Spaghetti Legs Read online

  This was all good fun and kept Eric and Basil amused. But it wasn’t until the new neighbour moved in that things started to get serious spywise.

  Neighbours are weird. You are forced to be friendly with them for no other reason than the sharing of a common boundary. There are of course exceptions to this rule: North and South Korea for one springs readily to mind. Throughout history, neighbours have shared tea, sugar, dog stories, and a mutual hatred for the people across the road with the loud music. This friendship goes on for years until they move out and another lot arrive with a whole new set of sugar borrowing stories.

  Eric’s was a normal neighbourhood. Every house had 2.5 kids, 1.5 dogs, 1.2 cats and the lounge room built around the tv.

  When the Keegans moved out, the Underwoods all took turns waiting by the window for the removalist’s van to arrive and pour out their new neighbours. It never came. Instead there was a procession of multi-coloured station wagons coming and going at all hours.

  Mr Underwood’s worst fears looked as if they’d be realised when on the first night the new neighbours had a barbecue and sang far too many verses of ‘Blowing in the Wind’ for his liking.

  ‘As if it’s not bad enough having the Suedes down the road, now we’ve got hippies next door,’ he said and charged out of the house to set up a security system for his vegetable patch.

  He needn’t have worried. After the marshmallow and tambourine house-warming party, the Underwoods soon realised that they only had one new neighbour--a mop of stringy hair and hippy clothes--called Liz.

  Lizard, as Mr Underwood referred to her, looked like someone who was always in a hurry. This was either because she was a very busy person, or she had no concept of time. They found out it was her concept of time when on one of her first days in the neighbourhood she walked home from the shops with Mrs Underwood. Eric’s mother had innocently asked if Liz knew what time it was. Liz’s reply was that time was just more evidence of fascist mind control. Mrs Underwood agreed that this could well be the case, but she was in a hurry to get home for the afternoon soapies.

  Liz looked completely out of place in three-bedroomed suburbia. The Underwoods could not work out why someone who would gladly have given up her tie-dyed T-shirt collection to live in an alley in Paris could possibly choose to live in the suburbs.

  For all her frizzy hair and seriously weird dress sense she was very attractive and Eric soon developed a massive crush on her.

  Since he’d broken up with Sunflower, Eric had sworn off girls for the rest of his life. But that had been a couple of weeks ago and he hadn’t reckoned on a total babe in dreadlocks moving in next door. And whereas Sunflower was a gorgeous looking girl of twelve, Liz was a gorgeous looking older woman with all her proper bits sticking out. She must have been at least nineteen. He didn’t know if it was love. But he felt sick to his stomach every time he saw her.

  Although his parents had nothing much to do with their new neighbour, Eric was determined to find out all he could about her.

  Liz left for work, or for wherever it was she went each day, at around nine o’clock. Eric watched her dart out of the house at ten past nine, waited a few minutes then jumped over the side fence and let himself in through her rear window. He noticed a painting hung out to dry on the line.

  She had a telescope positioned at the window and when Eric looked through it he found that it pointed at the surrounding houses rather than the sky.

  Her house had hardly any furniture. A couple of chairs, a few flea-bitten bean bags and an old stereo made up the lounge room. The main bedroom contained the telescope and a bed. Her clothes were all over the place. The second bedroom consisted of just an old rug and heaps of incense sticks. The third bedroom had an easel in it, some painting equipment and a huge stack of books.

  After about an hour of poking around Eric felt that he’d had enough adventure for one day and let himself out through the window. He carefully sealed up the flyscreen as he had done a hundred times before on his own bedroom window. He couldn’t help having a look at the painting on the line. It depicted rows and rows of houses that all looked the same, going as far as to have a clothesline full of nappies in each backyard. It didn’t inspire him much, so he went home.

  When Eric walked into his house he found that Paul was crying because the roof of his Lego mansion had collapsed on the beetles he had inside, and Jenny was furious because somebody had read her diary.

  Eric slunk guiltily into his bedroom. And as the storm clouds gathered in the west, he put on his walkman in an attempt to shut out the thunder from the sky and the commotion from the lounge room.

