The Family Across the Street by Nicole Trope
2
Gladys
Gladys pulls the cord to open the curtains in the spare room, letting in the glaring sunshine. She pushes at the window a little, cursing at how it sticks, as she does every morning. ‘Ha,’ she says when it finally slides up. The air is warm and fragrant, already slightly sticky with humidity.
‘You should keep all the windows closed today,’ shouts her husband Lou from their bedroom. ‘Keep the windows closed and the air conditioning on and pets inside. That’s what they said on the news last night. It’s going to get to thirty-nine degrees today, Gladys, you’re only letting in the heat.’
‘I’m letting out the stale air from last night. I’ll only open them for a few hours. I can’t abide not having fresh air,’ Gladys shouts back, irritation rising. He knows she likes to open the windows every morning.
‘I’m only telling you what they said on the news,’ says Lou. ‘You don’t have to listen to the experts, you never do anyway.’
Gladys ignores this last remark. She cannot get into an argument with Lou this early in the morning.
She looks across at the house next door to the two sets of windows that face her. It seems that Katherine is running a little late this morning because the blinds and windows are closed in both bedrooms. Gladys knows that the one on the left belongs to George and the one on the right belongs to Sophie. George has deep blue blinds and Sophie has iridescent pink. According to Katherine it was Sophie’s decision when the old animal-print curtains were removed last year. Gladys is not entirely sure that children should be given the choice on everything but she knows better than to voice her opinions. She’s dealt with more than enough people saying, ‘But you don’t have children so you can’t understand,’ in her lifetime. A woman whose mothering is being questioned can turn quite nasty and Gladys has learned to let her face do the talking. She can feel her lips thin and her eyes scrunch up a little when she sees what she considers to be poor parenting but she doesn’t say anything.
It’s odd that the blinds haven’t been opened yet. The children are usually up early and Gladys has become familiar with their routine of excited shouting as they run down the hall to wake their parents. There is a point in life at which a new day ceases to be a thing of joy and instead becomes something to be faced and dealt with. Gladys wishes she could pinpoint the age at which she stopped being delighted by the rising sun.
Now that she thinks about it, she didn’t hear them this morning. They are very noisy children, and she wouldn’t be able to hear them shouting in the morning if they were able to lower their voices a single decibel, but she has mentioned this to Katherine, breaking her own rule on not commenting on children’s behaviour to their parents, to no avail.
‘It’s Lou who needs his rest,’ she told Katherine. ‘Our bedroom is on that side of the house and we can hear everything.’ Gladys knows that she is guilty of using Lou’s condition a little too much. ‘My husband is ill,’ she hears herself tell someone at least twice a day. She knows he wouldn’t like her sharing his condition with everyone from her hairdresser to the young woman at the bakery, but it affects her life as much as it does his. Both their lives were irrevocably changed ten years ago.
‘I’ll ask them, Gladys, I will,’ Katherine said at the time. Her hands were full of parcels and she looked a little flustered, so Gladys had to concede that she hadn’t picked the best time to raise the subject, but needs must. When George and Sophie were babies, there wasn’t as much noise as there is now. Although she used to sleep with earplugs then, finding Lou’s snoring too much to bear. Now she needs to hear him. She is terrified that he will stop breathing in his sleep and she will simply sleep on, oblivious.
‘No wonder we slept late,’ she calls to Lou. ‘I don’t think those children are up yet.’ Sleep is a goal Gladys fights to reach every night. She is always exhausted to her bones when she gets into bed but the moment that Lou’s snores start, her brain cranks up and she goes through what she’s come to call her ‘wheel of worries’.
Have I paid the car insurance? When is Lou’s next doctor’s appointment? Did I make sure the electricity bill was on direct debit? Is there enough money in the account to pay for everything? Why is the car making that strange clicking noise? How much longer will Lou live? How will I live without Lou?
Round and round it goes, her brain a frantic hamster pedalling on a wheel. Last night was particularly bad and she knows that the last set of red numbers she saw on the alarm clock next to her bed was 03:00. Exhaustion made everything seem worse and Lou’s snoring became a jackhammer in her head. Bitter tears arrived and she placed a pillow over her head so the noise of her crying wouldn’t wake Lou. Finally everything was muffled and she slept. She was surprised to open her eyes at seven this morning instead of five thirty. She immediately felt the fright of oversleeping, realising the pillow had blocked out any sound, and sat up quickly to check on Lou, waking him. ‘Sorry,’ she said, as he groaned that he ‘needed a bit of rest, woman’, but she wasn’t sorry really. At least he was still alive.
