Piggy Eyes
I didn’t have much to show for forty years hard work other than my little house, but it was my place, my sanctuary, and I loved it like I would have done the children I could never have.
We decorated every inch of it, Charlie and myself, and I polished and dusted every day, keeping it perfect. The day he died, I cleaned and polished. The day I buried him, I took every piece of china down from plate racks and wall mounts and shelves and wiped them over, every last one. The inside of the house is as perfect now as it was when we first married, but sadly the same isn’t true of the rest of the street. Young couples with families have moved out to smarter houses on new estates, elderly couples have died or moved into neat bungalows with warden service, and their houses have all been bought by landlords, divided up, parcelled out for rent. At first many of the tenants were decent people, working people, but as the last few years have slipped past, there are more and more noisy gaggles of students that blow in every September and disappear every July, more and more narrow-faced single men who look as if they have left everything behind. Every now and then the street is woken at six in the morning when the police batter down the door of one flat or another. The landlords arrive the same afternoon, their men throwing the meagre contents of the flat into bin liners, fitting a new lock on the scarred door, and another man who smells of drink and looks as grey as the skies moves in.
I was lucky for a while, I was in an end of terrace, and the neighbours next to me stood as a bulwark against the rot. Tom and Kerry seemed as happy as anything. But Kerry ran off with a man she had met in her office, and Tom sold up the house and went contracting in Saudi Arabia, working with fifty other men on an oil refinery in the desert. He came to see me when he sold the house, to break the news. He had dropped his price twice, he said, but had received no offers from families, no offers from people like us, he said, decent people, just bids from the two or three landlords who owned three-quarters of the other houses.
He couldn’t afford to drop the price any more, he said, drinking my tea, and looking down at my carpet. I told him that it was all right, that I understood, that we mustn’t be snobs about these things, there were plenty of decent people living in rented accommodation. And for three years, I felt rather ashamed of my prejudices, because although tenants came and went, I did not have a single problem.
There was a quiet man, David, who I think had been in a hospital for some time. But he kept himself to himself, kept the house clean and tidy, and always gave me a cheery hello when we met. After him were the Kapoors, and they were a delight. Charming husband, who was always offering to help with any work I needed doing around the house, lovely wife, who was always keen to chat, and two delightful children, who had manners that would have shamed most of the other children in the street. I baked them all cakes—Charlie said I was a wonder for my cakes—and they brought me Indian food that I did not know the name of. Some of it was nice, but some was too spicy, and I had to wrap it up in newspaper before I threw it out, in case the Kapoors saw it when the binmen were emptying my bins and took offence. But they moved on after a year, moved on to another part of the town where thugs would not spray offensive words on their back gate. There were two or three tenants after them, short term lets, anonymous faces. Then one beautiful spring morning, there was the rattle and choke of an old van outside, boxes taken away, boxes delivered. It was at three fifteen that afternoon that the music started.
At first I thought that it was a heavy lorry going past outside, the rumble of its engine making the china dance and rattle on the wall. Then I heard that there was a rhythm to it, and I tutted to myself. The young drive around in their cars these days with the music on so loud that it can’t be good for their hearing, not good at all. But the music did not fade off into the distance with a squeal of tyres and a roar of an engine. It just stayed the same. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. I tried to ignore it for a while, but I could not. I was starting to get a headache, so I put my mac on and went down to the shops. I bought some ingredients to do some baking that I did not really need, and when I got home the music—if you can call it that, I certainly would not—had stopped. Everything in the house seemed touched by the silence that flowed through every room. It was beautiful. I didn’t realise then that silence could change, I thought that silence was just silence. But change it did.
Within days silence was no longer beautiful, because all that it meant was threat. Silence meant that the music was not playing, yes, but it also meant that the music was about to play. From being the absence of sound it simply became merely a precursor to sound, to the sick feeling in my stomach that came every time the music played. When there was silence, there was no thump, thump, but soon there would be, as night follows day. After a while, I don’t know whether I hated the silence more than I hated the noise.
I complained, of course. Not at first, I’m not the complaining kind of person. I wished every vain hope that I could think of—that he had not realised how loud it was, that he was only staying there for a few days, that he was a guest and that when he left there would be peace again. But the noise did not stop, it just spread across each day and into the evening like a malignant black shadow hanging over my home. On the fourth day, I put my coat and my courage on and went round to the house next door.
He didn’t hear me at first. I rang the bell, but could hear no sound, so I rang it again. I didn’t know if it wasn’t working—the landlord hardly kept the place in good repair—or if he just could not hear it over the music. I rang it twice more, and then knocked. Still no reply, so I knocked again, and again and it had taken me so much courage to go round that tears started to sting my eyes and I felt stupid and angry, so I kicked the door with the heel of my shoe, once, twice and then the door opened and he was standing there.
“Did you just kick my fuckin’ door?”
