Elementary Things

One of those damn undocumented people further down in the building had thrown an entire Christmas tree down the rubbish chute. Then people had kept chucking their Christmas and New Year rubbish in after it, cocktail sausages and prawn shells and all, and of course the whole lot got stuck halfway down, like a blockage. And good luck getting hold of an emergency caretaker over the holidays, so we had to live with the stench, which after a while started to smell like a decomposing corpse, and God knows, maybe that was what it was. So I could hardly stay at Mum’s any longer, even though she was ill with brain fog and needed my company just to remember her own name, but come on, I’m a sixty-year-old man, I need a bit of freedom, don’t I. And you can’t be on call twenty-four hours a day just because she’s forgotten where she put the remote, or which channel is which. If she’d understood, she’d have understood.

So I started taking longer and longer walks. The mere thought of the smell gave me acid reflux. First it was the stairwell, then the building itself, then the whole neighbourhood. One enormous rubbish dump full of rotting prawn shells. Out, just get out. Suddenly, obviously against my will but perhaps in accordance with fate, I found myself in the part of town with the shacks, where immigrants from near and far had put up tents, sheets of metal and whatever the hell else they could find to keep the weather out, and now I was going to get robbed. I could feel it. Just shove a gun in my face, now that I’d taken a wrong turn. I’d already started wondering how much an iPhone 20 was going to set me back when an old woman, actually a little like my mother, but sort of Romani, crossed the road in front of me. I’m not a racist, I should point out, just a realist. Someone has to say it like it is. Don’t throw the Christmas tree down the rubbish chute. Don’t light a fire on the parquet floor indoors. Don’t put rat meat on pizza. Elementary things.

The woman who was not my mother grabbed my hand, and better that than my phone, and began examining the lines. She ran her index finger across my palm, studied what she found there with a grim expression, shook her head and let go. Then she said nothing. It was as though she had weighed my soul on a set of scales, been disappointed and decided not to buy it. So damn deflating, typical immigrant. I’d at least been hoping she would tell me I was going to meet a tall, dark stranger. But I was never that lucky.