THE NEW NEIGHBOURS

The new neighbours moved in next door about a month before your family moved out.

The two things weren’t connected. Your old house had been sold weeks before because a new consultant role for your mum meant moving a hundred miles away, but nonetheless your disappointment at leaving the friends you had was tempered by relief you wouldn’t live next door to your new neighbours.
They weren’t difficult, weren’t aggressive or noisy. They just unsettled you, and from some conversations which your parents didn’t know you’d overheard they unsettled your parents too.
The parents walked in a stiff and slow way, as if they were both recovering from an accident. The father was very tall and very thin, and would often stand up an upstairs window, not looking at you or your house or even the street, just up at the sky.
The children were a couple of years younger than you, about seven or eight, and you thought they were twins although they weren’t identical, one had fair hair and one dark. They’d often come out into the front garden, but they didn’t play in any way that you recognised. The fair-haired boy just stood very still, staring at nothing in particular, for hours. The dark-haired boy walked slowly round his brother in a circle, not stopping, just round and round. Spying on them from your landing window, scared in case the fair-haired boy stared at you, you noticed that while his brother walked he did something with his fingers. It wasn’t a steady count, but he flicked them in and out repeatedly in what you thought was some kind of pattern.
After the move and the excitement and terrors of a new school you started to forget about them, and would only remember occasionally to tell the story in drunken after-hours conversations at university. When you graduated you moved further north from where your parents lived, now retired, and you found yourself in a career without ever meaning to.
In your early thirties, you travelled to a conference in the town where you grew up, and thought it would be interesting for your mum and dad to see what the old street looked like now. You had a couple of hours before your train back, so you caught a bus, and as you walked along the familiar crept up on you. Everything seemed smaller than it did in your memory. The vast space of a play park you used to walk to was a pokey little scrubland, and it was much closer to your street than you remembered.

Then you turned a corner and there was your house, much the same as you remembered it, but with a rowan tree laden with berries in the front garden, and solar panels on the roof.
And next door, a tall shape stood at an upstairs window while in the garden, a fair-haired boy of about seven or eight stood very still, staring at nothing in particular while a dark-haired boy walked slowly round him in a circle, flicking his fingers in and out repeatedly in some kind of pattern. You didn’t take any more photos, and this time you found it much harder to forget the new neighbours.