FicWad

The Little Boy Next Door

“The boy next door always looks at me,” Lily said.

I froze, confused. “Who…me?”

“No, not you, silly. The other boy.”

“What other boy?”

She grabbed my hand and pulled me downstairs. “I’ll show you.”

In the living room downstairs, I stood near a large window looking outside to the house next door.

“Look at the window at the top,” Lily said.

I poked my head out and had a look. Unlike my house, Lily’s other next-door neighbours had a brick house. It was two-stories high like every other house in the neighbourhood. All the top story windows had curtains. I didn’t see anyone.

“Do you see him?” she asked.

“Don’t see anyone.” I looked harder but still couldn’t see anything. “Does he always look at you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to go next door and tell him to stop?”

“No, he might hurt you.”

“Okay, I’ll stay here.” I looked at Lily, who was still in her pyjamas. “You’re still in your pyjamas. Have you had a shower yet?”

She grabbed a portion of her pyjamas, pulled the material to her nose, and sniffed curiously. "I'll have a shower now," she said, walking to the stairway.

“If you're scared, I’ll guard you while you’re having a shower.” I followed her upstairs.

Lily went inside the bathroom and closed the door. The bathroom had no lock, so if I really wanted to I could walk in while she showered.

I sat against the wall and waited.

Five minutes later, I heard the front door open.

Footsteps echoed throughout the empty house.

I got up and thought about entering the bathroom. I wanted to tell Lily but wondered whether telling her would solve anything. Instead I went to a cupboard and took out a cricket bat. The footsteps grew louder and louder. The intruder was walking upstairs now. I tiptoed towards the stairway and waited.

It was just Ella. She saw me with the cricket bat and laughed.

“Where’s Lily?” she asked. “What are you doing here?” She was all dressed up, wearing a little too much make-up. Her clothes were bright and cosmopolitan.

“Your mum told me to babysit Lily because you were out.”

“Oh, okay,” she said. “Sorry I had to go out. I wish I never did. My boyfriend just dumped me.”

I at least tried to pretend that I cared. “Oh…uh…how do you feel?”

“Fine. He was like, ‘Ella, you’re hot and all, but I’ve got the hots for someone else.’ Don’t you hate that?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “What a loser.”

“Yeah, I know. Are all guys like that?”

“Most of them are.”

Ella looked at me strangely and then laughed. She told me to get up and follow her to her bedroom. While I followed her down the corridor, Lily walked by. Her hair was damp from the shower. She smiled at me and asked me where I was going. After I told her I was going to Ella’s room, she turned around and, probably not wanting to be alone, followed me to her big sister’s room. In her room, Ella grabbed a football and gave it to me as a gift.

“Here, have this,” she said. “It’s my ex-boyfriend’s football. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want any memories of him.”

“Ha, ha!” sang Lily. “You got dumped!”

“Be quiet, Lily!” Ella seemed a little angry, but she smiled nevertheless. “Go play with your Barbie dolls. At least I had a boyfriend. You’re too little to date.”

“Hmph!” Lily stuck her nose up. “Well, I didn’t get dumped.”

“That’s because you never had a boyfriend! You’re still a little baby.” She walked up to her little sister and pinched her on the cheeks. “Poor little baby poo.” She imitated the baby talk parents used on their children. “Little baby needs to go potty?”

Lily smiled and laughed. Ella wasn’t being too antagonistic. I smiled as well. I started to wish I had a brother or sister when I grew up.

Lily ran away from her older sister and told me she was hungry. Ella decided to have a shower. I took Lily downstairs and found a tub of vanilla ice cream in the freezer. I served her three scoops. She wanted to eat hers in a cone but there were none left. She’d have to eat from a bowl. I served five scoops for myself. She and I sat at the kitchen table and ate silently. Lily got ice cream all over her mouth as she ate. When I pointed to her mouth she wiped the ice cream off with the palm of her hands.

“You’re supposed to use a napkin,” I said.

“Look at this,” she said, holding out her hands to me, showing me the cloudy white mixture of ice cream and saliva on her palm. She connected her right palm to her left palm as if she were praying. Then she rubbed her hands together quickly, heating up her palm with friction. After doing this for a while, she showed me her palm again. Understandably, her palm was dry. “It’s all gone,” she said. “Magic.”

Since the kitchen table was quite small, I could see that although Lily’s palms were dry, they were not technically clean.

“They’re not really clean,” I said.

She held her hands up in the air and inspected them. I gently touched her right hand and pressed a finger into her palm.

“All the ice cream is stuck in the skin pores,” I said, “and your hand is still a bit sticky.”

