even more strange. ‘He’s got a snake.’
‘Do you think they know where they’re moving to?’ John Ball said.
‘Give me Streatham, any day of the week,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘Look at them, all of them staring, and not one of them, it wouldn’t occur to one of them to come out and say, for instance, “Oh, I can see you’re hard at work already, I don’t suppose you’d like a cup of coffee to start the day with,” or – the least you could expect – an offer to let you fill your kettle at their kitchen tap. Makes you sick.’
‘We haven’t got a kettle,’ Keith said.
‘They don’t know that,’ Mr Jolly said, shaking his head as he carried on unloading. The pavement was thoroughly blocked with all these possessions; they’d better come soon.
‘You’ve got the coffee-table,’ Keith said, as Mr Jolly put it down on the pavement, just next to the sofa.
‘So we have,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘Cheeky sod. Right. I’m going over there.’
John Ball and Keith put themselves down on the sofa, just as if they’d been hard at it for hours. Mr Jolly, in a good humour, fetched three chipped old mugs from the cab of the lorry, walked up the driveway of the house opposite. The kid in the window upstairs with the snake – it was definitely a snake, there was no doubting that – he drew back into the bedroom with a look of alarm on his face. Maybe the snake wasn’t supposed to come out of its cage; maybe he wasn’t allowed to play with the thing before school. He rang the doorbell.
There was a confused noise inside. People talking, their voices raised and muted at the same time. It was a couple of minutes before anyone came to the door. It was a woman; she was dressed – that hadn’t been the delay, then – but her hair was unkempt. She held the door half open, looking at Mr Jolly with her mouth tense. She might have been expecting him, someone like him; she looked as if she was expecting something bad to happen to her, the next time she opened the front door. She said nothing.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you, madam,’ Mr Jolly. ‘This is a bit cheeky, like, but…’ He explained their predicament. She listened to the end; he grew less and less hopeful of success as he went on, she looked so unencouraging.
But then she surprised him by saying, ‘Yes, of course,’ and then ‘It’s awful to have to start work without a hot drink in the morning,’ and ‘No, I don’t know where you’d find somewhere to serve you breakfast, not without going right down into, I don’t know, Crosspool,’ a name that meant nothing to him.
‘Thanks very much,’ he said, handing over the mugs but not inviting himself in.
‘Who’s that, then?’ A girl’s voice came from the back of the house. ‘It’s not—’
‘No, it’s not,’ the woman said. ‘It’s nobody.’
Mr Jolly overlooked this rudeness, put it down to some kind of distraction as she carried the mugs away, almost at arm’s length. She left the front door open and Mr Jolly standing there.
‘It’s all with milk and two sugars,’ he said, calling into the kitchen where she’d gone, having forgotten to ask him any of this.
‘Sorry, what did you say?’ she said, coming out again, the mugs still in her hand.
‘Milk and two sugars,’ he said. ‘If it’s no trouble.’
‘It’s only instant,’ she said.
‘That’ll be perfect,’ he said, not having expected any other kind.
The conversation was not closed, but he felt foolish standing there. The other two sat on the other side of the road, talking with amusement to each other, watching his suspended embarrassment. Mr Jolly settled for a performance of head-scratching, whistling, inspecting his watch and looking up and down the road in an exaggerated way. He bent down and ran his second and third finger underneath a flower, a fat yellow familiar one, without picking it.
‘Don’t do that,’ a boy said, standing at the open door. It was the boy who’d been watching them from the upstairs window, a snake round his neck. The snake had been disposed of. Made you shiver to think of it. ‘That’s my dad’s flowers.’
‘I was just looking,’ Mr Jolly said. He was no good with children, having none; his sister neither, never wanted them, not that they couldn’t have had them, him and his wife. ‘I wasn’t going to pick.’
‘Just because he’s not here,’ the boy said.
‘Gone to work, has he?’ Mr Jolly said heartily. ‘Me too. We’re moving your new neighbours in, over the road, there. That’ll be nice for you, won’t it? Having new…’ He trailed away. The boy was looking at him, a horrified gaze.
‘That’s right,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘He’s gone to work, definitely.’
‘Good,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘Make a nice early start. I saw you, just then with – you know, your friend—’
‘What friend?’
‘Your special friend, the yellow one,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘At least he looked yellow from where I was standing. You know –’ he made a face ‘– sssssss.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the boy said. ‘I wouldn’t tell anyone else what you thought you saw only they might think you were mental or something. You wouldn’t want that, so don’t mention it to anyone, what you saw.’
‘Here you are,’ the woman said, bringing out the three mugs, now filled with coffee, on a shamingly clean tray. Amazingly, she’d only gone and put some biscuits on a plate as well. ‘I do hope my son isn’t bothering you.’
‘Thank you very much,’ Mr Jolly said, now rather baffled, and with the door closing firmly, he walked steadily back, balancing the tray carefully.
‘That’s the ticket,’ John Ball said comfortably. ‘Use your charm, did you?’
‘They’re all bonkers round here,’ Mr Jolly said, relieving his feelings a little. ‘Fit for the hatch, they are.’
‘Biscuits, too,’ Keith said. ‘You should have tried for bacon and eggs.’
‘That’s enough,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘And take your hands off those. This fucking job—’
‘That girl, rode with us—’ John Ball said.
‘Mental,’ Mr Jolly said.
‘Glad to get shot of her,’ Keith said.
‘Mental,’ John Ball agreed.
It had been a long night for the Sellerses. They had stayed not in the funded luxury of the Hallam Towers Hotel but in a small family hotel; since the week in the summer, looking for a house, the Electric had ordered a cut-back. Alice had found the Sandown, and apologized for it as soon as they had rolled up there, the night before. She ought to have known. The advertisement, found in a hotel guide, had used an illustration, not a photograph, and a highly fanciful one; you couldn’t have assumed that the hotel in reality would have had a horse-drawn carriage with a jolly coachman
