Their new neighbour
Five years ago, a van pulled up outside Cam’s flat, and a couple got out of it. Since then, he’s been trying to pinpoint the exact moment that they ruined his life.
Cam didn’t have much to do with the couple in that first year. So, they were always ‘the couple’, neither he nor Maisie knowing their real names.
The couple are planning something, Maisie might say, because she’d seen the woman through their living-room window, standing on her tiptoes and pinning Post-it notes in sequence on the wall.
The couple are having a party, Cam might observe, because the walls were now thumping and next door’s garden was full of people, the man hastily lighting candles on a caterpillar cake and presenting it, self-consciously, to his girlfriend.
Numbers, in helium balloons. ‘Two’ and ‘six’.
The couple are having sex again, Maisie might say.
Yet again, Cam might add, later that same day.
Always at it. Always omitting the final part of that sentence: ‘… and we aren’t. ’
Their first interaction with the couple came when they’d lived next door for almost an entire year.
Snow was falling in droves outside their window, and Maisie was sitting at her laptop ripping Bombay Bicycle Club songs off YouTube.
Behind her, outside the window, the fucking dog.
Before then, the dog had mainly stood on the couple’s back patio, staring unblinkingly at Cam as its owner loomed over it, smoking.
But one section of their shared fence had blown down, and now the dog was suddenly in Cam and Maisie’s back garden, urinating on their frozen rosemary bush.
They’d corralled the dog home, called a fencing company. Then, a knock at the door.
‘Jasper wanted to say sorry,’ the woman had said, proffering a bottle of wine. ‘I’m Clara, by the way.’
Maisie and Clara started talking. Then they started making plans.
So it was that the couple were invited round for a dinner party in the spring of that second year, even though the only contact Cam had had with the boyfriend was a brisk nod shared once when they’d uncomfortably coincided in taking out the bins.
Cam insisted on cooking from a recipe on his brand-new iPad, something he’d queued up for on release morning.
It ran out of battery halfway through, and his dhal stuck to the bottom of the pan while he was trying to find the charger.
The boyfriend, whose name was Seb, had only just got his first smartphone.
After several bottles of red wine, once the candles had started dripping on to the reclaimed wood dining table, Clara had told Maisie that she was a film director.
‘Or, I want to be,’ she’d said. ‘Everything I do is working towards that.’
‘She’s being modest,’ Seb had said, which isn’t the word Cam would have used. ‘She’s really fucking good.’
They were not Cam’s kind of people. Seb, with his haughty scowl and his beaten-up black headphones, apparently made a living as an actor.
His first film was playing on ‘select screens’ that year, so Maisie dragged Cam to a wanky arthouse cinema in Dalston to show their support.
Most of Seb’s other roles were in obscure daytime soaps, and he still worked shifts in a pub to scrape together extra cash.
Cam would be embarrassed, if his girlfriend was the breadwinner.
Clara was leaving her full-time job in production to work on set.
Her latest short film was getting buzz, whatever that meant.
The entire thing was uploaded on to YouTube, so Cam and Maisie watched it through the prism of an HDMI cable hooked up to their tiny TV.
Twenty-two minutes of Cam’s life that he would never get back.
‘She’s so cool,’ Maisie said afterwards, pacing the apartment as if discussing a teenage crush. ‘And she’s definitely going to be famous.’ A crestfallen pause. ‘I wish I was brave enough to do something like that.’
‘You’re too sensible to do something like that,’ Cam had said.
It was supposed to be a compliment.
When Cam had first met Maisie at Leeds University, she’d been studying literature.
They’d grown up since then. Cam didn’t row any more, and Maisie didn’t talk about being a poet.
But now, Maisie was writing again. Cam caught her reading a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five filled with Clara’s scrawly annotations, then passing her own well-thumbed anthology of Mary Oliver poems over the garden fence in return.
He knew that nothing good could come of this.
When Maisie was made redundant from her job in PR, early in that third year, Cam knew it was because she’d stopped making an effort.
In the months that followed, she’d said she was looking for jobs, but he’d more than once commandeered her laptop and found every tab open to the Open University.
It was in this context that they arrived at the barbecue laid on for a reluctant Seb’s twenty-eighth birthday.
It was August, and the city felt uncomfortable.
There were riots on the streets. Maisie made a peach and feta salad, and Cam brought a four-pack of Punk IPA.
When they arrived, a stoner called Ryan was sharing a joint with Ren, who was about to move to the Netherlands and was clearly looking for a way to broadcast this fact.
Some guy called Smudge was setting up his Bluetooth speakers next to a bin full of booze and ice, plunging a set of keys into the side of a beer can.
Then there was the vet, with his Alex Turner haircut, whose name Cam had missed, and who seemed most interested in talking to the dog.
And to Maisie, who always gravitated towards pets in social situations like these.
At one point, Cam caught the vet showing Maisie his lucky guitar pick. He couldn’t help but feel like he’d stumbled upon something untoward.
The Mayans had predicted that the world would end in the final months of that fourth year.
In the face of apocalypse, the country was seized with a kind of patriotic optimism.
The Diamond Jubilee. The opening ceremony of the London Olympics.
When Cam hung an enormous Union Jack over their front windows, Clara, the enemy next door, asked if he was starting a far-right political party.
