JUST A FRONT DOOR CONVERSATION

‘Hello stranger,’ said Godmother as I walked towards the block’s front door she held open for me, I knew.
‘Haven’t seen you for a while.’
Our laundry times overlap and we chat when we meet there but recently because my work patterns have temporarily changed I’ve not been down those mornings.
‘I’ve had work,’ I said.
‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘It’s been mayhem recently.’
‘Oh yes?’ my interest got.
‘One of the Somali women has taken the spare eleven o’clock time comes after yours but she arrives earlier then and if the washers are empty, which they have been since you’ve not been coming down, she’ll use them.’ Godmother, who’s known to speak her mind, pointed out that this wasn’t the done thing. ‘But it’s empty,’ said the woman, ‘I know...’ said Godmother. They had a row.
She took off the sunglasses she was wearing and said, ‘The next week I was leaving the laundry and she came in, completely ignored me, walked right past, said hello to Jay Jay and M’Ho, who were there chatting in the corner...
‘When I saw Jay Jay the other day, I said, “Were you talking about me?” Well, you know what Jay Jay’s like...’
‘Yes,’ I said, knowing.
‘...of course he denied it but then I asked M’Ho and he said they had been talking about me.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes, “Oh,”’ she said. ‘When I see her next...Everything was alright ‘til they moved in,’ she said.
She feels threatened, I know. She gets early morning phone calls from someone who, when she picks up, is silent the other end of the line.
‘She’s not all of them,’ I said. ‘She behaves like she does not because she’s a Somali but because she’s a bitch.’
As we spoke I was thinking how to work what we said into a piece, and that that was a betrayal of the reason for our conversation.