More Shooty

Our neighbour, Shooty the Drug Dealer has been away. Having been released from prison a couple of months ago, he became angry and confused by the lack of recreational facilities and employment options available to a gentleman such as himself, and so lashed out. This expression of frustration culminated with him stood on our porch as we were about to go to to bed screaming that we had better not be sayin' shit about his son. Being, up until that point, barely aware of even Shooty's existence, let alone that of his kid, we actually hadn't been sayin' shit about his son. It seemed there had been a misunderstanding.

Next day my wife went to the courthouse with Shooty's long-suffering mother and gave evidence resulting in his being sectioned that very same evening.

It's actually his grandmother's house, but Shooty lives there too. He'd been detained at the President's pleasure - or however the hell it works here in America - for assault of a senior, presumably the aforementioned grandmother, and detained for five years which suggests something stronger than an uncouth slap. By the point at which he felt compelled to explain his bewildering reservations in the strongest possible terms on our porch at an ungodly hour, the grandmother had moved out along with the mother and Shooty's son. They couldn't deal with him. Shooty's mother had actually adopted his son as her own kid, making the child both Shooty's son and foster-brother.

So this was why he couldn't find his son that one time, because the child was in the care of someone who actually gives a shit about his well-being.

Anyway, it apparently only takes a week to cure Shooty because suddenly he's back on our street. He's smashing bottles in the road at 2AM, mostly outside our house for some reason.

Logan who lives across the way spots him at 2AM, stood lurking in the gap between Logan and Tony's house, for no obvious reason. 'You have to stop this,' Logan tells him. 'They're not going to let you see your boy if you keep acting crazy.'

Shooty explains that it's okay because he's clean, completely off the drugs now. In fact the only thing he smokes these days is pot, so that's good news.

Tony's truck is broken into at some point during the next evening. A credit card is taken and someone tries to use it to spend $150 at HEB. The cops are called, but it's a mystery who might have been responsible. Maybe it was the creepy disused fairground owner or perhaps even the mayor all along.

Shooty's grandmother runs down the street midday screaming, 'He's trying to kill me!'

Shooty himself storms down the street early morning yelling, 'I hate that bitch!'

It's not looking great.

So as to save myself the bother of writing it all out again, here's what I posted on facebook.

Shooty the Drug Dealer paid us an afternoon visit. Either the meds aren't working or it's all the really awesome ganja he be smokin' like a chilled out playa that's been making him jumpy, because there he was on our lawn at two in the afternoon shouting the usual incoherent gibberish about how we be disrespectin' his son - a child the existence of which I am barely aware. Noticing our front door was unlocked, I went to flip the latch but before I could get there he kicked it open and hard, still yelling. I got the red mist, slammed it shut, then yanked it open and bellowed, get off my fucking lawn, you fucking cunt, as he scarpered back to his house.

The cops arrived two hours later and once again told us that he was a very troubled man with many issues.

'So we should definitely give you a call if he does it again?' I quipped, having already mentioned all the previous incidents. Shooty seen hanging about in Tony's yard at 2AM was probably a massive coincidence, to be fair.

'Yes,' said the cop, failing to spot my sarcasm. I went inside because I knew I wouldn't be able to keep myself from calling them a pair of useless donut-scoffing wankers. My wife kept talking to them. From what I could hear most of the conversation seemed to be the cops making sure we weren't going to do anything to upset Shooty.

I don't know how much Wendy Davis plans to defund the cops by, but whatever the sum, it isn't enough.

That was Sunday. Shooty himself called the cops at 3AM on Monday morning because his house was under siege by an armed gang which only he could see and hear. It took the cops eight minutes to respond - which is good going compared to the two hours it took them to get around to responding to us when an absolutely real and physical nutcase tried to kick in our front door.

By Monday evening he's back inside. This time his mother didn't require additional testimony or evidence, although again, we have no idea how long it will last or how soon he'll be back on our porch yelling at our house for no fucking reason. There doesn't seem to be much point in hoping for some miracle cure by which he'll suddenly start behaving himself.

