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Authors: Creina Mansfield

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BOOK: My Nasty Neighbours
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I
t was some time before the noise of the doorbell penetrated Ian's drum roll. I let Mum answer the door, after all, she was already on her feet and I was still resting on the sofa. I recognised the voices of our nearest neighbours, nos 9 and 13.

‘Mrs Stirling, what's going on in here?' I heard Mr no 9 asking. ‘It sounds as if you've got a pile driver upstairs.'

‘That's Ian. He's an oily rag,' Mum sighed.

‘Just because he goes to that cathedral school doesn't make him more holy than the rest of us!' snapped the woman from no 13.

‘Not “holy”, I said “oily”–' began Mum but Mr no 9 wouldn't let her get any further.

‘–and who keeps thumping on the bathroom
door? It's interfering with our TV reception.'

‘Not Helen, definitely,' Mum answered.

I sighed. It looked as if my exceptional diplomatic skills were needed. I joined Mum at the door. Mrs no 13 was off, ‘That drumming goes right through you,' she explained, ‘like… like–'

‘–a dose of salts?' I suggested, giving her a friendly smile.

She shook her head, ‘–like a knife. It goes through you like a knife.'

Piercing. Knives don't go through you, and if they did you'd have more than a headache, but, tactful as ever, I didn't point this out. And the charm offensive paid off because Mrs no 13 smiled at me and said, ‘David? My, you have grown.'

I'd grown from four foot eight to five foot seven inches in less than a year so I had heard this comment before. Strangely enough, I'd also noticed for myself, but I just grinned back and was beginning to think that the mood of the mob was changing when no 13's husband chipped in.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘that's why the stairs
reverberate. It's him leaping about.'

I stood still, trying to look like someone who rarely moved.

I can get up the stairs in three steps and reach the top before the sitting-room door slams, but I decided not to mention this and no 13 got the conversation back to the subject of the drumming. ‘That's what brings on the migraine,' she said. ‘They last about three days, after which I go completely deaf – and numb. No feeling in my ears at all …'

A red BMW pulled up outside.

‘… then paralysis spreads down one side. First the right side, though you can still feel a tingling in your fingers …'

A middle-aged man in a sharp suit got out and stared at the house. I hoped he might be a distraction, but the doorstep crowd was unstoppable.

‘This can't all be due to Ian's drumming, surely,' Mum exclaimed.

‘Quite right, Mrs Stirling. Quite right,' said Mrs no 13. ‘There's also the thumping on the bathroom walls. Last Wednesday we couldn't watch telly because our wall started to judder.
What was going on?'

‘May I interrupt?' came a new voice from the back. It was the man from the BMW.

But no 9 got in first. ‘Now, look, Mrs Stirling,' he said, using his I'm-a-reasonable-man type of voice. ‘I'm a reasonable man, but the noise has got to stop. It's affecting my wife's nerves.'

Mum said in a small voice, ‘I am sorry. We'll all make a determined effort to keep the noise down.'

At that moment the hat stand in the hall corner that I was leaning against toppled over. As coats and hats fell around me, I made a grab for some of them and discovered I was holding on to the tracksuit top I'd lost three months before.

‘Great!' I shouted. I looked up to find a circle of grim-faced neighbours glaring at me.

The stranger looked even more care-worn than they did, though he attempted a smile. ‘I just wanted to say–' he began.

‘Let me finish this first!' snapped Mr no 9. ‘Here,' he said, handing Mum an envelope, ‘this is for you.'

Mum reached forward to take the envelope
reluctantly, and I closed the door quickly. The chimes went again immediately.

‘Don't open it,' I said firmly.

I could see Mum was worried about the letter. The neighbours had shaken her. I took the brown envelope from her. There was no number on it, just:

Mrs C Stirling

Elm Close

Blackrock

‘I'll open it for you, Mum,' I told her. I was beginning to fear the worst. Nos 9 and 13 could have ganged up to take legal action against us.

‘What is it?' Mum asked, her voice shaking.

‘I'm not sure. It's from Higgins & Stop, Solicitors.'

I
followed Mum into the kitchen. She was turning the letter over in her hands, but not reading it. Dad, like Silver the cat, has an uncanny knack of knowing when to appear and when to disappear. He had missed the visit from the neighbours, now he came in followed by the man with the red BMW.

‘I met this …’ Dad started. But when he saw Mum’s face he left the man in the hall, closed the kitchen door and asked abruptly, ‘What’s up?’

‘No 9 just gave me a solicitor’s letter,’ Mum told him.

Dad took the letter from me and read it through swiftly.

‘Are they suing us?’ Mum asked.

‘Suing? Who?’ Dad replied.

‘The neighbours.’

Dad looked baffled. ‘Why should they? They didn’t know your uncle Albert, did they?’

