Remain Silent. Susie Steiner

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      ‘Housing officer, Fenland Council. Cuts to local authority budgets are beyond savage at the moment, well, as I’m sure you know. They must be cutting police budgets.’

      ‘They are, yes. It’s a very thin blue line right now.’

      They wait in silence for the kettle to boil.

      ‘Right,’ Mrs Tucker says, holding a laden tray, ‘let’s go through.’

      In the lounge, Mr Tucker is telling Davy about his predicament. He has an intense look on his face, as if he can’t unburden himself quickly enough.

      ‘I put everything into this house, every penny I had. I wanted to leave it to the kids. We were going to be mortgage free in about ten years except since they moved in, it’s worth nothing at all. Nothing! Who’d buy this off us with that going on next door? We can’t fucking leave.’ At the word ‘fucking’ he kicks the skirting close to where he stands.

      ‘Jim!’ says his wife. ‘Calm down.’

      ‘I won’t calm down. Don’t fucking tell me to fucking calm down!’

      Mr Tucker clenches and unclenches his fists, his jaw protruding.

      Manon glances at Davy, who is ashen, as if frightened. Perhaps he fears Mr Tucker might turn the fists outwards, there is that much pent-up aggression in the room.

      Mr Tucker continues, not quite shouting, but spitting out the words, ‘This house, it’s like a stone around our necks. Who’d take this house off us? All that rubbish out front, the noise, the smell. They come in at all hours, banging about, arguing, fighting. The drinking! Everything was all right before that lot came. We’ve complained that many times to the fella in charge over there, Edikas or something, he doesn’t pick up my calls any more. I’m at my wits’ end, I really am.’

      While Mr Tucker talks, Manon takes the couple in. Mrs Tucker wears a billowing shirt dress, black, and weighty black-rimmed spectacles. She has a look – makeup free, her hair short and practical, statement earrings. Knows how to shop, Manon thinks admiringly. Mr Tucker wears old jeans and a half-zip sweatshirt. He is not fat, but has the classic male shape – round belly, pipe-cleaner legs. He has lost his hair. On his wrist is a Fitbit, and Manon wonders if he is a man beset by resolutions: to be better. At which he fails.

      Mrs Tucker, seemingly unable to take any more of her husband’s tub thumping, leaves the room.

      Manon says, ‘It’s all right, Mr Tucker. I can see what a difficult situation this is. Have you talked to the police or the council about what’s happening? An antisocial behaviour order—’

      ‘No one’s listening,’ Mr Tucker says, sitting at last. ‘I’m powerless.’

      Mrs Tucker re-enters and sits on the sofa next to her husband. She’s sick to the back teeth of him, Manon thinks. He needs a job. He needs to go out each day to a job and come back tired in the evening and watch some telly. We all need that. Or perhaps he needs to rent, instead of own property. We used to be a nation of renters like the Germans; more mobile, less vulnerable to this kind of hurt.

      ‘Lukas Balsys,’ Manon says.

      She watches the name settle between Mr and Mrs Tucker on the sofa; watches the discomfort that name causes the married couple. What do you tell yourselves about Lukas Balsys? she wonders. Fucking hell, I thought my relationship was shaky. We’re the Waltons compared with these two.

      ‘Yes,’ says Mrs Tucker. ‘What about him?’

      ‘Are you aware that he has died?’

      ‘Yes,’ says Mrs Tucker. ‘Very sad.’

      ‘Did you know him well?’ asks Manon.

      Davy shifts – with discomfort, Manon thinks – in his seat.

      Mrs Tucker looks at Mr Tucker, who doesn’t return her gaze.

      ‘Um … not well,’ Mrs Tucker says, ‘I wouldn’t say well. He came here to fix some things – some plumbing. He was good at plumbing and we’d complained that many times to next door’s landlord, Edikas was it?’

      ‘He’s not the landlord, but he is their boss.’

      ‘Right, well I think he felt he owed us a favour. Perhaps he thought we’d stop complaining. So he sent Lukas around to look at our boiler because the pilot light kept going out.’

      Edikas, Manon recalls, hadn’t put it so delicately.

      ‘Banging the wife,’ was how he’d described it. ‘Everyone know she very into it. Very. Lukas could not force her, not that kind of man. Maybe Lukas kill himself for love. Anyway, we hear them through the wall.’ Edikas gave a filthy chuckle at this, then a bad impression of female orgasm, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ Then another phlegm-bubbling dirty laugh. ‘They always complain, this neighbour, so I think, I send Lukas round – Lukas plumb her hole!’ Edikas had shouted, laughing.

      ‘Yes, all right. I get the picture,’ Manon had said. ‘That was fast work from the two of them.’

      ‘Ask me, this wife would do it with anyone I send. Even Dimitri.’

      ‘What’s up with Dimitri?’

      Edikas had screwed his face up and tapped his temple with a finger. ‘Mental problems.’

      Manon had looked at Davy, without having to say ‘we should look into this Dimitri fella’, because Davy was already writing it in his pad.

      She looks now at Mrs Do-It-With-Anyone Tucker, sitting next to Mr Probably-Hasn’t-Done-It-In-Years Tucker.

      ‘Got any outhouses – shed or garage, that kind of thing?’

      ‘A shed, in the garden,’ says Mr Tucker.

      ‘Mind if I take a look?’

      She follows him out to a garden with an oval lawn surrounded by flower beds, bisected by a washing line fashioned from blue plastic rope, the same kind that tightened around Lukas Balsys’s neck.

      Manon stands beneath the washing line. The pegs are rusted onto it. The coils at the house end, around a post, are webbed with mud or spiders’ webs or algae, or whatever it is that welds things together, brownly, outdoors. Bits of the rope have faded to yellow. It doesn’t fit with the immaculate nature of the rest of the house.

      ‘Were you planning to replace this?’ she asks, one hand hanging from the line.

      ‘Oh,’ says Mr Tucker, ‘at one point we were. Can’t see the point now. I’m not putting a penny into this house, not now. Been up donkey’s years, that. It’s not very clean to put clothes on.’

      ‘So, did you buy the rope to replace it?’

      She glances into the shed while Mr Tucker holds the door open. No spare coils of new blue rope.

      ‘Not yet, no.’

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