We can get a restraining order, although the problem there is that it can't be delivered to him while he's in the loony bin because it might make him feel a bit fed up or something. My wife has nailed a no trespassing sign to every vertical surface on the exterior of our house which faces the street, which makes her feel better, but very much resembles a display of fear to me. We've purchased a box of shotgun cartridges from Walmart, which cost a surprisingly budget-friendly five dollars and probably represents the crossing of some line or other for me, but I'm past caring.

If nothing else, I take comfort from how fast that fucker ran when I bellowed, get off my fucking lawn, you fucking cunt. Never in my life have I had that effect on someone at the other end of a disagreement. It doesn't suggest great reserves of idiot courage on his part, and if he really wants to get at us because of something explained to him by the voices in his head, I don't think he has the intelligence for anything devious or sneaky.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

The Who Bloke

 

There were two doors, both number fourteen. One of them was A and the other was B respectively referring to upstairs and ground floor flats, but it was anyone's guess which was which. Both doors had inset panels of frosted glass so if you pressed your nose up close, you could just about see a flight of stairs behind the door on the right; but without any indication or which was A and which was B, it was anyone's guess. I tended to put the mail for flat A in the door on the right, basing this decision on a hierarchy of the uppermost dwelling being the primary one. Occasionally one of them would get something specifically addressed to the basement flat. After a while I began to remember the names, as I did with almost everyone on Glengarry Road after a year or so, and it got to the point where I no longer even needed an accurate house number. If, for example, I had something addressed to someone with the surname of Burnap supposedly living at number 63, it would go to number 36 without my really having to think about it, because that was where Campbell Burnap lived. Somehow I still retain some of this information twenty years later.

I haven't retained the name of the guy who lived at 14A, or possibly 14B but it may have been Adrian, or at least he looked like an Adrian to me. He resembled a more sensitive version of Phil Mitchell from Eastenders and was obviously gay. I'd been living and working in East Dulwich for about five years and gay people seemed drawn to the area for no obvious reason beyond that it was quiet and mostly civilised, and so I had somehow developed gaydar without really trying. I don't know how I knew, but I almost always did, although the information was never really much use to me. My sexual liasons have historically tended to favour persons with boobs, and jokes with opening lines such as three poufs walk into a bar aren't entirely my thing so I've never needed to check whether the coast was clear before committing myself to knuckleheaded discourse.

That said, at the time I hadn't had sexual liaisons with anyone in possession of boobs for a number of years and, some might argue as a consequence, I had taken to Doctor Who books. There was a new one  every month, and most of them were better than anything which had been on the telly. Doctor Who had been cancelled in 1989 and was still a decade away from returning as Britain's favourite breakfast cereal, so people tended to look at you funny when you mentioned it. I'd been obsessed with the show as a child and then as a teenager, so this may even have been the early onset of a peculiarly specific form of mid-life crisis.

One item of mail regularly received by Adrian - or whatever his name could have been - was a monthly subscription copy of Doctor Who magazine. I'd looked at the thing in WHSmith a couple of times but it was a bit too intensive even for me. Nevertheless, it meant I was well-disposed towards the Who bloke at 14A, or possibly 14B, even before I met him. On the first few occasions when I actually did meet him, my cheery postal good morning was met with only a silent sullen glance, but I persisted on the assumption that he was probably just having a bad day, plus life is too short to harbour resentment against persons you don't actually know. Eventually I caught him at his front door as I stood there with his latest issue of Doctor Who magazine about to go in the letterbox.

'Yes, I've been meaning to have a word with you,' he began somewhat icily, then went into a lengthy complaint about his mail being delivered to the flat upstairs.

'I understand the problem,' I said, 'but I don't think it's me,' launching into an explanation which probably foreshadowed the first paragraph, adding that his complaint tended to be common when I was on holiday and someone else was covering for me, and that whoever that was stood only a 50% chance of getting it right given the absence of anything to indicate which flat was which.

He seemed to understand, and was even a bit embarrassed, so I changed the subject with, I see you're into Doctor Who, which was probably akin to recognising a fellow Freemason in whichever year it was. He smiled for what seemed to be the first time ever, and we compared notes for a minute before he had to be off, being on his way out somewhere.

