He said: I only know who he is because I asked him twice and he wouldn’t tell me.
I said: the one at the end?
And he said yes, and put the box down, and said: he’s not stolen anything in seventy-four years, love.
Ozias Crane lives in the last house on that street.
He is seventy-four. He shouts at children when a ball goes into his yard, and he has done for as long as I have lived here, and everybody on that road tells their kids to leave him alone.
I have said good morning to that man perhaps eleven times in seven years and got a nod for about four of them.
Nobody on that street has been inside his house in thirty years.
I want to put down what I actually knew about that man on the morning of the lunchboxes, because it is embarrassing and it is the point.
I knew he shouted about the ball. I knew his gutter had been broken since at least 2021. I knew he did his shopping on Tuesdays because I had seen him at the same place twice.
And I knew — because two separate people had told me in my first year on that street, in the tone people use — that he was not right and that you did not send the children down there.
Neither of those people had ever spoken to him either. I checked, later, with both of them.
Seven years. A man four doors down, on his porch, most warm evenings, in full view, and the entire body of information the street held about him was a rumour with no source and a broken gutter.
PART 3
I went down there at about nine.
I had rehearsed something in my head that was mostly an apology, and I had a blanket-wrapped lunchbox in my arms, and I knocked on that door expecting nothing at all.
He opened it straight away, which meant he had been in the front room.
I said I thought this was his.
And Ozias Crane looked at the box and then at me and said: no. It’s the boy’s.
Then he stood in that doorway for about four seconds and said: you’d better come in.
His house is very clean and it smells of toast. There are two chairs and one of them has never been sat in and I did not ask.
