Read by Stephen Wedd
Bob Bradbury from next door was sitting in the swing seat on our porch, rocking himself back and forth like a man possessed.
"If I hadn't known how to make French toast none of this would have ever happened," he said, not for the first time. One of his broad, brogue-clad feet was planted squarely on the porch while the other pushed against the screen door. Staring and rocking, just staring and rocking; so that the whole seat complained with a creak and a whine and I felt the boards beneath us rock like a boat. He was beginning to annoy me.
"No Siree, I wouldn't be here now drinking this fine Scotch whiskey of yours, when by rights," he looked up at me on the word 'rights' his eyes blazing with injustice, "I should be half way round the world sipping Pina Coladas and lying in a hammock."
Bob gazed off at some invisible paradise that I was not invited to. He was a man watching the movie of how his life should have been, knowing all along he'd written himself out of the lead role - but for what? I like to think that I'm a patient man, but Bob had been sitting there fidgeting like a dog with mange for a half-hour now. He was drinking my best Malt like it was Dr Pepper and keeping me up late on a work night, and still he rocked and stared and jabbered on about French toast. Something told me a woman was involved. What else would drive a middle-aged neighbour to appear at your door in the middle of the night and ask if he can talk to you man to man? Until tonight we'd been on strictly Thanksgiving pickles and Christmas card terms. Still, I wasn't all that sleepy, and discovering Bob's big secret might give me something amusing to tell Vera in the morning.
"Look Kenny, I'm really sorry about busting your ear like this. The thing is you and Vera have always been fine neighbours, and pretty soon there's gonna be some bad talk about me. So let's just say I wanted you to hear the facts from me first." Teased by the whiff of another man's misfortune I leaned forward on my chair.
"I'm all ears Bob. Pass your glass over and I'll freshen you up. Vera's in bed so we won't be disturbed." Bob took another sip and gave a sudden palsied shudder. At last he stilled himself, looked me straight in the eyes, and seemed ready to spill.
"OK, this is how it is. For the last thirty years now I've been saving for my retirement. Then this year I came into some property; it's not much but it's down in Cape Cod and with what I've saved I could live pretty well. Nice and quiet. Anyway I told the guys at the company and they were happy for me: even said I could leave before the three months notice I'm supposed to work, on the condition I do just one more tour of duty. A trade show in Baltimore." Bob took a swig like it could save his life and I stifled a yawn. He continued.
"My line of work is home appliances; refrigerators, cookers, washing machines, that sort of thing."
"Yes of course," I said, "You gave Vera a great deal on our Laundromat."
"Did I?" He was vague. "Good, good… anyway, those trade shows can get pretty dull, you tend to see the same old odd-ball faces in every half-assed town, but on the third day of this one I noticed a woman browsing around the displays. I remember thinking to myself; 'now that is strange'."
"Why strange?" I had guessed right; there was a woman.
"Well you don't get many females at these kind of things. Women are sale-end you see, not part of my business, and this one; she was something special." His face lit up then. "A cool blonde like you see in the movies, dressed real nice too. Not young, but not old either. There was an air about her that seemed…"
"Seemed what?" I prompted.
"Feasible." He shrugged.
"She came over to my stand and started looking around. So I went over and said, like I do, 'I see you're interested in the new Belsung Dinerette model. That's a great choice madam.' And she bounces right back at me with this amazing smile you could have warmed your hands on and says, 'Ah Robert, you look like a man who knows his way around a kitchen, but tell me this, do you know how to make French Toast?' and then she smiled again and her teeth were all perfect, not a single filling." Bob stared off into the garden twilight.
"How did she know your name?".
"I was wearing a tag, I guess she read it." A memory flashed up of Bob in his navy blue suit with the shiny elbows, crumpled morosely in his drive at the sight of a flat tyre on his Oldsmobile. His tag, pinned on crooked had read. I'm Robert- Let me turn you on.
"And do you know how to make French toast?"
"Well as a mater of fact I do, my grandmother showed me when I was a child." He paused to sip at his glass of my whiskey. Vera would love this I thought; Pop Tarts ruled the breakfast bar in our house.
"So then what happened?"
"She told me her name was Susan O'Reilly and after the show she took me to a bar and told me she had invented a machine that made perfect French toast. All she needed was the right marketing and it would become the latest must-have kitchen gadget; the Kenwood Chef of the decade!" There was a gleam in Bob's eye and by the light of the porch lantern I thought I saw a thin drool of saliva escape his lips. He leaned forward and in a ragged half-whisper laced with whiskey fumes said;
"You remember the Breville Sandwich Toaster? The Soda Stream?"
I swatted a moth that had careered towards me.
"I see what you're telling me Bob. I'm guessing this Susan O'Reilly bought you a few drinks and told you she was sitting on a licence to print money if only her new idea could get taken up by a big firm, but to get to that stage she needed a partner with some cash. And this is where you came in, right?"
Bob sighed and stared down into his drink.
"I'm a broken man Kenny."
