‘Frank!’ Fran yelled when she saw the old woman take the corner, very slowly, dripping miserably. The woman shook her head at Fran, not wanting to make trouble. She even gave her a slightly pitying smile.
Everyone knows my business, thought Fran. Everyone feels sorry for me with the four kids and Frank. But everyone feels sorrier for Jane, with one kid and no husband. Both facts riled her and she clenched her teeth, cradling her can.
To think, she wondered, I nearly had my own horse once. Fran watched Jane step off the bus. It’s funny, but I’m sure she’s waving at the driver, she thought. To Peter she said, ‘Your mam’s back.’
Peter was studying the crazy reflections of his own face. They hopped like something bright on a computer. He looked up. ‘Does that mean I have to go home?’
Fran doubted it. When asked in for tea, Jane would reply, ‘Go on then.’
‘I bet that woman never bothers buying tea bags,’ Frank would tell Fran. Fran never replied. Frank had no right complaining about what other people drank. Jane had no manners, though. She was immune to hinting. Once Fran had told her she was going up for an afternoon nap and Jane had sat waiting downstairs.
Frank had noticed Jane walking from the main road to their gate. A smile of greeting played uncertainly on her face. He sloshed the water, aiming at her.
‘Watch out!’ Fran called, standing up. ‘He’s waving his hose pipe at you!’
The younger woman passed through the gate and glanced at him.
‘Must be my lucky day. But why’s it turned green?’
Fran said loudly, ‘Lack of use!’ They cackled, and Frank went back to fill the ever-emptying pool, gritting his teeth.
‘Careful, it’ll drop off,’ Jane said. Frank turned up the pressure. Peter ran to his mam. ‘Has he been any bother?’ she asked.
Fran watched the boy grip his mother’s wrist. She’ll have him soft. She kept promising him a new dad. What was he going to grow up like? Fran shook her head. ‘He’s had a good play. Haven’t you, pet?’
Dumbly Peter nodded. Back with his mam, he had switched his allegiance with that quick cunning of children. His eyes seemed to be asking Fran, Who are you anyway?
‘We brought the pool out for them,’ Fran explained, ‘because that bitch over there — that Kelly-Anne — said they couldn’t play on the grass by her window.’
Jane tutted. She knew all about that-bitch-over-there. Kelly-Anne and her husband Gary lived right next door to Jane. He was Frank’s apprentice and he went parading around in army pants thinking he was great because he was a part-time upholsterer. They were both under twenty-one and had been kicked out of their flat on the next estate for causing rows with the neighbours. They seemed to be doing their best to be getting kicked out of here, too.
‘They look like weasels,’ Jane had said. ‘Both of them.’ Fran didn’t like saying anything nasty about people, she just nodded. She thought Jane was probably jealous of them really, a young couple who had stayed together.
Even Fran had had enough of the young couple, though. The young husband would come running out of his kitchen to yell at the kids, telling them to fuck off home if they got too close to his window. They would wake the baby up, he yelled at the street. But the baby screamed all the time anyway.
Fran thought Frank should deal with Gary, since he was his apprentice. One Saturday afternoon a befuddled Frank had been shoved outside to get on with it. Fran assumed they would have a rapport and would sort out the friction like gentlemen. But Gary started on Frank. He screamed at the man who was supposed to be training him. Frank kept an eye on the less-than-safe grip Gary had on his pit-bull terrier. Jane said, ‘Remember how he yelled at Frank?’
‘There’s something creepy about that Gary,’ Fran said. ‘Frank reckons that he still won’t talk to him at work. Not since that row in the street.’
Jane went, ‘Oh,’ thinking that she wouldn’t find much to say to Frank either, if they worked together, God forbid.
‘He was like an animal.’ Jane sniffed and poured more tea. She enjoyed watching a good barney, though. That time she sent Peter indoors and stood by her gate, waiting for Frank and Gary to go for it.
‘Don’t threaten me,’ snarled the young husband. ‘I used to box for the army, y’naa.’
Frank was bleary and shirtless. ‘Yeah? And I sleep with an axe under the bed.’
Only recently another fight had begun when Fran was phoning her mam from the payphone outside Kelly-Anne and Gary’s house. She was just describing a fellow cleaner at Fujitsu as a ‘silly cow’ and next thing she knew, Kelly-Anne — who’d been listening out of her kitchen window — came running out of her yard, squawking her head off. Fran was forced to hang up. The young wife had yards and yards of bright-red hair she couldn’t do a thing with. (‘She needs upholstering,’ Jane had remarked.) From where they were having a tea break outside the converted garage, Frank and Gary came running to see their wives at it hammer and tongs. Frank was hopeless but Gary leaped right into the fray.
Kelly-Anne’s hair flamed silently as the young husband bellowed, ‘Are you calling my fucking wife an ignorant cow?’ His hands scratched privates in his army fatigues.
It was like most rows in Phoenix Court. Everyone shouting threats and abuse and then running off home to call the police on to everyone else.
‘Oh, so she’s at it again,’ said Jane mildly,