The next occasion, I got invited in, which was a bit of a shock after the first couple of frosty years and his failure to reciprocate any of my greetings. He was a little older than me but looked significantly older, so I thought, and his flat was much the same as mine. He mentioned a partner of unspecified gender, possibly feeling awkward about it for some reason, and that the partner had died. Additionally, his mother had died more recently. This seemed to explain my impression of him being a less than happy bunny, and I mentioned the unreciprocated greetings, or at least tactfully referred to them by saying, 'yes, you always struck me as having a lot on your mind.'

'Sorry about that,' he said. 'I think I was having a bit of a nervous breakdown for a while there.'

We talked about Who, albeit at crossed purposes. He hadn't read the books, although he'd heard good things about them; and he was quite into conventions and fan gatherings, which didn't really sound like my sort of thing. He'd met Sophie Aldred a couple of times and told me that her screen persona was pretty much her persona in real life. He showed me a fairly large model TARDIS which occupied his bedside table and had a lamp inside, which I found a bit weird. I might have found it weird that he showed me his bedroom, but his flat seemed to be mainly just a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen - much like my own. We seemed to be fairly similar in many respects.

I imagined that this would be the start of a friendship, if not necessarily a beautiful friendship, but from then on he kept himself pretty much to himself, just as before. Our meetings were chance occurrences, albeit significantly more jovial chance occurrences than they had once been. The very last time I saw him, he'd been having a clear out and getting rid of stuff. I handed him his mail and he gave me a DVD, saying, 'Here, you need to see this if you haven't already.'

It was a DVD of the BBC's Edge of Darkness from 1985. I'd never heard of it.

'Then you really need to watch it,' he said. 'It's very good.'

It seemed to be a crime drama and therefore possibly not my sort of thing, but it seemed like a generous act so I took the DVD home and watched it. I moved away from home in 1984 and didn't have a television again until about 1993, which is why I'd never heard of Edge of Darkness. The irony is that I'd moved away from home to take a fine art degree specialising in time based media, specifically film, video and, I suppose, television.

I thought Edge of Darkness was amazing, and so much so that I insisted my friend Andy come over and watch it too, which he did over a couple of afternoons. He also thought it was wonderful, and particularly enjoyed Joe Don Baker's massively entertaining portrayal of a Texan character named Darius Jedburgh - this in spite of Andy's infrequently stated general dislike of American culture.

'Yes,' he grudgingly conceded after we'd just watched Jedburgh terrorise guests at a conference with lumps of plutonium, 'if one really must be an American, then you should at least have the decency to be from Texas.'

I have no idea what became of Adrian, but Who was back on the box by 2005, and was a huge hit but seemed to have lost whatever it was I'd liked about the thing in the first place. Given that I now live in Texas, the rest may add up to some kind of narrative - if not necessarily one which means anything profound - but you may have to put the pieces together yourself.

Hanuman About the House

At the heart of the city of elephants, Hastinapura, the Lord Hanuman did make his home, but it was not the Celestial Palace we know so well from other tales of the Monkey King. Pawanputra Hanuman was in those days without such means, and was so obliged to seek affordable accommodation, a quest which saw him victorious when he agreed to share with Anjana and Sita, both of whom were considered great beauties in their way.

One day as Anjana gathered messages which had come from the king, she learned that the date of Lord Hanuman's birth was most imminent, having accidentally read notice of an appointment with the apothecary.

'What should we do, Sita?' she asked of her friend and household companion. 'Should we give him one?'

Sita's face grew red with surprise and embarrassment. 'Gosh!,' she exclaimed. 'That's very modern of you!'

'No, silly,' said Anjana. 'My meaning was, should we give to him a birthday present?'

'That is a very good and fine idea,' said Sita, 'although I know it would be unwise to give him a pearl necklace.'

'Crikey!' said Anjana. 'I would also say that it would be impossible because we are both ladies and it is my belief that such transactions are ordinarily conducted in the other direction!'

