Jessica Harper Uncanceled

“He can’t still be there,” I said. “My knees are killing me.”

I was on the living room floor. It had taken me years to convince my husband that we should switch carpet for hardwood flooring and now I was regretting it. I had been down there for at least ten minutes.

Brandon crawled past me, over the Moroccan rug, towards the windows facing the street.

“Oh, you get to use the rug,” I bitched.

“A good Marine utilises all the natural features of his environment.”

“Oh Brandon, please. You haven’t been in the Marines since 2012 and I don’t believe you ever crawled over any rugs in Iraq.”

“Shhh. He might hear us. A good enemy is a listening enemy.”

“Roger is not our enemy, Bran. He’s just… a bit verbose.”

Roger was our sixtysomething neighbor who seemed to spend half his life standing outside his house. This meant that you couldn’t so much as take the trash out without having to listen to one of his three-part anecdotes, that kept going further and further back in time so that he could give you the full background to whatever tedious story he was telling.

This week alone I had heard about the invention of double-entry book-keeping, flaws in the 1999 Mustang Cobra and the patchy track record of Japan’s foreign minister.

And Brandon and I were fed up with it, frankly.

I ask you, dear reader, is it fair that a woman can’t retrieve a rogue Snickers wrapper from her front lawn without being lectured on Archimedes’ invention of the compound pulley system?

No, Jessica, it is not, you are thinking.

And now, just as we were about to head to the supermarket, here we were again, avoiding sentinel, all-seeing Roger. Who was out there as usual, looking up and down the street.

“Why does he stand there?” I said.

“I don’t know. I used to think he was waiting for his daughter so she could pick him up or he could advise her on where to park but…”

“But I’ve never seen that happen,” I said. “Maybe he’s just trying to pick off some innocent passer-by, luring them into a conversation about the major diseases affecting wheat.”

“That’s actually a big problem,” said Bran.

“Oh, don’t you start. Anyway, remind me why we’re lying on the floor again?”

I knew Brandon’s answer would involve:

a) his time in the army;

b) the sayings of Sun Tzu, whom all men love to quote so it sounds like they are constantly preparing for battle.

“Because,” said Brandon, as I braced myself, “A low enemy is an invisible enemy. Not my words, but Sun Tzu’s.”

“And they say he was a strategic genius? Even I knew that a low enemy is an invisible enemy. What else did he say: try to avoid bullets? Don’t eat less than an hour before you swim?”

“It’s good advice, Jess. It’s the first thing they taught us at Boot Camp.”

“What, before they told you where the toilets were? Talk about skewed priorities.”

“Take this seriously. As Sun Tzu said, there are five kinds of spy-.”

“Please don’t list them all,” I said. “Aldi shuts in an hour. And I still don’t understand why we’re down here.”

“Because if he knows we’re in the house, he will wait out there forever in the hope we will come out and BAM, he can run through the new recycling schedule with us.”

This was a reference to my telling Roger I had lost the email about said schedule. Now he knocked on the door at least once a day to tell me if anything needed putting out in the street for collection. I always try to pretend to be busy doing something but there are only so many times you can pretend to be frying eggs, especially when there is no sound or smell of eggs being fried.

“Wait, I think he’s gone in,” said Brandon, who had eyes on the asset, as they say on Netflix.

“Shall we make a run for it?”

“Yep. As Sun Tzu said-.”

“Sun Tzu never had to get to Aldi before it shut,” I said. “Get a move on.”

We stood up, grabbed our shopping bags and threw open the door.

Roger was still there. He’d been hiding behind a bush. Sun Tzu would have been sniggering into his wonton soup at us falling for such a lame move.

He cut us down like we were daisies under a combine.

“If your neighbor’s weapon is conversation in daylight, go to Aldi by moonlight.” — Sun Tzu