taken off my gloves to fiddle with my key, and my fingers were numb with cold. I was curious to meet her, but I was keener to get into my house.
She didn’t ask me any questions, whether I lived alone or in a harem. Equally, she showed no interest in my property, which she might have done, as it is the mirror image of hers, or at least it was, before their ‘improvements’. She didn’t even glance up at it. At the time I interpreted this as self-absorption, but I know now it was simply that she accepts ‘difference’ without judgement. Instead she told me they’d decided belatedly to sand the living-room floor, and the constant noise was driving her ‘literally insane’.
‘Tell me about it,’ is what I didn’t say.
And then she hoisted her arm off my gate and said something about having to move the car before that cunt came back.
‘Mind my French,’ she said.
When her solicitor asked us the other day when we had first met it became apparent Ailsa had completely forgotten this encounter. She planted the beginning of our friendship a few days later – at the meeting about the trees when I was more obviously of use to her. So when I look back on this, I try to imagine it’s as if I am watching her without her knowing, an objective witness, a jury member say, who doesn’t know her history. I suppose it is obvious to say that if you can judge a person by the way they talk to waiters, a person can be measured even more accurately by their behaviour towards a traffic warden. I don’t drive but I’ve noticed how parking tickets tend to provoke disproportionate anger, a strong feeling of abused entitlement, in their recipients. I think of Ailsa as empathetic, as one of the least judgemental people I’ve ever met; and yet her reaction to Nathan was complicated. I think it wasn’t just the fine that got to her, but his resistance to her charms. Later I would learn how, as an only child, she felt responsible for maintaining the equilibrium at home; it was her own cheerfulness, her ‘upness’ that kept her parents together. On this occasion, her seductive powers failed. And yet how hard she tried to repress her panic – the almost perfect fusion of sweetness and sarcasm in her ‘have a fucking nice day’. And then her decision to sweep across and talk to me; her pointless lingering despite the cold, the havoc in the road, the furiously beeping bus. Was it kindness? I like to think it was. Or was it perhaps my cool that pulled her in? She had sensed my disapproval and wanted to win me over. Why? A frantic desire to be liked, or a woman in desperate need of allies?
As for her use of ‘cunt’ (from the Middle English: of German origin, related to Norwegian and Swedish dialect kunta and Middle Low German, Middle Dutch and Danish dialect kunte)? Not a word one should usually deploy without being sure of one’s audience. You could think of it as a hand-grenade or the kind of smoke-releasing canisters police hurl into a building before entering. Do your worst and see who’s left. But equally it could have been a distress flare, fired from a lifeboat; a scream, if you like, for help.
I was to have no contact with my new neighbours for a week or so. Over that period, they had a wood-burning stove installed, submitted a planning application for a ‘driveway turntable’, which would allow them ‘to enter and leave their property in a forward gear’, and signed up to Mindful Chef, a weekly healthy food delivery service. They also spent a Saturday night away, during which their fourteen-year-old, Melissa – or ‘Lissa’, as she was shriekingly referred to – entertained a few friends, a couple of whom left empty beer cans and a discarded box of fried chicken in my front garden. Over that time, someone inside their property also disposed of two damaged picture frames from Ikea and a large red Henry vacuum with a broken nozzle.
It was Tuesday late afternoon when I came up against them again. I was working at my desk in the front room. The traffic is heavy at that time of day, and I was listening to Classic FM through my noise-cancelling headphones. I had just received a new batch of words – anger and angst and anguish; I remember this clearly –