The People Next Door (8 page)

The following evening, Kieran grilled a pork chop, boiled some baby sweetcorn and sugarsnap peas and gently stewed a chopped Bramley apple.

Dan fried two eggs, opened a tin of beans and made a mug of tea. Kieran drank water.

The tantalising smell of perfectly cooked pork wafted around the kitchen. Dan needed a distraction. ‘Are your parents still alive?’ Might as well find out a bit about the man he’d taken into his house.

‘Both gone.’ Kieran cut into his chop and added a helping of apple sauce. ‘Father died of TB when he was young, I don’t remember him at all, and Mother got a stroke that killed her eventually. I looked after her as long as I could, but I had to put her in a home at the end.’

‘You were an only child?’

‘I was. Father died before they had a chance to have any more, and Mother never remarried.’

The night after that, Kieran told Dan he’d sold the family home to finance the nursing home fees for his mother. ‘I didn’t need a big house to myself. Took a lease on a little flat above a hardware shop. It hardly felt like a move – I was less than a mile from the house. Mother only lasted two years in the home, though.’

Dan tried hard to keep his eyes off the plump chicken breast on Kieran’s plate. The golden wedges
of potato, the carrot batons shiny with butter. ‘You never bought another house after she died?’ He lifted his tuna and onion sandwich. A blob of salad cream slid out and plopped onto the table.

Kieran shook his head. ‘I could have, but … I don’t know, I’d got used to the flat by then, it suited me fine. Although I did miss a garden – it’s nice to have it here.’ He took a sip of water. ‘I find something appealing about not being tied to a property. I like having my options open.’

He cut into the chicken. Dan’s eyes flicked down to the succulent flesh.

Also, I figured that since I’ve got no dependants, what was the point of leaving anything behind me? I’d have no one to leave it to.’

While that made perfect sense to Dan, he found the notion unsettling. Would he be thinking like that in twenty years’ time? Would he decide to sell this house at some stage, find a little flat to rent and live off the money because there was no one to leave anything to when he died? He scooped up the salad cream blob and transferred it to his plate.

Kieran eyed the half-eaten sandwich. ‘I’m thinking of doing a fish pie tomorrow night, but it’s as easy to do it for two as for one. Would you be bothered at all?’

Dan did his best to look only mildly interested. ‘That sounds good, as long as you let me get the ingredients. What would you need?’

From then on, Kieran had produced most of the evening meals and Dan kept the fridge stocked. Dan didn’t offer to cook and Kieran didn’t suggest it.
After dinner Dan did the washing up and Kieran went out to the patio to smoke his one cigar of the day. It was the perfect arrangement.

Over the course of a few more dinner conversations – the only time, really, that they were together – it emerged that Kieran had worked as a reporter for years in various parts of the country. ‘I wrote for a number of different provincial papers, everything from obits to sports results. I moved around a fair bit.’

‘But you grew up in Castlebar.’

‘That’s right, and Mother still lived there, so I used to go home as often as I could to keep her company. And when she got the stroke, I gave up the job I had then, which was in Athlone, and moved back to Castlebar.’ Kieran shook a wok of chopped vegetables, sprinkled soy sauce in, and everything sizzled loudly.

‘Back to the home place.’ Dan was sitting at the table, a can of beer in his hand. Picasso was sprawled on the floor in a square of sunlight.

‘That’s right. Mother needed someone with her and I didn’t like the idea of paying a stranger to do it.’

‘So you got another job.’

‘Well, I did and I didn’t. As long as I was making a move, I decided to try my hand at being my own boss. I made contact with the publications I’d worked for in the past and offered my services as a freelance contributor. I told them I’d do anything as long as I could work from home – review books, write a cookery or gardening slot, make up crosswords, that kind of thing.’ He added strips of beef to the wok and splashed in more soy.

The salty, savoury smell wafted around the kitchen. Dan’s stomach rumbled loudly in response. He drained what was left in the can.

Kieran shook the wok again. ‘So that’s what I’m still doing. I write a cookery column for one and review books for a few others, and in the summer I do the occasional gardening feature.’

Book reviewer – that would explain the scatter of paperbacks in the sitting room, the bundle perched on the side of the bath, the collection on top of the fridge.

