for the old cheese-fancier, some instinct that needed to be suppressed or sublimated into anger. Perhaps there was a subconscious sense in which Vie’s real objection was not so much that he had looked, but that he had jerked his head away.
No matter. Price was a snoop. Together, with the lights out, Dennis and Vie stood and looked up at the neighbouring window. They felt the play of his binoculars over their possessions, their lives: the fitted green carpet in the living room, the coal effect fire, the Daily Mail reader offer carriage clock, the Royal Doulton Ware figurine of the Queen Mother. They felt his mocking beams assess their choice of television programme, and the sad secret reasons for adopting this coffee-coloured son. They seethed, with the first stirrings of feud. When someone trampled the ornamental poppy in the front garden, they had an inkling that it might be him; when Dennis could have sworn that the slug pellets had been moved from one end of the shed to the other, he had a sudden notion; when Royal Doulton Ware sent them a frankly obscene figurine, instead of the requested statuette of Lady Di, they both found it hard to fight the suspicion; and when the cat went missing they had no doubt.
‘I tell you what, honeybunch,’ said Dennis to Vie, ‘I’ve got just the thing for him.’
His answer, of course, was cupressa leylandii, the nuclear weapon of suburban hate. When Dennis planted them, ten in a row, at the bottom of the garden, they were only eight feet tall. In two years they had almost doubled. Upwards, sideways and diagonally groped their spongy, aromatic fronds, dwarfing and in some places crushing the original wooden boundary fence. Twilight descended on the sunny little room where Price would take his breakfast. No longer could he range his little pots of curd on the sill, and watch them turn radioactive in the heat. A sanatorial gloom spread through the entire lower floor, turning all the cheese he made to a green thought in a green shade.
Soon the topmost sprigs were beginning to challenge the upper floor; soon, thought Price, he would need to keep the lights on all day, throughout the house. He began with letters; he invoked the council; he sent them the text of the High Hedges Bill, then making its progress through the Commons. But Dennis knew instinctively that his hedge was untouchable. An Englishman’s home is his castle, and Parliament would surely find it impossible to give one man the right to compel the chopping-down of another man’s trees. Price joined a leylandii victims’ support group. He became party to a class action which intended to test, if necessary before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the proposition that a man had not only the right to life, but the right to light.
It was no use. Sometimes, with much pleading, the council’s hedge officer would persuade Dennis to make a few desultory abbreviations to the very top. But if ever Price pushed or moaned too much, Dennis would threaten to expose him as a ‘peeping Tom’ and cheese freak.
‘I’ll get the health and safety round to that garage,’ he said. ‘We all know what goes on there. It’s disgoosting,’ said Dean’s adoptive father, and Dean felt a twinge of remorse.
And then one September, two and a half years after the deployment of the leylandii, Price exacted his appalling revenge. Dennis and Vie and Dean had been to Alicante, and things had not been easy. Dennis resented the way Dean kept his headphones on all day, and Dean was basically doing his nut. For seven solid days he had endured a beach holiday with his adoptive parents: Dennis with the Factor 15 glooped on top of his head, and every other extremity, Vie with her crispy hair and stunned blue eyes and pointless expensive jewellery; Dennis with his old man’s tits, Vie with her evening lipstick running into the cracks around her mouth.
Dean would stare at the incredible girls, and feel a repeated sense of amazement that people were allowed to appear like this, before him, in public. He would lie on his back and squint at the surf, and observe the curious fact that when a beautiful girl emerged from the sea, you couldn’t always tell how big she was. As she rose, with water running down her terrifying shape, he would assume she was a divinity, a Venus Anadyomene, a mega-titted six-footer. But then as she came closer, so close that sometimes she would drip all over him, he would see that she was really just a little Spanish girl, all in the same proportions, but with her dimensions magnified by the sun.
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