Twenty-two photographs, twenty-two timestamps, twenty-two mornings.
I’d spent the previous evening reading the local authority’s guidance on parking obstruction. Not skimming it. Reading it, twice, the way I read anything where I want to be completely certain I understand what I’m doing before I do it. I had found the enforcement line number, the criteria for what qualified as an obstruction of residential driveway access, the process for contacting the approved contractor that the council directed complaints to when the criteria were met.
I made a cup of tea.
I looked at Denise’s car, clearly visible through the kitchen window in the flat grey light of early morning.
Then I picked up my phone and called the parking enforcement line.
The thing about living in a semi-detached house on a residential street in a mid-sized English town is that most of the drama that happens there happens in increments so small that you barely notice each one as it occurs. It’s only when you look back at the aggregate that you understand how much ground you’ve lost.
Ezoic
I had moved onto Cleaver Road with Mark and our boys three years before this story takes place. Ben was five then, Oliver was three, and the neighborhood was the kind of neighborhood we had wanted since before we had children to want it for: quiet streets, a school close enough to walk to, neighbors who mostly kept to themselves in a friendly rather than hostile way, the kind of place where people wave when they’re reversing out of driveways.
Denise and her husband Paul had lived in the house directly opposite for eleven years. I knew this because Denise told me, in our first conversation over the garden wall, with the tone of someone establishing seniority. She had the authority of the long-term resident, the person whose memory of the street predates yours and who therefore has a kind of informal jurisdiction over how things are done.