They stood for a moment or two because there seemed to be laughter all around, and so they were unable to continue their discussion.

'No,' said Sita. 'You misunderstand me. If you will recall, I once tried to present the Lord Hanuman with just such a gift, but he politely refused it, for it did not feature the name of Rama and was in this way unacceptable to him.'

'So he did not like it then?'

'No, and he was not happy about the necklace either!'

Again there seemed to be laughter all around, and just as it receded, Lord Hanuman himself did come into the parlour.

'Hello, you two,' he said. 'What are we discussing today? I thought I heard you mention something about giving me one!' As he made this statement, he did catch Anjana's eye whilst smiling and raising his eyebrow in a meaningful way.

'Men!' said Sita indignantly.

Anjana sighed and shook her head. 'I really wish you would cease with this line of enquiry, my Lord, for as well you know I am cursed by a certain sage so that when I fall in love, my face will come to resemble that of a monkey, an eventuality I wish to avoid.'

'What's wrong with looking like a monkey?' said the Lord Hanuman, a little injured.

'Besides, I am saving myself for Kesari,' Anjana added, 'and I am technically your mother, I rather think you will find.'

'This is all very confusing,' observed Sita. 'I hardly know whether I'm coming or going.'

'Blimey,' said Lord Hanuman. 'Would you like to sit down? Maybe I could fetch you a chair.'


Much later, following a lengthy series of slightly repetitive comic misunderstandings, Anjana and Sita presented a gift to Lord Hanuman. They first draped a muslin cloth over the gift so as to conceal its nature and enhance the sense of surprise. Unfortunately this gave the gift a priapic appearance which put everyone in mind of the male generative member.

'I wonder what it can be,' said the Lord Hanuman dubiously.

'I shall give you a clue,' said Sita. 'You will enjoy it in your mouth.'

'Crikey,' spluttered Lord Hanuman. 'I rather think you girls may have entirely the wrong idea about me!'

Then they revealed that the gift was in fact a banana.

'Because you're a monkey, and monkeys like bananas,' Sita explained happily, which cleared up all further laboured comic misunderstandings.

What Happens When Someone You Don't Really Like Snuffs It

 

We used to think she was all right, but eventually we'd had enough. I say we, but my wife had the worst of it. I was mostly just an irritated spectator. She had been part of my wife's rock group, a rock group in this case being women, or mostly women, who get together to paint decorative designs on rocks and stones. The idea is that the stones are left hither and thither to be found by strangers in the hope of brightening someone's day. It's a random act of kindness.

Some of the rock group seemed decent people, but a few were problematic, tending towards gossip and fixating on things which wouldn't matter to anybody sane. I guess that's what happens when you hang out in a group. There's always one, sometimes two or three.

Anyway, we used to think she was all right, like I said. She was small, round, approximately Mexican, and always with a certain twinkle in her eye. She was distraught when her little dog died, and publicly so on facebook. I took pity and did a painting of the former pooch in the hope of providing some solace. She seemed to like that. I also painted a sign for her rock spot - a patch of garden in the grounds of her local library where people could leave rocks they had painted in exchange for any which took their liking. The sign was in acrylic paint on a large breeze block.

The pattern eventually emerged that she liked to get free stuff, which I only noticed as my wife became more and more irritable. The woman's facebook page was mostly sob stories, pleas for this or that, did anybody have such and such a thing she could borrow, or maybe just have? She had plenty of painted rocks from my wife, even a few of the old vinyl records which take my wife hours to decorate with elaborate mandalas. She added googly eyes and pipe cleaner legs to one of them and sent the photo back.

Look! I made a spider! Isn't he the cutest!

Others she embellished with bunny ears, or in one case, circular mouse ears so that he can be Mickey! My wife said nothing but I could tell she was upset, given all the work she'd put in. My own reaction was closer to nausea. I don't want anything to do with adults who are into Disney, particularly not anyone affecting to be on first name terms with the mouse. Life is too short.

