I was gazing at a collection of novelty corn-cob holders, wondering why I’d ever bought them, when my doorbell rang. I tossed them back into the box of kitchen utensils I was unpacking. An unassuming-looking middle-aged man stood on my doorstep, proffering a cellophane-covered plate topped with a shiny green bow.
‘I’m Bob from next door. Welcome to Five Pines,’ he said.
Five Pines is a gated community of identical houses in manicured grounds surrounding a golf club. The houses aren’t really identical, they just look alike. There are five models of house ranging in size and price, but they’re built of the same materials and have the same external finishes, roofs, and paint colour. The gardens are planted with similar trees and shrubs so that the landscaping is uniform. I don’t know what happens if a rebel resident installs a bright pink bougainvillea at their front door. Five Pines has its own security guards, so perhaps there is also a conformity enforcement detail which arrives to uproot the offending plant.
But I was happy with the conformity. After twenty years of the chaos, clash and never-ending variety of the city, the neatness of Five Pines was a relief. Every street comes off a single main road, like branches on a tree, and ends in its own sweeping circular dead-end where kids ride their bikes and play ball. So nobody drives down your street because they’re on their way to somewhere else.
I took the cellophane parcel from Bob. Under the crinkling plastic, three or four varieties of grapes nestled in plump bunches on a Perspex platter. I hadn’t expected anyone to bring me a cake, but a plate of grapes seemed like an eccentric choice of welcome gift.
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘I’m Anna. Come in.’ I led him into my kitchen cluttered with unpacked cartons. ‘I’m sorry I can’t offer you a hot drink. The kettle is still in a box somewhere.’
‘So you’re Anna Spires, the well-known romance writer,’ Bob said, giving me an appraising look.
I was surprised he knew this. ‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘But I’m really not famous.’
‘Not famous,’ Bob agreed, ‘well-known.’ I blushed and gritted my teeth, but Bob continued, ‘My wife, Barbra, got me on to you. I really enjoyed Careless Heartbeat. It was artful, the way you kept the reader in suspense. For most of the book I doubted whether Carrie and Tristan would ever get together.’
I stared at him, but his expression was benign and there wasn’t a trace of mockery in his tone. I’ve never had anyone, and certainly not a man, comment on the plotting of one of my romance novels. I wouldn’t say I churn them out, but my publisher does expect me to produce two or three books a year. And yes, there is a formula, but it takes skill to write the same story over and over and keep it fresh. I’m not ashamed of what I do.
‘But no doubt you’re also writing a real novel?’ he asked. ‘A bigger, better book?’ He spat his Bs with little explosive pops. It wasn’t quite an accent, more of a mild speech impediment. I saw that his lips were very thin, almost non-existent. Perhaps that was why had had to force out those sounds.
‘Not at all,’ I said lightly. ‘My romance novels keep me busy.’
But of course I was working on a novel. It was about gangsters in 1920s London – not exactly ‘write what you know’, but then, admittedly, neither were the romances. I’ve certainly never had a millionaire whisk me off in his private jet to woo me over a champagne supper in Cap d’Antibes. I had been working on my gangster novel for ten years. In fact, my move to Five Pines had been partially motivated by a conviction that a less distracting environment might be conducive to my finally finishing this opus.
‘So the romance novels are your bread and butter?’ Bob looked meaningfully around my kitchen.
It was small. My house was the basic model. The finishes were simple, the appliances, bottom-of-the-range. Even after the sale of my apartment in the city and the inheritance from my mother, this house had been all I could afford at Five Pines.
‘I have lived here a while,’ he said. ‘All of us on this street have. But you’ve just arrived, so you could live anywhere in Five Pines, and it would be all the same to you.’ I wondered where he was going with this. It wasn’t much of a welcome speech. But I didn’t have to wonder for long. ‘My mother is getting old, and I want your house for her. It’s the right size and next door to me. I was in negotiations with Five Pines, but there was a miscommunication and they sold it to you. So now I’d like to buy it from you.’
I was so astonished that I could not immediately think of anything to say. ‘But I’ve just moved in,’ I stammered at last.
He gestured to the boxes piled against the wall. ‘It would be easy to relocate to another house. In fact, there’s one coming up for sale three roads over on Yew Street. Bigger than this. Better bathrooms.’
Pop, pop, pop. I restrained the urge to brush a fleck of saliva off my sleeve. ‘I can’t afford a bigger house. Or the expense of another move and the fees.’
‘We’d pay all that for you,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t be out of pocket.’
I goggled at him. ‘We’? Who was ‘we’?
‘We,’ he said, as though he had read my mind,’ are the community on this street. Many of us knew each other from before. We’d all like my mother to be here.’
