Two Peas in a Pod

David and Gina were two peas in a pod.
Born into middle-classed families, both were the older child of two and both bullied their sibling incessantly. With only a year between them and their sibling, neither had a particular role, feeling undermined from an early age.
Both were the uglier child of the two and made damn sure that they were the cleverer by stealing parental time. Their fathers were both scientists of sorts, their mothers sexless worriers with a penchant for self-pity and negligence.
David proposed to Gina immediately after confessing that he didn’t want children, ever. Being similarly inclined, this was like music to Gina’s ears. She too detested the very thought of children.
After they married, the pair bought a little semi on the skirts of a half-decent town and set about making it their own. David worked for a law firm as a divorce settlement advisor and Gina had her own business as a marriage counsellor.
Their new neighbours seemed nice enough, but then they decided to have kids. The moment David and Gina heard the first scream of the cute little baby from next door, they put the house up for sale and managed to find a buyer without problem.
Wary that children could be lurking in houses close to their next home, they employed a specialist estate agent to find them a house in an area where children were not wanted.
The estate agent quickly found them a lovely, large Victorian semi in a leafy conservation area and showed the beady-eyed pair an overview of all residents. There were no children at all, although the average age of occupants was seventy-two.
‘Perfect,’ the pair said together, offering the full asking-price to close the deal in haste.
Their offer was accepted by the previous owner’s executors, and David and Gina weren’t fussed when they learnt that the old lady had died of pneumonia in the downstairs loo.
After a year, they became aware that the next door neighbour, a nice old boy, was depositing cat litter into white bin-bags and then placing them, together with other bags, mostly from supermarkets, into his wheelie-bin, which was housed in a covered area shared by David and Gina.
Not only did the cat litter smell, but, on further inspection, thye found that the old boy had not tied his bags up properly.
‘Look at the state of it,’ David said to Gina as they stared into the old boy’s wheelie-bin one evening.
‘It’s disgusting,’ whispered Gina. ‘And the smell.’
‘I know,’ said David. ‘We’ll have to have a word.’
Days later, the pair decided to broach the subject but the old boy just laughed at them, honestly thinking they were fooling about.
When the pair’s faces failed to brighten, the old boy shook his head and sighed.
‘It’s a bin,’ he said. ‘What do you expect me to do? Clean it?’
Gina looked up at him. ‘Well, it would certainly help the situation, don’t you think?’
The old boy couldn’t believe she was being serious. ‘I’m not cleaning the inside of a bloody bin!’ he said in uproar. ‘You’ll be telling me to clean the inside of my hoover next!’
But Gina didn’t take kindly to this, especially in view of the fact that she cleaned the inside of her Henry every Sunday morning without fail.
‘The least you could do is stop putting dirty cat litter in it!’ she barked.
‘What do you expect me to do with it, then? Feed it to the birds? Or maybe I should bury it!’ The old boy was outraged.
‘Couldn’t you train the thing to do its business in the garden?’ asked David, without realising how stupid his suggestion was.
But the old boy had heard enough. ‘Just fuck off and don’t speak to me ever again,’ he said, and walked away, slamming the bin’s top down.
As he did so, Gina held her nose to stem the stench as it wafted in her direction and David reeled away, thinking that the old boy might go for him.
Over the next few weeks, David was poked and teased by Gina to ‘do something about it’ and her prized Henry had to be taken away for repairs after some soapy water got stuck in the motor.
Early one morning, David decided to clean the old boy’s wheelie-bin out but the old boy saw him at it and called the police, who arrived just as the old boy was seen pushing David away from the bin. He had to be restrained when they caught him throwing David’s family-sized Spontex sponge (bought specifically for the one-off purpose of cleansing the bin) at Gina, who acted as if it was a brick, falling theatrically onto the lawn.
After much kerfuffle, the old boy was cautioned for anti-social behaviour and ordered to clean his bin out on a quarterly basis as an act of neighbourly respect.
But the old boy, a liberal man of great taste and honour, had other ideas, and decided to make David and Gina’s lives a living hell from that moment on, playing loud classical music at the weekends, banging about in his garden with the rusty old metal bins he used for his compost, parking haphazardly, revving up the Polo like a boy-racer, discarding empty crisp packets and beer cans onto his lawn, making fires with damp leaves on top when the wind was blowing their way, and, sin of all sins, ‘forgetting’ to close the top of his wheelie-bin on occasion. He’d even taken to walking down to the phone box by the cricket green (which was hardly ever used) and calling his own number in the early hours with the telephone next to an opened window.
After two seasons of constant menace, David and Gina put the house on the market. They could take no more.
