The Bad Neighbor Read online

  DAVID TALLERMAN

  The Bad Neighbor

  FLAME TREE PRESS

  London & New York

  For Loz, who’s overdue one of these.

  Thanks for your friendship, man.

  Chapter One

  As I heard the body’s impact against the wall and the raucous cry of “Fucker!” that accompanied it – both clear despite the intervening layers of brick, plaster, and faded paper – I knew the mistake I’d made. I’d got it all wrong, yet again.

  Only, I didn’t know quite how badly. Not then.

  The signs had been there to see. Aren’t they always? The glorious benefit of hindsight is a highway stretching into memory, and there on the roadside twenty meters high are the words of warning you could have heeded and didn’t. That you chose to ignore, because doing so was easier, and just maybe so that one day the cynical part of you, the part that doesn’t like you all that much, could turn around and say I told you so.

  I had. I’d told me so. I’d chosen not to listen.

  The problem wasn’t that the choices hadn’t looked like mistakes while I was making them, either, because they certainly had. No, the problem was that they hadn’t looked like choices. A case in point: fifty-five thousand pounds (or, let’s get the specifics right, fifty-four thousand, three hundred pounds) coming unexpectedly into my possession. The death of a well-off relative I never knew I had, a cousin that when – still breathless, still wondering if this was all someone’s weird idea of a joke – I asked my mother who she’d been, turned out to be so distant and unmemorable that she needed three minutes to place the name, another two to calculate the precise relationship.

  At which juncture, we both realized, or at least began to suspect, that my mother should have been the beneficiary and not me. We’re not a big family, but we’re a profoundly disjointed one. I quickly understood that there had been some spite involved, and that the bad blood likely related to my dad, bless his heart, who gets more sympathy – from certain quarters, anyway – for being in prison than my mother ever did for dealing with his bullshit all those years.

  Probably I should have offered to give her the money. I definitely should have volunteered to split it. I think I sort of tried to, though the recollection is fuzzy. I’d like to believe that I did and she said no; that she told me how much more I needed it than she did. I’d like to think that’s how the conversation went, and if it did then she was right. Her: nice house in the countryside, happily remarried, close to retirement. Me: a shitty flat on the outskirts of Leeds, supply teaching work I’d taken as a stopgap until something permanent came along, and the steadily growing comprehension that maybe it wasn’t coming after all. Penny-pinching. Disillusionment. Mild depression.

  Nearly fifty-five thousand pounds.

  A wealth of possibilities. Pay off the student loan first, of course, and the credit card. Settle the car, actually own the damn thing before it gave up the ghost once and for all. Then – what, a holiday? I could take Yasmina away for a long weekend. We’d not even been dating a month, but the notion of spending a few days alone with her already seemed an attractive prospect. All of that together would still leave a sizeable chunk to bank for the inevitable rainy day.

  Almost too many options. And by the time I was off the phone with my mother, I was starting to recognize the flaws in each of them. My student loan hardly needed repaying; it might be years before I was earning enough for the debt to become an issue. The car wasn’t a necessity; I’d been thinking about scrapping it anyhow. If I asked Yasmina to go away with me, the result was less likely to be the weekend of passion I’d imagined, more me frightening her off. I could save the money, but how quickly would it devalue? With the economy in free fall, what was fifty-five grand really worth?

  It was worth a house, that was what.

  I knew it was possible. Real estate was dirt cheap around Leeds. A guy at work had bought a two-bedroom semi in the suburbs with his girlfriend only last month; that had cost them a little under eighty thousand. Obviously they’d paid most of that with a mortgage, something my unsteady work situation would doubtless rule me out of. But what did that matter? Even if the place was a slum, it would be home, and even if I was hanging off the bottom rung of the property ladder, I would still be on it. Compared with where I was at present, that was a hell of an improvement.

  I wasn’t working that day, so I spent the rest of the afternoon on the internet, searching property sites. It didn’t take long for my heart to begin to sink. My budget stretched to grotty repossessions and rundown terraced houses – and then barely. After an hour I had to stop because my hand was shaking, panic setting in at the thought of actually living in one of these miserable hovels. I got up, made a cup of tea, and drank it leaning out of the window of my third-floor flat, gulping the fume-soaked air.

  I just had to lower my expectations. I was going to have to do some renovating; that was okay. So what if the money I was currently paying out as rent was going on paint and curtains instead? Perhaps I’d need to be flexible on location and hang onto the car. The compromises wouldn’t be ideal, but what about my life was?

  I made a shortlist of the least awful places. I made a few phone calls. A lot of them had already gone – and mostly I found myself feeling secretly grateful. My shortened shortlist comprised five properties, which I made appointments to view on Friday, the next day I had off. I spent the intervening days with a gnawing tension in my gut, and half a dozen times came close to phoning Yasmina to tell her what I was intending, before thinking better of it at the last minute.

  The first place I looked at, one-bedroom flat that had seemed pleasant enough in the photos, stank of mold. I could only assume a pipe had burst somewhere in the foundations, and I couldn’t imagine that any amount of air freshener or incense would erase that biting odor. The estate agent pretended not to notice, and I pretended not to notice them pretending.

