A Summer’s Day Read

I came out into the baking heat of the late afternoon in singlet, shorts and thongs and wended through the garden to the shade trees near Wilson’s Wall. I placed the two books and a glass of iced tea on the table and dropped into one of the canvas chairs.

Sarah and Mike had given me the books for Christmas with the compelling, “They’re best-sellers, Dad!” I reached for the top book, opened the third chapter, read the page and then slapped it shut. The unremitting hopelessness of the abused youth was unsettling. I had no idea why the book was so popular or why Sarah had given it to me. I opened the second book from Mike. The outback detective was under a hot tin roof drinking whisky with a grizzled prospector who might give him a lead on the bloody murder of a loathed small-town big shot. I put it down. It was too hot to think about drinking whisky under a hot tin roof or the bloody murder of a loathed small-town big shot.

I had whittled the day away on the couch watching cricket—a near perfect day if I hadn’t tripped out to the letter box and found that note from Wilson. It was his single-minded pettiness that bothered me.

I picked the crumpled note from the pocket of my shorts and read it again. Wilson was complaining about several branches overhanging the wall. Their leaves were falling onto his garden and into his pool. I looked up and to the side. The branches were up high and barely overhung the wall. Normal people would not bother.

Em and I had slipped into retirement, still paying the bills and grabbing the concessions on rates and anything else we were entitled to. She morphed from bustling librarian to voluntary busyness and female chit-chat at the community centre. I joined the Men’s Shed and the local nature club and enjoyed attending the retired maths and science teachers’ morning teas twice a year.

I had taught at state high schools for thirty-seven years. Where did they go? All the early enthusiasm and sense of fun—optional extras for the face-to-face daily grind—were soon blunted by stroppy teenagers, aggrieved parents worried about their kids’ progress, and indifferent administrators. I hung in, accepting it was a vocation rather than a money spinner, and was drilled on teamwork and consensus. I was pretty well worn and wasted towards the end and spent the last few years developing curriculum. Finally disgruntled with the edicts, the fads, the paperwork, and having grumbled once too often to Em, I decided over a cold beer and a turn of the sausages on the barbecue, “I’ve had enough!” I retired on an indexed pension, rankled by those irritations.

The last thing we wanted in our retirement was someone petty and intimidating like Wilson. Wilson and his grudge.

I sat back, sipping the tea, sweating, feeling my Christmas flab pressing into the chair, and musing how to get Wilson off my back. An email to the address included on his note might do. Subject: Leaves from trees fall to the ground. Followed by a simple explanation aimed at the dullest eighth grader. That should irritate the devil out of him. But it was sarcastic and petty … not me. Em would say, after forty years of marriage, “Jim, scrap it. Go and see him. Be neighbourly.” But I hated arguments and wasn’t in the mood to be neighbourly. And you don’t want “mature” men behaving badly …

The Wilsons appeared five years ago. They bought the last acre block in the estate for an eye-watering price. It had lain undisturbed next to us for forty years. We felt we had lost a friend when they got that.

Their contractors bulldozed everything except a small token group of gum trees. They set the neighbourhood agog for two years building a two-tiered pastel wedding cake with a four-car garage spread across the front elevation, and landscaped a water-guzzling English garden surrounded by a solid square-cut rock wall—all in contrast to us and our offended neighbours living in modest houses tucked away on large bush blocks.

We wondered—apart from their rotten taste in mansions—how and why they had become a couple. He was a smiley, solidly built man in his mid-fifties. Em thought he looked “distinguished”. Gloria was much younger, attractive and very self-assured—perhaps a “trophy wife”. There were no signs of children. They were obviously very wealthy and sported the latest cars. They turned up in the social pages and appeared to support well-known charities. Wilson was, mysteriously, “somebody big in the city”.

Wilson was a shrewdy. Their acre was bordered by a natural reserve except for the road and our common boundary. He came to get us to sign a shared cost agreement for the wall between our homes. I said, “No way …” I saw the anger in his eyes and I thought he was going to hit me. Em said indignantly, “Why should we! The cost of it!” We dug in and paid the equivalent of a shire-approved dividing fence at one tenth of the cost—paid by bank cheque on Wilson’s unsmiling insistence. We called it Wilson’s Wall.

The Wilsons got their wall, but in tit for tat, Wilson, and occasionally Gloria, complained about almost anything, from the leaves to the “awfully loud music” when Sarah and Mike lived at home, and smoke from the annual burn-off and other niggly things. They were civil if we met in the street or at the shops and were pointedly pleasant to Em, but gave me a look-down-your-nose as if I had walked on their presumably plush carpets with muddy boots or something worse.

They also entertained and sprinkled a few neighbours into their catered soirees which they held on their front lawn or around their rear pool. One neighbour, an artist, said, “Lovely evening, lovely couple.” Another, a lawyer, said, “I wouldn’t tangle with Wilson. He’s a man who gets his way.”

