A is for Angelica (2 page)

There’s a woman walking towards me from across the road. She’s smiling and waving a pair of scissors in the air. I don’t know who she is. I’ve never
seen her before. She has long black hair tied back in a ponytail and she’s wearing a pair of tight fitting jeans with coloured cotton embroidered around the hem: pink, purple, orange and
black. The sleeve of her cardigan falls away from her shoulder as she bounces over the kerb. I can see part of her upper arm. Thin with faint creases, like the lines on her neck when she smiles. I
stare at her. And then I remember, Kipling’s diarrhoea. She goes to speak to me. Her eyes are green and twinkling and I have my hand in an inside out sandwich bag, holding a soggy log of dog
mess.

‘Hello, my name’s Angelica,’ she says. ‘I’ve just moved into twenty-three.’ A pair of yellow marigold gloves half-hang out the back pockets of her jeans. Some
of the fingers are inside out.

‘I’m Gordon Kingdom,’ I reply. She nods at me and smiles. ‘I live on this side of the road. On your side you’ve got Ina Macaukey. She’s at twenty-five and not
long out of hospital. Next to her is Morris Webster and Ginger at twenty-seven. Ginger’s a cat. You’ll not see much of them. Then there’s the Martins at twenty-one. The rest you
can work out for yourself.’

‘It sounds like a friendly place.’

‘And like I say, I live here, number eighteen. On this side.’

‘I see,’ she says, looking at me. She thinks I haven’t finished, that there’s more to come. There’s an uncomfortable pause between us and I notice how pretty she
must have been, at some point. Her cheeks are flushed red, from the cold I think, though they might be her normal-coloured cheeks. Now she’s staring at the inside out bag of dog mess in my
hand. She can’t be a day over forty-two. Ten years younger than me.

‘My dog’s not well. He’s been sick in the house. I couldn’t walk him this morning.’

‘I see,’ she says again, still smiling. I should leave it at that.

‘He’s shit on the bathroom floor as well. By the time I get in, he’ll have probably shit on the landing.’

Now she’s staring, not smiling. Her jacket has opened slightly at the top. She’s wearing a bright yellow v-neck underneath. The colour matches the gloves in her pockets. I see the
slightest centimetre of cleavage, a smidgeon, an ounce. And I can’t believe she made me say shit. Twice.

‘So how’s the house?’ I ask.

‘It’s fine. Empty though. The van’s coming this afternoon. I just brought a few boxes over in the car.’

‘Where is it?’

‘The van?’

‘No, the car.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t mine.’

There’s another uncomfortable pause. Her ponytail sways because she’s slowly shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She must be cold.

‘So, how’s the house?’ I ask.

‘You just asked me that.’

‘Yes. Sorry. Is there anything else you want to know?’

‘Not really. Who am I replacing?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Who lived here before me?’

‘Karen Carpenter.’

‘Really?
The
Karen Carpenter?’

‘No. This one was Welsh.’

‘Did she live on her own?’

‘No. She lived with a husband.’

‘Well, I’m only renting at the moment.’

‘So were they. For fifteen years.’

‘Why did they leave?’

‘I think they found somewhere better.’

‘I see,’ she says. And then we stop again, just long enough for her to have legitimate grounds to say, ‘Well I’d better get on with it, get it finished before the van
arrives,’ and for me to reply, ‘Of course, I’d better let you go.’

I watch her turn and walk away. She looks younger from behind. Slimmer. She opens her front door.

‘It’s my birthday!’ I shout.

She turns and shouts back, ‘Mine too!’

‘You’re joking!’

‘No! Happy Birthday!’

She’s joking. She has to be. But either way, I don’t mind, so I shout, ‘Happy birthday to you too!’ and crouch behind the garden fence where she can’t see me. As if
I’d been down here beforehand. I look at the dog mess in my hand, squeezing into shapes inside the bag. I think I hear her shout something else. Then a door closing. I stand up and
she’s gone.