Another evening, Dan took cutlery from a drawer, filled a jug with water. ‘You said your mother died eight years ago.’

Kieran was whisking a sauce for their roast lamb. ‘Right. Eight years in August.’

‘So … you were ten years in the flat altogether?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What made you move?’ Dan took two glasses from a shelf. And why did you choose this place?’

Kieran’s story intrigued him, as much for what wasn’t being said as for what was. There had been no mention of his ever being married or attached to anyone. And what had prompted his move to Belford, eighty miles from Castlebar? His work hadn’t changed. He hadn’t mentioned friends or family here.

Kieran shrugged and stirred the sauce. His back was to Dan. Ah, it was just time for a change, I don’t know. And why Belford … no idea, it could have been anywhere.’ He lowered the heat under the broccoli and bent to take the lamb from the oven.

And that was it. Not very informative, but Dan could hardly demand a fuller explanation.

Perhaps inevitably, Dan was becoming more interested in food. In the supermarket he picked up a loaf of bread called ‘garlic and rosemary foccaccia’ and brought it home. The crust was hard, but inside it was the colour of avocado, soft and holey as a sponge, and it tasted interesting. He explored the salad section and came home with radicchio and Chinese leaves, leaving the butterhead lettuce alone. For the first time in his life he bought potted mussels and goat’s cheese.

And then, one night, it was Kieran’s turn to ask the questions. He sprinkled salt on a baked potato and said, ‘I’m guessing you haven’t always lived on your own.’

Dan had assumed it would come up eventually. ‘No. My marriage broke up a couple of months ago.’

Kieran nodded. ‘Sorry to hear that. Must have been tough.’

‘Yeah.’ Dan dug his fork into the floury potato. ‘We were married two years.’

‘Right.’

‘Picasso is really her cat. She left him here.’

‘I see.’ Kieran looked at the cat, perched in his usual chair. ‘I gathered you’re not big on cats.’

Dan had to smile at that. ‘Not really.’ After a while, he said, ‘It was my wife who persuaded me to go freelance. Up until we met I was working for a publisher, earning about two-thirds of what I do now.’ He’d already told Kieran about the proofreading and copy-editing.

‘And you have the office in town.’

‘Yeah – gets me out of the house.’ Although calling it an office was pushing it. ‘Cubicle’ would have been more apt, or even ‘broom cupboard’.

Every weekday morning, Dan left the house around nine and walked the short distance through Miller’s Lane to the main street. He turned left at Kennedy’s Shoe Repairs and Key Cutting, passed Clery’s newsagents, the Daisy Belle boutique, Sullivan’s pub and the Lotus Blossom restaurant. Then, less than seven minutes after leaving his house, he opened a green door and climbed two and a half flights of stairs, past the homeopath and the beauty therapist on the first floor, past the little toilet on the next half-landing, past the accountant on the second floor, past the point where the serviceable brown stair carpet ended, till all that lay ahead of him was an unpainted plywood door.

His office was a lot smaller than his bathroom at home, with one small window that barely allowed enough daylight in, a fan heater that turned the room from freezing to tropical in under ten minutes, a table that just about held his laptop, a single chair and a phone line. It suited Dan perfectly.

In theory, he could have worked at home – all he really needed was a computer and internet access – but when a friend had mentioned the little room that was going for next to nothing above his girlfriend’s cousin’s homeopathy business, just about the time Dan was thinking of going freelance, the idea had appealed to him.

He liked the notion of going to the office like everyone else, and he was under no illusions about his lack of focus. So easy at home to wander into the kitchen for coffee, to while away half an hour over the hedge with a neighbour. The more he thought about it, the more he realised how much he needed an office.

Ali thought the idea was ridiculous. ‘You’re paying good money for this’ – she stretched out an arm and almost made contact with the opposite wall – ‘when you can work at home for nothing?’

Uncharacteristically, Dan had stood his ground. ‘It’s plenty big enough for what I need, and the weekly rent is less than I can earn in half a day.’

Ali was unimpressed. ‘That’s not the point.’

He put a hand to the back of her neck and squeezed gently. ‘I want to get out of the house, just like you.’

‘So go for a walk at lunchtime.’ But she didn’t pull away.

