The Whiskerly Sisters (8 page)

Inspired, she had bought a cheap tape recorder and had spent a very unpleasant afternoon taping the Hounds of the Baskervilles over the fence. Every time she stepped onto the patio, the totally inharmonious barbershop quartet of the canine world would start and continue for at least twenty minutes. She spent the next evening taping the incessant squawk of the parrot through the wall of her lounge and part of the following day capturing the noise of the children in the garden, accompanied by the unpleasant whine of the mother nagging at them through the French windows. When she had finished her discordant recording, she took it next door and pressed play, but thugjeans turned it off after five minutes, declaring it was a set up and he didn’t need to hear anymore. He then shut the door firmly in her face.

Charley then spent several fruitless hours researching noise pollution on the net. It seemed there was little she could do other than waste her valuable savings on an endless stream of solicitor’s letters, which ultimately would prove useless, toothless and spineless and, since Charley simply refused to waste her precious money firing blanks, she decided to close down that avenue. She had then spoken at length to a very nice man from the Environmental Health Agency, who had advised her to keep a diary of the noise. He told her that someone from his department would visit the house in question to monitor the noise level after which they would get back to her. That had been weeks ago. No one had been in touch, nothing had changed and, when she had tried to follow it up, she was asked to quote her reference number and, as she didn’t have one, she was told she would need to start again.

Undeterred, Charley turned her attention to drawing up a petition and canvassing her neighbours. She spoke to everyone in the cul-de-sac and also those in the immediate vicinity. She was relieved to find that, whilst she bore the brunt of the situation, everyone was suffering varying degrees of aggravation and delighted that someone was finally prepared to tackle the problem. One woman, whose garden backed on to theirs, told her that she had already been round several times to ask them to keep the noise down. The constant barking of the dogs in the afternoon was keeping her six-month old daughter awake and fretful. Uncharacteristically, Charley felt sorrier for her than she did for herself and reached out a tentative finger to stroke the grizzling child’s wet cheek. The new mother, pale with exhaustion, managed a thin smile and said she hoped this would do the trick. When she felt she had collected enough signatures, she took the document next door. The DGs accepted the petition with good grace, refused her offer of a resolution meeting, closed the door politely and left Charley fuming with impotence in the porch.

The constant disturbance had already frayed her nerves and was now beginning to depress her. She had done everything she could think of to deal with the fuckwits next door, barring harming anything and she had now begun regularly fantasizing about poisoned meat and slow strangulation. Talking to the airhead wife had been a waste of time; the husband had shown himself to be a chav in YSL.

Charlie felt exhausted, frustrated and, worst of all, she was beginning to feel defeated. Weeks of sleepless nights were beginning to show in the dark circles under her eyes and the pinched set to her mouth. Charlie loathed looking anything less than perfect. She had lost her appetite, her sex drive and she was struggling to maintain her composure. She felt that her normally high standards were dropping. It seemed to her that her life was spiralling alarmingly out of control. Worst of all, she was beginning to believe there was nothing she could do to change the situation. The ingrates next door rose effortlessly above her and, if anything, had seemed to increase their volume. Smug in the conviction that she was Hitler in a thong, that the entire neighbourhood were Fascists and there was nothing anybody could do to stop them, the DGs enjoyed being the clear winners.

Charley found her only relief was at the gym, taking her frustration out on her class, working herself and her group into a near stupor in the hope of relieving the itch of her irritation. Charley would have tried putting her house on the market, but with the recession in full swing, nothing was selling and anyway who would want to buy a house next door to Hell’s Zoo?

Returning from class one night, feeling morose at the thought of another barrage of noise, Charley drove into the garage, switched off the engine, and exited the car, savagely slamming the garage doors behind her to give the ingrates next door a taste of their own medicine. She paused on the driveway, watching the pale moon flit between the scudding primrose tinted clouds and inhaled the welcome smell of the lavender that was just beginning to bloom in her front garden. She stood quite still for a few moments, simply enjoying the tranquillity of a late spring evening.

Charley stirred. She hesitated. Something was different but she couldn’t work out what it was. Taking another lungful of air, she deliberately relaxed her breathing whilst outwardly probing the landscape with her internal antennae.

Something was different. It was quiet. Impossible and yet there it was again, the sound of silence – really quite deafening.

“My God,” thought Charley. “They must have gone out.” She turned to face her neighbour’s house and saw that there were no cars on the driveway. For the first time since forever, the DG’s were not at home. Her face relaxed into a delighted grin and she broke into a little samba on the flagstones as her mood changed from one of defensive apprehension at the thought of the noise inevitably waiting for her to one of sunlit goodwill and peace toward all men on earth. Immediately she decided to go for a late night skinny dip in the Jacuzzi whilst listening to her favourite CD before settling down to watch the news and then off to bed. She would break open the Prosecco and relax in the tub – bubbles on bubbles. Perfect.

Fifteen minutes later found Charley relaxing in the hot tub, naked under the foam with a glass of chilled wine by her side; her head comfortably resting against the padded edge of the Jacuzzi and her eyes closed as she listened to her favourite band, Il Divo. Lost in her own wet world and idly fantasising about what she would do if she ever got any of the Italian trio alone, Charley failed to hear the subtle squeak of a patio door opening and the swish of a tail against glass. Seconds later, the gates of Hades swung open.