It snowed this afternoon. I watched the flakes settle on the grass, cars and pavement as I opened a new folder, filed Angelica under A. Now it’s dark and there’s a
veil of white draped across the street like a just-washed tablecloth. I take Angelica’s file and make notes about our conversation this morning. I write s*** instead of shit and try to
describe the way she walked across the road, both towards and away from me. Her small steps and folded arms. Scissors poking out of her back pocket.

At half past midnight, I put her file back and go downstairs. Kipling is in the kitchen, asleep in his basket. I stroke his head and check his bowl to see if he’s eaten any food, but he
hasn’t touched it. I pull a dining chair out from under the table and sit on it, trying not to wake him as I struggle to squeeze my feet into my gardening boots. I tip-toe across to the
fridge and take out the cake I baked this afternoon. It has a single candle on it. There’s enough for one helping.

I put it on a plate. Place it on the table. Look at it.

Then I pick it up again, walk to the front door and out into the street. My spade is on the floor by the Christmas tree and a box of sandwich bags. I take it and walk across the road to
Angelica’s house. Everything is silent apart from the buzz of the street lights and the sound of my rubber boots breaking the snow. There’s no-one to disturb. I bend down, put the cake
on Angelica’s doorstep and take my matches from my pocket. I light the candle. The flame goes out immediately. I turn and look at my footprints, take one step backwards so my foot lands in
the exact same place it had been before. Then I scrape my spade in the snow and use its sharpest edge to level out the nearest footprint to the doorstep, make it disappear. It takes fifteen minutes
to get home, walking backwards across an empty street.

I close the door, leave my boots in the hallway and go upstairs to the spare room. I stand at the end of the bed and think about what happened last night. Before this morning. Before Angelica
moved in. And it feels too much to bear. So I look at my watch. It’s five past one. I sit for a while, watching Benny painting pictures with his eyes closed.

Cressington Vale

I hid behind curtains before I met Angelica.

It started the day I caught the vicar’s wife masturbating with the blinds open, her full-length mirror tipped at an unfortunate angle. In truth, he’s not really a vicar and
she’s not really his wife. He’s a Jehovah’s Witness. She’s his bit on the side. I thought about slipping a note discreetly under the door to stop it happening again, but I
decided against it. Besides, she should’ve known better. She’s older than me. After that, I found myself sitting by the window for hours on end, surveying the street. Letting the world
drift past. Taking my mind off things. I watched my neighbours and got to know them better than I ever had before. Their changes in behaviour. Their simplest of movements. Their finest of
details.

These are skills that I’ve developed. I never kept watch when I was young. But I listened hard and heard everything. Like the things my friends would say when they thought I’d left
the room. And my parents having intercourse. I only heard them once, but the worry stopped me sleeping. I made nightly interventions, which included coughing loudly and walking to the bathroom to
flush the toilet. Anything to let them know that I was there and still awake. Anything to stop it. Sometimes one of them would get up and come to my room. They’d ask me what was wrong and
I’d tell them I’d had nightmares. This went on for over a year, until my mother said she was going to take me to the doctor. So I told her the truth. She was silent for more than
fifteen seconds. Then she laughed quietly and rubbed her eyes to show me that she was tired. ‘Your mum and dad both love each other,’ she said by way of explanation. As if that changed
a thing.

I listened hard at work too, when things were different. When I had a job to go to, an office to work in and meetings to attend. But those things are gone. Cressington Vale is my office now.
It’s better than a real job. There are no conversations with colleagues who are younger than me, who feign interest in my weekends. No sitting at a desk, watching through a gap in a blind as
they leave early to drink together. No listening to other people’s conversations through thin, fabricated walls. No waiting for someone else to do his or her job properly so that I can do
mine. There’s none of this. These are things that used to happen. These are things that will never happen again. My life is different now. I don’t go to work. I don’t have an
office. I stay at home, hide behind curtains and make notes. I wait for something to happen.