‘They have to be at school soon,’ calls Lou now. Every weekday morning, Katherine walks the children to school unless it’s raining or too cold, in which case she drives. Gladys and Lou are usually sitting in their front room by then, by the lovely bay window that looks out onto the street, having their breakfast. Toast and egg for Lou and muesli for her. As the children pass their house, they peer through the grey metal front gate and wave at Lou and Gladys. ‘There go those kids,’ Lou always says, as though Gladys hasn’t seen them. ‘Yes,’ she always replies, waving madly to make sure the children have seen her acknowledgement of their greeting.
‘It’s only seven thirty, Lou,’ says Gladys.
She returns to their bedroom, wrinkling her nose a little at the stuffy heat that has already formed in the dark room since she turned off the air conditioner, knowing she was going to open the windows for a short while. As she opens the curtains and windows in there as well, Lou watches her, his lips thinned with the effort of not repeating his opinion. He is sitting up in bed, his grey hair sticking up and his face made older by the grey-white stubble of his morning beard. She notices that his blue pyjama shirt is misbuttoned and restrains herself from fixing it for him. He doesn’t like to be fussed over in the morning as he prepares himself to get out of bed. She can see his feet moving under the duvet cover, stretching out the night’s stiffness in his muscles.
‘They should all be up already, after the way John left this morning,’ he says irritably. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t hear it. At least I managed to fall asleep again. There’s no need for that amount of screeching – and I can tell you, I used to sell cars and it’s not good for the tyres, not good at all.’
‘I know you used to sell cars, Lou. We’ve been married for forty-five years. It’s not something I’m likely to forget, is it?’ Gladys hears her impatient tone and feels guilty, but she’s already feeling peevish in the early-morning heat, made worse by the knowledge that she will be stuck inside today because Peter, Lou’s carer, can’t be here today. If not for that, she would have driven herself down to the beach for a swim. Or she could have called Penny, who is always up for a spot of lunch.
She takes a deep breath as she folds her nightdress and sticks it under her pillow, imagining she is down at the ocean with the salt tang ripening in the heat and the cool water eddying around her toes.
I’ll go tomorrow. But today I will practise patience. Lord, please give me the strength to be patient.
Both she and Lou understood that Parkinson’s is a progressive disease when he was diagnosed at the age of sixty-five. ‘You’re very lucky to have got this far without it really affecting your life,’ their doctor told them.
‘Well, I’m buggered if I’ll let it affect me now!’ Lou replied. He was unused to anything standing in his way. He was a barrel-shaped man, only slightly taller than Gladys but with a loud voice and a large presence. When he walked into a room, you knew about it. He had a deep tone that people instantly trusted, which was why he’d been so successful in the car game. Gladys had watched him once, many years ago, when she’d gone to have lunch with him. She’d had the day off and they were going to drive to a little restaurant on the harbour that served the most divine prawns. She’d been early so she had sat quietly in the BMW showroom, surrounded by the bright metallic cars, beaming their luxury, and watched Lou talk to a customer. He had taken the man’s hand, essentially to shake it, but then he had closed his other hand over the top and whispered something, as though imparting a secret. Lou had nodded as he spoke and soon the man was nodding along with him and the sale was secured.
Parkinson’s had affected him slowly but surely. He had moved through the stages and was now, at seventy-five, in stage three. He could get around after a fashion with his walker but he needed the wheelchair most days. Peter usually came for at least five hours every day, despite Lou’s constant complaining that a carer was a waste of money. Gladys said, ‘We don’t have children, Lou, and we’re old already. What else is the money for?’
‘You might live on for a good decade or two without me, old girl. I don’t want you to go without.’
‘Don’t fuss, there’s enough for me to be very comfortable,’ she told him, and then she had to hide in the bathroom so she could shed a few quiet tears. She had made her peace with not having children a long time ago, but in her mind, she had somehow assumed that one day she and Lou would just die together.