And I’ll get a lot more work done than if I was at home.’ He tapped the pads of his fingers along the top of her spine. ‘I’ll make sure I’m home before you in the evening. I’ll pretend I was there all day.’

Ali shared rooms with two other solicitors in Charleton, about thirty-five miles from Belford. Her commute, on a good day, was forty minutes each way. Considering that she rarely left work before six in the evening, Dan felt quite safe in making this promise.

‘It’s still money down the drain.’ She wasn’t happy. ‘I suppose you’ve got to sign some kind of a lease so you’ll be stuck with paying for this, even when you discover I’m right.’

Dan kneaded the flesh of her neck quite hard. ‘There’s no lease – I didn’t have to sign anything.’

No need to mention the three months’ rent he’d paid upfront. She hadn’t asked about that.

‘Well …’ Her head dropped forward, yielding to his hands. ‘I suppose if you must

He put his mouth to the side of her neck and bit. She tasted of peanuts. He spoke against her skin. ‘C’mon, I’ll buy you dinner. Chinese or Indian?’

After Ali had walked out on him, the office was even more of a haven for Dan. It was where he went to escape the reminders – the overmantel mirror she’d found at a car boot sale that only needed a touch-up to the gilt frame. The picture she’d given him for his last birthday. The rug they’d brought back from their honeymoon in Turkey. Her cat, Picasso.

Everywhere he looked in the house, there was something to bring her into his head.

In his office, which Ali had avoided after that first visit, there was nothing to torture him. No pictures, no mirrors, no rugs on the worn wooden boards. He’d bought the heater when the air had sharpened last autumn.

The beauty therapist downstairs was about fifty, with severely cut pale brown hair and clothes that floated after her when she walked. She nodded solemnly whenever she and Dan came face to face on the stairs. She smelled of baby powder.

The homeopath, Thomas, was less aloof. He and Dan had gone for a pint a few times when they happened to be leaving together. Thomas was in his
late fifties, divorced a number of years ago and sharing a house with his older, widowed brother.

‘We have our own habits, we don’t always see eye to eye,’ he told Dan, ‘but, by and large, I have to say it’s a lot less hassle than living with a woman.’

And so far, after nearly three weeks of sharing his house with another man, Dan had to agree. Kieran didn’t complain if Dan left a damp towel on the bathroom floor, if Dan’s socks didn’t always make it to the laundry basket. He never objected to feet on the coffee table. A few crumbs on the worktop didn’t bother him, or a scrap of marmalade in the butter dish or a kitchen floor left unswept for more than a day.

It wasn’t perfect, of course. Kieran was an insomniac, up and down the stairs at all hours, sometimes turning on the telly in the middle of the night so the muffled sound floated up to Dan, directly overhead.

And Kieran broke things. In the few weeks he’d been there, he’d exploded the kettle by plugging it in empty. He’d dropped one of the six crystal tumblers that Dan’s parents had given him and Ali last Christmas. He’d snapped off one of the washing machine knobs so now they had to use a screwdriver to change the settings. He’d somehow managed to crack the wooden toilet seat (Dan didn’t ask), forcing them to sit sideways or risk the excruciating sting of a trapped thigh. He’d broken his key twice in the front door lock and wrenched a socket from the wall when he was pulling out his electric toothbrush charger.

He was always most apologetic when any of these
incidents occurred, always made every attempt to repair or replace any casualties. To tell the truth, none of them really bothered Dan. What did a broken kettle matter when water boiled just as easily in a saucepan? So what if you had to position yourself a little more cautiously on the toilet seat? What was the loss of one glass when they had five left between two of them? Who cared about a broken washing machine knob? It wasn’t as if either of them used it that often.

On balance, Kieran’s arrival had been a good thing – particularly his arrival into the kitchen. And he was always pleasant company. He didn’t try to talk during the news or sulk when
Match of the Day
came on, and he replaced toilet rolls and bleach, often before Dan realised they’d been running low.

And every so often he played the most beautiful music, standing between the two apple trees at the bottom of Dan’s garden.

The first time Dan heard it, the evening after Kieran had moved in, he assumed his new tenant had the radio on upstairs or was playing a CD. He lowered his book and listened. The music wafted in through the open sitting room window behind him; Kieran must have his bedroom window open too.