For example, the average bay window for a house on Cressington Vale is approximately three and a half feet from the floor, so when someone sits in their front room to watch the television, or
eat their dinner on a tray, I only see them from the neck up. Each day I make a list of the time each head-in-the-window becomes a body and gets up to close the curtains. Ina Macaukey is always the
last. She sits and crochets in the light from her television. Its colours always changing. When all the curtains are closed, I make supper, read the newspaper or go upstairs and sit by the spare
room window. That’s where all the action is. It’s where I keep my files. I can see up and down the street, over the trees in the road and occasionally into bedrooms. I avert my eyes at
the slightest sign of nakedness. I’m never indiscreet. But there have been incidences. First there was the ‘vicar’s wife’, and then the unpleasantness of glimpsing a penis
at number nineteen. I turned away, but not quickly enough to avoid registering the offending member as not belonging to Peter Smith, as perhaps I might have expected, what with his wife, Janice,
closing the downstairs curtains just half an hour before. I never say anything though. These matters are not my business. Not any more.

I used to be part of the neighbourhood watch committee. I was watch coordinator for fifteen years, six months and twenty-five days, appointed following a spate of muggings in the local area and
around six weeks after the previous coordinator resigned. She’d been one of the victims. Before then I’d been watch secretary. My responsibilities included planning meetings and taking
minutes. I also set up and provided a reminder service, where I would ring committee members approximately three hours prior to a meeting. I’d let the phone ring twice and then hang up. To
track attendance I created spreadsheets, which I ruled out by hand and completed in pencil, then traced the lines with a thin marker.

These days there is no neighbourhood watch. In fact sometimes it feels like I’m the only one who does any watching at all. Cressington Vale is a quiet street and one of the oldest in town,
tucked away from the new housing estates. But misdemeanours take place on quiet streets. They still need rules and boundaries. So I keep a file labelled ‘Suspicious behaviour’, which I
add to almost every other day. It’s a dossier of unusual happenings. Most involve neighbours. Like when Andrea Turner returned home late from work with a towel wrapped round her head.
She’d been to her first aqua aerobics. Or when Don Donald, my oldest friend, left his mattress on the front lawn. He’d been bitten twenty-seven times in the night and only on his legs.
He said he wanted to give it some air.

I’ve found that if you ask directly, people will explain themselves.

Cigarettes

Angelica has been here less than a week. She’s changed everything. The snow has gone. I haven’t made a single note on anyone else since she moved in, apart from
Benny. I’ve still made notes on Benny, and I’ve still hidden behind curtains, but I’ve only been looking for her. Everything else seems incidental. Like two people speaking at
once. Eventually one of them gets lost, drifts away.

Angelica lives on her own and smokes outside. She always smokes before she goes to bed. She’s doing it now, sat on her doorstep. It’s half past eleven. I’m watching her from
the spare room. The night hides the colour of her clothes. I can see her perfectly clearly, but she’s in several shades of grey. She takes long hard drags of her cigarette and blows smoke
into the sky. I think about our conversation again. The day she moved in. The boxes in the street and Angelica marching with her scissors in her hand, ordering the removal men here, there and
everywhere, mucking in, taking boxes into her hallway, putting them down, using her scissors to slice through the masking tape. She’d open a box, see what was inside and write on it with a
marker pen, and I’d wonder why she hadn’t done that when she packed. The removal men drove away at four o’clock when it was getting dark. Angelica sat slumped on her doorstep,
same place she’s sitting now. Her hair escaping from her ponytail, loose around her neck.

I’m going to go and speak to her.

What can I say?

I could tell her that the cake was from me.

She can see me coming.

She’s going to speak first.

‘Thanks for the cake. You shouldn’t have gone to the trouble.’

‘How did you know?’

‘I didn’t tell anyone else. And you should’ve knocked.’

‘It was late.’

She leans back against the door. It comes ajar and she’s in colour. Her toenails are painted, each one a different shade.

‘Where’s your husband?’

She leans forward again and the door closes. She’s back in greyscale.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You’re wearing a ring.’

She folds her arms to hide the ring with her jumper. It’s a huge jumper. It looks soft to touch.

‘We’re separated.’

‘I see.’

I shouldn’t have said it. I should have waited. I can feel my skin losing moisture. I’m sweating through my clothes and I can see the snap-twitch of Ina Macaukey’s fingers out
the corner of my eye. Her dark old face hung over her embroidery.

‘Who’s the boy that lives next door?’ she asks.

‘Benny. Benny Martin.’