Neighbourhood Gossip

When the second, much louder knock came, the stranger opened the front door to my parents’ house. I heard her do it while I stood rooted to the linoleum, shaking but curiously passive, as if I had no say in what was about to happen.

Male voices filled the hallway, more than one. These voices must belong to friends of hers, the stranger, I assumed, my heart racing and sinking at the same time. I resigned myself to a fate brought on by my own stupidity, by the good manners my parents had instilled since before I was able to talk. I looked down at the chopping board, the heavy block of blond wood smooth from years of use, safe, familiar. My knuckles blanched white, taut and shiny where my fingers clutched the serrated knife.

I was saved by a blether that warm, spring day: Mrs Wade at number seventy-seven, the neighbourhood gossip, a hedge-hovering chatterbox with eyes of an eagle. 

It was a little after nine in the morning when I heard the first knock at the door. Fridays were my late start at uni: one lecture in the afternoon that was hardly worth the bus fare. Geography, a class I was taking to fulfil my first-year study requirements. What use were fluvial planes and tectonic plates when I could have been reading Flaubert or actually learning to use Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? But I was a rule follower, biddable to a ridiculous degree, precisely the personality traits that got me into this mess in the first place.

Ironically, it would be these traits that saved me, too.

I answered the door in my pyjamas, probably still half asleep, to find a young woman in a pink, velour leisure suit standing on my parent’s front steps. She asked if she could use the bathroom. I hesitated, but not for long enough. The instinct to say ‘no’ had my insides twisting at the thought of an awkward refusal. Everything about the situation cried out for that response. Who comes to a stranger’s front door and asks to use the bathroom early in the morning? Not in this neighbourhood. But her timing was perfect: morning drop-off at the local primary school tailing off. The happy sound of children in the playground a backing track to her request. This person, who could have been anywhere from eighteen to thirty, seemed harmless. I conferred on her a narrative: young mother caught short on the school run. It took guts to ask. She was wearing baby pink velour for goodness’ sake. Serial killers and psychopaths don’t dress in pink velour.

Do they?

Against my better judgement, I let her inside. The bathroom was on the half-landing. I pointed it out to her, then hovered in the hall watching her disappear upstairs, a sinking feeling in my gut, instinct telling me that this was wrong, that I’d made a terrible mistake.

Good manners kicked in again; I decided it was rude to stand like a jailer at the bottom of the stairs listening while she used the bathroom.
I retreated to the kitchen where I had been making toast before she arrived. I stood at that wooden chopping board with one ear cocked towards the bathroom above. For the longest time, there was no sound.

Eventually, I heard footsteps on the stairs. No toilet flush, no clanking cistern or running water tank, no door unlocked or even opened. Only later would I find out that she had done none of these normal things; although she had left a ‘deposit’ and an odour behind, flushing seemed beyond her.

With pending relief, I hurried through the house to meet her at the bottom of the stairs, keen to usher her out before any damage could be done and my stupidity found out.

‘Can I use your phone?’ My heart sank. So near yet so far.

This second request chafed at my insides again; an itchy discomfort that called for another ‘no’ but elicited an in-for-a-penny-hung-for-a-sheep response from me. I pointed to the phone, which sat on a shelf near the front door, returning to the kitchen to hover while she made her call. That is when the second, more commanding knock shook the house.

Still in my night clothes and with the serrated bread knife clutched in my hand, I walked through to the hall not knowing whom I’d find.
The woman in pink had let two men inside. Their shadows darkened the doorway. I hovered in my own home as if I was the one who did not belong. Quietly, the men took her outside. No shouting, no drama.
One large policeman escorted her away while the other came inside.

Polite and shaking, I showed him into the room we saved for guests. He dwarfed the sofa, this big Glasgow cop, while I perched on my mother’s armchair in pyjamas and bare feet, 18 years old but feeling like a naughty child. I had let a complete stranger into my parents’ house;
the peril was horrifyingly obvious. I blushed as the story began to unfold. How Mrs Wade, the neighbourhood blether, had watched the stranger approach my front door seconds after that same young woman in pink velour had punched Mrs Wade in the face for refusing access to her bathroom.

My inability to say no had saved me. You were right to give in to her requests, the policeman said. I went to geography that afternoon, but couldn’t say what I learned. By the time I got home, the blether had cornered my mother, giving her chapter and verse on my close call.

Months passed before I learned that I wouldn’t be required to testify in court. The young woman pled guilty; I was off the hook. For years, I was opposed to ‘Care in the Community’ – Scotland’s answer to psychiatric care. Thirty years later, I’d say it’s I who was at fault and Mrs Wade who was brave. That young woman was merely a victim.

This piece was written for the Scottish Book Trust’s “Blether Campaign,” a 1000-word non-fiction challenge.