Blackstoke Read online

  ‘Hello Mr Fenchurch,’ said Grace. ‘Is everything okay?’

  ‘No, it bloody well isn’t,’ said Quint, clearly struggling to keep his ire in check. His patchy white hair was all over the place, and he looked like he’d got dressed in a heartbeat. Behind him, loitering at the end of the drive, hovered Wendy in a dressing gown of her own.

  ‘What’s happened?’ asked Grace, confused.

  ‘That bloody dog of yours.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’s relieved himself on my front lawn overnight, that’s what.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘A shit. A big dirty shit. Right on the grass.’

  ‘No, I mean I don’t understand. Dewey was in with me all night, and when he needs to do his business, he goes in my back garden and my back garden alone, then I immediately dispose of it. And he hasn’t been out of my sight since yesterday evening.’

  ‘Oh, give over. You expect me to believe that?’

  ‘Yes, I do, considering that’s precisely what I’ve just told you, and it’s the truth. Mr Fenchurch, if there is a problem with your lawn, it isn’t because of my dog.’

  Quint wasn’t finished, and threw his hands to his hips and jutted his paunch out at her. ‘Well, what do you suppose happened then? An owl did it, passing overhead? Perhaps that little baby next door? No, this was a big fat shit. And what do I know that is big enough to do something like that, and who we already know likes to do his business in gardens, by your own admission?’

  Grace went into full lawyer mode, as if ready to defend her client, in this case Dewey the wolfhound, to the hilt.

  ‘Mr Fenchurch, you have absolutely no evidence aside from your own assertions that my dog is responsible for what happened. I don’t even need to ask whether you saw Dewey do it because you’ve already betrayed the fact that you didn’t. You are acting out of wild assumption, and I urge you not to. I have tried to be as considerate as possible with the requirements of my dog, who I know to be of considerable size. I know that having such an animal in their midst might not be everyone’s cup of tea. But I have been as respectful and cordial as I can. I would not allow such a thing as you’re suggesting to happen, and I know that on this occasion it didn’t.’

  Quint squinted at her. ‘Are you calling me a liar, missy?’

  ‘No, I am suggesting you are mistaken. And there is never any necessity for sexist patronisation. Now please, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Who’s going to clean it up?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue, Mr Fenchurch. Goodbye,’ she said, closing the door, chalking the win up in her head, but simultaneously sad that the erstwhile kindly neighbours had turned on her without a moment’s notice. Maybe moving here hadn’t been such a good idea, she thought, before heading back to bed and the poor, oblivious accused.

  13

  ‘Come in, boys,’ said Peter, stifling the surprise and confusion in his voice, mangling it back down with the sickly aftertaste of too much wine some twelve hours ago. The twins walked into the house without a word, and dropped immediately to undo their shoelaces.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he said. The boys didn’t listen, and continued detangling the laces on their identical school shoes. They were in full school regalia—shirts, ties tied far too short, trousers slightly too baggy, blazers with sticky sleeves, and identical record bags slung over their shoulders. Their reddish hair was identically parted into a lopsided McDonald’s M.

  Peter couldn’t tell them apart if his life depended on it.

  ‘The boys are here,’ he shouted upstairs, and in immediate answer, Jacob appeared around the corner to the kitchen holding a piece of part-inhaled toast, a swipe of butter on his cheek.

  ‘Umm, hi,’ he said, still chewing. Alice’s head appeared over the bannister, her hair half-straightened. The twins looked straight up the stairs at her, framed in light from the skylight high over the stairs.

  She ducked her head back immediately, and Peter caught her mutter ‘Oh, Christ…’. He should have really been shocked at her attitude, and how grown up she’d just sounded, but he couldn’t avoid finding her horror funny. They were indeed weird boys, he thought, and noted that he wouldn’t like to be caught half-dressed by them either.

  ‘Go on in lads, fix yourself some toast if you’d like,’ Peter said, ushering the besocked boys towards Jacob and the kitchen, but they were still transfixed by the spot on the bannister where Alice had disappeared.