  The next day, Eric left the house and returned to his spy-making. He let himself in and was content to just relax on Liz’s bed and look through her books.

  As he was leaving at lunchtime he noticed that there were two more paintings hung out to dry. A quick glance revealed that they were only of people’s backyards again. He was about to walk away when he noticed that one of the paintings detailed Mr Bell, from down the road, hurriedly leaving by the Fogarty’s back door as Mr Fogarty was pulling his car into the driveway. He looked back at the first painting and saw what looked like Mrs Graham paying the milkman, but he realised that it was the milkman who was handing over money to Mrs Graham.

  This went on for the next two weeks. Each day Eric let himself into Liz’s house, looked through the telescope at the detailed lives of their neighbours and learnt something new about his neighbourhood on the way out. The Hill’s Hoist had never revealed so much.

  Two days before Iggy was supposed to return, Eric had just made himself comfortable on Liz’s bed when he heard a key in the front door. He didn’t have time to get out, so he dropped the book he was reading and hid under the bed.

  Eric could hear Liz pottering around first in the bathroom and then the kitchen before she came into the bedroom a short while later. The bedspread didn’t touch the floor and through the small gap he could see her feet walking all over the place until finally she leapt onto the bed.

  The springs sagged so badly that they pushed into his face. He was able to turn his head sideways in order to breathe, but apart from that made no other movement.

  Finally Liz’s breathing changed as she fell into a deep sleep.

  Eric crawled out from under the bed like a guilty crab and quietly fled. This time he ignored the information packed paintings that dangled from the clothesline.

  The next day he let himself in by the normal method. He was shaken, but he refused to let one small scare interrupt a promising career in international espionage.

  After a few hours he let himself out again and thought that with Iggy due to return any minute and the end of the school holidays it would be his last visit for a while.

  The painting on the line was hung up sideways so he had to cock his head on one side to look at it. It was a painting of Liz lying on her bed. There was something beneath the bed that he couldn’t quite work out. A face maybe. To his immense horror, Eric realised it was himself.

  Liz came over unexpectedly in the evening to see Mr and Mrs Underwood. Surprisingly she hadn’t come over to complain about Eric ransacking her house, but to invite the family to an exhibition that she was holding in an inner-city art gallery. She told them about her plans to live and work in Paris when the exhibition was over. And with the polite exchange of addresses, that they all knew they would never use, the neighbours said goodbye at the Underwoods’ front door.

  ‘Oh by the way, Liz, what’s your exhibition called?’ asked Mrs Underwood.

  ‘The Hidden Suburbs,’ said Liz. And she walked across the front lawn and out of their lives.

  The scare of being found out by Liz in such a demeaning way made Eric decide to give up being a spy and become something else instead. He felt that if he couldn’t put one over on a paint-drunk hippy, he was unlikely to get the better of any trained enemy he was sure his spying skills would be pitted against.

  When Liz had been in the lounge ro
om talking to his parents, Eric spent the time moving from under his bed to the wardrobe and back again in search of the perfect hiding spot. Under the bed proved to be not such a good idea because in the darkness he rested his head against a pair of damp and slightly mouldy pyjama pants. He had hidden them under the bed after wetting them a couple of weeks earlier, dreaming about Sunflower Fox. The wardrobe wasn’t an appropriate hiding place either. After he’d disentangled himself from Jenny’s massive collection of clothes he heard a distinctive growl. When his heart had stopped pounding he realised that it was just the deep contented purring of his cat, Kitty.

  Eric didn’t want to begin to imagine how much trouble he was going to be in now that he’d been sprung spying on Liz. Only a few weeks earlier, after he’d finished his chores, he had been grounded for a fortnight for using steel wool to scrub some stubborn mark off his parents’ car. But this was break and enter. He was sure they would tie him to a bed until he was sixteen and beat him senseless on the hour.

  In the end he couldn’t stand the waiting any longer and had burst out into the lounge room and shouted, ‘Okay I admit it, I’m guilty.’ This caused a great deal of confusion for everyone.