My wife specifically became irritable, as I recall, following the death of the dog. It was perfectly natural that the woman should be distraught under the circumstances, but the figurative daily wailing and gnashing of teeth on social media seemed out of all proportion, and it felt as though she might be milking it somewhat. Personally, I tend to experience grief as a private thing. Wheeling it out on social media, day after day, month after month strikes me as odd, and I've never found heart-shaped emoticons much consolation.

Then there were the private messages, gossip about other rock group people, someone had done this or said that, and you know who has some weird, unsavoury kink, and that terrible woman never pays when you take her to lunch. She's so mean and greedy, and that son of hers, the retarded one, well...

This last accusation was what broke the camel's proverbial back. We knew for a fact that the supposedly terrible woman often paid for lunch, and the comments about her son, an entirely likable young man coping with certain learning difficulties, were simply too far over the line. My wife said so, then immediately became the person spreading hurtful lies about the woman who makes things into Mickey. The entire rock group rallied around, posting hilarious passive-aggressive messages on facebook about knowing who their real friends were, the sort of shite which your average fifteen-year old girl would regard as a bit self-involved. My wife no longer qualified as a real friend to women who make things into Mickey.

Then suddenly she had cancer. We felt sort of bad - or at least awkward - until her facebook page filled up with the gnashing and wailing of teeth, further requests for free stuff, and yet more hymns of praise to those real friends, the ones who had stood by her through thick and thin. It's hard to feel too sorry for someone with cancer when they not only continue to act like an asshole, but somehow get worse. Pity me for no longer do I know the joy of eating, the posts screamed in contradiction to pictures of the woman gleefully stuffing her face with the usual junk food. My wife used to work in cancer research. We've known plenty of people who've suffered and died. Somehow this just didn't sit right so we stopped thinking about it.

Then suddenly she's gone.

Both Bess and I are actually surprised, and yet somehow it doesn't change anything. The weekend comes and we meet up with Leslie and Ernest, another couple who fell out of favour with the rock group because of the woman who made things into Mickey.

Leslie makes a tray of cupcakes covered in fondant googly eyes. We're not actually meeting up to celebrate somebody's death, or at least we're trying not to think about the possibility that we may be, but we meet up nevertheless at the Longhorn Steakhouse. I drink beer and we eat Leslie's sarcastic cupcakes while laughing about the worst, most self-involved excesses of the woman who made things into Mickey. It feels a little as though we're skirting around the famed Mexican attitude to death. It's not so much that we're glad someone annoying is dead, but it's nice to move on with a bit of ceremony.

Carnival

Jackie has the week off and Karen is covering her walk, which is the one next to mine. Fay is immediately behind, covering Crystal Palace Road because Richard is also away. I hear someone ask where he is.

Juliet's head pops around the corner of the frame. 'He's probably at home having a smash innit,' she reports with mischievous glee.

'Really Juliet,' I say with mock indignation. 'I'm surprised at you.'

'All right then,' she adds, somehow taking my faux outrage as a request for clarification. 'He's at home having a wank!' She does the hand gesture in illustration of her hypothesis.

'Must run in the family,' says Danny without looking around.

'Fuck off,' suggests Fay, who is Juliet's older sister.

'Are you going to the carnival?' Karen asks.

'You must have nearly all of your tea set now, yeah?' Danny continues. 'Just a few weeks to go. You must be excited.'

'Fuck off.'

'Harsh,' says Andre as he walks past, loaded down with parcels.

'Did she just tell you to fuck off?' asks Joel from the frame on the other side of Danny.

'You can fuck off too,' says Fay, directly addressing Andre for some reason.

'Don't say that, Fay,' Andre smiles.

'Fuck off.'

'Just think, your whole tea set might be finished soon. That should make you happy, yeah?'

I asked about the tea set last week. Danny told me that Fay has a subscription to a weekly magazine, one which comes to the sorting office because she lives in the area. It's something to do with the late Princess of Wales, and each issue of the magazine comes with a souvenir item of fake commemorative crockery building up into a sort of Lady Diana tribute tea set with cups, sugar bowl, fancy spoons and so on and so forth. Our amusement derives from this being the very last thing anyone would ever expect of Fay.

