5. Crocodile Tears

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

Odd behaviour by the neighbouring man

Tania was in a most confused mental state. Hovering just beyond reach of her no doubt bright mind was the image of the bloke next door frantically filling in the deep hole that he’d only just managed to dig, and at the forefront of her awareness was her ex husband Kevin who in a way that she couldn’t understand she still seemed to have quite powerful feelings for. If only he hadn’t been so possessive. She knew she had the sort of appearance that made some men want to look a second time, but she couldn’t help that, could she?

Their mutual passion for each other had been almost overpowering during the two or three good years of their relationship, the way they had clung to each other during the dark hours of the night,, the excitement of mutual exploration that never seemed to pale into insignificance, the truth between them in whispered words.

Yet he had tended to read far too much in the nothing of a strange man glancing her way, and she absolutely refused ti change her dress sense or hairstyle or anything else to discourage such glances. After all, hadn’t Kevin himself bought her that short summer dress that had been the crux of their last and most fiery argument? And he had called it special, said it made her look perfect. Then a nobody had wolf-whistled from across the street in town, and he had lost it. In public too.

And now, with the chasm of divorce between them, they were sharing the same house, for purely economic reasons. Not the same bed, she couldn’t have lived with that not after what he had said, but the same bathroom, the same living space, the same kitchen…and he still displayed elements of that infernal jealousy even though he had instigated the divorce himself because she was his and nobody else was going to have the least smidgen of her while he was alive. He’s actually said that. He didn;t seem to get it, that she loved him, but she belonged to nobody but herself.

“Why couldn’t you have been more normal?” she had asked him so many times it was beyond her ability to count them.

“I would if you didn’t flaunt yourself,” he would always respond.

“I can’t help my face, my mouth, the way I can’t help smiling,” she had retorted, or words very much like that, “but don;t you get it? I’ve never actually more than glanced at another man, but at the same time you’ve lost me. Through your own actions, the stupid way you think!”

“But you could try not to look so, so,,, a smiley,” he always responded.

The big trouble for Tania was she still rather liked him quite a lot. Or was it love? Did she still love him despite everything he had said, all the nonsense he had accused her of, all the rows that had precipitated? And now there were the sarky comments he made about the bloke next door, a bloke whose very behaviour was open to the darkest of suspicions in her mind. A man she could never in her wildest dreams feel more than distrust of.

Kevin was sitting in the easy chair he had long since adopted as his own and was pretending to read a book. She could tell he was just pretending to read because of the number of times his eyes left the page and glanced her way. But she couldn't really say anything because if she did he would ask her something like what jerk are you seeing tonight, then or something more offensive than that

She stood up and reached for his cup, empty for the past half hour and on the coffee table inches away from where he was sitting. That was another annoying thing about Kevin. He was quite happy to leave used cups and crockery wherever he felt like leaving them, not clearing them away until she made a mover herself. Maybe it was just as well they were divorced!

“Off to perve at that bloke next door and his fancy trousers, through the kitchen window?” he growled at her.

“Don’t be such an idiot,” she retorted, “he’s nasty!”

“But he’s bright. Must be. Didn’t he say he was a teacher?”

“That doesn’t mean anything!” retorted Tania, “and I’ve had a few teachers when I was at school who were thick as planks,”

“What do you mean you’ve had?” he said scornfully, “where was it? In the bike sheds? Behind them where nobody could see? Or in the maths teacher’s car? You know: Mr Armitage with the wandering eyes and the bulge in his trousers?”

“You disgust me, Kevin!” she snapped, and then, more quietly, “what on Earth is he doing?”

“Who?” he asked, no real curiosity in the one-word question.

“It doesn’t matter!”

But what was he doing with his rubbish bin, and did it matter?

Maybe it did. The man called David from next door was in his garden and very carefully trundling his blue wheelie bin, the one they usually used for landfill rubbish, to the gate at the bottom of his garden. Beyond it, there was a pathway, not much of one really and hardly ever used by anyone, and mostly overgrown with scrubby weeds, and the silly man called David was carefully pushing his blue wheelie bin through the gate and encouraging it down a shallow step onto the path.