Free The Candle Dancer / The Way That You Found Me by Patrick Holland Page A

of their house anymore.
    ‘There are parks all along the street!’ Jenny declared.
    ‘Just let it slide.’
    Victor’s wife was a defeated child psychologist in her mid-forties. I was not sure what she did at work, but whatever theories she concocted in the university office where she worked did not extend as far as her home, as her daughters ran amok. Victor avoided them by endlessly polishing his vintage Jaguar and cutting planks for the flooring of a new downstairs room. Often you saw him standing at the head of his carport looking over his yard, and I imagined he was formulating some ratio of square metres left by the years before his daughters became adults and could be made to leave.
    ‘Humph! Parking on her side of the street!’ said Jenny. ‘I’ve got a good mind to go over there and tell her off about the behaviour of the ‘three wyrd bitches’ she’s raised up out of hell over there. God, the gall of the woman! Isn’t she embarrassed? If I was her I’d keep my head down.’
    ‘Don’t work yourself up, Jen. It’s just a stupid note.’
    ‘What if there were no parks in front of our house? Which there weren’t this morning? What if I have to be rushed to the hospital? I can’t be expected to walk half way up to Banks Street to get in a car.’
    ‘I know, I know. I’ll talk to Victor.’
    But I didn’t. How could I? The day before I would have done so happily—even told him off if it came to it. But now there was this unspoken thing between us: the candle dancing. Somehow I felt it, whatever it was, and the note on the windscreen were related. Though how, I could not say.
----
    That afternoon I was out front replacing a faulty stair. Under the circumstances—the risk of exposure–I would have left it, just stepped over the damn thing, but there was Jen to consider… Victor was downstairs putting the third coat of polish for the night on his Jaguar. His daughters sat on their balcony smoking and laughing. Behind them was a “No Smoking” sign that their father had put up, and it had become a source of great amusement for the girls. Shortly afterwards they set up their pink one-man tent and turned their music up which meant they would be spray tanning and then I realised it was Friday and probably they were having a party.
    I got up from where I knelt on the stairs and saw Victor staring at me from his driveway. I waved. He cut me cold and went back inside the carport. The girls must have been having a few vodka pops as the upstairs of Victor’s house began to sound like an army barracks. In the past Victor had politely asked me to excuse his daughters‘ ‘arguments’… this was the catch-all term he used for the barrages of sailor talk that came down from the top deck of the house at any hours, sometimes just minor things like, ‘get down to the fucking car this instant, Dad, or I’ll be late for school.’ To which he would reply, ‘Coming’. But at other times the talk got nasty. As it did tonight once Victor and his wife had driven off and left the girls to themselves and teenage boys started pouring in off the road and out of taxis. On the milder party nights, Victor sat in his downstairs office indulging his penchant for fantastical adventure movies, with which he drowned out the barbaric talk of his children, while on the bigger nights he and his wife left town. Which was what they did this night.
    Jen sat watching a BBC
Poirot
film and fuming while I attempted to read the more literary columns in
The Economist
and enjoy a scotch.
    ‘You fucked him, didn ya?’ came a male voice from across the road.
    ‘He never laid a hand on me!’
    ‘Well why was e in ya bed?’
    I should say this conversation was conducted at the decibel level of a rock concert.
    ‘I don’t know, I was asleep.’
    ‘How’d you know he never laid a hand on ya if you were asleep?’
    ‘Cause I woulda woke up.’
    ‘You wouldn know who ya fucked!’
    ‘That’s it!’ screamed Jen. ‘I’m calling