  The second was opposite the crummiest cemetery I’d ever seen. Most of the gravestones had been kicked over or smashed, and the paths were liberally strewn with dogshit. As I was driving away, I realized that the large building behind high walls on the next street was in fact a prison.

  The third, another flat, this time a two-bedroom, was dark and dingy and made me feel uncomfortable the moment I entered. The door to the smaller bedroom was gouged deeply, and I spotted similar marks in the bare floorboards. When I asked the estate agent about it, she said absentmindedly, “Oh yes, I think this is the room they kept the python in.” I almost laughed, until I grasped that she wasn’t joking.

  I can’t remember what was so dreadful about the fourth place. I was starting to tune out by that point. Maybe it was nothing specific, merely a background sense of grime, inexplicable smells, frayed carpet, chipped work surfaces, and peeling wallpaper. At any rate, I had to interrupt the estate agent’s dispirited efforts at a sales pitch when my mobile rang. The call turned out to be from the agent for my next appointment, ringing to tell me that the couple he’d just shown round had put in an offer, and the owner was taking the property off the market.

  Good luck to them, I thought.

  I went outside and assured the estate agent I’d think it over, both of us knowing I was lying. I hurried back to my car, grateful to discover that it hadn’t been broken into while I was away. Given the state of the neighborhood, I’d half expected to find a burned-out wreck propped up on breeze blocks.

  I felt a little better by the time I got home. Wasn’t this stupid, really? Nearly fifty-five thousand pounds had dropped into my lap, and all the money had brought me so far was misery. Perhaps I’d been right the first time; perhaps settling my debts, a few days in the sun, and having a solid chunk of capital in the bank was an infinitely more practical option for a windfall that, after all, I hadn’t done a thing to earn or deserve. By the end of the weekend, I’d convinced myself that my failed efforts at house-hunting were probably for the best.

  Then, on the Monday morning, just after I’d finished with my first class, I got another phone call.

  “Mr. Clay?” A woman’s voice, chirpily enthusiastic. I wondered immediately what she was about to try and sell me.

  “Yes?”

  “Oliver Clay?”

  “It’s Ollie, but yes.”

  “Oh. This is Katy from Relocale Leeds. You made an inquiry about a property last week? Number twenty-eight West Mount Road?”

  Had I? “Okay,” I said.

  “There’d been an offer, but it’s now been withdrawn. Would you still be interested in having a look round?”

  I could hardly remember the house in question; they had all merged into one disappointing blur by then. I was so disheartened with the entire enterprise that I almost told her no – almost. “Why not?” I said. “Sure.”

  We set a date for the next evening, and by the time I’d hung up I found myself feeling oddly excited. Ten minutes before, I’d been prepared to give up on any hope of home ownership, and here I was reading what must be a perfectly normal circumstance as some kind of a sign. Maybe all those other places had needed to be lousy so that I’d set my standards to a realistic level. Maybe this could be the one.

  Of course, I never thought to ask why anyone would make an offer and then change their mind.

  What did occur to me was a sudden impulse to involve Yasmina. I didn’t know what had kept me from telling her about the inheritance – perhaps only that doing so
might seem as if I was bragging – but now I felt ready. I rang her up and, after a minute’s small talk, said, “Look, I’m actually calling with some big news. Like, really big.”

  I told her about the money and, while she was digesting that, mentioned that I was considering putting it into a house.

  “That sounds sensible,” she agreed.

  She had a way of pondering for a moment before she made statements like this, and then pronouncing them solemnly, that I found immensely charming. “Actually, I’ve just arranged a viewing for tomorrow evening,” I said. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  As soon as the words were out, I saw what an odd suggestion it was. We’d been on three or four dates at that point, and though we’d got on well – and though I was secretly hoping that the next time she might invite me to stay over – we weren’t quite at the stage where I’d have dared describe us as a couple. What if she took this as some madly presumptuous proposal that we move in together?

  But Yasmina wasn’t the type, even if I didn’t know her enough to realize it then; not one for jumping to conclusions or for deliberate misreadings. “I’d like that,” she said.

  * * *

  From the outside, the house resembled half the properties I’d seen the week before and two thirds of those I’d viewed online. Most of the housing in and around Leeds is terraces, and plenty of that consists of back-to-backs, which are exactly what they sound like: parallel rows of boxy dwellings with adjoining rear walls. But this one, I recalled, was a plain old terrace, and even had a yard. The idea of owning a yard was appealing. A yard would mean barbeques on summer afternoons, and maybe a few potted plants to brighten up the place.

  The house also had bars on the downstairs windows, as did most of those on the street. Again, that was a common feature, in certain areas at least. At first their presence had shocked me, but I’d quickly rationalized that, if the alternative was making life easy for burglars, there were worse things to put up with. The property to the left, in fact, had a broken pane patched with cardboard and gaffer tape, despite the protective cage. Yet noticing the damage was all the attention I paid; I didn’t pause to wonder how or why it might have happened.

