‘She doesn’t think, though.’
‘It’s because he’s not working full time. They get cooped up in that house. And he’s got an army temperament.’ Fran gestured to the house next door to the young couple’s. ‘Sheila and Simon are asking for a transfer. They can’t stand it. And they’ve lived here almost as long as I have. They moved in the week crippled Mrs Wright in the bungalow got busted for vice. It isn’t right they should have to move because of the likes of Gary and Kelly-Anne.’
‘Sheila and Simon will never get a transfer,’ Jane said. ‘Their house stinks inside. Cat piss and all-sorts. The council do an inspection, you know. You have to be clean. They look into everything.’
‘Oh, don’t say it like that.’
‘But it does stink. Remember that party they had for Ian.’ Fran’s heart had gone out to Sheila at that party. Sheila and Simon had less than anyone on the Court and the buffet hadn’t been up to much. She’d made up little sandwiches cut into diamond shapes, bread and marge sprinkled with pink and yellow hundreds and thousands. All the kids loved them and they vanished. Peter cried because Jane pulled him aside and said he wasn’t to put anything off Sheila’s table into his mouth.
Fran said, ‘Sheila reckons their little Ian is too scared to even play in the yard in case the army man sets his pit-bull on to him.’
‘The army man!’ Jane laughed. ‘He could only have been in for a year. What’s that — basic training? But he wears those green pants like they were going out of fashion. I’ve got some news about the army man.’
She bustled Fran into her own kitchen. Fran knew what sort of news Jane liked. She eased the kitchen door shut behind them so the kids wouldn’t hear. Jane sat herself at the pine table and Fran asked, ‘Do you want some tea?’
‘Go on then,’ she said complacently, as if she wasn’t really brimming to tell her tale at all.
‘Did you hear that racket last night?’
Fran blew on her tea. Jane had already gulped half a mugful down. ‘I heard something in the street,’ Fran cautiously replied. She had been craning her neck out of the bathroom window at half past one. ‘You know our house. Can’t see a thing from here.’
‘Well, I was ideally placed,’ Jane said.
You would be, thought Fran. ‘Does that woman ever sleep?’ Frank asked once. Coming back from the pub of a night he would look up and she would be staring out of her window at him. ‘Hasn’t she got any furniture to sit on?’
‘I think I heard that rough Helen over the road, yelling at someone at the top of her lungs.’
‘She was,’ Jane said eagerly. She had witnessed the whole thing. ‘She was out at the bottom of her yard holding a knife.’
‘I thought she’d seen a burglar.’
‘So did I, at first.’ Jane was withholding some delectable trump card. Fran could tell. She braced herself. ‘So I listened —’
‘All I heard was Helen shouting that she had seen him, whoever he was, hiding in the bushes —’
‘Bushes?’ Jane frowned. ‘I thought she said “bus shelter”.’
‘Maybe she did. The sound was distorted round our way. But she said she had seen him every night for a week.’
Jane scalded her throat, drinking too fast and laughing. ‘For a week!’ she exploded and had to put her mug down. Fran became impatient. ‘Was it a burglar, then?’
Jane composed herself. She struggled to meet the momentousness she felt the telling of the tale deserved. ‘Did you hear Helen shouting, “I can see you hiding there, you effing wanker! And I’m not leaving the bottom of my yard till you piss off home — else I’m calling the coppers!”’
Fran nodded. ‘Yes, I heard all that.’
‘Well, I’ve got reason to believe that poor old Helen really meant what she said —’
‘What?’ Fran was lost.
‘So he knew he’d been caught, because Helen shouted, “Don’t pretend it’s not you, ’cause I can see you, with the dog,” and then he must have sloped off because Helen went back in. But then, from my window on the other side, guess who I see sneaking into his house at quarter to two in the morning?’ She sipped her tea. ‘It was the army man himself, Gary!’
‘He was the burglar?’ Fran gasped.
Jane banged her palms on the imitation pine. ‘No — not a burglar! A wanker! Helen really meant a wanker! She caught him with his pants down in the bus shelter by my house, relieving himself… sexually, I mean. The dirty bugger.’ Fran’s forehead knitted up. The lower half of her face unravelled completely. ‘No!’
‘I talked to rough Helen this morning. I went past there especially, going to the shop with Peter. I had to ask.’
‘And you’re sure it was him with the dog?’ it had to be, that time of night, didn’t it?’
‘God!’ Fran stirred her tea. i’ll use the other bus stop from now on.’
‘When I got off the bus just now I had a quick look at it.’ Jane shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I was looking for.’
‘He can’t be very… well… happy at home, can he?’ said Fran thoughtfully. ‘And all the kids round here! He must be a right queer bugger. You hear about it, don’t you? But when it’s right on your own bus stop…’
‘I want to know what he was doing with his dog.’
They burst out laughing, although Fran didn’t think it was a very nice thing to be laughing at. Frank came in to dry his hands on the tea towel. He took a can from the fridge and Fran groaned. Starting already at a quarter to three.
