Neighbours Read Free Page A

Scratchrot twitched her bones.
    â€˜Oh well, better get on,’ said Nerlin.
    After the cobwebs, Mordonna went back through every room checking the dust was properly organised – not too thick on the table tops and nicely gathered into hairy piles in the corners. By the time she’d done that, the kitchen frogs had clambered over the dirty dishes and licked them clean; the crusty toad had nibbled all the hard burnt bits off the pans and the cutlery snake had slithered his tongue betweenevery prong of every fork. All Mordonna had to do was put everything back in the cupboards.
    The noise from next door always faded a bit after lunch. That was when Mr Dent, after a hard morning shouting and swearing and a thick greasy lunch, fell asleep and Mrs Dent settled down to watch an American reality show full of people that made even her look good.
    Nerlin and Mordonna took advantage of the temporary peace by having an afternoon sleep, doing a bit of gardening and trimming Grandma’s toenails where they grew out of her grave by the clothesline. Then it was teatime, followed by another short snooze before the kids came home from school.
    If it hadn’t been for the wretched Dents next door, life would have been perfect.

When the Floods moved into number 13 Acacia Avenue, there had been two nice old couples in the houses on either side. Life had been peaceful. Their neighbours had brought them cake, and in return the Floods had given them crispy fried cockroaches. One of the advantages of having old people for neighbours is that they often can’t see very well, so when the Flood children gave them bowls of crispy fried cockroaches – which are delicious, by the way – they thought they were bits of crispy bacon.
    The disadvantage of having old people for neighbours is that they die a lot. Even after Winchflat, who was the scientific brains of the Flood family, had used his Massive-Electric-Shock-Dead-Person-iReviver 9 on the old couple at number 11, they only came back to life for a few weeks.
    That was when the Dents moved in and shattered the calm of the whole street.
    They were the neighbours from hell. Not real hell where some of the Floods’ best friends lived, but hell-on-Earth – which isn’t actually a real place, more a state of mind. If you think of the worst person you’ve ever met or seen on TV, the Dents were much worse than that.
    The Dents fought each other and swore a lot in very loud voices. They filled their front yard with rusty old cars and broken machines and their back yard with thousands of empty bottles and other garbage, which often ended up in the Floods’ garden. In one of the old cars out the front, they kept a ferocious dog called Rambo that tried to bite everyone.
    All their clothes were made of shiny nylon and Mr Dent had a terrible moustache and a big gold chain. Mrs Dent had lumpy legs you could seeway too much of and her hair looked like cushion stuffing that had been soaking in a bucket of bleach. Mr Dent’s job was making sure he never had a job – which there wasn’t much chance of anyway. When he was eighteen he had been sent to work cleaning out the pipes at the sewerage works, but they sacked him after two days because the pipes were more disgusting after he’d been inside them than they had been before. That had taken a lot of sneaky skill on his part, but to make extra sure he was never given a job again, he slipped in the sludge and hurt his back just enough to get a pension.

    Mrs Dent’s job was avoiding Mr Dent and anything that kept her away from the TV.
    They had two vile children: Tracylene, who had way too many boyfriends, way too much eye-liner and way too few brain cells, and Dickie, who was ten, but should never have been allowed to become one, never mind two, three, four, etc. Dickie’s hobby was breaking into other people’s houses, peeing on their furniture and putting Barbie dolls in their