The call was made to the specialist estate agent and, this time, their request was for a large detached house with plenty of land, as far from anyone as possible. Both their parents had died by this time, leaving enough money to have done with neighbours of any sort.
The estate agent came back to the pair with a gorgeous Georgian property set in sixteen acres.
When the pair viewed the property, they immediately fell in love with it.
The grounds were gloriously landscaped as if nature itself had been the designer, and the house was exactly as they had hoped, albeit in need of renovation.
The breathtaking views across the Surrey Hills stopped the pair in their tracks as they inhaled the sweet aroma of rural life. At last, they could be alone.
The estate agent was quick to point out that the house had been on the market for quite some time before being taken off again, and when he told them the price, David and Gina had to pinch each other to disguise their gleeful surprise.
‘There’s one tiny snag,’ said the agent, taking the pair over to a bedroom window that gave onto the wondrous vista of tree-filled hills that seemed to go on forever with not one house in sight. ‘If you look over here, by the foot of the furthermost hill, an application for a small agricultural recycling unit was made about two years ago.’
David almost laughed. ‘That’s about five miles away,’ he said.
‘It’s actually six miles from here, and word has it that the application’s not being taken seriously by the council,’ reported the agent.
‘So what’s the problem?’ asked Gina.
‘Personally, I don’t think there is one,’ said the agent, scratching his nose. ‘The house only came back onto the market two days ago and the vendors have instructed me to look after the sale on an exclusive basis, so it really is up to you. It just so happens that you called at precisely the right time for a property fitting this description. Amazing, really.’
The pair acted nonchalantly, scurrying off to wander around the place for a while longer, falling deeper and deeper in love while the agent took a few calls on his phone.
David and Gina had never taken a risk in their lives, but now, with the mouth-watering prospect of becoming local gentry at a knockdown price, they seemed bent on throwing caution to the wind.
‘Let’s just buy it, now, before anyone else gets a sniff of it,’ said Gina in a sly, insistent whisper.
‘You’re right, you know,’ said an excited David. ‘Even if they do build a recycling unit down there, it’ll be as big as a pinprick on the horizon. We’ll hardly even notice it.’
They couldn’t help but titter together at the sheer pleasure of being privy to this cut-rate opulence.
‘We’ll buy it,’ said David to the agent.
‘Great,’ he replied as if it was just another deal, ‘I’ll get the papers together. If you could come by my office tomorrow, we can pretty much tie up the whole thing then.’
‘Excellent,’ said David.
‘The pleasure’s all mine. See you at, say, ten o’clock?’
‘That should be fine.’
As hoped, David and Gina signed the paperwork the next morning and sold their little Victorian semi within weeks. They didn’t care that the old boy’s grandson and his family were buying. They’d offered the asking price, after all.
It did seem strange that the surname of the agent, the old boy and the buyer of their house was Thompson, but they put it down to coincidence, being a rather common name.
When they moved in to the huge Georgian house on the hilltop, David and Gina were in heaven.
Renovation work commenced immediately and they invested heavily to maximise the market value of the property at a time when, if only they’d seen it coming, property prices were actually beginning to falter in a decidedly deathly fashion for the first time in thirty years.
When news came of the recycling unit’s application being accepted, much to the dismay of the people of Sussex, the neighbouring county in which it lay, and once renovation at the house had been completed, the impact took a while to sink in for the pair.
The front-page newspaper article read; ‘Thompson’s ambitious plans for a recycling unit, to dispose of agricultural waste, using the latest ethical technology, seemed dead in the water when its application was first refused. But, after careful consideration, Sussex Council decided that the plan should go ahead when all considerations were taken into account. The main criteria for the revised planning application rested with the favourable wind factor of the site, which had been viewed as unimportant prior to the findings of considerable analysis made available by Thompson. With the prevailing wind heading into the Surrey Hills, and with only one household for some thirteen miles in its path, the odour of the recycling unit would be so limited to the public as to justify the extended recycling of residents’ waste as well as agricultural waste, making this site one of the biggest in the country…the site will generate three hundred new jobs for the community.’
David and Gina’s mouths dropped to the floor.
‘What shall do about it?’ asked Gina.
‘What the hell can we do about it? We were told, weren’t we? And it’s in the paperwork,’ replied a horrified David. ‘Oh God, can you imagine the smell?’
‘This is the only house in its path.’
Meanwhile, the old boy read the article in the company of his son (the estate agent), and his grandson, who’d just redecorated David and Gina’s house next door with the help of his great grandchildren.
‘They’re where they belong now,’ said the old boy, putting down the paper to play with his great grandchildren on the lawn.
David and Gina’s house plummeted in value so much that they were forced to liquidate all their assets and move out.
They now live in a one-bedroom flat on a very rough estate with direct access to the communal bins.