It all went wrong for Dean when his adoptive parents became involved in a war. It was a war with the neighbours, and it was as full of malevolence as anything that took place in Bosnia. Next door was a man called Mr Price, who was, sociologically speaking, not so very unlike Dennis Faulkner. Instead of working for Otis elevators, Peter Price had been quite big in the Milk Marketing Board. The high moment of his career had come in the 1970s, when he had helped to formulate Lymeswold cheese, the Heatho-Walkerian plan to deal with the Milk Surplus. Alas, Lymeswold never caught on. It was likened fatally by Auberon Waugh, the journalist, to banana toothpaste, and as a piece of import substitution it was no match for the soft blue cheeses of France and Italy, let alone the great wagon wheels of industrially produced cambozola, the German cheese that trundled across the channel with the ruthless housewife appeal of a BMW. Like Dennis Faulkner, Peter Price was pensioned off early. But instead of just watching the television, or doing his roses, Price the Cheese was a man with a dream.
In his garage he had a row of vats and centrifuges and skimmers and strainers. Day in, day out, he would clank and prod, sniffing and pressing and squeezing. From the age of ten or so, Dean would go and see Price the Cheese, and his extraordinary machines.
‘Go on,’ Price would say, ‘try this one.’ Price would cut the coagulum into strips, and Dean would put the latest radioactive isotope on his tongue.
‘Or try this one, my dear sir,’ the caseomaniac would say. ‘I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.’
‘Mmmmbmm,’ said Dean.
‘Have you heard of Auberon Waugh?’
‘No, sir.’
‘You wouldn’t say this tasted like banana toothpaste, would you?’
‘No.’
One day, Price told himself, the garage would produce a cheese so startlingly magnificent that the humiliation of Lymeswold would be avenged. Tesco would buy it. Waitrose would certainly buy it. No one, not even a posh git like Auberon Waugh, would dare to brush his teeth with this one. This cheese would be pungent, and that was the problem. Most days, in fact 90 per cent of the time, his garage exuded nothing to trouble the nose. On a very few days, when he hadn’t been perhaps quite liberal enough with the Milton disinfectant, there would be the faintest bouquet of udder, as of two lactating cows standing close to each other in a warm milking parlour. And once in a blue moon, when Price the Cheese hit on something sensationally ripe, he would open the garage door and emit.
On a still, hot summer’s evening, he was capable of producing an odour that was probably bacteriologically identical to the substance generated between the fourth and fifth toes of a squaddie who has marched for twenty- four hours in the desert in rubber-soled boots. One these occasions Mr Faulkner complained, though if the truth be told the objection was not so much to the cheesy aromas. The real protester was Vie, who had once been having a bath in the upstairs bathroom, without drawing the curtains.
She had looked up, and had the sudden thrilling sensation that someone was watching her. From then on, Peter Price was in trouble. Perhaps Vie had conceived some feeling for the old cheese-fancier, some instinct that needed to be suppressed or sublimated into anger. Perhaps there was a subconscious sense in which Vie’s real objection was not so much that he had looked, but that he had jerked his head away.
No matter. Price was a snoop. Together, with the lights out, Dennis and Vie stood and looked up at the neighbouring window. They felt the play of his binoculars over their possessions, their lives: the fitted green carpet in the living room, the coal effect fire, the
‘I tell you what, honeybunch,’ said Dennis to Vie, ‘I’ve got just the thing for him.’
His answer, of course, was cupressa leylandil, the nuclear weapon of suburban hate. When Dennis planted them, ten in a row, at the bottom of the garden, they were only eight feet tall. In two years they had almost doubled. Upwards, sideways and diagonally groped their spongy, aromatic fronds, dwarfing and in some places crushing the original wooden boundary fence. Twilight descended on the sunny little room where Price would take his breakfast. No longer could he range his little pots of curd on the sill, and watch them turn radioactive in the heat. A sanatorial gloom spread through the entire lower floor, turning all the cheese he made to a green thought in a green shade.
Soon the topmost sprigs were beginning to challenge the upper floor; soon, thought Price, he would need to keep the lights on all day, throughout the house. He began with letters; he invoked the council; he sent them the text of the High Hedges Bill, then making its progress through the Commons. But Dennis knew instinctively that his hedge was untouchable. An Englishman’s home is his castle, and Parliament would surely find it impossible to give one man the right to compel the chopping-down of another man’s trees. Price joined a leylandii victims’ support group. He became party to a class action which intended to test, if necessary before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the proposition that a man had not only the right to life, but the right to light.
It was no use. Sometimes, with much pleading, the council’s hedge officer would persuade Dennis to make a few desultory abbreviations to the very top. But if ever Price pushed or moaned too much, Dennis would threaten to expose him as a ‘peeping Tom’ and cheese freak.
‘I’ll get the health and safety round to that garage,’ he said. ‘We all know what goes on there. It’s disgoosting,’ said Dean’s adoptive father, and Dean felt a twinge of remorse.
And then one September, two and a half years after the deployment of the leylandii, Price exacted his appalling revenge. Dennis and Vie and Dean had been to Alicante, and things had not been easy. Dennis resented the way Dean kept his headphones on all day, and Dean was basically doing his nut. For seven solid days he had endured a beach holiday with his adoptive parents: Dennis with the Factor 15 glooped on top of his head, and every other extremity, Vie with her crispy hair and stunned blue eyes and pointless expensive jewellery; Dennis with his old man’s tits, Vie with her evening lipstick running into the cracks around her mouth.
Dean would stare at the incredible girls, and feel a repeated sense of amazement that people were allowed to appear like this, before him, in public. He would lie on his back and squint at the surf, and observe the curious fact that when a beautiful girl emerged from the sea, you couldn’t always tell how big she was. As she rose, with water running down her terrifying shape, he would assume she was a divinity, a Venus Anadyomene, a mega-titted six-footer. But then as she came closer, so close that sometimes she would drip all over him, he would see that she was really just a little Spanish girl, all in the same proportions, but with her dimensions magnified by the sun.
‘Dean!’ Vie had called to him at one stage, ‘shouldn’t you be going for a swim?’ And he had leaned forward, flapping his hands in irritation. He had sulked, in fact, all holiday, and his sulk was the worse because he was ashamed of his sulking; and he was ashamed because he knew, with the good part of himself, that Dennis and Vie were only doing their best. He sulked, and felt guilty for sulking, in the taxi all the way from Birmingham Airport.
So when he saw what had happened to the hedge, he felt an almost superhuman surge of loyal rage. The desecration was bad enough on its own, the tremendous battlefield aura of aggression and violation that rose from the buzz-sawed stumps. It was insane, in itself, that Price should have felt able to cross the frontier, in broad daylight, and perpetrate this massacre. But the real offence was the insult that made Vie cry, and made Dennis sink to his knees in lamentation. ‘My trees,’ he cried, and his voice rose over Wednesbury like Rachel weeping for her children.
At the end of the lawn, next to a mound of hacked-off foliage, were the limbs and trunks of the victims, neatly hewn by this psychopath, into even lengths. Propped up, in felt tip, was an amateur advertisement: ‘Logs for sale.’
‘Haven’t you heard?’ said Price the Cheese. ‘Law’s been changed, hasn’t it. The council sends you three warnings, and then they are entitled to chop down a vexatious tree.’
‘I saw no warnings,’ said Dennis Faulkner.
‘Really?’ Price cocked an eyebrow.
‘What is this law?’ wailed Vie.