  Their sudden fixation unnerved Peter, tickling something high in the back of his head. Protection, anger, discomfort, all on a small scale. These urchins were eyeing up his little girl after all, but then he remembered that Alice wasn’t so little anymore, and, given the way she’d looked at them last night, he didn’t really have anything to fear from these two misfits, save for a little schoolboy infatuation. It could even be regarded as sweet, so he cast his fears aside.

  ‘Chop chop,’ he said jovially, and the boys did just that.

  ‘Do you want to come and meet LeBron?’ Jacob asked. ‘I have to feed him.’

  The boys followed Jacob back through the house, as Peter watched with curiosity. The twins seemed to ghost through as if they were on autopilot, content to be guided by decisions made in advance for them. Apart from the shoes, which they were adamant about.

  Peter gravitated towards the living room window, and peered through the wooden Venetian blinds, out at the rear patio. The twins dropped to their knees in front of the hutch, watching Jacob open the small side door and put three handfuls of flaky-looking feed in the bowl on the outside of the mesh. LeBron, a black and white guinea pig, watched, shuffling his nose and whiskers. He was named after LeBron James during Jacob’s long-forgotten basketball phase a couple of years ago. The guinea pig’s hair was so straight and long, he could be an elegant wig with eyes, only in a bizarre cow-hide pattern.

  The twins watched with a fervour, an intensity that seemed unbefitting of lowly LeBron. It was as if they had never seen a guinea pig before, and regarded his sitting in his own shit and occasionally nibbling on it a sight worthy of deification.

  ‘They are extremely weird, Dad,’ said Alice quietly into Peter’s ear, having suddenly appeared next to him. ‘They freak me out.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Peter, turning to note that her hair was now finished. ‘I take it you guys agreed to go to the school bus stop together this morning?’

  ‘We absolutely did not,’ she replied, adjusting her own uniform. ‘I want to make an impression on my first day, but going with those two isn’t exactly the impression I was hoping for.’

  Peter had forgotten that it was the kids’ first day at a new school, and felt more than a little guilty. The move was big news for all of them, not just him.

  ‘How do you feel about it?’ he asked, while watching Jacob try to hand LeBron to the twins to be petted, but they refused to take him, preferring to ogle the rodent instead.

  ‘Alright, I suppose. In all the films the mysterious girl always joins the class midway through the school year. It feels as close as my life will ever get to a movie.’

  ‘I don’t know whether that’s a good or a bad thing,’ he replied.

  She buttoned her blazer, and flicked her hair out from behind the lapels. ‘I’m not sure either. I’m sure I’ll know soon enough. Do you mind if I slip out early? I think Jake’s got this.’

  Peter looked out at the boys again, as Jacob seemed to be giving the twins an in-depth lesson into what goes into making the perfect sawdust-based bedding. Then he remembered the way those boys looked up at his daughter moments earlier, and felt a swell of protection again. This morning was the first time he had properly sensed it, and it scared him a bit.

  ‘Sure, sweetheart. Your secret’s safe with me.’

  ‘Thanks Dad,’ she said, before pecking him on the cheek and marching to the front door, leaving him to watch the peculiar scene through the glass beyond. Peter couldn’t help but flush with pride.

  The
move was working.

  14

  The house was empty for the first time since they’d moved in. Pam stood at the top of the stairs, embracing the glacial quiet, letting the fervour of the weekend dissolve. The kids were at school. Peter had taken the morning off and built some flatpack metal shelves for the garage—his self-proclaimed domain—before going to the office for the afternoon. So Pam had the brand new house all to herself.

  It felt strange to be the first ever occupants of a property. Everywhere she had ever lived had already carried someone else’s history before her arrival. It gave places a comforting feel, like the houses possessed more experience, were older and could mother them. Now, it was completely different.

  There was no history here. At all. It was neutral, unblemished in neither a positive or negative light. Everything the house would witness was forward from this point, never backwards. Pam found it quite daunting.

  She floated down the stairs, her ankle-socked feet silent. At the bottom she glanced into the living room, seeing the new furniture arranged in a formation yet to be confirmed. It looked okay, good for both viewing the big screen TV and facilitating conversation when hosting.

