Neighbour

by Simon von Wolkenstein

“It should fit” she said. At least she would have if she’d been with me but I’d left my wife at home while I broke into my neighbour’s house. I was trying to squeeze one of her hairpins through the lock at the back of Sue’s house when it suddenly snapped the catch and I stood in the kitchen.

To backtrack.

I don’t normally invade other people’s homes but this was no normal set of circumstances. For the last six years we’d been at a stand-off, Sue and I. From my Loungeroom window I could see through to her study. Her house sat higher than mine so all I could see was the study ceiling, the lamp on her desk, and her head as she sat there night after night — doing something. I knew she wasn’t reading because her activities involved too much movement. Not jumping up and down of course but side to side organising movements of the type that led one to wonder the reason behind it all.

It’s not like I hadn’t been a good neighbour, in the early years I’d often try and find out what she did for a living, “Surely you must have a hobby?” I’d ask. I’d tried many lines of questioning but it seemed to me that over the years she had begun to avoid me more than at first. She was very private. After so long a time I knew only that she had a white car and that she lived next door to me. And also that she did something important everynight. Now I knew it was important because I was so interested in it. I’m not usually the type to be bothered by trivial matters.

It was half two in the morning as I stood in her kitchen. My wife was asleep and Sue was asleep. Two years previously I had attached a microphone on a water pipe near Sue’s bedroom to ascertain her movements in readiness for tonight’s adventure. I had charted her nocturnal sleep patterns and knew that she would now be in the middle of a deep sleep. In fact from the kitchen I could hear the muffled ticking of her bedroom clock coming down the hall.

I edged forward quietly.

When we first moved in I had assumed that she’d been playing patience, but the expressions on her face were so judgemental that I soon realised that she must have been examining something. I imagined a forensic pathologist taking home unsolved cases each night but her secrecy was such that I soon made the leap to war crimes. Somehow she was conducting work for the United Nations in Indonesia. She did have a habit of ordering Indonesian home delivery and these two facts fitted together so well that I was startled to find her desk empty when I finally reached it in the darkness. I felt around with my hands and found nothing. The drawers were empty and the bin beneath was empty. Then I noticed a piece of chalk beside the desklamp. I picked it up and smelt it but it smelt only of chalk. I was placing it back carefully when I brushed the lamp and turned it on. I froze, but the house didn’t stir. I breathed again. As I went to turn it off my eye caught some chalk scribbling on the desk itself.

Through the haze of my rising blood pressure I read the question, “Where is your wife?”