It was Mum’s turn to look baffled. ‘Uncle Albert wouldn’t complain about the noise we make. He lives hundreds of miles away in Waltham Abbey. Anyway he’s tone deaf.’

Her face brightened for a moment. ‘He wouldn’t mind Ian being an Oily Rag. He’d be a wonderful neighbour!’

Dad was re-reading the letter from Higgins & Stop. ‘Uncle Albert live next door? It’s a bit late for that, I’m afraid,’ he said, handing Mum the letter to read.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘He’s dead.’

‘And he’s left his entire estate to me,’ Mum said slowly, looking at the letter again as if she didn’t quite believe it.

I’d only met my great uncle Albert a few times. He lived in Essex in the south of England, too far away for a day visit. And we never stayed overnight with him, Mum said it was too unhygenic. Great Uncle Albert was a miser. He kept deep within his house, surrounded by the junk that was stacked high all around him.
Narrow corridors wound between the piles of newspapers, overflowing boxes and souvenirs from his travels. He had some brilliant things too. My favourite was a sailing ship woven out of glass. About a metre high, it stood on the mantelpiece in the sitting-room, covered by a glass dome. The sea was also glass, spun like white candy floss. Pirates – Long John Silver; sailors – Admiral Lord Nelson; all the swash-buckling films ever watched were compressed into that ship in my imagination.

‘It’s a death trap, that place,’ Dad said once after we visited. ‘One dropped match and that lot’d go up like a bonfire.’

‘It’s too damp for that,’ Mum snorted. ‘Did you see the mould on the walls?’

Great Uncle Albert looked like a city gent who’d fallen into a pile of coal dust and carried on without stopping to wash himself. The suit he wore was constantly thick, dark and shiny.

‘Great Uncle Albert’s very old and frail,’ Mum always said, but this made him sound weak and to me he was the opposite – fascinatingly different – a true eccentric. He talked about his dead brothers and sisters as if
they were still alive, and confused all our names. We hadn’t visited him for years and, since he never wrote or phoned (‘a waste of good money’), we didn’t know he had died until the solicitor’s letter arrived.

‘“Estate” means everything he owned,’ Dad was explaining.

‘Dear old Albert,’ said Mum affectionately.

‘How old was he?’ I asked.

Mum tried to calculate. ‘Let’s see. He was Granny’s older brother. She was seventy-seven when she died and that was when you were still in a buggy, so that’s …’

She gave up. ‘Oh, about ninety.’

‘Not bad, considering he still rode his bicycle until last year,’ said Dad admiringly.

‘He used to say “I’m ready to go any time”,’ Mum recalled, looking weepy.

‘The ones who say that always last the longest,’ said Dad.

‘But I never thought he’d leave me everything – dear Albert!’ said Mum.

‘How much?’ asked Ian, entering the kitchen. The drums had been silent for some time, he had obviously overheard the news.

‘Thousands – when we’ve sold the house.’

I let out a whoop of delight, then picked Mum up and twirled her round. Ian was chanting, ‘It could be you!’

Just then Helen entered the kitchen with the BMW driver trailing behind her. ‘This is Harry,’ she said.

‘Nice to meet ya, Harry!’ said Ian, slapping him on the back. Though he was a strange-looking bloke, we were in the mood to welcome anyone.

I put Mum down. ‘What’s going on?’ asked Helen. ‘Have we won the lottery?’

‘As good as. Great Uncle Albert’s dead!’ Ian replied.

Very carefully, Harry said, ‘Presumably he was not a favourite uncle.’

That changed the mood.

‘Quite,’ said Dad, casting a sheepish look at Mum. ‘Wonderful old gentleman, Albert,’ he said. ‘Er, sorry, Barry.’

‘Harry,’ corrected Helen.

‘Sorry, Harry. What must you think of us? May we offer you a cup of tea?’

Mum and Dad were moving into Formal Hospitality Mode, which was odd: they didn’t
usually do this for Helen’s boyfriends, but then Helen’s boyfriends weren’t usually middle-aged men.

When Helen objected to Harry being given a mug and went in search of the best china, Ian and I escaped upstairs.

‘Who’s he to tell us how we should feel about Albert?’ Ian asked resentfully. We’d both liked Great Uncle Albert. He’d never spoken to us in a special voice for children. He barked at us just as he barked at everyone else. He would whack me over the head with a rolled-up newspaper. I always recognised this as a sign of friendship. On one visit he gave me a Davy pit helmet – a real one that miners wore to go down into the coal pit. I wondered whether he’d been a coal miner but when I asked Mum she said he’d worked for the Co-op all his life.

I was sorry Great Uncle Albert was dead. Alive he would never have moved to Elm Close, to Dublin, or anywhere else. In fact, he’d refused Mum’s invitation to come and live with us, much to Dad’s relief. Albert wouldn’t have left those mysterious piles of belongings, but now he was separated from them forever.

