An animal of the highest order.

Byline: Kevin Martin, Special to Gulf News

They say you can tell a lot about your neighbours from the clothes on their wash line. I am thinking this as I drape a load of washing on the hoist behind the house.

My neighbour, G.S., isn't going to learn much that's damning, I'm afraid. There are no nappies on the line, so the wife hasn't suddenly given birth to son number two, after a 20 year gap. Especially not after waiting that long and - almost - seeing son number one off our hands.

He - son number one - has been voicing a rather oracular prediction: "One day soon, I'll be gone". He's been doing this for too long for me to take it seriously. My wife, though, gets a catch in her throat and a tear in her eye every time he makes such a pronouncement.

The wife, I have to warn readers, is pretty champion at both these feats. She wept copiously when the killer in Dirty Harry got killed, which I constantly cite as an example of stretching sympathy too far.

No, my wash line today isn't going to reveal anything startling to G.S., whose neighbourly face I have on one occasion glimpsed at the window before he ducked out of sight. So I suspect that G.S. keeps an eye on my clothes line, or, to be fair, let's say my clothes line is in his line of sight when he looks out of his upstairs window and puts on a show of being a nature watcher.

To be equally fair, when I'm in the upper part of my house I get the same view of G.S.'s back yard, where his clothes line is situated. I can state with confidence that, in the three years I have resided here, I have never seen clothes flapping in the wind on G.S.'s line. I don't know if he wears singlets, or uses bed sheets, or exercises indoors in a track suit, or if his towel is Turkish or terylene, lemon or green. Towels, they say, are the most 'aired' items in every household. Not G.S.'s. I am certain he bathes, of course, for I have seen him drive to work smartly groomed, clean-shaven and hair still clinging damply to forehead. But I haven't seen an item of clothing hung out to dry.

There's a reason, I think, for this. G.S.'s clothes hoist is situated in the middle of his rather large backyard which, amazingly, bears a miniature resemblance to the savannah. The grass has been allowed to grow to heights I didn't believe grass had the potential to attain. As a neighbour I have now become mildly anxiety prone. For I envisage some of Australia's deadliest snakes - the taipan, for instance - lying coiled in wait for me, attracted to my unclad ankles. I voice this anxiety over dinner one night.

Amazingly, two days later, it is another early morning and this time it's me standing at my window doing some nature gazing. Suddenly, a furtive movement in G.S.'s yard fills me with alarm. I try to focus in the breaking light and espy what appears to be a large animal scampering through the grass. I make a note to talk to G.S. about this. I leave for work.

At dinner number one son says, "Dad, take a look at G.S.'s backyard!" I look. It's shaven clean, like a court ready for Wimbledon. "Thank me," says the son. In answer to my querying eyebrows he says, "I told him about the taipan on his doorstep!" "You didn't!" I say, adding, "You little liar!"

Well, his friend Michael just so happened to have a dead snake handy. And, with one lie, son number one helped free me of my reptilian anxiety.

G.S. is not a very big man. In fact, he's seriously undersized. And it is there in the darkness that I realise that what I'd espied scampering through the grass may just have been an animal of the highest order.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.

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