I was convinced the man next door was a war criminal

and his wife a guard from a camp I’d seen in a film

where spotlights and barbed wire were everywhere.

Both had exchanged their uniforms for clothes you wear

when you want to disappear into suburbia: the man

favoured white shirts and trousers held up with braces

and a wide brim hat to hide the scar like a thin seam

below his left eye, although it may have been shadow

from a wayward line of straw. His wife was a water

colour ghost in a grey dress, her hair pinned up,

and she scuffed her shoes on the path and stairs.

Some things you remember, some you invent to turn

need into belief. I spoke to the man only once

after he’d returned the tennis balls I‘d lost. On each

he had written Do not molest your neighbours

in red marker. I almost asked How many did you kill?

The first time I spoke to his wife was when we stepped

around each other in a supermarket aisle. I said hello,

and whatever she said was lost in a bubble of saliva.

One day I watched her lift and carry a large bird

that had flown into her kitchen window. She held it

until it came to and flew away. How many did you kill?

I did not say. I’d been looking at pictures in a book

about war: soldiers shooting men in a pit under smoke

like a strip of white sheet. In another, beside a bell

that had fallen from a church, a line of dead people.

My uncle had been a field gunner in Papua New Guinea.

When I told him about the neighbours, he said Be careful.

The enemy is everywhere. I began to watch them at night

through a gap in their living room curtain. They seemed

normal sitting there, their faces pale in television light.

I pulled the draw string to bring Europe down

on a wall map. I read the names of countries, rivers

and towns out loud. I looked at myself in the mirror.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

Neighbours

Odesa, City of Odysseus