I said nothing, intimidated by the maleness of him. He was not very tall, but was broad in stature, and his arms were thick with muscles. He wore some stained tracksuit trousers, and a blue vest, and he was probably only in his late twenties but he had the face of an old man. I could smell sweat, and stale tobacco. What struck me most about him though, were his eyes. He had very blond hair, and his eyelashes were fair almost to the point of being invisible. It brought me an instant memory: walking through the covered market in town, a butcher’s stall, on the side of it a pig’s head, like an ornament, the ears flopped down, the eyes shut, great curling fair eyelashes.
“I’m from next door,” I started.
“I don’t give a shite where you’re from, I said did you just kick my fuckin’ door?”
Was a day once, when if anyone had spoken to me like that, Charlie would have laid them out flat. But Charlie was gone.
“I’d tried ringing the bell, and knocking, but you couldn’t hear me—perhaps the bell—and with the music…”
“You can’t go around kicking on people’s doors.” His self-righteous indignation annoyed me, gave me the courage to speak.
“I wouldn’t have to if you hadn’t had your music on so deafeningly loud. I can hear it through in my house, you know.”
He shrugged. “Better take the fuckin’ glass off the wall then, love. Stop listening.”
“I was not—I can’t help but hear it.”
“Turn your telly on then, get some fuckin’ earplugs, whatever, not my probblem. Not that fuckin’ loud. Place I lived before, had it louder than this, never got any complaints then.”
“Maybe the walls are thinner—really, please, it is very disturbing.”
He shrugged, hawked up some phlegm in his throat and spat it onto the concrete just inches from where I was standing. “Like I said, not my fuckin’ problem.” Then the door shut in my face, and I stood there for a moment, in the rain, and I cried. I didn’t cry because of the yob, or because of the music, I cried because my Charlie would have dealt with this piggy-eyed thug in a minute, he wouldn’t have stood for anyone talking to me like that, and my Charlie was not there and never would be again. I went back into my house. The music had dropped in volume, but not by much. I made myself a cup of tea, cut a slice of the lemon drizzle cake that I had baked the day before and turned the television on and pretended to myself that I was watching it. That evening I went and sat in our bedroom, and thought of Charlie. I didn’t sleep there anymore, couldn’t sleep there anymore. I slept in the small bedroom. Our bedroom was the room we had shared through all those years of marriage, and the room I had nursed Charlie through those last months of pain and fear. After the day of his funeral, I washed the sheets and put them back on the bed, and then I left the room exactly as it was. I dust and polish, you’d think it was still lived in, but it is the room exactly as it was at that last moment when Charlie was still alive. His spare pyjamas are folded neatly on the chair, in case he had an accident. His painkillers, that strong as they were could not, in the end, touch the terrible pain that he felt, in the little green marble cigar box. His glasses, on the bedside table, where he liked them. Everything there, everything but him.
And so it went on, day after day. The drop in volume didn’t last. I hoped to myself that the neighbours on the other side would complain, but they did not, they were students and had their own chaos to cause. I saw them round at his door a few times, and think that they were buying drugs from him. Several times I thought about knocking on his door, but I could not find the courage. He would just stare at me with piggy eyes and swear and make me feel small and vulnerable and alone. After a couple of weeks, I phoned the council. I should have done it earlier, but I am not the complaining kind, and involving authority made the whole business seem more serious. I worried that they would not believe me, that they would think that I was a silly old woman, I worried that they would believe me and that what would happen after would be worse than the problems I had faced before. As it turned out, I was right.
The man the council sent out was very nice, very sympathetic. He spoke about noise levels, and legal action. He ate some of my chocolate sponge cake and told me it was so nice, he might come back anyway even if the noise stopped. He told me about how it was the aim of the council to get neighbour disputes resolved by arbitration. The initial step often solved the problem, he said. He would write a letter to the occupant, he said, informing him that there had been a complaint, and warning him of the possible penalties should things go further. There would be no need to mention my name, he said, and no-one need know who had complained.
Two days later, I realised that I had run out of cocoa powder. I put my raincoat on, because the sky looked threatening, and took my shopping bag in case I decided to buy anything else when I was there. He must have watched me leave, because it was on the way back home that he was waiting for me. I took the short cut home, as I always did, the little alley that ran down the side of the railway cutting. It took five minutes off the walk, and I was always grateful for that on the way back. As I walked down the alley, a shadow fell away from the other shadows at the far end and I saw that it was him walking towards me. At first I hoped that he was walking to the shops, so I kept my head down and held my handbag tight in one hand and my shopping bag tight in the other, and said hello as I tried to walk past.
He said nothing, just stepped to the side so that I could not pass.
“Excuse me,” I said, but my voice squeaked like that of a mouse. I was very afraid.
“Was you, got the fuckin’ council in. Wasn’t it.” It wasn’t a question.
