Free A Sight for Sore Eyes by Ruth Rendell Page B

years longed to do. His uncle would be our, putting in a power shower in a flat in Golders Green and afterwards visiting Jimmy in hospital. Keith, who had never shown much affection for his brother in the past, or indeed for anyone, had become a faithful visitor at Jimmy's bedside. So no one would be at home to see or to hear. The Edsel, a delicate pale-yellow and spotless, its engine several times rebuilt, stood on the extended concrete pad under the new carport with its four metal posts and its gleaming roof of corrugated polvtetrafluoroethylene. It was - or seemed - the largest of any cars Keith had had, too large to be parked horizontally across the garden, its bonnet and grid like a pursed mouth facing the back fence, its huge finned boot with high taillights close up against the french windows. Next to it, underneath where the motor bike stood when Keith was at home, was a long slick of oil. The carport, designed to shelter a big car, had taken up even more of the space than the original pad and Teddy's tool collection was crowded up into a corner, in the right angle where two fences met. He lifted up the plastic sheeting and shook off the water which the previous night's rain had left in its folds. Underneath, from a box and then from their newspaper wrappings, he took a saw, a hacksaw, chisels of varying sizes and a hammer. Mr Chance had owned nothing so crude as an axe, but they had one Grandma Brex had used in distant wood-chopping days. Teddy found it, damp and blunt, among the welter of mould-coated rubbish under the sink. He carried his tools into the dining-room and began. It was five o'clock when he started and by seven-thirty he had sawn the legs off all the chairs and the arms off the carvers, sawn off their backs and prised out the seat cushions. He didn't want to stop to eat, so he sharpened the axe on Mr Chance's whetstone and started chopping. Within half an hour he had reduced the six chairs to firewood. That was when the people next door banged on the wall. They banged a few times and then the phone started ringing. Teddy guessed it was them, a yuppie couple who had bought Mr Chance's house and thought themselves a cut above the rest of the people in the street. He ignored the banging and the phone, but his axe work was done for the time being and he began sawing up the sideboard. The man next door came round and rang the bell when Teddy started chopping again at nine. Teddy let him ring a few times and then he went to the door with Kenneth Clark's Civilisation in his hand, open at the chapter called 'Grandeur and Obedience'. 'Look, what's going on? What is this?' 'My uncle's making a coffin,' said Teddy. 'He's got a deadline.' The neighbour was one of those who blush when they think they've been told a lie or are being sent up, but don't know how to handle it. 'What deadline?' he said. 'Ten p. m.' said Teddy. 'Nearly over. Good-night.' He shut the door hard and gave it a kick. Saying sorry wasn't a habit of his. Before going back to his dismemberment of the furniture he went upstairs, found the gin bottle under Keith's bed and poured an inch of it into the egg-cup he had taken up with him. Into it went the diamond ring. Teddy put the egg-cup under his own bed. He chopped up the sideboard in double-quick time, stacked a woodpile four feet high and was in the kitchen eating a large can of baked beans on three rounds of toast when Keith came in at twenty-five to eleven. 'You're eating late,' said Keith. Teddy didn't reply. Keith set down his two plastic carriers, full of bottles and beer cans, lit a cigarette with a match and dropped the match on the floor. 'Don't you want to know how your dad is?' 'What do you think?' said Teddy. 'You watch your mouth. You haven't been near your dad since he went in there and that's all of two fuckin' months. Poor old sod's on his way out and you don't give a fourpenny fuck.' 'How about you watching your mouth?' said Teddy. 'Or washing it out? With like cyanide.' He went