Rat – by Anjelica Rush
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
He is screaming about his mother, his father, the Jews, the Chinese, the Clintons, that family in Number 8, those builders in Number 9, the shitty fucking internet, our shitty fucking building, this shitty fucking country.
Most of it we disagree with, though when he yells that you can’t trust the government we shrug because there’s no arguing with that.
We aren’t trying to listen in, we’re not nosy, it’s just that we don’t have a choice on account of the courtyard in the centre of our building. It’s not a courtyard, really, so much as a patch of tiles surrounded by stacked apartments on all sides. Each apartment has a window overlooking this patch, so that sound bounces between us all like a 24-hour squash tournament.
And because they are at that age where they hate each other’s guts, the kids in Number 8 won’t stop crying and the only fix for them is hours and hours of children’s TV, playing through the tinny speakers of an iPad, where the characters talk at sky-high frequencies that make our teeth want to drop out of our gums. And the builders’ favourite tool is the one that whines, from 7 am to 4 pm, always whining. And someone on the top level throws up for stretches at a time – big, ambitious marathons of throwing up, the watery thunk-thunk-thunk of half-digested meals in a toilet bowl three times a day. And there’s the scrabbling in the walls that gets louder at night. And – it’s not noise but it bears mentioning – Mrs Next-Door’s vaping, tropical-scented and pungent as anything, which seeps into our clothes and our pillows and our hair like we’re renting out a rotting, one-bedroom papaya husk.
So, even though we don’t always agree with him — we sympathise.
And we do our best to respect his privacy, really we do, especially once we realise that the woman is with him tonight. He screams at her and she screams back, and every time she does this, he breaks something.
There goes the Wi-Fi modem, she screams, there goes the TV, there goes the bedroom door, the kitchen table, the toaster, the fuckin’ SodaStream.
And even when he bellows that he is going to kill her, that he is straight up going to murder this bitch if she doesn’t shut the fuck up, we Google ‘neighbour about to kill other neighbour what to do if’ in case there’s someone on the internet who says we can ignore it. Someone who says we should just stuff our earphones in our ears and turn up the volume until the decibels are kicking in our eardrums and we can’t hear the screams, let alone act on them.
But Google is firm about death threats: they are to be taken seriously.
So we forgo the earphones, go into the other room – the one that does not overlook the courtyard – and dial the number. We explain, laying it out in furtive whispers even though there’s no way he can hear us over his own shouting. We’re speaking so quietly that the operator has to ask, multiple times: can you repeat that, honey?
Then it’s back into the other room, to sit by the window and listen and wait.
He’s versatile, though, this guy, he’s got range. In the seconds between the knock on his door and the moment that he opens it, he is transformed.
To what do we owe the pleasure, officers, he says. We hear him welcoming them in, offering them a beer, assuring them that yes, officers, everything’s fine here, officers.
We hear them, two of them, moving through his apartment. The chink of a utility belt, the crunch of a boot on broken glass.
He’s as cool as a cucumber.
Oh no, sir, the bedroom door has not been ripped off its hinges. It’s these old buildings, see, the funniest thing, it just fell off in the middle of the night. And oh yes, sir, that table’s always been unsteady, sir, same with the TV – second-hand, you understand; serves me right for being a stingy bastard, hah, am I right, sir?
She’s struggling, though. We can tell by her breathing – shallow and halting – that she doesn’t like them poking their noses in. You can almost hear the screams from earlier, all pent up inside her, fighting to get out.
Who the fuck told them that he was hurting her? She wants to know. Who the fuck gave them that idea?
Was it Number 8? he asks smoothly. Just out of curiosity? Was it the family in Number 8?
And she says yes, I bet it was those cunts in Number 8.
And we could have yelled, no, it was us, the cunts in Number 5! But we aren’t about to give ourselves up.
One of the officers, stern now, tells them that the call was anonymous.
He jumps in: of course, yes, of course it was anonymous and of course he can respect that.
He makes a joke we don’t quite catch and an officer chuckles.
A spot of banter follows, a back-and-forth rumbling between the host and his visitors; she does not say a word, but that’s just as well because no-one’s asked her to.
Now there’s the shuffling of heavy leather boots moving towards the door. We exchange a look. Not having done this sort of thing before, we’re surprised that the whole ugly episode has been resolved so quickly, with such apparent ease, with such relative good humour. But, sure enough, there’s the clack of the door being unlocked and, sure enough, here’s the gravelly tones of the policemen, issuing a final reminder to keep it down. Then it’s boots on stairs trooping away, and the click of the front door slotting back into place.
Then silence.
An absolute, pristine, ceasefire of a silence.
We breathe it in, not just us but every other tenant, too. Everyone in the building is bathing in it, soaking in it, delighting in this luxurious absence of sound. Even the creature in the walls stops scrabbling.
For the rest of the evening, he does not utter a word. There’s some squeaking, some crunching noises from his apartment – we picture him putting things to rights, straightening the furniture, sweeping up the glass – but mostly he observes a muted, remorseful silence. This, we know, is the silence of a man taking a long hard look at himself.
We’ve drawn the line at death threats and it seems that he has, with a prod from the law, agreed to respect this boundary. We are touched.
So when we’re picking up our mail the following day, and we see him crouched in front of the cluster of mailboxes, we smile widely as if to say: Hey, neighbour!
He doesn’t acknowledge us. He’s not being rude, he’s just busy stuffing a package into Number 8’s mailbox. He’s having difficulty because the package is so lumpy. We can see a small bump that might be a tiny, pointy-snouted skull, then a large bulge that could be a coarsely furred body, and, finally, a long, tail-like shape curling into one of the corners. The stench leaking from the package is so rancid it makes us long for Mrs Next-Door’s vape juice.
We collect our mail and return to the apartment and this time we don’t tell anyone about anything. ▼
Image: mini life on Flickr
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