They’ve shared a whole life together, seen the world, experienced everything it has to offer from long holidays on sunlit beaches to a cruise to Antarctica. They spent Christmas in a different country every year for at least three decades, and they have so many lovely memories to look back on. When they are both in the mood, they compare opinions on the best hotels they’ve ever stayed in. Gladys thinks it was the Langham in New York, where they watched a snowstorm rage outside their window as they sipped champagne in the understated, elegant room, but Lou favours the InterContinental in Tahiti, where they enjoyed a room right over the sapphire-blue ocean. Both agree that the best meal they ever had was in a little restaurant down a side lane in Portugal, where only the locals seemed to be enjoying the chicken dish. Sometimes a memory will catch Gladys and she will say to Lou, ‘I thought I would never stop laughing…’ and Lou will finish for her, ‘When the waiter in France scolded you for trying to speak French,’ and they will laugh together again even years after it happened. They never ran out of things to talk about; only lately, as things have got worse, have their lives shrunk to this house and conversations around Lou’s deteriorating health.
She wouldn’t trade her life for anything, but the loss of her best friend looms large now and she sometimes thinks that her shortness with him, her need to be away from him as much as possible, is self-preservation. She has no idea how she will go on. She has friends in her life but no one she feels she could call every day. Penny is as close as she’s got to a best friend but Penny only ever has an hour or so to grab lunch. She’s busy with her grandchildren and her art.
Having Peter in their lives became a necessity only in the last year. Gladys knows herself and she knows that if she’s trapped at home all day, her temper gets short and then she lashes out at Lou and then is eaten alive with guilt. He’s never been an easy man but his failing body frustrates him and makes him fractious and cranky. She understands that but she doesn’t always deal with it as graciously as she would like.
‘Do you think I should call Katherine?’ Gladys says as she smooths the duvet, along with her tone, and plumps her pillow. ‘Maybe one of the children is sick and I could walk the other one to school.’
‘You leave her alone, Gladys,’ says Lou. ‘She doesn’t need your interfering.’
‘She’s a mother of five-year-old twins. I imagine she’s glad of any help she gets. Anyway, she asked me to walk George to school when Sophie had tonsilitis last month, didn’t she?’
‘Then you know she’ll ask you if she needs you,’ huffs Lou. ‘Now do you have any idea when you might get around to a cup of tea? I’m completely parched and you know I have to take my medication early in the morning.’
‘Right now, Lou,’ says Gladys, and she leaves their room and walks slowly down the stairs to the kitchen. She feels her knees protest but at least she can still walk; she feels terrible for Lou that it’s such a difficult process. Last year they had a stair lift installed for Lou but she wants to avoid using it herself. Using it would feel like giving in to the aging process when she is supposed to be the strong one.
She fills the kettle and watches the lorikeets in the tree outside the window, waddling up and down the branches, their green wings flashing in the sun. Usually, the children would be out in the garden by now. ‘They seem to be powered by an inexhaustible supply of energy,’ Katherine has said. But Gladys can’t hear the creaking of the swing set or the children chattering to each other as she usually does. She decides that she might go over later, just to see, just to check. It’s the neighbourly thing to do. There is no reason for her to feel worried for the family except for that little incident yesterday that has somehow thrown her off a little. When she thinks about it, she experiences a tickle of concern, as though there is something she needs to remember or something she needs to do about it.
Maybe she should have mentioned it to Lou, or maybe even Katherine, but she’s sure that it was nothing.
The first time she met Katherine and John she noticed Katherine’s striking deep brown eyes and her beautiful thick hair hanging in lovely honey-brown waves down her back. A small bump was only obvious as she turned and the wind pushed her top against her stomach. Gladys didn’t say anything, knowing that it was never a good idea to comment on a woman’s body. She’d been asked once or twice if she was pregnant when she was younger, and having to answer that she was not always broke her heart. But Katherine placed her hand protectively on her stomach when she saw Gladys notice. ‘Twins,’ she said, smiling. ‘As soon as we started trying, it just happened.’
Gladys smiled widely, the ‘welcome to the neighbourhood’ chocolate cake growing heavy in her hands. ‘How lovely,’ she said.
If there was something wrong, Katherine would tell her. She would, wouldn’t she? They’ve been neighbours for long enough. They’re not quite friends but Gladys hopes Katherine knows she can count on her if she needs her.
As she makes Lou’s tea for him and takes it upstairs, she decides she will definitely go over there later and see if everything is all right. There’s no harm in checking up on a neighbour, no harm at all.