  A shadow crossed the far window, nothing more than a waft of darkness, right to left, causing her to start. She took a step closer, emboldened by the daylight and the fact she knew the back door was locked (she’d checked it after Peter had left), and saw LeBron in his cage, running in tight circles around his hutch as he always did. He was only exercising, her unease dissipating with a smile. It had to be quite the change for him too.

  She passed into the kitchen, and surveyed her new domestic domain. It was a walnut-clad, culinary behemoth, black metal appliances tastefully ordaining the warm wood. A centre island stood monumental in the middle, with a near-ornate chopping board at one end. She hadn’t cooked a feast there yet, but she would, in time—although at the moment it still looked sparse, unwelcoming. Sparkling, but with little sub-surface quality to write home about, as if lifted straight from the showroom and dropped by a crane into the hub of the house. It would take some getting used to as well—yet another thing to add to the growing list of assimilatory tasks.

  She strode to the smart looking espresso machine, which Peter had ordered despite never having had an espresso. She had always seen espresso as the pep of the well-to-do, reasoning you didn’t often catch the homeless bumming change for a ‘cup of espresso’. She herself liked the taste of coffee, and was game to give it a try. There were still a hundred and one things to do in the house, but there was nothing like the new and partially exciting, so she decided to have one. The complicated looking machine—all tubes, filters, spouts, buttons and beepers—stood by the sink and, as she got there, she glanced out of the window.

  A curious sight, further down the street, caught her eye. It was Quint Fenchurch, the fellow who had behaved so strangely the night before. He was in the final touches of unravelling a wire fence around the perimeter of his front lawn, pacing out yards with long strides, then tying it to narrow green fence poles he must have already erected. The fence was a couple of feet high, with dark green zigzags top to bottom along its length.

  It looked a bit over the top, and more than a bit unsightly. It was on his property, she remembered, so he could do whatever the hell he liked—but that didn’t necessarily make it the most considerate of things to do. He put the last post in, firmly surrounding his front lawn in what now looked like chicken wire.

  Pam wondered what prompted this, and why he was going to such measures. Quint seemed to fix something to the last fence post, and walked back to his house, following some coil from the fence to the porch, where he picked up a black box.

  No way, Pam thought.

  Quint fiddled with the box, and walked back to the fence. He bent over, as if to listen to it. He stood again, before surveying it. Pam was transfixed as he repeated the ritual, returning to the house to mess with the box, before coming back to listen to the fence again. He seemed dissatisfied, and Pam watched in horror as he reached out to the fence with his hand.

  Quint’s body pitched backwards into the air, his back spasming arrow straight, his head thrown skyward, and he landed in a heap on his lawn. Pam was shocked herself, but suddenly realised that tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she was convulsing with laughter. Quint shook his hands furiously, rubbing them together, before crawling to his feet.

  Pam composed herself, and reminded herself to tell the children when they got home, under no circumstances to go near the Fenchurch house. As funny as that was, she didn’t want to see that happen to one of her own—apart from Peter maybe if he was in a particularly dour mood. That would be hilarious, she thought.

  15

  As soon as five o’clock hit, the West house was overrun by visitors. Overrun was perhaps an overstatement, but that was certainly how Peter felt, as he waded through the still-packed shopping bags in the new pantry trying to find a bottle of wine comparable to or better than last night’s gifts. He worried that he’d set the bar too high, because now all he could find were a few bottles of four quid sparkling pink and a couple of dusty bottles of red which could have been nice once, had they not been left to rack and ruin.

  Peter brought the pink fizz back into the kitchen, hoping to holy hell that it didn’t offend his guests, David and Christian, who had appeared with a gift of their own, to welcome the West family to the neighbourhood—a cellophane wrapped cheeseboard, complete with sample cheeses and little twirly knife thingies to slice them with. Peter thought it was nice but fiddly. Bells, whistles and little else, but he appreciated the gesture.

