1. Underpants

The Bloke Next Door

1. Underpants

Tania was perfectly happy with her life since her divorce came though even though she still shared a home with her ex. There were a few other things she might have changed had she the power to do so, but the one thing that actually did happen and that she would most certainly have gone out of her way to change had she been able to was most unexpected.

She was about to become a neighbour and unknowing acquaintance of a serial killer.

David Rozelle was a good looking man with an easy-going apparent gentility that completely hid the beast she would eventually discover that lived underneath his pale skin. And on top of that when she first noticed him he was smartly dressed in just the right clothes to make Tania want to look at him more than once.

She first noticed him on the day he and his parents moved into the house next door. He was, she supposed, somewhere in his twenties, which matched her 24 years almost exactly. The main difference between them apart from gender was whilst David still apparently lived with his parents she was separated from husband Kev but still shared a home with him for purely practical reasons.

It wasn’t that she was on the look out for a new relationship: she’d only just got out of one with Kevin Beaufort because that had been claustrophobic, to say the least. Her life with Kev had been one of having to watch everything she did, said or thought because he supervised her with eagle eyes in order to stop her straying, though he thought it perfectly all right if he flirted with any girl who happened to catch his eye. So emotionally Kev was no more, and there, like a miracle, was smart looking David next door.

The first she noticed of him was when he wad digging the garden next door a few nights after they’d moved in because in all truth digging a garden after dark and with midnight not so far away seemed an odd thing for any man to be doing, especially when all his effort seemed to be doing no more than digging a hole. And from the way he was attacking the ground it was surely going to be a deep home at that. But she found herself admiring him from the anonymity of her kitchen window. She did like the way his muscles rippled, his strong shoulders catching the moonlight because, well, he was topless, and after a half hour of struggling with his spade and bearing in mind she was the only person likely to overlook him, he became devoid of any trousers, persisting with his spade and wearing no more than a slinky pair of underpants that struggled to contain his well-muscled backside.

She sighed, and went to bed herself, the image of the handsome young man in tiny underpants toiling insanely in his garden being grist for a host of erotic dreams. And next morning when she climbed out of bed it was with a belief that she must get to know that man.

She looked out of the kitchen window and there he was, in the garden #again and mercifully properly dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt and sitting in a deckchair right next to the piece of garden he’d been furiously digging the night before. The hole he’d been attacking was still there, and from where she stood it looked very deep. But what she particularly noticed was the fact that he was weeping.

His shoulders were shaking, his head was in his hands, and he was a picture of almost complete misery. She decided he needed someone to intervene, to get in between his emotions and the sunshine (which was already really bright, it being late May). So she went outside, dressed appropriately enough in a denim dress, ostensible with something to drop in one of the three bins that were parked against the wall under the kitchen window.

“Hello,” she said brightly, “you don’t know me, but I live here…” Such a daft way of introducing herself! Of course she lived there or why would she be dropping litter into her bin?

He looked u[ at her and sniffed. If misery had a face, his was it.

“I’m Tania,” she said, “is something wrong?”

“It’s my mum,” he said, sounding like a child too young for school, and she remembered his rippling muscles from last night and contrasted them with the picture of misery in a deckchair, “I’ve lost her.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and then queried, “lost?”

“She went to bed last night,” he muttered, and he really didn’t have to, there was nothing he could say to that. After all, she didn’t even know his mother.. The family had only moved in the day before.

So, “she’s probably nipped to the shops for something she forgot,” she said.

“I’m David,” he told her, rubbing his eyes on the back of his left hand, “I don’t often cry like this, it’s just that I’m worried.”

“You sound it,” she told him.

“I mean, I’m a man and I’ve got a good job,” he continued, unnecessarily, she thought, “I teach handicapped kids. You know, those with problems. You know: autism and such like, and a couple with Downs… that kind of thing.”

Why is he telling me this? She stared at him as she asked herself that question.

Maybe I ought to change the subject, take his mind off his lost mother who’ll probably turn up any time now anyway...

She pointed to the three waste bins in a tidy row under her kitchen window. They contrasted with those next door which were all higgledy piggledy and one of them had its lid missing.

“You ought to put those bins in a straight row, maybe under the kitchen window like ours are?” she mooted, “I mean, they’ll be emptying the green one tomorrow you know, the recycling one. Put it under the window and you won’t have so far to go to fetch it if the weather turns wet, and it looks better just there, anyway.”

“It’s all right,” he grunted, “I know what’s what. Keep your nosey snout out of my bins!”

There was something about the way he dried his eyes and turned aggressive that alarmed her. She’d never met anyone quite like that. If Kev, her ex-partner who invariably spent too long in bed at weekends was up she’d tell him about their new neighbour who’d lost a mother. Not that he’d be interested, but knowing neighbours can be important, she thought.

“Go away and stop spying on me, or else,” snarled David, “can’t you see that I’ve got something on my mind?”

“Humph,” muttered Tania, and she returned into her own home quite convinced that a smart appearance and a well-pressed pair of trousers doesn’t necessarily say anything good about a man.

Kev was up. He looked at her sadly, and shook his head.

“I saw through the window. He sees right through you, then,” he grunted, “so he knows he’s too good for you!”.

© Peter Rogerson, 20.05.24

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