Maisie had found this incredibly funny, but then, Maisie had long since switched her allegiances to Clara’s side of the fence.
The pair of them were always going to readings at independent bookshops together, or to see the kind of cerebral films to which Cam was allergic.
That year alone, Clara had directed a music video for a semi-successful band, and an aftershave advert that was actually being shown on TV.
Maisie said that she always saw Clara’s drawings popping up on something called Pinterest.
‘She does drawings now?’ Cam had replied, exasperated.
‘She’s a multi-disciplinarian,’ Maisie had replied, with the pompousness of someone deploying a new term for the first time.
‘She’s a show-off.’
He certainly felt like Clara should have stuck to drawing when he stumbled upon Maisie watching her next short film.
‘Is it for kids?’ he’d said.
‘Why would you think that?’
‘It’s got puppets in it.’
Maisie had sighed as if Cam was the most stupid man in the world. ‘It’s a metaphor.’
‘Well, it’s not that clever,’ Cam had said. ‘Anyone could do it.’
‘Even me?’
They were arguing all the time by that point.
They arrived for Seb’s next birthday with sour faces, watched the happy couple at the grill through gritted teeth.
Seb and Clara were always acting like teenagers, hands running up and down one another as if they weren’t surrounded by other people.
Cam was drunk already, and he could tell that Maisie was annoyed with him.
She moved to the other side of the patio with a guy who looked familiar.
He realised it was the vet, his nauseatingly glossy hair now tied up in a man bun.
His name was Nimesh, and he was making her laugh far more than anyone who wasn’t her boyfriend should.
‘Why did you become a vet?’ Cam could hear Maisie asking.
‘I think animals are better company than humans,’ he replied. ‘Better judges of character, too.’
Ryan was walking around with a film camera, taking candid pictures, and Cam was in half a mind to stamp the contraption into the floor.
Jasper was licking Maisie’s hands, canoodling harder with her than Seb was with Clara.
Cam sulked off to the fridge, snooped around Seb and Clara’s flat with Maisie’s half-empty bottle of rosé in his hand.
He muttered to himself as he looked upon the ruffled bedsheets, Clara’s hand-drawn picture of Seb and Jasper hanging above their bed.
Cam drained the bottle. Maisie would never write a poem about him.
The fifth year started with Clara’s thirtieth birthday.
Cam felt like a spare part, standing in the corner and checking his phone as Clara’s sister emerged from the kitchen, carrying an enormous cake with some help from Maisie.
Clara’s sister was pregnant, fit to burst. Cam could tell that he’d touched a nerve, when he made that innocuous comment to Clara in front of everyone.
‘You next?’
A rare case of Seb and Clara being on different wavelengths.
‘Not yet,’ Seb said.
‘Yet?’ Clara replied.
It was just a moment, and the moment passed. But once everyone else had tucked into the cake, Cam snooped eagerly on the small argument that followed.
‘It’s just that you’ve never asked me,’ Clara said, to Seb.
Seb didn’t say much at all. He simply stormed outside for a smoke.
How could a failing actor give her what she needed?
It was no secret that he still hadn’t popped the question.
He’d just landed his first lead role, a troubled musician in a brooding teen romance, and even this he couldn’t crack a smile about.
He didn’t want to be typecast, or pigeon-holed, or made to look a fool.
He kept his beard longer now, his dark hair hidden beneath a beanie hat.
Cam wondered, with a thrill, if Seb was going bald.
Not long after her birthday, Clara shaved one side of her white-blond hair into what Maisie called an undercut, keeping the rest relatively short and lethally straight. Maisie was talking about ‘making a change’ herself, but Cam wouldn’t humour the conversation. She turned to Clara instead.
‘Who’s stopping you?’ Clara said.
Cam was pretty sure that Maisie had been texting someone else, someone who wasn’t Clara.
She denied this, but then, she denied everything.
That’s why he opened the letter, the one addressed to her, as soon as it arrived.
He’d seen the name of the institution on the envelope.
She wouldn’t keep this a secret from him.
‘What have you done?’ Cam stammered, when Maisie walked back into the kitchen after the resulting row.
She placed the kitchen scissors on the counter, calmly washed her hands. Her hair, always mousy brown and reassuringly normal, was now sheared above her shoulders and dyed a bright box-dye red.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, the following day, when Maisie had told him they needed to talk. ‘This is all because you want to go back to school?’
‘Not school,’ Maisie said. ‘I’m going to do a master’s. Then, if all goes well, a PhD.’
It was exactly five years since Seb and Clara had moved in next door, and Cam sat on the sofa as Maisie stood calmly in front of him, reciting from a script she’d clearly prepared in her head. On the other side of the fence, he could just about see Jasper, staring with those scuffed-button eyes.
‘And I’m just supposed to come with you?’ Cam said.
‘No,’ Maisie replied, steadily. ‘You aren’t.’
When he spoke again, Cam was aware that his voice sounded whiny. But if there was ever a time to be whiny, this was it.
‘You can’t just break up with me,’ he said. ‘What will I tell my parents?’
Now, as another van pulls up outside to start collecting Cam’s belongings, he realises that the exact moment doesn’t matter. Maisie has broken up with him, and he’ll always blame the couple next door.