Toys

I see her from time to time. Over the fence. We don't have much to say to each other. Not these days. I can also see her from my kitchen window. Out by her pool. On a lounge chair. Reading a magazine. And I’m not going to deny it. She is looking good. Trim. Toned.

The established rules were if our 'thing', the thing we had going for a few months, during the warm summer afternoons, got anywhere near to being discovered we’d break it off. Then and there. No hesitations. Like throwing a switch. On a guillotine. Cut it off. So, one afternoon, that's exactly what happened. A family friend turned up. We were in the bedroom and all of a sudden there was someone knocking on the front door. She told me to keep quiet. Not a peep. I could see she was freaked out. She pulled on her robe. This was a totally random pop-in. So okay. I kept quiet in the bedroom. Listening. Looking at the door. At the ceiling. And I could hear her talking to this 'family friend'. And when she got rid of him, she comes back and goes, why would he just show up like that? Out of the blue. And she sat on the edge of the bed chewing her nails. Something I'd never seen her do before. And that was it. As agreed, it was over.

Thinking about it now, seeing her over the fence, now that things have settled down, now that everything has slotted back onto it predictable track, I was thinking that maybe, I might suggest that we have another go. After all, our schedules coincide. So that makes things easy. She’s over there and I’m over here. Two people with extra time on their hands. Hot, empty afternoons stretching out into languid evenings. Moths bumping against the veranda light. Nothing but a single fence separating us. So what the hell?

And listen, when we had our 'thing', we didn’t lay around for hours on end. In each other’s arms. It wasn’t like that. It boiled down to quick and efficient physical gratification. No illusions. No creeping affection. No ‘what ifs?’. None of that ‘let’s run off to Queensland together in the hope that this feeling lasts forever’ because guess what? It won’t. It would fade and become something steady. Reliable. Life support. Like I already have with my wife. Like she has with her husband. And she was fine with that. It’s very rare to meet a woman like that one next door. A woman who is truly not prone to these fairy tales.

She never complains about her husband. Not once. Fact is, we barely talked. Our thing was contained inside a sunlit afternoon bubble of sex. Our real lives were one thing and our sunlit bubble thing was another. And listen, her husband is an alright guy. A top bloke. Really. I wish him no harm. No ill-will. The man has a garage full of toys. A jet ski and some kind of souped-up racing car. Illegal modifications by the sound of the engine. He even has some of those little remote control cars. He uses that nitro fuel. A combination of nitromethane, methanol and oil. Runs them up and down the street on the weekend. The remote control in his hands. A little childish if you ask me but hey, each to each his own. His kids go to some private boarding school. Only come home on the holidays. The husband is a carrot top. A Ginger. Same as his kids. The husband told me once that all his toys help him relax on the weekend. Called them his ‘stress busters’. ‘This is an investment' he said. 'These 'toys' will keep me from having a heart attack at fifty’. He told me this one day when we were standing out front. On our respective driveways. And I could see the logic in that.