Free Spinning Around by Catherine Jinks Page A

were a bit bipolar,’ she diagnosed, upon our second meeting, ‘but that’s okay, because so am I. My advice is: keep drinking coffee and stay off the Merchant Ivory films.’
    She’s good company, is Lisa. It’s no coincidence that she knows most of her neighbours, and is friendly with a lot of them (the ones, she says, who only exhibit slight neuroses or personality disorders; they can be interesting and fun). She’s a sociable sort of person, unlike me. I don’t know any of my neighbours, except to wave to. I don’t even know their names. It’s my North Shore upbringing, I suppose. People who are raised on large, leafy blocks flanked by the residences of reticent bank managers, and who are driven everywhere as children, and forbidden to play on roads, or wander far from home, don’t develop the kind of skills that you need to casually drop in on a friend down the street. Lisa is different. She grew up in a noisy, beach-suburb house with a banging screen door and cousins over the back fence and neighbours sitting around on plastic porch furniture lighting cigarettes and telling their kids to take the dog with them, and be back by five.
    As a result, Lisa will talk to anyone, freely and fearlessly. And if they turn out to be tiresome nutters, then she detaches herself with cheerful nonchalance, not really caring what they think of her in consequence. I admire her so much.
    She’s a nice person, too. Whenever her husband has to work on a Saturday, she invites me around as a gesture of solidarity, and we sit drinking coffee while the kids play together. Her boys, as I’ve said, are a bit of a handful, but Emily can take it because she’s such a resilient, good-natured kid, just like her father. If she falls down and hurts herself, she just gets up again. Jonah’s different. I can’t imagine how he’s going to survive school, because he’s terribly sensitive, with a tenacious memory. Whenever we go to Lisa’s house, Emily always dashes out to play trike races with Brice and Liam while Jonah sits inside, arranging Matchbox cars into complicated patterns.
    I feel so sorry for the poor darling. My heart dissolves whenever I see him frowning fiercely over a tricky Lego attachment. But what can I do? Maybe I should give him a computer for his next birthday, and be done with it.
    When Lisa answered the front door today, kicking aside her dog as she did so, piercing screams from the back of the house made Jonah clutch at my neck, almost choking me. Lisa rolled her eyes (‘They’re being electric eels, or something’) and invited us all in. Emily disappeared immediately; I hardly saw her again for an hour. Jonah stayed with me while I sampled Lisa’s freshly unwrapped chocolate muffins (she cooks curries, not cakes), pressing his brown, silky head against my jaw. He wouldn’t go to Lisa. He wouldn’t loosen his grip on my neck. I had to carry him out to the garden when I went to look at the new lattice that Simon, Lisa’s husband, had put up. It was framed, and firmly rooted in the ground against a side fence. Lisa intends to train a passionfruit vine up over it.
    â€˜It’ll be another barrier between me and that psycho next door,’ she said, in a loud voice. ‘And it should be all right, because it gets the sun in the mornings. What do you think? It’s nice, isn’t it?’
    â€˜Very,’ I agreed.
    â€˜I think I might get Simon to do the whole fence. We’ll paint it all white and it’ll show that we haven’t given up entirely.’ She pointed to the bald patch in the middle of her backyard, where Liam, Brice and Emily were kicking up dust. ‘Simon has a fit every time he looks at that lawn,’ she explained, ‘but I tell him: “What are you moaning about? Your head’s in a worse state, and I still like it.”’
    Simon, in fact, is a paunchy, balding, sun-whipped