“I’m sorry, I don’t—”
“Don’t lie to me, I fuckin’ know it was you. Fuck you think you’re doing, grassing to the council?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I tried talking to you—”
“Listen,” he said, and I looked up at his face for the first time and saw him staring at me with those hateful piggy eyes. “I know where you are. I know when you go out. I know when you come in. I know when your fuckin’ house is standing empty. Do you know what I mean? Eh? Do you get me? I fuckin’ know. You live alone. Alone. So phone the fuckin’ council, today, and call ‘em off. And if you think about going to the fuckin’ police…”
He didn’t say any more, just stood there staring at me, his presence more of a threat than any words could be.
“I won’t go to the police,” I said, and I felt tears of shame in my eyes. Oh Charlie, love, why did you leave me so soon. I thought about what this animal might do in my house while I was not there, and knew that I had no choice.
“Aye, and the council?”
“I’ll call them. Today.”
“Aye, you will. ‘Cause if you don’t…” he lifted one finger, and gently touched my cheek with it, and I felt as if I had been slapped. Then he dropped his hand and walked past me, brushing against me, his stink on my coat and on my hair. I heard him walk away and stood there for a moment, trembling. Then I walked home, put the kettle on, and started to bake.
The evening of the next day, I walked round to his front door and rang the bell. There was a long wait before I heard footsteps. He opened the door and stood there, impassive, what do you want, you’re so beneath contempt, old lady, that I won’t even bother saying the words.
“I’ve—I’ve thought things over,” I said. “And I need to talk to you for a minute or two, but I’d rather not do it on your doorstep.”
He stood in the doorway and stared at me for a minute. Let me in piggy eyes, let me in.
“I’ve spoken to the council,” I said, “told them that I had changed my mind, that everything was all right now, that there was nothing for them to fuss about. I’m here to make peace, but I’d rather not do it on the doorstep. I have something for you.”
He shrugged and walked back into the house. I followed him into his front room. It stank of sweet smoke that wasn’t tobacco, and the rank stink of a man’s unwashed clothes and the smell of his sex. Posters half-fell off the walls like peeling skin. In the corner, against the wall that divided his stinking room from the order of my house was the brutal black monolith of his hi-fi. I looked away from it.
He stood in the middle of the room, didn’t offer me a seat, scratched absentmindedly at one of the arm holes of his t-shirt. He stood too still, and his eyes wandered too much, as if he were a goldfish, perpetually forgetting what it was that he was looking at. That would be the sweet smoke that I had smelt.
“We’ve got off badly,” I began. He shrugged. I don’t care. I don’t care. I am piggy eyes and I don’t care for anyone or anything. “I’ve had…there’ve been…well, I have had problems of a personal nature, and it’s meant that I’ve been less tolerant than I would normally be. Live and let live, that’s usually me. And, all this, this business. The council and everything. Not like me at all.”
“Still not turning the fuckin’ music down,” he said, “don’t matter what you say. You don’t like it, your fuckin’ problem, not mine.”
I dug the nails of my left hand into my palm so hard that I felt a new wetness there on top of the thin skim of sweat.
“That’s what I’m saying. I realised that I was too—too hasty. After all, we’re neighbours, we have to live alongside one another, make compromises. So I’ve given things a try, bought myself some decent earplugs for when I’m sleeping, turned my television programmes up a little, and now I can hardly hear the music at all.”
“S’what I said in the first place,” piggy eyes said. “Would have saved all that fuckin’ bother.”
“I know, but as I say, I’ve not been myself. Let’s start again, I hate to not get on, I’ve always got on with my neighbours. So let’s start again. I’ve brought you one of my cakes over. After everything that’s happened—well, it’s a peace offering. A gesture. So we can start again. I’m known for my cakes, ask any of the folk who have been living around here for a while.”
He looked at the box for a moment and then took it from me, opening the lid with greedy fingers and staring into it with piggy eyes. “Chocolate,” he said, and he broke a chunk off there and then and stuffed it into his mouth. He chewed it, swallowed it, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Aye, S’all right. Ta. But don’t think it means I’m going to stop playing my music. I’ll maybe turn it down a bit, but I’m not stopping just ’cause of a fuckin’ cake.”
“I promise you, I’m not going to be asking you to turn your music down any more.”
He grunted something which sounded like an acknowledgement, and I showed myself out. He didn’t even appear to notice my passing, but already had the lid of the box up, rooting inside it like a pig after truffles. I had hardly shut the door of my house, shutting out the memory of his stinking room by taking in a deep breath of clean air scented with lavender, when the music started again. The plates on my wall moved, scenes of Cornish cottages and Scottish mountains dancing in rhythm to the bass. Thump, thump, thump, thump. For the first time, it didn’t bother me. It didn’t bother me at all. Flour, butter, eggs, cocoa powder and a whole bottle of the painkillers they gave to Charlie to get him through the last days, all crushed up, one by one, pestle and mortar, thump, thump, thump, thump. The music didn’t bother me at all.
After a while, it stopped. And it did not start again.