As Charley’s vivid imagination was enjoying unbuttoning the shirt of the darkly attractive Sebastièn, next door’s three cats streaked soundlessly over the fence and into her shrubbery for a little late night defecation. As Charley imagined herself whispering something provocative in the Signorno’s ear and anticipated his lips moving to meet hers, next door’s dogs, free at last from the confinement of the house, began their frenzied barking. Moments later the drill began its whirring, toneless drone. Lights came on in the houses surrounding hers as neighbouring dogs, roused from their slumber, began a howling reprise and children, suddenly robbed of sleep, began to cry in protest. Amidst all the cacophony, the sensual vision that was the topless divo dissolved in an instant as Charley was cruelly catapulted back to reality. Startled from her reverie, she opened her eyes in time to see the curtains in next door’s back bedroom twitch and, despite the furore around her, Charley swore she could hear the sound of suppressed giggling from above. From the corner of her eye, she noticed that the black and white one had perched itself on the edge of her patio table and was delicately licking its paws, confident of its absolute right to be in her garden.

The bastards. The absolute fucking bastards! They had set her up. They had set HER up and now they were laughing at her. Watching and laughing. How dare they? How fucking dare they? Who did they think they were? The arrogant, ignorant, sodding peasants.

Fuming, Charley hauled herself ferociously out of the Jacuzzi, barely managing to control the strong urge to unceremoniously shove the intruding cat off its precarious perch. Not bothering with her robe, she strode angrily towards the house, the water streaming down from her naked body to soak the tiles of the patio beneath her feet. She stepped into the house, slammed the garden door behind her, locking it with an angry twist of her wrist and leaving a puddle of frothy water in her wake.

“Enough already!” she fumed. This was too much. This was on purpose. This was untenable.”

Charley was not easily provoked, but, once roused, she was a formidable opponent. It was time to change tactics. Not bothering to dress herself, and with aggressive, staccato movements, she brewed herself a pot of her favourite fresh ground Jamaican Blue, quickly grabbed a piece of paper and a pen from the bureau in the hall, scraped a chair back from the kitchen table and sat down. She began with six main headings:

Who? What? When? Why? Where? Which?

Late into the night, she sat and thought and wrote and planned, for once, oblivious to the assault on her ears coming through the walls. Amazingly, it faded into the background as her lists grew and her plans began to take shape.

Whilst she still had not come up with any concrete answers by morning, the first brush strokes of a few potential new strategies were beginning to colour up in her mind. Satisfied at last, she rose from her seat to stretch. Cramp hit first, sending shards of pain up and down her leg muscles. Carefully, she stretched out her stiff limbs, shivering with cold. She looked down at her naked, white flesh and cursed herself for not putting on her robe. Yawning, she meandered down to the bathroom where she took a long, hot shower, towelling herself down briskly. She stood for a moment to watch the sun rise, then crawled under the duvet and snuggled down to sleep, smiling to herself.

It was time to turn up the heat. It was time to fight fire with fire. It was time to take the battle to the enemy.

W
ell, she’d done it!! Okay not her exactly. To be precise, Izza had done it for her. After several months of angst ridden dithering and several tentative false starts, Jax had finally agreed to join an internet dating site. Well let’s face it, she was too old to re-join the Youth Club and she felt it was somehow sad to sit alone in a pub reading a book in the hope that some erstwhile knight in shining armour might possibly ride by and offer to buy her a drink. She wasn’t the least bit interested in attending evening classes in Italian cookery or creative writing and there was no way on the planet that she would go to a singles club. So how else was she going to find a man? Ruthlessly, Izza had summed up the situation. Slam dunk!

DesperDates was the very thing, her daughter had assured her, expertly writing her profile. Admittedly, she’d had a brilliant afternoon with several bottles of wine, and several of the girl pals, during which time she was encouraged to preen, parade and pose in a variety of outfits while Fresna clicked away with her new digital camera.

“Try to relax, you’ve a tendency to hunch those sexy shoulders,” she’d advised from behind the lens.

“Suck your stomach in and stick your tits out,” ordered Celia, leaning on the dressing table and draining the contents of yet another glass of wine. “Christ Jax, not like that, you look like an overstuffed bouncy castle!”

“Shut up, Ceals,” growled Fresna. “You’re not helping.”

“Focus,” commanded Charley, popping her head round from the behind the door to the en-suite where she had been grimacing at the stale contents of Jax’s make-up bag. “Just imagine what you’d like to do with the man of your dreams and work from there, just work from there.”

“Give me the dominatrix within, Jax, glare at the camera. You got to show the bastards who’s in control,” encouraged Fresna, moving the camera onto its end to try for a full length shot.

“Stop frowning, it makes you look ancient,” mumbled Izza, sitting cross-legged on her mother’s bed, head down, fixating on her mobile. Why hadn’t he called?

By the time Fresna smiled the satisfaction that signalled the shoot was over, Jax felt exhausted, but the best was yet to come. For another sixty hilarious minutes, the girls joined in, helping themselves to the contents of Jax’s wardrobes and pouting shamelessly at the camera until each one of them had at least one passable photograph to take home in memory of a fabulous afternoon. True, Jax had been left with the shambles of her bedroom where it seemed the entire contents of her closets had been spilled in crumpled polycotton ton profusion all over the floor. Jax grimaced. Did she really own that much beige?

Shutting the door firmly on the bombsite that was now her boudoir, the girls spent the evening and several more bottles of wine arguing, debating and giggling over the merits and demerits of the assorted photographs saved on Fresna’s Nikon until consensus held sway and Izza quickly posted the best four images of Jax on the net before she could change her mind. She was out there.

There was a close up of head and shoulders to show off Jax’s lovely green eyes; there was a saucy shot of her in Tiff’s red basque top and what Jax considered to be a too short, short skirt. The third shot offered a full length picture of her in the garden, secateurs in hand, seeming to nonchalantly prune her roses and the fourth showed her walking Celia’s dog in the local park. A variety of photographs for the discerning e-gentlemen at the other end of the ether to give them at least a remote e-idea of what they might be e-getting.