‘I’ve forgotten my ladder,’ says Alphonse. ‘I could go home and fetch it, but I notice there’s one in the garden.’
‘Can you get it yourself?’ Dieter heads off upstairs.
Outside it’s even hotter now. Alphonse does his best to avoid stepping in dog mess as he crosses the garden. Isn’t Björn ever walked? In attempting to remove the ladder he sees there’s another on the other side of the garden wall. They’re linked by a worn purple swimming board with M AND L FOR EVER written on it in felt-tip pen. It’s a rickety structure, easy to dismantle. He props the board up against the garden wall and resolves to tie the whole lot together again more securely later.
As he cleans the living-room walls, the sound of the hard brush sends Björn to sleep. The ammonia Alphonse uses to tackle the greasier surfaces in the kitchen wakes him up again, though. He sneezes and slinks away to the hall with a look of alarm. Then claws tick on the stairs. Alphonse opens the glass sliding door to dispel the stench.
When his master comes down to make himself a sandwich, the dog isn’t with him.
‘Like anything?’ Dieter asks, his thoughts clearly elsewhere.
Alphonse has his own sandwiches, but he accepts a cup of coffee.
Dieter looks past him, at the ladder, then out of the window. He walks over and slowly shuts the sliding door.
‘Mila put that ladder there,’ he says. ‘Children.’ He smiles apologetically, then signals his habit of eating at the computer.
Mila is about thirteen and resembles neither of her parents. With a dramatic sweep she throws off her backpack.
‘Hello,’ she says. Then, dismayed: ‘What’s my ladder doing here?’
‘Perhaps you could say hello to Alphonse first?’ Her mother has come in behind her.
‘I just did. What’s my ladder doing here?’
‘I borrowed it for a bit, because I forgot mine. I’ll put it back shortly. I’ll tie the swimming board nice and tight. Promise.’
‘But I need it now.’
‘Homework first,’ says Els.
‘Haven’t got any homework.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
Mila storms out of the room the moment her father comes in.
‘Hello!’ he says crossly. Without responding, she runs up the stairs.
‘Puberty. We won’t be spared,’ Dieter chuckles. ‘You don’t think of that when you’re in it yourself, how your own children will subject you to it eventually.’
‘It’s not that bad,’ says Els.
She asks whether he has any children.
‘I don’t think so.’
They find that funny and something gleams in their eyes, a slight curiosity, slight suspicion. Alphonse resolves not to make that corny old joke any more.
He fetches the cable ties from the van. On the other side of the house he attaches both ladders to the swimming board.
‘I’m calling on your neighbours shortly, by the way,’ he says, back in the kitchen.
Els and Dieter stare at him as if he has a hatchet embedded in his skull. Why the neighbours? He explains that he’s taking them some colour swatches, so they can choose a colour. As soon as he’s done here, he’ll make a start there.
Dieter wraps his arms around his head. Els slaps a painted wall with the flat of her hand. ‘Damn,’ she says, looking first at her Pick Nick-pink hand and then at the skeletal fingers on the wall. ‘Sorry.’
Alphonse presses a cloth to the mouth of a bottle of turpentine and holds her hand in his to clean it. For a moment she stands there like a crestfallen child, her fingers wide open so that his resolute, fatherly strokes can find all the paint. Then her rage flares again. ‘Really, what are they playing at?!’
He takes a small, new roller out of its packaging and skims it breezily over the handprint like a lightweight steamroller. It works.
‘Everything we do, they copy,’ Dieter explains. ‘No idea what’s going on in those people’s heads. They see your van out front and before you know it, their kitchen’s in need of a new colour too.’
‘Their bedrooms.’ They haven’t heard him.
‘It’s been going on for years. We buy a house, they buy a house. We have a baby, they have a baby. We get a new car or travel across the United States and they do too.’ Els glumly removes traces of paint from under her fingernails. ‘What are we supposed to do? Move?’
‘We’re not moving.’ It’s Mila who’s spoken. They didn’t hear her coming downstairs and as she crosses the living room to slide open the glass door they stand motionless next to the granite worktop and stare at her.
Els waits till she’s outside before going on: ‘It’s even got to the point where they’ve started interfering in our lives. They think they can make certain adjustments to our lives.’
Dieter wants to interrupt. His mouth points in her direction and his lips purse several times, backed by an index finger describing the path of a powerful insect.
‘We don’t know that,’ he says eventually.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ says Alphonse.
They thank him, somewhat startled by the abrupt ending and slightly dismayed at how much they’ve divulged, but they haven’t told him the whole story yet.
Before he steps into the hall, he sees them, floating on a flying carpet above the garden wall: two thirteen-year-old girls, flinging their smiling faces forward and back.
He catches another glimpse of the girls through the window in the rear wall of the neighbours’ house before he’s led to an armchair. His clients sit in two separate chairs to his left, each with one leg thrown over the other. They’re slightly shorter and rounder than Els and Dieter. Between him and the couple, bubbles tinkle in the glass of tonic they’ve put on the coffee table for him. At his feet pants a small, attentive dog of an indeterminate breed. When Alphonse picks up the glass and puts it to his mouth, the animal seems to hold its breath.
‘Where are you from?’ the woman wants to know.
‘From Brussels,’ he says. ‘I’ve been living here for almost nine months now.’
‘Yes, yes,’ the woman enunciates. ‘But where are you really from?’
‘From Brussels, he said, didn’t he?’ Her husband stands up nervously. ‘Would you like an olive, Mr, er?’ he asks. ‘Cheese?’
‘No, thank you. And just call me Alphonse.’
‘We’re Sieglinde and Ronny. I’ll go and get some anyway,’ says the woman after her husband has sat down again. She goes to the kitchen, which is walled off from the living room. It sounds as if she’s emptying all the cupboards.
‘How did you get on next door?’ the man asks. He’s obviously trying to make the question sound neutral.
‘I think I’ll be finished there by tomorrow evening.’
‘Didn’t she say anything, Els, when she heard you were coming to see us?’ Sieglinde lays out little bowls of olives and cheese, putting cocktail sticks and a napkin holder beside them.
Alphonse isn’t immediately sure how to answer. ‘It seemed to interest them,’ he says.
Ronny sniffs. ‘No doubt!’ exclaims Sieglinde. ‘She’s crazy, Alfredo.’
They’re