The Garden Party

For Kitz, (with apologies!)

    Later on this day the Sun will descend into a nest of frothy sparks. Everyone knows that the material past cannot be changed. It is essential to rationalise mortality in order to live. What long eye lashes you have. I will recount the events to you as well as could be expected after the passing of such a great period of time with the most minute details drawn from my imagination to fill in the blanks. You have won a monogrammed T-shirt and pencil case.

    The previous occupant of the flat was known as ‘Horror Check’, due to his general appearance and skill in communication. I never met him, but a friend who lived in the block of flats closest to the main road told me the details of his period of tenancy. I was there delivering junk mail and she offered me a cup of tea, so we sat on the concrete railing by the strips of garden which lined the tower blocks outside of her back door. Along the path and across the pitch of bitumen, his flat lay concealed in the furthest corner of the ground floor. It was as inconspicuous a space as was required by the housing department for the extreme characters who were sent to be hidden there. It had a little patch of garden below its main window containing scraps of Slater eaten and weather worn paper bearing garbled crayon warning messages addressing the invisible ones. An aged and fragile ‘Twisties’ packet lay caught in the bind of roots. The only flowers which grew there amidst the sickly weeds were those which can survive on human neglect.

    Horror Check had a shock of hair encircling his whole head which had been combed to give the impression of the effect that a long period of sleep has on the hairstyle. In his opinion the end of the world was the main subject which should be dealt with in all human relations and he spoke and thought of nothing else in increasingly ferocious doses until They were made aware of him and decided that he as unable to look after himself. Once gone, They peeled away from his window all of his posters and hand written placard declarations which had blocked the view, and for a time gone largely unnoticed by the hundreds of other tenants, who found that respect for one anothers privacy was in such a close proximity as occurs in housing commission flats was essential.

    Some people who had noticed the array of images thought that there were a gang of metal heads living in there who had put up their favourite bands’ posters and record sleeves adorned with apocalyptic imagery to stop people from observing the rituals of their clique. If anyone had looked closely there is the chance they would have seen Horror Check’s red glowing eyes peering from one of the strategically placed observation gaps between the window filling documents.

After they took him away on a permanent basis, a friend of mine took over Horror Check’s vacant flat. When he accidentally locked his key inside he smashed all of the panes of glass from the door after returning from a three day city stroll and being unable to find any other way in after having ingested a cask of wine between three and five am Sunday morning. It was imperative that he lay down to sleep before the Sun had fully risen. These vampire slices of broken glass then lay precariously about the floor of the main room of the flat for as long as he continued to stay there. No effort was ever made to remove them, ominously arranged around the blanket on the floor where he slept as though he’d shattered from a glass cocoon.

   I went to visit him but found that he was not there and that there were now pieces of packing crate nailed over the door taking up the duties of the glass and a heavy padlock securing it. When I finally found him home after numerous fruitless visits he gave the explanation, while casting a wary eye across the circumference of the empty car park, that 'you couldn’t trust the neighbourhood.'

While I was sitting on the floor, which was the only chair, one afternoon, he stopped in his trek to the kitchenette with grimy coffee mugs in hand, poised and focused rigidly on the open front door. He began to mumble piteously in an explanatory tone toward it and I rose to my knees to see from the window what was going on. There were five cops standing looking through the window at the contents of the room. My host was visibly agitated by their unexpected presence rifling through stored files in his memory for the misdemeanor option they could be there for as he began to spill the oddly shaped beans which must have been some what conspicuous to them, given they had yet to ask him any questions. They waited until his alibi dynamo ran down and explained there had been a call from a nearby resident reporting to them a dead body lying amongst broken glass on the floor of this apartment. There had been occasions when I, too, had knocked on his window and wondered whether his crashed out form, lying in the full glare of the Summer Sun, would respond with life, so it stood to reason that someone in passing might think that he’d been killed in a violent struggle, as evidenced by the broken glass on the floor and the general disarray of the room’s contents. They gave disapproving looks at the security device with its crooked nails affixed to the door, made some recommendations with the stern authority of pool attendants and left us alone again. We looked to each other surprised not to be in the back of their car.

The suspected homicide had been brought to their attention five days earlier.

    The next time I went to see my friend in the flat I found it was vacant again. The only evidence he had ever been there was the new looking lock and fresh putty in the door window as well as the microscopic flakes of his skin’s dust mingling uncomfortably with that of Horror Check’s on the top of the built in shelves where the government cleaner couldn’t be bothered wiping. It would be impossible to find him using any other method than chance meeting in the street. The letterbox was overflowing like sandwiches in a greedy kid's mouth with replies to his requests for details on correspondence courses and applications to join nudist camps, peppered between all the bills. Some of the letters were already in the garden where they had become the left overs from the snails’ dinner parties.

   I sat on the door step and read about how much he owed, always highlighted by large red stamped demands, until that became boring and finalised my resignation, and then I went home. The little garden filled by chip wrappers and dying plants weeping off their dried up leaves is still there.

I can’t control the pen any more.