The foot traffic of the offended, curious for a glimpse through the driveway gates, increased along the road during these affairs, attracted by the music and the lights and the buzz of chatter from the grounds. Occasionally Em and I sat under our trees with a cold beer or glass of wine, like Darby and Joan huddling around their wireless, listening to Gloria Wilson’s engaging plummy voice and Wilson’s flat twang drift over the wall. I visualised Wilson’s broad face and his white capped teeth and half-smile charming the women.

One evening, yet again hearing the laughter generated by one of Wilson’s jokes, I blurted out, “Geez, what a show pony!”

Em smiled mysteriously, comparatively, the same look she had when we met a bunch of naked people on a nudist beach, “I think he’s all right …”

I said, “Gloria has a nice, rich voice.”

She must have sensed what was on my mind and murmured, “She sounds like a loud school girl taking an elocution lesson,” and made me smile when she added subversively, “One wonders how Gloria Wilson copes with the cultured and well-heeled …”

An invitation had yet to be received. Perhaps the Wilsons thought us a bit bolshie. Not that it mattered. After all, we had lived in the bushy estate for over forty years—the Wilsons were mere blow-ins.

I tipped back on the legs of my chair and returned to the story. The outback detective was driving his dusty Land Rover over badlands in pursuit of Jed, the man his whisky-drinking informant had tapped as the chief suspect. It was getting interesting.

From over the wall I heard a sliding door being flung open, followed by a loud cry. I almost fell backwards.

“You fool!”

“Listen …”

“Don’t you touch me!” Gloria’s plummy voice had turned into a flat, strangled snarl.

Wilson rasped, “For Christ’s sake, calm down!”

I quietly brought the chair down to four legs. I sat up. Listening. Frozen.

“What do you mean, the tax office is investigating us?”

“Look, I can handle it! It’s the auditors. I’ll pay them off …”

“And what about her!” she shrieked. “What about her!”

“Glory, I’ll fix it.”

“You bloody idiot!”

I heard a slap.

“You bitch!” Wilson sounded hurt.

A scuffle. Something tore. Another slap.

“You scratched me, you bitch …”

I heard a loud smack.

Silence. Then Gloria croaked, “Look … look what you’ve done … You hit me! Oh, you bastard, you bastard …”

I stood, belly sucked in, legs tense, toes screwing into my thongs. I could scramble over the wall. But I felt heavy, clumsy. I could get the ladder. I could call out …

I heard heavy breathing. Gasps. Scuffling. They were alive.

Shortly, “Oh, God, look what you’ve done to me … I’m bleeding …”

Wilson panted, “It’s not broken. Just wipe it …”

“Oh, look at me …” Gloria was crying.

I heard sniffling, shuffling steps. Somebody tried to close the sliding door. Wilson muttered an expletive. Then silence.

I picked up my books and half-empty glass and moved—hunched, like a soldier trying to dodge a bullet—across the garden and into the house.

Em and I had our rows, but nothing like this. A career of consensus and teaching teenagers and dealing with school administrators was no preparation for this. The outback detective might have scrambled over the wall, helped Gloria and arrested Wilson. Or scrambled over the wall, knocked Wilson down and then helped Gloria. I was flummoxed. I should have stayed inside.

Em breezed in while I was washing my tea glass. “I’ve had a marvellous day!” She plonked her shopping bag on the kitchen table. “How’s your day been?”

I said, “Well …”

Em was happy, bursting to tell her news. “I bumped into Gloria Wilson this morning. She was shopping. She invited us to their party next week. A gathering, she said. After all this time, too!”

“Em, would you like a glass of white?”

I poured her a cold glass of white wine and opened a stubby of beer and sipped from the bottle. We sat at the kitchen table. She was pleased, excited, planning what to wear, wondering, “Should we take a bottle?”

I told her. “I was having a quiet read …” Em listened, at first alarmed, then sad, and then defiantly moist-eyed.

“How terrible! I hope she’s not hurt!”

“Wilson might be.”

“Oh …”

“It sounded bad. Shrieking. She hit him. And scratched him. The bastard hit her. I think she had a blood nose. Then they went quiet. They went inside.” I added, “Wilson will have scratch marks …”

She blinked, “How awful!”

“I don’t know what I could have done. It happened suddenly.”

“I suppose you were shocked …”

We were quiet for a moment.

I said, “I suppose they’ll patch it up.”

“I suppose they will.” She sipped her wine reflectively.

“What a scandal, eh? The tax office investigating them, and trying to bribe the auditors … And another woman!”

“It is a surprise, isn’t it? Who would have thought? Them!”

“He’s a spiteful man. If I hadn’t heard that today …”

I looked at Em. How could we possibly attend their party? All that petty business over the branches and leaves—and their whinges. And we knew too much. It would be embarrassing. It would be too much for Em.

I said, “We’d better not go next week.”

Em said, bright as a bird, “Next week? Why shouldn’t we?”

I was thrown. Bemused. “But why?”

“I want to find out more!”

Philip Rintoul lives in the Perth Hills. His story “Bolthole” appeared in the July-August 2021 issue. A collection of his stories, Tales Tall and True, was published by Austin Macauley Publishers in 2021.