'Lady Di would be very disappointed to hear you talking like that, Fay,' says Danny.

'Fuck off.'

'So ladylike!'

She kisses her teeth. 'You better watch I don't cut you.'

'Don't be like that, darling,' says Andre.

'And after I've cut you, I'm going to kidnap your dad and do him up the arse with a strap on,' Fay adds, almost casually as she continues to sort mail into the frame. 'And I'll make your mum watch innit.'

Andre doesn't have an answer to this one and walks off, silent with laughter.

Everybody pauses in their work to look at Fay, impressed. She smiles to herself and basks in our admiration.

'Are you going to the carnival, Fay?' Karen asks again.

'I'm going to have to see. I don't know what him indoors wants to do, you know.'

'Bring him along. Tell him you'll be doing the bogle innit. That might help him make up his mind.'

'That's that dance, isn't it?' I say, because it's one of those things I've been wondering about. 'The bogle, I mean.'

'What dance?' says Karen.

'You know,' I say, and I put my letters down and step back into the walkway. I put my hands on my knees and stick my arse in the air, moving it up and down whilst impersonating a dancehall rhythm with my mouth. 'That dance.'

'Fay, have you seen this?' says Karen.

Fay looks around and chuckles. 'Oh my days.'

'But is that the bogle?' I get back to my letters. They still haven't answered the question.

'You want to come to the carnival with us, Lawrence?' Karen asks.

'I dunno. Sounds a bit lively for me, Notting Hill and all that.'

'You should come with us. You ain't got nothing on this weekend innit.'

'I don't know. It'll be all that bashment stuff.' It occurs to me that I had another question. 'What is bashment anyway?'

'What's bashment?'

'Yeah - I keep hearing that word on the radio, so what is it? Is it just like dancehall and that?'

'He can't go. His misses won't let him innit.' Juliet has turned up out of nowhere.

'Well, I don't know about that,' I say, although I sort of do. I try to imagine herself at the Notting Hill carnival, doing her best to stick to the white bits with the whole food and hand knitted goods while bending over backwards to identify with black people and getting it all wrong because she doesn't actually know any, apart from Nadia. She has it in her head that I have a thing about Nadia, which I suspect is a misinterpretation of my talking to Nadia like she's a human being rather than my black friend.

'I'm going,' says Juliet, and like everything Juliet says, or at least everything Juliet says to me, there's something in there that I don't quite understand - possibly an invitation, an element of amusement although nothing cruel. She has a fierce little face, like a black Minnie the Minx. She's trouble but in an interesting way.

'You can go with us lot,' says Karen.

I bite my lip and keep on sorting the mail, wishing the world was just a little bit different to how it is.

Farewell to Charlie

Charlie was a rabbit who came into our lives about eighteen months ago. I introduced him here. He became a member of the family and we loved him. He spent mornings outside in his run in the garden, then came in when it got too hot. His hutch was in the front room, but he had free run of the house while we were at home. He got on fine with the cats, and a couple of them seemed to be actively afraid of him so he was never any trouble.

About a week ago, a neighbour called on us, asking us if we could rescue a rabbit which had been hanging around in her yard. It was obviously a domestic bunny which had escaped, but she was moving, and the new people had dogs which didn't bode well for the future of the rabbit. The woman had tried to catch her but had never been able to do it. My wife, having apparently acquired some sort of rabbit mojo, said that the bunny just came hopping right up to her and so suddenly we had a second rabbit. She's small, mostly black, and about eight months old according to the vet. Being female, it occurred to us that we may as well keep her. Charlie would have fought with another male rabbit, but if we had them both fixed, it seemed likely that they would get on okay and we wouldn't end up with a million bunnies. This would also solve the problem of finding a home for her given that the Rabbit Rescue people told us they had no room, just as they had before, which casts some doubt on what the rescue element of their name might refer to.

We named her Maisie - which had been Charlie's name before we'd realised he was a boy - and set her up in the front room next to Charlie's hutch so they could get used to the idea of each other, as they were clearly doing. She was worryingly underweight, but then so was Charlie when he first turned up.