She started licking her fingers, coating them with a sweet glaze of spit. “Mmmm, my fingers taste good.” She held out her hand in front of my face. “Have some,” she said.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Mummy always licks my fingers when we cook food.”

I looked at the small hand in front of me. Her fingers were lightly glossed with a layer of sugary saliva. I gently held her by the wrist and brought her hand to my mouth. My tongue licked her fingers. My mouth clamped on tightly to her index finger. I sucked out all the sweet girly nectar from the skin pores on her fingers and swallowed. She tasted good.

Lily looked at me, probably wondering why it looked like I was worshipping her fingers instead of just tasting them. When I finished, Lily held her fingers under her nostrils and sniffed my saliva before rubbing her fingers against her clothes. I noted that Lily often enjoyed smelling things.

Ella came downstairs and asked if there was any ice cream left. She served herself four scoops and sat down next to her little sister.

Ella was eager to talk. “I met someone at the mall…”

“Taste my fingers.” Lily had her fingers held up to her sister’s face.

“No! Yuck! Get that out of my face!”

“Keith had some,” said Lily. “He liked it.”

Ella looked at me.

“Uh…her fingers…” I rubbed my forehead, thinking up an explanation. “Her fingers had splinters in them. I had to bite her fingers to get those splinters out.”

To my relief, Ella changed the subject. “My love life has taken an unexpected turn,” she said.

“Is that right?” I asked. “How?”

“This new guy I met…oh, I am so in love with him…”

“How’d you meet him?”

“Met him at the mall. While I was shopping for denim jeans, he just walked up to me. I told him I was new to this city and he asked me which school I planned to go to. He’s actually going to the same school as me. He’s got a really weird name…I think it’s Italian or something…I wrote it down…” She took out the piece of paper. “Mark Iller…Mark Illeragnim.”

“Mark Illeragnim? I know him. He’s in the same year level as I am.”

When I was young, Mark was the guy who always bullied me. When I was only eight years old, I coloured in a picture of a rabbit with a black crayon. Everyone else in the class coloured in their rabbit using many different colours. I argued with my classmates that my rabbit looked more realistic, but Mark Illeragnim the bully teased me so much that I took a crayon and threw it at him. The crayon hit Mark in the eye and made him cry like a baby. The next day, however, the bully got his revenge. While I was outside playing on the monkey bars during a cold day, Mark snuck up from behind and pushed me into a giant puddle of water. The teacher at the time told me to get myself inside the classroom to dry off. My school uniform was completely soaked. The teacher went to another room and came back with a fresh change of clothes. Unfortunately, the change of clothes looked nothing like the school uniform and for the rest of the day I stuck out and everyone looked at me. I hated Mark then and I hate Mark now.

“You friends with him?” asked Ella.

“Not really. I don’t like him at all.”

Lily finished her ice cream. “Can we paint the cubby house now?”

Ella ignored her sister. “Mark is not like most guys I’ve been with. There’s something about him that’s really hot.”

I finished my ice cream and grabbed Lily’s plate, ready to wash them in the sink. Ella, however, told me to go outside and help Lily paint the cubby house while she stayed inside and cleaned up.

I was glad to get out of the house. The backyard was sunny and green. A small ready-made cubby house about a metre cubed in volume sat at the base of an oak tree. The cubby house looked like the ones that were pre-assembled in factories. It was made of pure pine. All that was needed now was paint.

I looked at Lily. “What colour do you want to paint it?”

“Grey.”

“Are you sure you want grey?”

She nodded. I went to the shed to get a bucket of white paint and a bucket of black paint. The bucket with black paint was half empty so I took the bucket of white paint and poured it into the bucket of black paint. Lily spoke to me while I poured.

“I like mixing colours.”

“Before you mix colours together you have to be sure you want to mix them. You can make grey paint from black paint and white paint, but you can’t make white paint from grey paint. Once you mix them, you can’t unmix them. It’s permanent.”

“That’s what I want. In Sydney, my daddy was painting the garage, and he wanted to paint the wall black and the door white.” She started laughing. “But when he went to the toilet, I…I mixed the black and white paint and Daddy had to paint the garage grey.”

I smiled. Her story wasn’t very funny, but she obviously thought it was.

“Keith, when you grow up, what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said, thinking carefully about her question. “I’d like to change the world—make a permanent mark before I die—but to do that I need to be really powerful. What about you? What do you want to do?”

Lily picked up a stick and looked at the bucket of paint. “I want to mix paint.”

“I’ll mix it instead.” I didn’t want Lily to get dirty. Her mother might not hire me to babysit again.

