FEEDING THE MONKEY

'Have you told him yet?' she said as we sat drinking coffee.
'No,' I said. 'I wanted to tell her and you before anyone else.'
The day after I got a text saying, 'Congratulations, well done, Xxx.'
I texted back, 'I feel strangely unmoved, thought there'd be doors opening in my mind but haven't detected anything like thus far'
Boots walked past alone. He used to walk around a step or so behind a woman could have been his twin. She had long dyed black hair, like him, and like him, wore plenty of eye liner. But I've not seen them together since I moved in here.
He had a bad accident, head injury affecting his speech so when our conversations would include me saying, 'Sorry?' when I hadn't understood what he said. A lot of what he said was ideas that other people or groups of people should do and I'd say, 'Why don't you do that?' and he'd say, 'I might,' but I don't think he ever did.
Since the laundry time change I've not seen him to talk to and unlike with Godmother I don't miss the contact. Thing is I can't trust him not to be telling someone else what I say as he tells me what others have said. Boots was an ally of Plover and would pass on information about him.
'He put that poster up,' he told me when I asked, pretty sure who it was anyway, the language and target of attack.
Once in a meeting in the flats Plover started a rant, was eventually asked to leave then escorted from the room still shouting, jabbing his finger at me as I watched curious about the condition of his internal world. If I saw him in the lift I'd grunt, 'Uuhh,' and he'd turn his back to me. He was quite frightening really because he had a history of violence taking a sword to his son who said, 'He's a wanker.' I wouldn't like the D to say that about me, not behind my back, she has a healthy contempt.
I'm someone easy to talk to, available for gossip, never revealing sources, expedient in distribution. 'Well I heard...' is a way I'll begin an exchange, and I mean exchange, I don't give for nothing, I expect something in immediate return or I'm clear I'm planning for the future and feeding the monkey.

I DON'T MISS BOOTS

Now I've changed my laundry time I don't see her very often, maybe in town, on the way or way back, But not to talk to.
The caretaking team was picking up litter in front of Frances House as Godmother walked back from Stokes Croft me taking my time to not catch her up, overtake.
She stopped and said, 'Glad to see you earning your money.'
'What you talking about?' said CT. 'I'm always earning my money,' sounded offended, 'I was doing the lifts this morning,' smile on his face.
I thought she might walk on but even by the lift down from Thirteen, I'd got in, and the door closed behind me, she hadn't come into the block.
She might've said to CT and the team, 'You want to be careful, do your job, or I'll get my boys over, give you a hand, and I don't mean helping.'
She threatened to set her boys on a man lived in one of the flats a few floors below her had been harassing a woman lived opposite told Godmother now telling me. 'I said to him, “If you keep on I'll ask my boys to have a word,” I think he heard me,' she said, 'she's not said anything more about it.'
Catching up the way I like on inter-flat gossip: who's getting raided/abused/shagged/moving in or out, how she is, I miss her in the laundry...
but I don't miss Boots.

A MISSED OPPORTUNITY

'Was I rude to him?' I said.
We were sat on the sofa in the silent disco just above North Road about half eleven the night of the first Stokes Croft street festival. This was before the incident had occurred I was to ask her about later. We made up the dialogue to the silent film showing: a love scene, might have been, it was the way we told it.
She walked into the man wheeling the bike as we left and headed to get chips before going back to the flat for a coffee.
On Jamaica Street he was standing in the doorway of the shop next to the studios opposite the back entrance to the massage parlour. Three other men were there and he was talking to one of them as we passed.
'Hello,' he said, 'you having a good evening?'
'Hello,' I said, 'yes. How about you?'
'Yes,' he said.
We walked just a little further stopping to look in the window of the shop at the small screen showing a gig from the inside.
'Where's that?' she said.
'The Canteen, I think.'
'Is it live?'
'I don't know,' I said.
We turned round together to see if what was on the screen was what was happening in the Canteen we could see from where we stood.
'No,' I said, 'it isn't.'
'Look, fire jugglers,' she said.
'Are they inside or out?'
'Out,' she said, 'It's a reflection.'
we watched a few minutes then walked on stepping round a group of young drinkers and up by the Bell people sat on the pavement to the entrance to the alleyway.
As I lay in bed the early hours of the morning I thought how I hadn't had a conversation about the evening with him and how it might not have been rude but that it was a missed opportunity.

MILES TO GO

The new tenant lives the same floor as the laundry, before he moved in I came out the lift and there was, turned out I heard later, the dead body of a man by the door of what is now the new tenant's flat.
The flat is for junkies, that's all I've known live there.
The previous tenant woke one morning next to his girlfriend'd died during the night, the police investigated but no charges were brought, three months later the tenant died of liver failure when the cancer he knew would kill him eventually did. The Dead Sofas practiced in his front room, I couldn't hear them from my flat but he told me about them and the night they played at Mackies.
The new tenant feeds off the Hungry Ghosts queuing outside the Croft or from outside the canteen's fence he asks them, drinking coffee, cocktails, a pint or two, for spare change or a cigarette. His relationships are based on their capacity to gratify his needs and wants. It doesn't nourish him without product.
He limped out of the lift having said to his friend on the way up, 'Sometimes it seems to take longer than other times but I know it's the the same each time.' The limping, crutches, occasionally a wheelchair after amputation, when it's known to have been said, 'It's not a joke anymore.'
His friend said, 'Hmm,' watching the numbers.
The new tenant has miles to go.


WAIT FOR ME

...Stokes Croft, the people who wander the streets with anything left, wondering...headlines, films, the number of cars, public transport, bodily fluids in the lift, someone's friend staring at the wall...
she asks me things, makes suggestions, what we could do...when I got further than how I felt I understood why I was this side and not the other...
'I'll be fine,' she said when I dropped her off...lost minutes in the afternoon.
When she was back at the flat I asked what happened and said, 'I want to stand for election.'
'I won't vote for you,' she said, 'because you didn't wait for me.'