My wife took them both to a veterinary clinic supposedly specialising in rabbits to be fixed on Monday. Before I'd even heard anything, it suddenly occurred to me that Maisie was surely too skinny for such an operation. My wife called and said she had bad news and I feared the worst. They had started to prepare Maisie, then realised that her heartbeat had become alarmingly irregular.

My own heart felt like it skipped a beat.

The bad new was that they hadn't been able to spay her because she was too underweight, but she was otherwise okay and we could try again in another couple of months.

The bunnies came home.

Charlie seemed fine the first day, if understandably subdued. We had pain medication to give him but weren't unduly concerned given that it's a relatively straightforward operation for male rabbits. We would have had it done before but there didn't really seem to be any need, given that it was just him and the cats

I never saw his back end, but Bess had a look and said it was terrifying and that she was sure it shouldn't look as it did, gnarly with huge Frankenstein stitches, swelling and so on; but, as I say, he seemed okay, relatively speaking. By Wednesday he was even more subdued. He was eating, but not much, and he didn't seem to be producing the usual steady stream of cocoa puffs. This had happened once before. He became constipated with complications before we realised that a steady diet of the things everybody assumes rabbits should eat - lettuce, carrots, and so on - was actually too rich for him. It was pretty scary, but we took him to the vet and he came though. Since then we had learned that carrots and the like were okay but only as a weekly thing. This time he was eating mostly just grass and hay, so we assumed it was some sort of reaction to the operation, possibly stress related.

This morning I got out of bed and found both Charlie and my wife missing. I called her phone. She'd got up in the night to check on him, then taken him straight to the emergency vet. He'd had diarrhoea and seemed in a really bad way but was presently being seen. She called back about thirty minutes later. Charlie had died due to complications from blood poisoning contracted from his own droppings infecting where his nuts had once been.

She brought his body home and I buried him in the garden, planting a wild petunia to mark the spot. Wild petunias had been one of his favourite things to eat. He used to tear them from my hand when I brought them in from the yard.

Today has been fucking unspeakable.

It has occurred to me that this surely can't be a routine occurrence following neutering, and my suspicion is aroused by the post-operative state of his back end and that some vet apparently already had Maisie prepared for her operation before noticing that she was underweight. It had seemed that way to me but then I'm not a vet; but none of it is going to bring my rabbit back, so I'm trying not to think about it.

He was mostly white with a few little black spots, and his fur was like cotton, the softest fur I've ever known on an animal. When I picked him up he'd sit in my arms and make a chewing sound, which is apparently the rabbit equivalent of purring; or sometimes he'd scramble up onto my shoulder as though trying to launch himself off into space. Recently, my wife bought a set of brightly coloured plastic cups, eight which nest inside each other like Russian dolls and made for toddlers but we'd heard that bunnies like them. Charlie thought they were great. He'd lift the cups out of each other one by one with his teeth, arrange them around his hutch, or in the water bowl, or line them up on the edge of the hutch and bat them off into space with his nose, then watch them fall with a look of intense concentration - like he was conducting an experiment.

He was the most wonderful rabbit in the world and he brought nothing but joy into our lives. If you were to ask me to list humans whose deaths would affect me less than that of Charlie, I could reel off the names without even pausing to consider.

This has been a generally awful year, and Charlie was one of the few good things about it.

 

 

 

Full of Prostitutes

It's about 7.15AM and I'm wheeling my bike down our driveway, about to go out.

'Yo!' It's Shooty the Drug Dealer walking along our road at this time of morning for some reason. 'Whose car is that?'

I ignore him because he's a knob.

'Yo!' again, 'whose car is that?'

I look at him. He's looking at me, and at the car right behind me. He's looking at the car which is parked in our driveway. He's looking at our car, which is parked in our driveway, and has been parked in our driveway more or less all day, every day for at least the last few years.

'It's our car,' I tell him, seemingly somewhat redundantly.

'What?'

'It's my wife's car.'

'Oh. I thought it was Kimberley's car.'

I have no fucking clue who he's talking about. 'No,' I confirm. 'It's our car.'