  ‘I’m afraid we are still so disorganised that all we have in are some cheap bottles of rose,’ Peter said, holding the bottles of his embarrassment aloft. ‘And please don’t mistake the bottles of pink as a cheap pop or anything.’

  ‘Oh dear, Peter,’ Pam said with an exaggerated sigh, ‘cheap pop is exactly what they are.’

  David and Christian laughed and Peter cracked a smile, relaxing. ‘I can see we are going to have a bit of fun us lot,’ Christian said, chuckling Olivia back and to.

  ‘Yes, if you can discount the fact that I’m turning into a present-day Basil Fawlty,’ replied Peter, as he shoved two of the bottles in the freezer, and fetched glasses for the contents of the third.

  ‘What is it you do Peter?’ asked David.

  ‘PR, I’m afraid. I’ve got two weeks off for the move—took some holiday time early, but I’ve still ended up going in. Pam was a teacher.’

  ‘Now I’m the dutiful, house-bound cave-wife,’ she interjected, to Peter’s chagrin.

  ‘You miss it?’ asked David.

  ‘Yes, but two kids of my own is full time enough. And you guys are…?’

  ‘Sales and advertising,’ David said, thumbing towards himself then Christian respectively. ‘Hum drum. Buy this, wear that, eat this, do that.’

  ‘Yeah, aside from you Pam, the rest of us are proper drones for the corporate capitalist machine,’ says Christian.

  That irked Peter a little, who had never seen himself that way, but he couldn’t shake the truth in it, even though David and Christian seemed to have begrudgingly made their bed with it.

  Alice appeared, changed from her uniform back into what was fast becoming her other one—those Superdry pants and a jumper. ‘Hello,’ she said as she walked into the kitchen. ‘What’s for tea, mum?’

  Pam looked stumped, and glanced at David. ‘Ah, you see what I mean about this being full time?’ Peter placed a glass of rose in front of David, who raised it instantly in acknowledgement of Pam’s comment. ‘I hadn’t really thought. The last few days have been such a whirlwind, we’ve barely done any shopping at all.’

  ‘Haven’t we?’ asked Peter, his voice unmistakably barbed. He wondered what on earth he’d paid for in those bags back there.

  ‘Well, you’ve got cheese,’ said Christian, taking the lead.

  ‘For tea?’ replied Alice with a grimace.


  ‘Alice,’ admonished Pam.

  ‘She has a point,’ said Peter, sliding a glass of wine in front of Pam. Pam’s mouth hung slightly open, flabbergasted that he would have such a sly dig at her in front of the children, let alone their guests.

  The doorbell sprang to life, a shard of music that popped the cloying atmosphere in the kitchen.

  ‘Can you get it Alice?’ Peter asked, leaning against the counter. In truth, he felt bad—he should have kept his mouth shut, but… he couldn’t help it. He felt so railroaded, cajoled and forced into this move, and lavished so much money on kitting the house out, that the bubble of resentment in his throat kept growing ever stronger—and it prompted little barbs like the one he just made.

  Alice sighed, and marched to the door in a stompy motion so forced, clichéd and over the top it could be a stage-school improviser’s incarnation of teenage angst.

  ‘Sorry folks,’ said Peter. ‘It’s been a hell of a few days. We are all a bit tired and cranky.’

  ‘Hello, there,’ boomed a voice from the hall, with a grand imposing primness. Oh no, thought Peter.

  With a dramatic flourish, Fletcher Adams swanned into the kitchen. He looked charged and febrile, and very self-important. ‘You’re all here, it seems,’ he said. ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘Hi Fletcher,’ Pam said, while Peter reached for another wine glass. David and Christian got up to shake hands.

  ‘Yes, so good to see you both,’ says Fletcher, as if he was suddenly the host. Peter poured wine and handed it over, which Fletcher accepted without a word of gratitude. ‘Now, neighbourhood watch,’ he said.

  ‘What about it?’ said Peter, looking at Pam for support. He wanted to catch her eye, to give her a look to say he was sorry, but she pointedly made no eye contact. Peter knew she was hurt, and he cursed himself.

  ‘I’ll lead it obviously,’ said Fletcher.