The Fourth Bear

8. Noisy Neighbors

Most noise-abatement orders served: Heavy-metal-loving Mr. and Mrs. Scroggins and their seventeen hyperactively argumentative children have often been referred to as “the noisiest group of sentient beings yet discovered by man” and were moved to a special pro-noise council estate on the Heathrow flight path, until neighbors complained that they couldn’t hear the jetliners anymore. Their collective 179 noise-abatement orders pale into insignificance, however, when compared to Mr. and Mrs. Punch of Berkshire, who have notched up 326 orders in the past forty-five years and also hold the record for “loudest argument in a restaurant” and the “longest nonstop bicker,” which lasted for three hours and twenty-eight minutes at a sustained level of 43.2 decibels.

—The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records , 2004 edition

Jack was right: The evening editions of The Mole , The Toad and The Owl covered little else but the Gingerbreadman’s dramatic escape, along with lurid accounts of what he had got up to the last time he was free. The scaremongering that had begun on the radio was thus reinforced, and by nightfall panic buying had occasioned the systematic emptying of every food store and gas station in town, causing several shopkeepers to comment in private that they wished a dangerous homicidal maniac would escape every week.

Jack pulled up outside his house in the north of the town and locked the Allegro. His neighbor Mrs. Sittkomm was staring inquisitively over the fence as she pretended to take in the washing. But she wasn’t looking at Jack—she was looking beyond him to the house attached to Jack’s on the other side.

“There goes the neighborhood,” she muttered with barely concealed venom.

Jack followed her look to where a moving van was disgorging a procession of carefully taped cardboard boxes. “Ah!” said Jack. “Our new neighbors. Any idea who they are?”

Mrs. Sittkomm stared at him and then ran through the gamut of severe English disapproval. She started with a slow shake of the head, went on to raised eyebrows and a glare, then ended with an audible tut. She beckoned him closer and hissed under her breath, “Nurseries!”

“Which ones?” asked Jack, more through professional interest than anything else.

“You’ll see,” said Mrs. Sittkomm scornfully. “They’ve no right to be living with decent real people. They’ll bring house prices down, you see if they don’t.”

“Bears?” asked Jack curiously.

“Mercifully not,” replied Mrs. Sittkomm with a snort. “I had a bear as a lodger once; took six months to get the smell of porridge out of the spare room—and the honey in the carpet…”

She didn’t finish her sentence and just signaled that her contempt was total by rolling her eyes, shrugging and looking to heaven all at once, a curious maneuver that reminded Jack of a stage contortionist he had once seen.

Jack left Mrs. Sittkomm to her twisted moral dilemma, walked along the street to his new neighbors’ house and rang the doorbell.

A florid-looking woman in a flower-patterned dress answered the door. She had large, exaggerated features, unblinking eyes and a shiny, almost varnished complexion. She also had several bruises on her face and one arm in a sling.

“Mrs. Punch…?” said Jack, recognizing her immediately. She and her husband were well known to him and the NCD. Although their constant fights were no one’s business but their own, Jack was always concerned that they might throw the baby downstairs, something they had been threatening for over thirty years but fortunately had not yet done.

“Inspector!” screeched Judy, staring at Jack as though he were something you might tread on in the local park. “What the bloody hell do you want?”

“I’m not here on business, Mrs. Punch. I live next door—and keep your voice down. I’m only a yard away.”

“Nuts to that !” she screamed, so loudly that several pieces of saliva exploded from her mouth with such force that Jack had to step aside to let them pass. “Lazy bastard of a husband!” she shouted over her shoulder into the house. She waited with extreme patience for perhaps a half second for him to appear, and when he didn’t, she screamed “HUS-BAAAAND!” so loudly that Jack felt his ears pop, and one of the flowerpots in the garden shattered. Presently, and with the slow, almost reptilian movement of the worst kind of loafer, Mr. Punch appeared, dressed in his traditional red tunic and hat. His features were more exaggerated than his wife’s, his complexion more florid, shinier and uglier. He had a large hooked nose that curved down to almost touch his upwardly hooked chin, and his long, thin mouth was curled into a permanent leer. He wore a small pointed hat and had heaped upon his back a hump that was as pointed as his chin, nose or hat. He also had several bruises on his face, and one eye was puffy and black. He had an infant clasped to his chest in a typical crossed-arms Punch pose and was rocking the baby back and forth in an aggressive ma

“Bloody hell!” said Punch in an a

“I live next door,” said Jack, “and keep your voice down. If I ever hear you swear without asterisk substitution, I’ll arrest you for offensive and threatening language.”

