Losing It Read Online Free Page B

waiting for her.
    This was the scene
chez moi
a few days ago, but it might havebeen any time in the last five years. It’s been played out so many times it’s in danger of erasing itself. Ever since Mr Dyson and his then wife Erica moved into Number 9, there’s been friction between the two houses – between Charles Johnson and Roger Dyson, anyway. Dad would happily provide you with a long list of infractions made by his neighbour against the spirit of peace and neighbourly harmony. There is the matter of borrowed tools which have yet to be returned – Dad keeps a list and reported his neighbour to the police on the occasion when his strimmer was borrowed without his permission. (Mum’s permission didn’t count, apparently). And then there is the fact that Roger Dyson is a Southerner, a Londoner in fact, who has come to take possession of a bungalow, a plot of land and, it is rumoured, a considerable windfall, bequeathed him by a distant relation. Dad hates Southerners, Londoners in particular and wishes Roger had stayed distant, too.
    Then there are the handful of parties Roger has held since he arrived in Laurel Gardens, one with ‘ghastly pop music played at a volume of 85 decibels’. Yes, Dad’s got a decibel counter (85 decibels is exactly the same reading as I got when I measured the racket our own lawnmower makes when he runs it up and down his stripy back lawn, every Sunday). And then there’s the issue of Flossie and Ellen, his two Rottweilers, who keep at bay nosy officials and interfering neighbours alike. They’re noisy brutes, I grant you, and Dad has had to complain more than once about the barking and whining after 5.30 in the evening. They’re a danger to the public, Dad has said, but in actual fact, you’re only in danger of being licked to death.
    Everything about Roger Dyson and his way of life repels my dad like a dreadlocked crusty with a mongrel on a string repels a Rotarian. He hates Roger’s business, of course; living next door to a scrap heap has never rated highly on his list of aspirations. He hates his bad language (though this has improved since Clive persuaded him to rename one of the Rottweilers Flossie. It hadbeen called That Fucking Dog and cries of ‘Where’s That Fucking Dog?’ had regularly disturbed the normal tranquillity of Laurel Gardens). He hates the ‘brazen Jezebels’ who show up in the evenings and leave in the morning ‘looking like the unmade bed they’ve just rolled out of’. He hates Roger’s many tattoos, which he sometimes examines with the aid of binoculars when Roger takes off his shirt to unload his truck or to work in his yard. He doesn’t hate Clive but he has his doubts about him. But fair play to him, we all have those.
    Most of all, he hates the idea that he bought our house on the firm understanding that the long-dilapidated wreck next door was scheduled for imminent demolition. He’d understood that planning permissions had already been approved for two neat semi-detached town houses to be built on the site. But it’s five years on and somehow the eyesore is still standing, pretty much unchanged and now the property of someone who no more suits the tone of Laurel Gardens than the bungalow itself does. To say that Dad finds all of this very trying is an understatement of epic precautions, as Clive might have said.
    Before we moved into Laurel Gardens, we lived in a crappy pebble-dashed semi on Eccleshall Crescent. A crappy monkey-puzzle tree blocked almost all the light from the front windows, while the back was overshadowed by crappy ’60s hi-rise flats, every one of whose occupants could, even without their telescopes, enjoy whatever was happening in our kitchen and back bedrooms. We’d bought the house as a temporary measure when Dad’s employer, GirdEx, relocated here. All we needed was a base from which Dad could go to work in the week and spend his weekends looking for somewhere more befitting the status of an up-and-coming middle