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Genre Fiction Short Story

Jen Webb

Helping me, helping you

My neighbour went mad last week, unexpectedly, distressingly. It was on the evening news - you may have seen it? The headlined story of how I woke early that morning to the sound of shrieking, and went next door to investigate.

She and I have lived side by side for fifteen years, and in all those years we never spoke, though our bedroom windows face one another across that narrow strip of lawn, though we've moved shoulder to shoulder across our respective back yards, watering the lawns, digging weeds. During the long slow nights we have listened to one another move about our respective homes. Her clock chimes every half hour, prettily. My clock sits silently on my bedside table, its electronic face spilling the time in glowing numbers down its face. Time visibly passing, night after night.

A month ago, at last, I crossed the path to ring the bell on her front door, thinking of all these years that we’ve been neighbours, all these years that we’ve listened to each other’s night sounds, the rush of water, the rare copulations, the solitary sobbing. I hear her phone ringing in the early evening. I watch her friends drive her to tennis, and she watches me leave to play golf. And a month ago, I broke our silence. I crossed the path, I rang the doorbell, I introduced myself and asked her to my home for coffee and cards. She did not reply, not in words, but nodded imperceptibly and led me down her steps and up mine.

I still don’t know her name. She didn’t tell me, and after fifteen years of intimate isolation, how could I ask? I called her "my dear." That has a solid, safe, genteel ring to it, I think. It sounds neighbourly.

I made the coffee - I make excellent coffee, all my friends say so - and carried the tray through to my sunny front room, and set it on my small oval table with its Queen Anne legs. "Milk?" I asked, and she took the coffee pot from me, peeling my fingers one by one away from the handle. It was quite a complex operation. She stretched across the table and took my wrist in one hand, and with her other hand wrenched the coffee pot away from me. Clutched it towards her chest. Pushed my hand away into my lap where it lay perplexed and still. She poured a little milk into her cup, then a little coffee. Carefully counted out a very few grains of sugar, and stirred them in, vigorously. A mere suggestion of more milk, then top it up with coffee, add three Sucaryl tablets, and stir.

I had to pour my own, which I do in the normal manner: a splash of milk, then the coffee, add sugar, and stir. Then I fetched my cards. For her I used a five card spread - Ten of Cups; the Fool; Six of Cups; Queen of Wands; Ten of Swords. "The Six of Cups holds the others together," I tell her; "It’s a good sign." And this is my reading:

You have the assurance of everything you could wish for; but you should expect the unexpected. I see a touch of nostalgia, even sadness; but if you look towards the future, not the past, you’ll realise that you are stronger now, that things are better than they were.

I read the Queen of Wands as me, a gracious lady offering help. I tell her that’s what it means, without saying that I think it refers to me.

And then there’s the Ten of Swords.

My neighbour is looking unblinkingly at the card. The image is the conventional one: a body lying face down, pierced with swords. "It’s not what you think," I say. She says nothing. Her face does not move. I say, "This card just indicates change. Certainly there may be a little - well, let’s see - a little stress along the way, but that’s just part of the change process. It’s all for the best. It’s the start of something new." I almost believe it myself.

Oh, neighbour. She nodded slightly, then drained her cup, slurping loudly. And then, standing up, she reached out and took my face between her two hands, she kissed my lips, and carefully constructed a smile of such unexpected energy that the cat started and leapt out of the window. Then she left too, through the front door.

I have many friends. That has meant, as the years pass, that there have been many sorrows to resolve. Mostly divorces; a few widowings; midlife crises; chemical dependencies; retrenchments. Once, dreadfully, the death of a child, when none of my clever tricks could soothe the pain, could knit up the wound. Oh my dears, my damaged friends.

I have remained miraculously untouched, with my cats and my books and my steadily increasing collection of contemporary art. My neighbour is untouched too, like me. Like me, she fills her time with phone calls and by tending her garden, which is large, attractive, ordered. I watch her, occasionally, as she trims and weeds and waters. She doesn’t plant flowers, but some of the shrubs bloom from time to time. She has no pets, no children, no car. She leads a simple life, one for which I occasionally hanker as I move from committee meeting to interview panel to conspiratorial deal. I move through the corridors of power, accumulating some modest status, the tangentially acknowledged ability to influence decision makers. It’s a quiet life, all the same. Work, TV, friends. Sometimes a show. And then, last week, I woke early to the sound of shrieking. I had been half-expecting it, ever since that Ten of Swords. I slipped into my robe and ran across the path to where her door stood open, and the urgent desperate sounds drew me in. "Help," she was crying, and "No," and "Oh, oh, oh".

Her house is an old person’s house, though she is my age, more or less. It has that odour of dusty carpets and skin. A cat (one of mine, I think) is wide-eyed in a corner. My neighbour is sitting in a chair, knees pulled tight to her chest. Her mouth gapes in a rictus, her eyes are concertinaed, her hands clutch her feet. And she is making that dreadful wounded noise. Over and over she cries, the sound pervades my body, settling harshly in that vulnerable strip between my breasts where it twists coldly, tearing at my self-possession.

I approach. I touch her hand, which is cold. Only her throat is moving. Around her chair are swarms of ants. Beside her, on the floor, cold tea and crusts of toast. I call out to her, over the sound of her high cries: "My dear!", I say, "My dear!" She doesn’t hear.

What else could I have done? I open my mouth wide, as wide as hers. I place my lips on hers and gulp down the screams. In they go, sharp as aspirin, and I wrap my arms and legs about her; we tumble to the floor and lie entwined, and every part that can touch is touching. Eye to eye, lip to lip, hip to groin, breast to breast.

Well, you know the rest. It was on the news. They found us like that in the late afternoon. When they pried us apart two of my fingers were broken, and there are dark bruises on my inner thighs. As they peeled my mouth off hers, the screams leapt out again. The paramedics blanched, then found in their baggage a helmet which they bound around her head, a straitjacket for the mind. It blinded her, silenced her, clamped her mouth shut.

As for me, my lips are torn, my mouth has set in its rigid gape. They have bound up my face but can’t close it, even with drugs. I have lost the power of speech, for now, but that’s okay. Saying lets loose the things that are better bound.

As for her, she sits upright in the bed across from mine, her head securely wrapped, one eye peering around the helmet, staring fixedly into mine. If her mouth weren’t bound, I know she’d smile at me. Sometimes she winks. I think she winks, though it’s hard to tell when there’s only one eye exposed.

I lie on my back in the bed opposite her, my legs trapped in space, bent and rigid under the bedclothes, and my jaw fixed open with her pain. We are bound to each other and, except for the curious flow of doctors, are alone to stare silently across the sterile floor, locked together in an anomalous mutuality. We are neighbours, we are sisters. You might even say we are friends.