away. Neither do the children; I wonder if they sleep through it now because they’re so used to it, or if she’s in there with them, all huddled in one room while the children sob, telling them to ignore the scary sounds at the door. Either way, nobody comes. Then you bang on the door. You like the banging, you spend most nights doing this, relieving your tension and anger. You work your way around the entire house, knocking and banging on every window you can reach. You taunt your wife in a sing-song voice, ‘I know you’re in there,’ as if she is pretending that she isn’t. I don’t think she is pretending, I think she is making it quite clear. I wonder if she is asleep or wide awake and hoping you will go away. I guess the latter.
Then you pick up your yelling. I know she hates the yelling because that above all embarrasses her, perhaps because your voice is so distinctive – though we couldn’t ever think it was any other couple on the road behaving like this. I don’t know why you haven’t figured this out by now and just cut straight to the yelling. She remains resolute for the first time I’ve witnessed. You do a new thing. You go back to your car and start blowing the horn.
I see Dr Jameson’s torch moving from upstairs to a downstairs room and I hope he isn’t going to go outside to try to calm you down. You will no doubt do something drastic. Dr Jameson’s front door opens and I hold my hands to my face, wondering if I should run out and stop him, but I don’t want to get involved. I will watch and when it turns violent I will step in, though I have no idea what I will do. Dr Jameson doesn’t appear. The dog comes running around the house at top speed, almost falls over himself on the flooded soggy grass in the race to get inside. The dog runs inside and the door is slammed. I laugh in surprise.
You must hear the door slam and think that it’
s your wife, because you stop honking the horn and Guns N’ Roses is all that can be heard again. I’m thankful for that. The honking was above all the most annoying thing you’ve done. Almost as if she was waiting for you to calm down before letting you in, the front door opens and your wife steps out in her dressing gown, looking frantic. I see the dark shadow of someone behind her. At first I think she has met somebody else and I seriously worry about what will happen, but then I realise it’s your eldest son. He looks older, protective, the man of the house. She tells him to stay inside and he does. I am glad. You don’t need to make this any worse than it already is. As soon as you see her you jump out of the car and start shouting at her for locking you out of the house. You always shout this at her. She tries to calm you as she makes her way to your still-open jeep door, then she takes the keys out, which kills the music, the engine and the lights. She shakes the keys in front of you, telling you that you have the house key on your set. She told you that. You knew that.
But I know, as does she, that your practicality belongs with your sobriety, and in its place is this desperate, wild man. You always believe that you’re locked out, that you have been deliberately locked out. That it is you against the world, or more that it is you against the house, and that you must get inside using any means necessary.