  ‘Okay Eric, I give up. What is it that you’re guilty of?’ said Mr Underwood between sips of coffee.

  Totally fazed, Eric looked around the room. Not only was Liz not there, she appeared not to have mentioned his crime either.

  In the end he admitted to sabotaging Paul’s Lego and reading Jenny’s diary.

  His parents both had a laugh and told him not to do it again, which Eric thought showed a distinct lack of consistency in their punishment system.

  Later on that evening, as the moon shone clear and bright over Toongabbie, Eric went to bed thinking that it was far out that Liz hadn’t dobbed on him. He looked forward excitedly to Iggy’s return the next day.

  Eric leapt out of bed at six in the morning and rang the airport. He spoke, or rather listened, to a recorded message about flight numbers and various arrival times. There had been no reference to Paris by the recorded voice and it became pretty clear that anybody who wanted flight information had to do a fair bit of homework before making the call.

  Eric’s Uncle Tim had once come out from England for a brief visit and he remembered that Tim’s flight had arrived at around nine o’clock.

  If he allowed Iggy’s mother about an hour to drive the old Honda Civic back from the airport, Iggy would be pretty tired after a twenty-hour flight, so say give him half an hour to rest. Eric reckoned he could call on Iggy at about ten thirty and fill him in on all the goss of the area, particularly the brief stay of Liz.

  Eric usually loved Sunday mornings. He would lie in bed until about seven, make mental threats to the paper boy and more particularly his whistle, go back to sleep, then finally get up at around ten to devour his bacon and eggs before hauling himself back to bed to watch the sports shows on tv.

  But this Sunday morning had begun to drag.

  After unsolving and re-solving his old Rubik’s cube a couple of times, Eric whiled away a good chunk of the morning flicking lint balls into a set of imaginary goal posts on his bed. Finally, after psyching himself up for a couple of hours, he plucked up enough courage to smuggle both sets of pyjama pants out into the washing machine, because it had happened again that night.

  Eventually, and to his everlasting relief, the Olde English clock in the lounge room struck ten thirty.

  Eric casually put on his shoes, strolled out of the front door, and bolted down to the Suedes’ house full of news and questions for Iggy.

  ‘Oh hi, Eric,’ said Mrs Suede at Eric’s excited beatings on the front door. ‘Come in.’

  Eric walked straight into the Suedes’ lounge room. It was full of suitcases and packing crates. Iggy had sure taken a lot of stuff.

  ‘Is Iggy in bed, Mrs Suede?’

  ‘No?’ She looked confused.

  Eric could hardly tell the difference between Mrs Suede’s confused look and her normal one, so he made no comment.

  ‘Where is he then?’

  ‘Iggy wrote to you didn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah, he sent me a letter from Paris.’

  ‘But he sent you a second letter as well?’

  ‘No.’ Eric was beginning to get a sneaky suspicion that Jenny might have hidden it in revenge for him reading her diary.

  ‘I think you had better sit down, Eric.’

  Eric looked around the room for somewhere to park. There weren’t many choices. He had read in his father’s Time magazines that poachers were killing elephants in order to sell their ivory on the black market, so he made a small protest by not sitting on the upturned, plastic, elephant-foot umbrella holder. Instead he made himself as comfortable as possible on an old mahogany tea-chest.

  ‘Iggy’s not coming home, Eric.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry, love. He won’t be back.’

  ‘But all his stuff’s here,’ said Eric, nodding at Iggy’s half unpacked books, posters and clothes.

  ‘Yes Eric I know, it’s both our stuff. I’m not unpacking, I’m packing. I’ll be joining him.’

  ‘You’re going to live in Paris?’

  ‘Not Paris, London.’

  ‘But, but why?’

  ‘Iggy wrote to me and said that he wouldn’t be coming home. He also said he’d written a couple of letters to you. I thought it would have been hard for him to save for a trip like that, what with him only working part time in the library and the video store. He only bought himself a one-way ticket.’

  ‘But who’s he staying with?’