It struck me then that perhaps I had unwittingly moved onto a street housing some sort of cult, and that Bob was the leader. You do hear of such things.
‘No need to decide now,’ Bob added soothingly. ‘That house on Yew Street won’t be available for a month or so.’ He headed towards the door. ‘Just don’t unpack all your boxes.’ He winked at me, a strange, slow, single-eyed blink that left me more unnerved than ever.
Some weeks passed, and I heard nothing more. Bob waved whenever I pulled into my driveway. So did his wife, Barbra. In fact, all the residents of my street waved in a thoroughly friendly way. But I had no more visits from Bob and began to think his proposal had not been serious. So I unpacked all my boxes and settled in. I went to the clubhouse and learned bridge and mahjong and attended Zumba classes. I took golf lessons and played tennis. Afterwards, I had coffee with some of the ladies I played with, but in the evenings, I was always alone. Making friends at Five Pines was clearly going to take some time.
And then I had an idea: rather than waiting to be invited, I should do the inviting. It was October, so why not invite all my neighbours to a Halloween party? I wrote invitation cards in deliberately spidery handwriting and slipped them into the mail slots of the houses on my street. When the day of the party arrived, I decorated my house with glowing pumpkins and fake skeletons and cottonwool cobwebs. I made cupcakes with black, liquorice-flavoured icing and my famous severed hand sandwiches – white bread, ham and ketchup sandwiches sliced with a hand-shaped cookie-cutter. I looked up a Halloween punch recipe on the internet and mixed up a lurid purple mixture that was a great deal more potent than it tasted. At 6pm I was standing in my kitchen dressed as a scary nurse in a short white dress stained with fake blood. By 6.45pm I had eaten four severed hands and drunk three cups of purple punch. Nobody had arrived.
And then the doorbell rang: Bob and Barbra, wearing matching outfits, the most convincing Halloween costumes I had ever seen. They had both come as silvery skinned reptilian creatures – lizards, perhaps? Not lizards, but something very like them. There were no uneven Velcro fastenings, no crooked zips, just seamless, sheeny scales. My own costume seemed cheap and, if I’m honest, a bit slutty, by comparison. But my relief at not having been snubbed by the entire street was so overwhelming that I didn’t care.
‘Come in!’ I cried, throwing the door wide. ‘Have some punch!’
‘I’ve brought a pie,’ Barbra said. She had the same weird speech defect as Bob, I noted, but spat out, not just her Bs but also her Ps. ‘An eyeball pie.’ She gave a sudden rather croaky laugh. ‘Not really. They’re grapes, peeled grapes.’
A pie made from peeled grapes? I took it, wondering who had the time to peel grapes. Especially as her hands, I saw, were also covered in silvery, scaled skin. What a brilliant Halloween costume! Her nails were long and perfectly pointed, like little claws. How had she wielded that tiny paring knife? I sloshed punch into paper cups and watched Bob and Barbra take experimental sips.
The doorbell rang again and more of my neighbours arrived, many of them also bringing eyeball pies – clearly a neighbourhood food-favourite. The doorbell kept ringing. In the end I just left it open. They crowded in and gobbled the severed hands and the liquorice cupcakes. They crunched up all the crisps. The eyeball pies were a big hit and, when I tasted some myself, I found it savoury, not sweet, and rather gristly. But I didn’t want to offend my guests, so I had another slice and washed it down with a lot more punch.
My neighbours laughed and drank and danced The Monster Mash. Towards the end of the evening, many of them were so inebriated they were crawling about on all fours. My Halloween party was a resounding triumph. The only thing that seemed a bit peculiar was that every single guest had come as a silvery skinned reptilian creature.
‘Well, I’ll just have to ask where they got those fabulous costumes and get one myself next year,’ I thought at the end of the evening as I stumbled to bed.
I did not sleep well. The combination of purple punch and eyeball pie roiled in my stomach, and I had vivid, disturbing dreams. I stirred in the early hours and found my room throbbing with a pulsing light which slid through the slats in the blinds and made my eyes twitch. I wanted to get up and look out of the window, but I was filled with a paralysing dread.
In the morning, my house was neat as a pin. There was a pile of printed paper waiting for me on the table. A Post-it note stuck to the first page had a message in permanent marker: ‘The house on Yew Street is up for sale’. The document beneath contained an offer from Bob to buy my house for one and a half times what I had paid for it. I signed the contract.
That very day I repacked my boxes. I also began work on a new novel, one I knew I could write entirely convincingly: not gangsters, not romance, science fiction. And, as soon as I could, I moved back to the city.
Philippa Hall is co-editor of Funny Pearls.
Story illustration: Original image by Funny Pearls.