‘Miserable git,’ I said, and I didn’t mean Albert.

I
an came into the kitchen with another catalogue full of pictures of drum kits.

‘Mum, take a look at this! It’s the best on the market!’

Mum flung off her rubber gloves in exasperation. ‘Ian, how many times do I have to explain this? We haven’t any more money yet. We have to sell Uncle Albert’s house first, and before we do that we’ll have to clear out the contents. That will be a nightmare! Uncle Albert hasn’t thrown anything out since war was declared in 1939.’

‘Why was he like that?’ I asked. ‘Why did he hoard everything?’

Mum considered for a moment. ‘Well, he was brought up in the days of real poverty. He would
have been lucky to share a pair of shoes with one of his brothers or sisters. People didn’t have the number of possessions we take for granted nowadays. They kept things carefully. Albert never lost the habit.’

‘Much better for the environment – a careful use of resources,’ said Helen, who was measuring out a diet portion of muesli. This from a person who’d cut down the Rain Forests if it would result in a new shade of lipstick.

She opened a glossy magazine. ‘Mum, can I have a Paul Costello suit? Harry says it’s understated quality.’

‘Harry says,’ repeated Mum bitterly, then added, under her breath, ‘How often must I hear those words?’

‘Harry is a professional image consultant,’ Helen reminded us. ‘He should know.’

‘Yes, dear,’ replied Mum, unconvinced. ‘Now, back to the real world, who wants to help with stage one: clearing out Uncle Albert’s house?’

‘It’s a long way,’ objected Ian.

Mum nodded. ‘It’ll take three days. One day to get there, one to do the clearing out, and a day to travel back.’

‘Can’t,’ said Helen emphatically. I’ve got a special date–’

‘–with the suit!’ I finished for her.

‘I haven’t even decided when we’re going yet,’ Mum pointed out.

‘Well, I’m bound to be busy. We’re doing electrolysis next week,’ said Helen.

‘What’s that?’ I asked. It sounded like electrocution.

‘Pulling hairs off people,’ Mum explained.

‘Have you been practising on Harry?’ I asked. He was nearly bald, though the bit of hair that did grow was pulled back into a ponytail.

‘Can we fly over?’ interrupted Ian. I could tell he was searching for a way out too.

‘No, of course we can’t,’ Dad chipped in. ‘We’ll probably want to bring lots of things back with us, so it’s got to be the ferry.’

‘So you’re going too, Dad?’ Helen asked hopefully.

‘Yes,’ Dad answered. ‘I’m going to contact the estate agents and put the house on the market.’

‘I’d definitely help if it was just a day but the pressure’s really building up for the Leaving Cert,’ whined Ian.

Mum and Dad looked impressed. Study was usually the last thing Ian worried about. But they missed the look he and Helen had given each other. As kids when Helen and Ian were forced to let me join in their games, that was the look they gave each other after they’d found a way of leaving me behind. Once, when I was six, they left me in the cupboard under the stairs for hours under the impression that we were playing ‘Hide and Seek’.

I guessed that they wanted the house free of Mum, Dad or me. To test my suspicion, I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll help.’

I was right, Ian and Helen beamed at each other.

‘Good lad!’ Dad said, stretching over the breakfast clutter to pat me on the back.

‘Wonderful!’ Mum agreed. They were overdoing the praise a bit to annoy Ian and Helen.

‘Yeah, wonderful!’ drawled Ian. ‘Brute strength’s what’s needed for this job. Let’s face it, if brains were potatoes, David wouldn’t have enough for a bag of chips!’

I heard Helen giggling at this as they left the
room together.

Mum planned the trip to Waltham Abbey like an SAS Officer on a mission. Soon she’d fixed the dates (a week ahead in my mid-term break), booked the ferry to and from Holyhead and begun planning what we should take with us.

My list included: walkman, packets of biscuits, cans of Coke, bars of chocolate and a copy of Great Moments in Rugby. Mum’s included vacuum cleaner, step ladder and black refuse bags. All Dad could think of was sleeping bags.

‘Sleeping bags? What’s wrong with the beds?’ I asked.

An unfortunate question. Mum started to describe the beds in Great Uncle Albert’s terraced house. Dust mites, bed bugs, creeping dermatitis. All in all, sleeping in one of those old beds seemed to be a slow way of committing suicide.

‘Why don’t we stay in a hotel?’ I asked.

‘Take too long, cost too much,’ Dad explained. ‘Don’t worry,’ he assured me, ‘we’ll
go out for meals, but we’ll just camp down on the floor.’

‘In the sitting-room?’

‘If you like.’

‘Okay.’ The sailing ship would be in view. I’d be in my sleeping bag and be able to imagine the sailors in their hammocks.

At least I’d get good food – no weevils in ship’s biscuits for me.

BOOK: My Nasty Neighbours
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