He wanders off mumbling about something being full of prostitutes, which is the actual expression he uses, in case anyone thinks I'm making this up. It sounds as though he means that Kimberley's notional car is full of prostitutes.

Who fucking knows?

A week later it's more or less the same encounter, except this time he wants to know have I seen a six-year old boy running around. This would be his son. Apparently he's mislaid the kid. You know how those things just run off and who can tell what the fuck they get up to? The question is put to me at 7AM as I step out of the front door to call the cats in for breakfast. I'm still in my pants. The weird thing is that I get the distinct impression of Shooty having emerged from behind the small lemon tree in our front yard, as though he's been waiting, or was lurking.

'No, I haven't seen a six-year old boy,' I tell him. 'I've only just got up.'

Weeks pass and then he turns up on our porch one evening. He doesn't actually knock at the door, instead being content to shout at it.

'You been calling up my grandmother, bitch?' he enquires. 'You better not be saying shit about my grandma, puta.'

All of this is recorded on our Ring, which is a door bell with a built-in camera activated by movement. Following the recording of Shooty proposing that we refrain from discussing his grandmother in scurrilous terms, we have a video of him sat on our porch for an hour between two and three in the morning.

He's back again the next evening, this time at 8PM as we're awake and still watching telly. His arrival is heralded by a loud bang which we later realise was him kicking over our wheelie bin in protest. He doesn't actually knock or ring, and perhaps doesn't understand the latest doorbell technology, again preferring instead to stand a foot or so away from our door and shout at it. Mostly it's about his missing son, the six-year old, the one presently in the care of Shooty's mother and grandmother. They all moved out about a month ago, unable to deal with him, and are still waiting for him to be carted off before they come back.

I catch Shooty's eye through the window and do the what the fuck, dude? gesture. The thing is, I'm somehow not actually scared of him even though I probably should be. Face to face he seems idiotic, even pathetic, regardless of the reputation.

'Fuck you!' he screams with real feeling and gives me the finger before wandering off. He thinks we've kidnapped his kid, or we've been badmouthing his kid, or we've given his kid to aliens who are probing the child even as we speak. Nobody knows.

We call the cops, because when we called them this morning, they said to call them if it happened again, and it has happened again. They arrive after about fifteen minutes and explain to us how Shooty is not a well man and may be feeling confused and upset right now, and we should definitely call them next time it happens.

Neighbours come out of their houses to share notes with us. Shooty has been dropping in for a loud one-way chat with everyone on the block, so it turns out. Someone actually saw him carrying an axe the previous night.

I've identified our boy as Shooty on the understanding that he shot and killed someone in his house five or six years ago but was never convicted because the cops were somehow unable to prove anything; or maybe they decided that they would definitely act if it happened again. However, it turns out that I am in error and he merely stabbed someone and should therefore probably be identified as Stabby the Drug Dealer, but I'm sticking with Shooty, having thought of him as Shooty for most of his time in the stripey hole.

He was in the stripey hole for abuse of a senior, whatever that means. His rap sheet can be viewed online. No actual murder, and nothing sexual, but otherwise he's pretty much done the lot. Also interesting is that the rap sheet logs calls made every couple of days for the last two months, ever since Shooty came home - mostly nuisance and disturbances, but one of them involving a knife. I guess maybe the cops were waiting for a nice even number, like fifty.

Anyway, he's now binned up, presumably medicated, and his goldfish memory will hopefully have forgotten whatever he imagined we did by the time he comes back, which he hopefully won't.

Perhaps oddly, the detail I've found most depressing is his moronic territorial yapping because I've heard it too many times.

You'd better not be saying shit about this person or that person somehow associated with my good self, because you'll be amazed at the vigour of my righteous fury. You better not be saying shit about my hood. Don't you know I be from the southside?

This is drivel you come out with when you have nothing else going for you, when the sum total of your personality is an address and the fact of your continued existence; and so you have to jab your existence at other people like it's a stick with a cowpat on the end, and keep jabbing until they notice, because when they notice you, you become real.

It's exhausting.