Neighbour

Every day I walk past where, just three weeks ago, my neighbour installed a white enamelled shutter – permanently closed – over his window, and a perfect moon of grey-primed pine board over the fanlight above his front door. I often see him out walking – usually in long, slow diagonals, crossing a road. His house, I have thought, is the centre of his extended, seemingly purposeless excursions.

I try to avoid him. He is nearly deaf. He has pedantic ideas about the Taiwanese government and the women in Shanghai.

For months now he has been bringing me the mail that the postal worker has been leaving mistakenly in his box although mine has never been left in his. Once he changed the bulb in my car’s left headlight. God knows how he did it without a key.

Wipers

Our neighbours wanted to know whether we had noticed that, for nearly three weeks now, by seven o’clock every morning – which is the time that one of them leaves for work – all the windscreen wipers of the vehicles parked in our street had been flipped into the vertical position – standing like sentries, in the way of Stalin’s supporters, as they put it, who were too afraid to sit down before the man himself did. By the afternoon, only a few of the windscreen wipers would still be vertical, which was a sure sign to thieves that those particular cars weren’t being looked after in the way that other cars were.

The thing to do, they advised – and this they had been telling everybody they knew in the street, and we should do likewise – was to resist the temptation to lay the windscreen wipers flat. In this way, they thought, the thieves would be confused and would go and find another street of cars to harass.