THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

A lifetime of daydreaming and fantasy comes to a sudden end for Rupert

Snow lay on his front garden as Rupert stared out of the window. A robin visiting and calling would have been nice but there wasn’t one. It was nearly Christmas, but not quite.

But then there was Emily from next door walking by. And Emily walking by made everything well-nigh perfect because on good days like this, he recalled, Emily often walked past. He watched her as she passed, marvelled as ever at her sheer perfection, supposed he loved her in a spooky kind of secret way. Sighed, and she was gone.

He’d lived in this house for seventy years! Seventy years of looking out at this front garden and the pavement of the street beyond and seventy years of Emily walking past.

And seventy years of never saying a single word to her, never greeting her with a cheery “hi there”, never inviting her in for a splash of tea in a china cup, never acknowledging her existence. Just hoping she’d walk past, and watching her when she did.

Never acknowledging just how much he loved her.

There had been that time sixty-odd years ago when she’d been playing hopscotch on the pavement with a few other neighbourhood girls �" he couldn’t remember them but he could remember her, sliding the stone over the chalked squares on the pavement and hopping to the end and back. Or skipping. He’d watched that, too. He’d watched her through this very window and had itched with every fibre of his body to go out and tease her and have a game of hopscotch with her or maybe a turn with the skipping rope, he in his short pants and she in her pretty summer dress. But something always held him back.

Maybe it was mother. Dead now for so many years that she surely didn’t count when it came to wondering about why he was who he was and what words in the long ago of his life had directed his path through the labyrinth of time, though he did sometimes blame the poor woman.

He sort of knew that he’d never been happy.

But how, he asked himself, can you blame an assortment of mouldering bones for the person you became years after the funeral, when you laid her in the ground and, when the other mourners had gone, secretly stomped on the earth that would be piled onto her coffin and wished her well in Hell?

Because he knew that she’d been a good woman, really.

But when he’d been dreaming of hop-scotching with Emily next door she’d been so sarcastic it hurt.

“You’ll grow up to be a nancy boy,” she said when she saw the way he stared out of that same window and let his eyes roam over the girl from next door, let his gaze tease her pig-tails, let his watering eyes absorb the way that pretty little skirt hung down..., “playing girly games like that! Be a man, Rupert, be a real man and play with guns! That’s what men do, bang-bang you’re dead!”

For years she’d no longer lived next door, but had still walked past his window, on the pavement that bordered the street, and never, but never, looked his way,

But he couldn’t blame his mother’s memory for the way Emily, now well stricken with the passing years but still as pretty as ever, walked past without knowing that he, Rupert lived and breathed for her, and had her image etched onto his brain like the permanent image it was.

He remembered when she’d married Bert, the hoodlum who had courted her and proceeded to give her three children and a great number of black eyes. He hated Bert and wanted nothing more than to see the scum fall down dead in the street. But he never did that though Emily did divorce him soon enough.

She had to, thought Rupert, or he’d have killed her.

Yet he knew full well that the Berts of this world eventually get what’s coming to them. This one did. He had a really nasty end, splattered over the railway lines that used to run along the banking behind their little street. They said he’d been drunk as he staggered to the lodging house where he now lived, close enough to Emily to still be a threat and see the kids, and, they theorised, he’d somehow fallen off the footbridge that used to be there. And not just fallen, but fallen smack in front of a coal train that had turned living flesh into a bloody mess.

And Emily had moved back in next door, with her parents.

And there she had stayed for all the years since then, bringing up her three children, walking to the shops from time to time, smart, hair always neat, face tidy and never excessively exposed to cosmetics, just as pretty as she’d always been.

Her kids had all gone by now. One was married to an American and lived in Utah where they scraped a living in the dust of a worn-out world, another was married and become a politician whose dreams of perfection veered too far to the left to ever be taken seriously in his homeland, and a third had died too soon, an overdose they said, but an overdose of what? He didn’t know.

So Emily was alone since her parents had done what parents do, and passed away.

And in all that long life Rupert had never spoken a single word to her. Not of sorrow, not of joy, not of anything.

And there she was walking past his snowy front lawn.

And pausing.

Yes, and pausing, and looking his way, and seeing him as he stood by the large front window of his home and gazed out at her.

His heart almost missed a beat as a collage of all the times he’d watched her doing just that but without the pausing flashed through his mind. The pretty young thing, the mother, the proud older woman. They were all there as a sort of magical composite in his mind. And that composite always walked on, never pausing like she had just now.

His heart clamoured inside his chest as her eyes looked his way.

Eyes that he’d seen a million times in fantasies looked straight at him.

How much he loved those eyes!

Then she turned and walked down his front path, through the gate as he had often dreamed she might, smart, beautiful as ever, maybe smiling, he couldn’t tell, and she rang his doorbell.

It was Christmas time, and she was ringing his front door bell!

He wished he had some mistletoe!

Swift as he could but embarrassingly slowly he rushed to the door, to open it, to smile at her, to hold her in his arms, to tell her just how much he’d always loved her, to reminisce about the hopscotch games he might have shared with her, to say how sorry he was at the dramas that had punctuated her life and how things, from this moment on, were going to be good like they always should have been.

She fixed him with her eyes.

With her lovely, lovely eyes.

“I don’t know who you are or what you’ve got against me, but I’d be really, really pleased if you stopped staring at me like you do whenever I walk past here!” she said, “you’re a disgusting old man and ought to be locked away from decent folks like me! I dared say I ought to report you to the police!”

And she scowled at him, and turned and took the composite mental image out of his life.

© Peter Rogerson 15.12.17