  Perhaps that was because the estate agent chose that moment to pull up, in a new-looking, metallic-blue Audi that seemed almost exotic on such a street. The driver wasn’t the woman I’d spoken to on the phone but a young Asian guy, impeccably dressed in a well-cut suit; even his tie had likely cost more than my entire wardrobe. Climbing out, he greeted us cheerfully: “Evening, folks. Ollie Clay, is it? And would you be Mrs. Clay?”

  “Ms. Soroush,” Yasmina corrected pleasantly. “Call me Yasmina.”

  “Yasmina,” echoed the estate agent, as if to fix the name in his memory. “I’m Imran. You two seen a lot of properties?”

  “This is the first we’ve been round together,” I said. “But I viewed a few last week.”

  My tone must have betrayed me. “Not so hot?” Imran suggested.

  “Not so hot,” I agreed.

  “Yeah, if this is the kind of price bracket you’re looking at, then I’m afraid there’s not much. The better places tend to go quickly. This one, though…you could do a lot worse. Might want to snap it up fast if you’re interested.”

  He took a set of keys from a pocket, wrestled with the lock, tried a second bunch, and finally succeeded in getting the door open. Beyond was a small living room, with a staircase directly before the entrance heading up to the second floor. The carpets had been stripped, leaving exposed boards; the light bulb, too, was bare. The paper on the walls was a horrid Seventies affair in green and gold, the sort of eye-watering design you couldn’t believe anyone would ever have chosen. Most of it, anyway, had begun to peel, in one spot in a great, drooping strip.

  “The electrics were rewired recently,” Imran announced. “There’s central heating, and a combi boiler that’s fairly new.”

  He escorted us through to a narrow kitchen, little more than a tunnel with a window. The worktops were scratched, dinted, and ingrained with dirt; the cupboards above were in a similar condition, with one panel hanging off-kilter and another missing its handle. Out the window I could see the yard, a rectangle of concrete confined by high fences, with a gate opposite the back door that looked as though one good kick would take it clean off its hinges. I couldn’t imagine myself inviting friends to socialize in that desolate space; I couldn’t see potted plants doing much to soften its bleakness.

  As we traipsed back into the living room, I noticed a second door, sunk in the side of the stairwell. “What’s through there?” I asked.

  “That’s the cellar,” Imran told me. “Most of the places around here have them. Want a look?”

  “Why not?” I agreed.

  Imran went first down steep stairs, of bare stone to my surprise. From the moment he’d opened the door, I could smell the mustiness of long-trapped air, and by the bottom step it was threatening to suffocate me. The light switch achieved nothing, so Imran made do with the torch on his phone. Its glow gave an indistinct impression of crumbling brick, a dirt floor, and cobwebs so vast and opaque that they must have housed spiders by the generation.

  “Good for storage,” Imran said, doing well not to choke in the stale air. “Or I’ve seen people convert them. TV room, maybe, something like that.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, and hurried back up into the living room.

  There, Yasmina, who hadn’t braved the cellar, caught my eye. Her expression said, Why are we wasting our time? I found myself wishing I’d shown her pictures of some places, to give her a little perspective. But before I could respond, Imran had appeared behind me and said, “Want to check out the upstairs?”

  There was a bathroom and two bedrooms, one decently sized, the other not much more than a closet. Of the three, the bathroom was in by far the worst state. The bath panel was a sheet of chipboard and was hanging loose; the tiles, which ran halfway up the wall around the tub, were cracked and some of them were missing; on the opposite wall bloomed great smudges of mold. I took one glance in there, attempted to calculate the work that needed doing, gave up, and hurriedly withdrew.

  We trooped back to the living room once more. Imran was toying with his phone, this time with a sense of urgency. “So, got any questions?” he asked, some of his upbeat politeness vanished.

  “Do you think the owner would negotiate?” I wondered.

  “They’ve already come down once,” Imran said. “It’s a good buy at this price. You can try, but….” He let the sentence trail.

  Nearby someone shouted, loudly and unintelligibly, and all three of us started. I couldn’t tell if the cry had come from one of the neighboring houses or from the street. Thin walls, I thought absently, as though such a thing was positively a virtue. And I knew then that I’d made up my mind.

  Maybe Imran read that from my face, or maybe he just wanted to get out of there. “If you’re interested, don’t leave it too long,” he told me. “Like I said, the better places get snapped up quickly.” He checked his phone again, and jabbed at the screen. “Yeah, the next showing’s a couple, tomorrow lunchtime. So if you’re tempted, make sure you call the office before then.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “Great. Well, good meeting you guys.”

  He led the way into the street, locked the door behind us, and in moments was back in his car and pulling away, off to whatever important business had come up.

  I felt more excited than I had any reasonable right to be. It wasn’t that I hadn’t noticed everything that was wrong with the place; I wasn’t blind to how crummy it had been. But it was okay. And after what I’d seen the previous week, okay struck me as pretty damn great.

  “Let’s get going,” Yasmina said.

  Yasmina lived on the edge of Leeds, in one of the nicer suburbs. I realized to my shock that this area was making her uncomfortable. “Just a minute,” I replied. “I just want to…you know…think for a moment.” I gazed at the outside of the house, trying to imagine that it was my home and how that might be.

  She needed a second to understand. “You’re not thinking about taking it?”