Helen rubbed fretfully at her bleary eyes.  She took a deep breath and rang the doorbell.  It took an age for anyone to answer, she had to ring three times before the neighbours’ younger son, Matt, pulled the door open.  He was laughing, turned slightly away, to speak to someone behind him, and he still had a big grin on his face as he focussed in on Helen, on his doorstep, Paul’s duffle coat pulled round her pyjamas.

For a half beat Helen thought about apologising, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

“Any chance you could turn the music down now?” She shouted, wanting to be sure he could hear over the incessant thrum of Slade’s So here it is…

The grin slipped away. The shoulders hunched.  It’s alright, Helen thought, he knows me, he won’t turn nasty, but she wasn’t quite sure.  She waited.

“Sure”, he said, glancing at his watch, “it is nearly midnight, isn’t it.”

“Right.”  Helen turned to go, obviously there wasn’t going to be an actual apology.  The door shut behind her with no appreciable lessening of racket.

She slopped in her slippers down her neighbour’s tiled path, out onto the pavement, and up her own flagged steps.  She put her hand into Paul’s deep pocket and for a moment there was no key. Panic leapt, then stilled. Of course the key was there.  She let herself in and went to the kitchen for a glass of water and some painkillers.  She dropped the duffel coat over the banisters and headed back up to bed.  The music next door stopped abruptly.  She sighed happily as she pulled the duvet over her, and then frowned again as the babel of voices and laughter rose, someone was shouting, persistently and insistently, although she couldn’t make out what exactly.  She realised sluggishly that they were out in the garden. More than just the knot of smokers on the patio, the entire group of partyers were out trampling Mrs Henry’s herb parterre and pocking her lawn with stilettos.  There was an expansive whoosh, and then a fizzing and a popping and then finally an ear shaking crash.

© Cherry Potts 2011 read at Liars’ league Leeds 2011