It was framed like a bourgeois painting. Like a twisted Hockney, a sun-kissed ripple, delicately fragile, vying, dying to be observed. It was like a brass-lined sketch, terribly detailed; a mocking caricature, drawn by a wandering hand, desperate for company. Like a window into a saturated, lucid daymare, crystalline and curated, sadistically orchestrated, ornamented by bohemian excess. By indulgence. The sight of it alone, that very first time, made me feel like a cracked safe, cast into a lake, filling with water through slits, sunk amongst sand, debris, bottom feeders. It’s not beneath me to admit that.

The garden was framed in an oval clearing. There, across the way, from the vantage point of my sitting room’s water-stained window, past the crumbling wall, a sea of dumped refuse bags and the dividing line of the placid river (neatly separating rent from mortgage), it seemed to perform for our benefit alone. The clearing itself was formed by the bowed arms of an elm, a thin swathe of oak sprouts, the buzzy sharpness of hair-like holly prickles. It was a serendipitously cruel gap, in which the sun seemed to beam down with succulent golden rays as if ordained from heaven. I’d never even noticed it before that sticky, sickly day in a rainless July that taunted me like a desert-dwelling devil, strategically placed desk fans placed around the flat naff-all in particular. An ajar, wafting, rusted fridge door, offering more exercise than comfort, empty, blue rectangular tubs of cheap Neapolitan ice cream inviting blue bottles, cold showers around the clock between myself and the wife, that did nothing much in a hurry. How I had never noticed the garden before, is perhaps the most curious thing of all. It’s curious what the brain will blot out, for the mere sake of preservation; for peace and quiet, blissful ignorance. Still, I was not jealous. No, no, not at all.
What you gawping at over there, nosy Parker? quizzed my wife, a mug of milky tea in each sweaty hand.

There were usually four of them in the garden: two women, two men. Various shades, heights, but similar enough to be classified as part of the same ecosystem. Most mornings I’d hear them, obnoxiously shouting back and forth, as if the concept of not being Earth's only inhabitants, was a mere theory. I soon learned that one of the women was named Joséphine, and one man, Camus. Most afternoons, they were all stuck to one another in a sweaty fervour beneath the berating sun in one of about three configurations, around a square wooden table, surrounded by the wildest, most abundant fruit plants in their prime; tomatoes, plums, peaches, that would fall and invite small birds. Vines pregnant with green things fit for wines, that the women picked, barefoot, bare-breasted, hair, bandanna-wrapped. Most afternoons they would tan on the lawn, their perfect bodies, toned and annoyingly proportioned, sizzling into deep browns, chic sunglasses wrapping their faces. It was hard not to think of them as lobsters: tenacious pests, destined to outstay their welcome. Back and forth they would journey to the house, with trays of food on teal, hand-painted small plates; combinations that were so colourful that they looked sinful to eat. Large glasses would clink, while we’d try and watch the telly, jet black bricks glowing, crackling beneath marbled meat, colossal langoustines, sliced eggplants, drizzled in oils, as gold as angel piss, that managed to gleam even from fifty metres away.
After eating, they would sometimes cool off in the river. Or sit listening to Zappa, or Bowie, or Jarre records, evening candles glowing, moths enamoured. Smoothing, oohing, laughing, snorting, clapping. There was always laughter. Laughing at jokes with hazy punchlines. Laughing at jokes, acted out with rapid hand movements and child-like gestures, or snarky imitations. At jokes loaned from contagiously popular articles by painfully chic magazines, that even to my eavesdropping ears, over the way, went over my head completely. Relaying episodes and encounters from furniture shop visits, from countryside yoga retreats, from chance encounters with celebrities in new local coffee shops, produce spots; years of local dereliction and decay, having metamorphosed into vibrant, yuppie conveniences, collected by old money landlords like mere toys. The woman with the long, tamed locks who sounded much like a sports car that had been fed the wrong fuel type, loved to dance with her partner; stockier and balding, but a dab hand with clutches and swirls of her body, which seemed to set off her screeching giggles. No matter how high we raised the telly’s volume, their collective laughter sliced through. I was not obsessed; not in the slightest, but I found myself watching them, night and day, jotting down things, sketching things, fantasising things. Nobody laughed that much in real life. I’d lived long enough to know.

After a fortnight, I rooted through the mildew-lined boxes of my garage one morning, fetching my binoculars in a bid to improve my view. They had begun constructing a small ladder of sorts, from the riverbank to the garden’s edge. I watched as the stocky man, later identified as Marc, walked back and forth, high on a steel ladder slanted against a maple tree, felling limbs, to be collected, trimmed, sliced, hammered by his compatriots. The excess wood was used to fashion a large birdhouse. Even as they worked, they rarely wore clothes; breasts bounced, genitals swung, like wild people— a notion enhanced by the tattoos, clanging of silver jewellery; bangles, necklaces, even earrings large enough to ting. A handsome, black Alsatian-type, whom they called Godot, arrived one day, and would watch as they all worked, jumping playfully as wood was exchanged, reworked. I had always wanted a dog, but tenants were not permitted pets. It had always been that way.
For days on end, I began counting the gardens back and forth, until my brain felt like mush. I couldn’t be certain, but the more I looked, the more I wondered if the house they occupied was, in fact, the house. Years earlier, my wife and I had submitted an offer. It was a two up, two down affair— no driveway, but a lovely garden and a good-sized kitchen. The estate agent said the second room was perfect for a nursery and my wife and I looked at one another embarrassedly. Like many things in our lives, it was not to be. The shame of that final phone call still gripped like Parakeet's claws upon the many fruit tree branches that could have been ours. There, in the darkness of the room, slumped in the frayed, sticky leather of my ancient settee, my blood boiled, their alien happiness taunting, with a sadistic Roman hedonism.

One particularly airless bank holiday evening, I lay in bed, laboured with insomnia, blue still in the sky’s hems. I tossed and turned in the path of the bedroom’s plastic fan, its humming barely masking the commotion from a soiree underway beyond the water, filling the ajar window’s gap. The other side of the bed was vacant, the kitchen light already on when I stepped in. My wife was standing over a chopping board. I watched as she sharpened the clutched, rusty blade, over and over, hawk-like focus, steel against steel. She opened her mouth to speak, and then paused, before starting once more.

I was thinking, darling, she started, her mouth rounding with a serpentine smirk over the metallic scraping, maybe one of these days, we should go over the way, and introduce ourselves. Now, wouldn’t that be neighbourly of us?