I am 58 and it feels as though my neighbour has woven herself into the very fabric of my dreams. She lives just opposite and, in this surreal patchwork of twilight and rain, it seems her sole purpose is to follow every quiver of my day. She knows the precise moment each delivery van hums down the streetbe it groceries or fish and chipscounting every bag as if to weigh all my secrets. Should the postman dawdle by even two minutes, I hear a distant murmur, as if the headlines are my queue and the posts delay is breaking news.
Her vigilance is boundless. I sense her clocking the rhythms of my rubbish, charting the number of black sacks I lay by the bins on windy Tuesday mornings. Two last week, three thisshe marks the change as though the dustbin holds the key to my soul. Should I skip a week, bereft of enough refuse, she still notes my absence. Once she asked, plain as milk, whether I throw away foodher words drifting over in the late afternoon like a nosy fog. I just stared, confused as to when my kitchen scraps became a question for parliament.
And then theres my dog, Winston. Hes not huge nor fierce, but he does bark when strangers drift too close to the garden gate. Each bark is grist for her dreamlike complaints. She has knocked on my red door to declare that Winston barked far too much while I was away at work, her words as precise as the toll of the church bellseven barks at half past two, three more at four, she says. Some nights, I fear she understands the pulse of my old house better than I do.
My husband isnt beyond her scrutiny either. If he tumbles in late from a shift, theres a hushed aside the next dayYou two mustve had a late one last night, or Your David didnt get home till nearly midnight, did he? If he comes early, she wonders aloud if hes caught a bug or lost his job. Her gossip skips from window to window, echoing around terrace houses until it comes back to me twisted, knotty, strange.
My sixteen-year-old daughter, Alice, is watched no less. When Alice heads out with her friendsJoy, Grace, Eleanormy neighbours dreamscape keeps count, noting every girl who steps over our threshold, every shadow that departs. If Alice brings someone in, the time-stamp of their visit is added to her invisible ledger. She once informed Mrs Green next door that that girl is always out, as if Alice were her own. That was a strange momentI confronted her, feeling as if my boundaries had been painted over in invisible ink.
The oddest thing: she isn’t new here. Shes lived on this street in Oxfordshire her entire life, like me. The house is my mothers, God rest her soul, and she left it to me, her only child. I have no plans to move, for I love my homes walls steeped in history, and the oak in the garden thats older than all our troubles. The house is not the wound; it is living beside someone who does not believe in fences, even the invisible sort, that stirs the storm.
These days, Im not sure what to do. Ive tried ignoring her, being kindly English and coldly blunt, but nothing bends her resolve. She simply remains, a constant presence in the hazewatching, whispering, leaping to conclusions I never arrive at myself. So, Im left wondering: in this strange, never-ending dream, how do you survive a neighbour who refuses the gentle fiction of privacy? How do you keep your peace, avoid a great row, yet not hand over your life as if it belongs to the whole village?
Have you any advice, out there in the morning mist?