It was all so pathetically predictable; this middle-aged, balding divorcé, sloppily arranged in Vera's favourite porch seat. The suburbs were full of them. He'd been well and truly hustled by a pretty face and some flirtatious attention. My thoughts cantered off on a tangent. Now Bob would have to move out, his house would go on the market. Perhaps someone with a bit more spark would move in and smarten the place up. Bob had let it go these last couple of years, it was lowering the tone, and no doubt the value of the rest of the street. Perhaps whoever bought the place would be more like me and Vera; a blue-chip family with a station wagon and a tractor mower. We'd get together for barbecues and the kids would play in each others' backyards. Yes, I was thinking, it wasn't looking to good for Bob.
"How much she sting you for?"
"The lot; my savings, the pension from the firm, even the deeds to the beach house down in the Cape, she said the bank would need it as collateral. I signed it all over to her."
"I see."
"But it gets worse Kenny." The ice cubes murmured in Bob's glass.
"Worse than losing your life savings?" I couldn't help it, I smiled, but Bob didn't notice, he had started swinging again. Creak and a whine.
"Well I'd say so. This afternoon, there was an accident. She slipped over."
"Miss O'Reilly slipped over?"
"Uh huh. We were arguing in the kitchen. She stepped backwards and kind of tumbled into the chest freezer. I think she's dead Kenny." We were both silent for a moment. The moth that had bugged me before began to flutter against the mesh of the screen.
"I'm sure it was an accident Bob, you can explain that she slipped, it's an unusual thing, but it's perfectly – feasible." Bob laughed, he seemed a bit drunk.
"It's funny, when me and my ex-wife moved here she used to say this street was too stuck up for us; that we'd never fit in. Well I spent twenty-five years trying to fit in and not get noticed for the wrong things. I'll be noticed now all right."
"Don't you think you're turning this more into a melodrama than you need to Bob? No one will doubt it was an accident. She probably banged her head or something when she tumbled, or maybe the sudden drop in temperature was a shock to her system and she had a heart attack. Who's to say she didn't have a dodgy ticker all this time?" Bob shook his head.
"No Kenny, you mean well, I can see that, but when Susan came round this afternoon I wasn't expecting her, she surprised me, and I guess she saw something that shocked her." The moth was still throwing itself against the screen. Too dumb to realise it would never pass through to the deep velvety night on the other side.
"What did she see?"
"My ex-wife's head in the freezer." He looked at me sharply, I didn't flicker.
"She started up screaming so much I thought I'd have the fire brigade beating down my door, so to stop her carrying on I kind of shoved her, with one of the steak knives." I had been in Bob's kitchen once, to borrow a sink plunger. It had the same lay out as ours. I pictured it now with Susan O'Reilly growing frosty in the freezer, and bits of the ex-Mrs Bradbury packed into ice-blocks around her. Then I pictured the newspaper men who would come, the satellite trucks and the rolling news. I saw myself standing at the porch door with a microphone under my nose saying the words we all wonder if we'll ever have to say, 'No I really didn't know him that well, he kept himself to himself.' Our street would become a notorious murder scene, real estate prices might drop.
"The thing is Kenny, I know it's over for me. I didn't mean to kill Susan, I didn't mean to kill my wife either, but who's gonna believe me. There's nowhere to run to now and no point chugging on any more." Bob looked up at me with tears in his eyes and then he showed me a small bone-handled revolver.
"It's Susan's." he said glumly, "I think she got it to threaten me with."
"Now be very careful with that Bob, it could be loaded."
"It is Kenny, I made sure. I'm going to kill myself with it. I'm not much of one for putting words down so I thought it would be best if I confessed to someone decent and upstanding like you, rather than do the old suicide note routine. Those things can get taken out of context. All I ask is that you tell the cops that I was a good guy really and it was all a terrible accident. Will you do that for me?" As he finished speaking Bob slipped the barrel of the little gun into his mouth. For what seemed like a frozen second our eyes met. Then I nodded and he closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.
The gun didn't make as much noise as I expected, though Bob's brains made quite a mess of the screen door; that moth would never fly again. I sat there for about a half-hour afterwards just listening to the night. Then I carried Bob's dead weight back round to his place. For a bad few minutes I thought there might not be enough room in the freezer but after a bit of re-arrangement of the ladies I managed to wedge poor Bob down between them. That seemed right somehow. Then I dropped the gun in after him, wiping it off carefully of course. Who knew what the police would think when they finally showed up, but something told me no-one would come calling for Bob for quite a while. Cleaning up at our place took a bit longer and dawn was breaking by the time I finally climbed into bed next to Vera.
She stirred in her sleep and I kissed the back of her neck. Then I whispered.
"Darling, I forgot to tell you, the bank's decided to transfer me to Chicago next month, I think it'll be great change of scene for us and the kids."
"Go to sleep honey, you're tickling me," she murmured.
--
The Good Neighbour by Maggie Womersley was read by Stephen Wedd at the Liars' League "Mad & Bad" event on May 8 2007.
Maggie Womersley grew up in Sussex but now lives in London. Until recently she worked in the TV industry as a film researcher, a promo director and more recently in programme development. Her writing is inspired by the "What if?" factor, the uncanny, and by the resilience of ordinary people who find themselves thrust into extraordinary situations.
Steve Wedd is a veteran of Liars' League. As an actor he works largely in the corporate and voice fields, finding sweet release for some of his pent-up urges in cultural oases such as the Liars' League events.
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