Neighbours… everybody needs good neighbours

I had just driven the car into the garage at home.

As I alighted I became aware of the commotion. What I heard were these heartfelt sobs – and they were coming from the direction of our kitchen. They didn’t sound like the noise my wife makes when she’s watching yet another rerun of Bambi on TV, so, I reasoned, it must be some other woman sobbing her heart out over the formica-topped units.

And indeed it was. With my wife standing ready with a box of Mansize Kleenex, there perched our neighbour Christine, George’s long-suffering spouse, weeping uncontrollably while occasionally dabbing at her swollen and reddened eyes. What the hell was going on? I was not immediately to find out, because as I entered the kitchen I was greeted by my wife with her silent “Don’t ask” glower in my direction. So I did what any other sympathetic man would do, I beat a hasty retreat outside to the potting shed and pretended to do stuff out there for a further 20 minutes or so. That is until Christine decided to turn off the fountain and return home next door.

It was only then that I got the explanation. Correction: I got Christine’s side of the story via my wife. Apparently George, her health-obsessed husband has become very difficult to live with. During the height of the Covid pandemic he practically sealed his entire family inside their home. And, to add to the problem, he was anti vac. That is until he, inevitably, caught the virus himself. Happily it was a fairly mild dose, but it didn’t lead to any easing up in his fixation. Christine told my wife that on the occasion that he invited us into their home for drinks… where we sat at one end of the room, while she and George sat way down the other end… after we left George got schmuttered -up in a plastic boiler suit and incinerated anything and everything my wife and I might have come into contact with.

He was apparently also manically obsessive about isolating his household from contact with a recent Asian flu scare. Although, as far as I know not a single person in the Maltese Islands ever contracted the disease. So my wife asked her the obvious question. Was she then thinking of leaving George. Her reply was forthright and to the point: “Not a chance. Since the house is in my name it’s he that would have to go… and I can’t see him doing that somehow.”

A day or so later I bumped into George over our garden fence and got his side of the story. Needless to report it was diametrically opposite to Christine’s. He went straight for the jugular with: “I heard the bitch had been round at your place whining to your wife. My mother was right, I never should have married her. She warned me, her family were no better than rich hamalli.”

I refrained from offering an opinion and George soon marched off in a huff.

Two days ago, in the late afternoon, my wife met Christine again. She had just parked the car after what my wife assumed was a trip to the hairdresser’s. Coiffed and smiling, Christine was transformed from the tear-stained wreck of a few days ago. And, when my wife remarked on her svelte appearance, she replied: “Yes, George is taking me out for dinner tonight, how sweet of him eh.”

As they say in the north of England: “There’s nowt so queer as folk.”