Love thy neighbour
Jeremy Clarke
Three of us are in my brother's new outdoor hot-tub listening to the football on the radio, drinking some beer. There's me, my boy (Mark, aged 12) and my brother. The radio is a blue and yellow plastic fish. The volume control on this fish is its eyeball, its tuner the dorsal fin. The fish is stuck on the outside of the kitchen window with suckers. Half an hour gone and still nil-nil.
It's me and my boy's first time in my brother's new hot-tub. My brother demonstrates how, by twisting this knob one way and that one the other, one can regulate the flow of underwater bubbles. At maximum strength, he tells us, they are capable of blowing little Emily's pants right off. (Little Emily is his two-year-old daughter.) My brother justifies the expense of a hottub by saying better to have one now, on credit, than save up and get one when he's too old to enjoy it. Otherwise we don't talk much because we are straining to hear the football commentary over the competing noise of the bubbles.
My brother's garden is small. On three sides we're overlooked by my brother's neighbours. Little Emily is playing in the garden with little Jake and big Daniel. She and Jake are naked. We watch them playing. Their games could be described as riots tempered by weeping.
My brother's wife screeches at the children through the kitchen window. My brother says his wife is in a strop today. It's understandable, he says. They've been having trouble with the next-door neighbour. She's got this big black fluffy alsatian and it drives my brother and his wife mad with its incessant neurotic barking.
(Spurs score a goal and my brother and I simultaneously throw back our heads and groan. We listen in disgust as the commentator describes the goal again, then my brother resumes his narrative.) They've asked her nicely to stop the dog barking. But she was rude, so my brother rang the Environmental Health people and made a complaint. The Environmental Health people visited my brother's nextdoor neighbour, listened to the dog barking and issued her with a warning.
This afternoon, says my brother, his wife happened to look up and noticed a video camera pointing into their garden from the next-door neighbour's bedroom window. He points up at it. An unsuccessful attempt has been made to conceal the camera behind vertical blinds, but it's there all right, pointing right at us. As soon as he saw the camera, my brother says, he called the police. (After all, his children are running round with no clothes on.) A police officer is expected at the door at any minute. This, my brother explains, is why his wife is shouting a lot at the moment.
But you are the police,' says my boy, always alert to the inconsistencies of adults. 'Why don't you just go round and arrest her?' My brother explains to my boy that, although he and his wife are full-time police officers, they cannot just go around arresting their neighbours for noise nuisance, and in any case today is their day off.
Day off or not, though, my brother is uncomfortable at the thought of being interviewed by a fellow police officer while he is in the hot-tub. Apart from anything else, it's hard to appear like the aggrieved party in a civil dispute while lolling in a hot-tub with a glass of ice-cold beer in your hand. You can't, for instance, say things like, 'See what that infernal woman and her dog have reduced us to, officer.' So when the door-bell rings my brother hops out of the tub sharpish-like and puts both feet down the same leg of his shorts.
The policeman is a colleague of theirs. 'Hi, Brian!' they say. Brian comes into the garden wearing a black flak-jacket. Compared with the rest of us Brian looks overdressed. He looks over at me and the boy sitting in the hot-tub and says he must be in the wrong job. Then my brother and his wife escort him over to the part of the garden where he can see the video camera to its best advantage. Neither my boy nor I can hear what they are saying because of the bubbling noise. But we watch my brother and his wife pointing up at his next-door neighbour's window and Brian pulling at his chin. Then Brian straightens his shoulders and goes next door.
There's a flurry of goals while he's away. It goes: 1-1, 2-1, 2-2. With five minutes left, the match could go either way. When Brian comes back, West Ham are pressing and my brother's ear is glued to the fish. Brian tries to tell my brother that the woman flatly denies filming him; in fact denies even owning a camcorder. But my brother tells him to shush a minute — West Ham have a corner.
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