As the newcomer, I didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot with my neighbours. For a while I tried hard, no doubt too hard, to get their attention. But they gave no response. Initially I put this down to possible visual impairment, until one day I saw them waving back at someone in a boat out in the middle of the lake. Their failure to greet me was clearly deliberate. Still, I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. After all I had chosen this area and this house for peace and quiet and solitude. I had found all of this here and it did me good. But it was awful too because I wasn’t used to it. And these people ended up tormenting me, even though they also only wanted to be left alone.

I drew closer to them because they rejected me. Rejection, after all, is still a kind of contact. To show them that I posed no threat, that I wasn’t interested in meeting them, I drew my curtains whenever the man glanced towards my house. I even closed the shutters if I thought they might be watching me from their jetty. And yet, all the while, I knew that what I took for intrusiveness was really pure indifference.

This was their way of showing me that for them I didn’t exist and that, in truth, I was the interfering one, if there was, in fact, any interference to speak of. This indifference was fine with me. But then again it wasn’t, because I didn’t understand what I could have done to deserve such a slight. When one day a storm battered our shoreline and the two of them remained motionless in their deckchairs, without even responding to my offer of help, I finally realized that becoming good neighbours was out of the question.

Not even a downpour could drag these two from their routine, which they pursued with determination as if they were fulfilling a duty.

Sometimes the man bolted out of his chair, startled, and hurried down the steps that led into the water amongst the reeds. He leant with both arms on the railing, bracing himself against some unknown danger. He stopped dead and stood there for hours on end. Once in a while, something moved in the reeds, circling and creating a whirlpool in the water. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, he turned and headed back to his chair, where he made himself comfortable and lay still until night fell.