  ‘My friends in London for the time being until I get over there and get us our own place.

  ‘See Eric, I used to be a writer just like Iggy wants to be. I lived in London and I was quite successful. Of course my name wasn’t Rainbow-Fish Suede then, it was something much more amusing.’

  ‘Wha…?’ It was hard to believe.

  ‘Gwendamere Ramsbottom. Anyway, after I met my boyfriend, Ignatius Hollingsworth Junior, we decided to change our names. We then set off travelling around the world and got married. Unfortunately he was killed in a parachuting accident just after Iggy was born and I haven’t written a word since. I think Iggy felt that if he went to Paris, Moscow and London it might inspire me and get me writing again. I don’t know if it will but he’s not coming back and I’m sick of disappointing him. So the only way of finding out is by going back to London.’

  ‘But what about the house? Have you sold it?’

  ‘It’s not ours, it never was, we were renting. I only expected to stay for a couple of months until Iggy was born, but it ended up being eighteen years. I guess I’ve been hiding.

  ‘All I know now, Eric, is that I’ve got to get my life in order or I’ll lose the only thing that matters to me.’

  ‘Iggy?’

  ‘Iggy.’

  ‘Your wardrobe needs an overhaul for a start,’ said Eric, pointing at her crimplene flares and quoting directly from his father.

  ‘A lot of me needs an overhaul,’ said Mrs Suede laughing, ‘I’m just glad I’ve got a second chance. You know Iggy could have stayed here, got into uni and done really well for himself. But he believes in me enough to sacrifice all of it. I owe it to him to start living again.’

  After a hug and kiss Eric left the Suedes’ house for the last time. He’d spent so many happy times in that little fibro box, and now some other family would move in and stamp their personality on it. He also realised that unless they had a young boy in the family he would no longer be welcome in it, despite playing a major part in its history.

  As Eric dragged himself home he wondered why all this was happening to him. He looked at the clouds. He could not remember seeing the sun once these summer holidays.

  Eric tried to think about all the good times he’d spent with Ian and Iggy. There was that time he and Ian were hot on the trail of some Argentine ants which they thought were valuable. They had followed one fr
om just near Ian’s house to the creek and felt they were getting pretty close to the nest. Unfortunately just before they hit pay-dirt they stumbled on the two toughest guys in school and, more crucially, their cigarette stash.

  Eric had wanted to bolt because he was much faster than either Billy Nelson or Greg Fern, but he was well aware that Ian wasn’t.

  Ian tried to stand up to their bullying, and as Eric remembered later, had in fact thrown the first punch. But neither of them was cut out for fighting and they’d taken quite a beating. It finished with them both having their faces rubbed in some dog dirt.

  Eric remembered they had half dragged their sorry selves home when Iggy had come skate-boarding up to them, having just got back from Parramatta Library.

  ‘What’s happened to you two? It looks like you’ve been dragged backwards through dog shit.’

  ‘We have.’ Ian wiped the blood from his nose. ‘There’s a couple of thugs from school down the creek and we caught them smoking.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Billy Nelson and Greg Fern. Why?’ asked Eric.

  ‘Just testing the water. I know them, they’ve both got older brothers in high school, but I can handle them. C’mon, Nelson and Fern are dead meat.’

  Iggy’s revenge wasn’t violent, nor was it even painful for the two thugs. It was better than that.

  Nelson and Fern had seen what they were up against and they knew just how to play it. They were well aware of the laws of the jungle, having set most of them in Toongabbie Primary. They knew Iggy Suede was a dangerous animal and they did everything he commanded.

  They kissed the soles of Ian and Eric’s shoes, scooped mud into their half-full cigarette packets and waded through the creek wearing nothing but their underpants. And after Iggy had threatened to half kill them, assured him that that was the end of it and they wouldn’t even look sideways at Eric and Ian in the playground.

  ‘Eric. Watch out for the garden gnome,’ said Mr Underwood and Eric was immediately jerked out of his stupor after walking home from the Suedes’ house on autopilot. ‘I’m moving them around to try and stop the cats bogging in the flower beds.’