“Like I g*ve a shit!” screamed Mr. Punch, tossing the sleeping baby into a pram and picking up a handy baseball bat.

Jack stood his ground. “Drop the bat or you’re under arrest.”

“It’s not for you!” screeched Mr. Punch. “It’s for my lazy scumbag of a wife. Where’s my di

Judy expertly ducked the baseball bat that quickly followed. Mr. Punch, thrown off balance by her quick maneuver, left his flank unguarded, an opportunity quickly grasped by Judy, who thumped him painfully in his already badly bruised eye. Mr. Punch gave a scream of pain, but Judy hadn’t finished. She grabbed his arm, twisted it around so hard he had to drop the bat, which fell with a clatter to the floor, then stamped on his knee from the side. He collapsed in a groaning heap near the still-sleeping baby.

“I’ll get your bloody di

“Are you okay?” asked Jack.

“Never better!” he gasped, his painted grin not for one second leaving his face. “Terrific lass, Judy. Very… spirited. ”

“Very,” said Jack, thinking that if Judy hadn’t ducked the baseball bat, she would be unconscious, or worse. Still, this was what they did. What they had always done. For over three hundred years, they had beaten the living blue blazes out of each other for the joyous edification of the masses. Of course, what with the changing attitudes to marriage, women and respect for the law, Punch couldn’t actually kill anyone anymore, but the violent slapstick remained. He had for centuries been a source of lighthearted entertainment, but his star was now low on the horizon, and he was seen more as a misogynistic social pariah than an icon of antiestablishment dissent—especially in any neighborhood in which he lived. It wasn’t his fault the world had moved on; today’s Punch was a fly in amber, a fossilized pop-culture relic from a bygone era.

“I’m too old for this endless fighting crap,” he said mournfully, wincing as he struggled to his feet. “Want to come in for a beer? We could chat about the good old days—do you still do your ‘Jack Sprat / eat no fat’ routine?”

Jack’s heart nearly bounced out of his chest. He’d hidden it for so long that he’d almost forgotten that he was himself a PDR—a Person of Dubious Reality.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said defensively. “I’m as real as the next man. Besides, that Jack Sprat is spelled with one t —I have two.”

“Oh, right, ” said Mr. Punch with a smirk. “In denial, are we? Got anything against PDRs?”

“No,” said Jack hurriedly. “Some of my best friends are PDRs. But I’m not and never have been—okay?”

“Okay, okay,” said Punch, winking. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

“There’s no secret. I don’t know what you mean, really I don’t,” responded Jack, complaining perhaps a little too forcefully. “Maybe another time for the beer—and keep the fighting down, yes?”

“I’ll try,” said Mr. Punch, with all the conviction of a weak-willed recovering alcoholic being offered a shot of Jack Daniel’s, “but you know how it is.”

“Look what I’ve just found,” said Judy, returning to the door as though nothing had happened and holding a broken di

“It’s the first piece of crockery I ever threw at you. See, I wrote the date on the back.”

They smiled and then hugged, gingerly trying to avoid the bruised areas on each other’s bodies.

“Fish pie, sweetheart?” said Judy.

“Sounds perfect, my cherub.”

And she picked up the baby and walked back inside the house.

“Well then,” said Jack, still firmly rattled by Punch’s comments over his PDRness. If Punch knew, how many others? His first wife knew because she’d been one, too—the “wife who could eat no lean”—but his second wife, Madeleine, had no idea, which on reflection was a big mistake. You can’t and shouldn’t keep those sorts of secrets from loved ones.

“So,” he added, swallowing a rising feeling of panic, “enjoy your… um… evening.”

“Th-thank you,” said Punch, gently closing the front door behind him. Jack walked back down the garden path to the sound of breaking crockery and a scream from Judy that transformed mid-wail into a lascivious giggle.

Jack took a deep breath to calm himself, opened his own kitchen door and walked in. “Honey,” he said, “I’m home!”

“Wotcha, Dad,” said Ben, his nose firmly wedged into a copy of Conspiracy Theorist magazine, something in which he had a particular interest. He had been overwhelmed when he learned that his dad had an alien working for him, but underwhelmed when he actually met him. Instead of talking about faster-than-light travel and wormholes, Ash had droned on at length about seventies Datsun motorcars, collectible plates and who he thought was the best Cartwright on Bonanza .