“I want to mix it,” she said. “Let me mix it.”

“Okay, go ahead, but be careful. Don’t get any paint on your clothes.”

I stood aside and let the little girl mix the black and white paint. The paint was thick. Lily struggled at first but soon became comfortable with it. After a minute or two it looked like Lily was starting to get bored. I continued to talk to her.

“Wouldn’t you like to change the world?” I asked.

“I am,” she said. “I’m changing the colour of this paint.”

“Keep stirring then. It’s not grey yet.”

“I want it to be grey.”

“Why do you want to paint your cubby house grey?”

“White hurts my eyes,” she said, “and black is a sad colour.”

I nodded. Her explanation made sense in a way.

“Is this grey yet?” She pointed to the paint. She seemed tired.

“Almost. Keep stirring.”

“This is boring.” She stopped stirring and handed me the stick. “You do it.”

I stirred the paint and got out two paintbrushes from the shed. Lily and I took about twenty minutes colouring in the whole cubby house. I suggested we use more than one colour but she only wanted grey. Lily didn’t like the strong contrast between black and white paint. She wanted something simpler. When we finished painting the cubby house, we sat on the grass and waited for the paint to dry. It was a sunny day, so the wait wasn’t long.

Ella came out to the backyard to see what we were doing. The cubby house was completely grey: the roof, the walls, and even the door. Before I had a chance to congratulate Lily on a good paint job, she pointed up to the top story of the neighbour’s house over the fence.

“That boy is spying on me again,” said Lily.

I turned around to the house next door. In the top story a dark figure disappeared from a window. The figure was quickly replaced by rustling curtains. I kneeled down to Lily. I was slightly worried. Ella looked worried as well.

Lily started to get scared again. “He always spies on me.” She grabbed her older sister’s leg and hugged it. Ella kneeled down and hugged back.

I looked at Ella with envy. I wish Lily had hugged me instead.

We heard the back door open. Nancy walked into the backyard. She had returned from her job interview.

“Oh, there you are,” said Nancy. “I got worried when I came back and saw the house empty.” She looked at Lily and saw fear on the little girl’s face. “What’s wrong Lily? What happened?”

I explained. “There’s a boy next door who keeps spying on her. Perhaps we should call the police.”

Lily verified. “It’s true, Mummy. He always looks at me.”

“Don’t worry about them,” said Nancy. “That’s where the Wozza family lives. I’ve already spoken to them. They’re harmless.”

“How are you so sure they’re harmless?” I asked.

“Only a father and his son live there. The father is in a wheelchair…had both his legs taken off in a car accident. His son is only nine or ten years old.”

“What’s the kid’s name?”

“Edward. He prefers to be called Eddie.” Nancy turned to Lily. “Did you have fun with Keith today, Lily?”

Lily nodded. She smiled again. “Can he babysit me again?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Nancy paid me fifty dollars for my services. I returned home to my parents who were back from church in a good mood. They were very happy when I told them how much money I made. My mum thought my being a babysitter was very amusing.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That night I sat on my bed and looked out the bedroom window. The only source of light was from the computer I left on. I was so used to its humming noise now. Tonight the moon in the sky seemed brighter than usual. It was a cloudless night but a dilute pillar of smoke ascended from the local park about ten blocks away from my house, as if someone was lighting a fire there. I wasn’t surprised. Once every three months I noticed smoke coming from Dendy Park at night. This has been happening since I was twelve. I told my dad but he told me it was probably just a bunch of people camping—nothing to worry about.

I lied in bed and thought about my day. I started to wonder about the boy next door who spied on Lily. Was he like me or was there another reason why he spied on her? My mind then started to drift towards Ella’s new boyfriend Mark Illeragnim. Since I hated Mark so much, I started to wonder whether I could still be friends with Ella. Thinking about Mark triggered the release of hundreds of childhood memories that night.

Mum kissed me on the cheeks and pushed me lightly to class. It was my first day. Fast-forward five hours to lunch. Mark Illeragnim pushed me against a brick wall.

One of Mark’s friends looked at me. “He’s shittin’ himself, Mark. Leave him alone.”

Mark didn’t listen. “You know, Keith, I’ve never heard you swear. Everyone else swears but not you.”

“So what if I don’t swear?” I replied.

“Say ‘fuck.’” He was smiling at me with a menacing grin.

“No.”

Mark grabbed me by the shoulders. “Say it!”

“NO.”

“Say it or I’ll kick your ass.”

“Fuck,” I whispered.

He let me go and walked off.

That was the first and only time I said the f-word.