“I’ll bung you a few quid if you catch anybody fucking my cat.”
That’s what I’ll remember, Roy. You offering me money if I spotted anyone in the neighbourhood sticking their old fella up your mangy old cat because, unless I have lived more of a sheltered life than I believe, I’m pretty sure that the slang term pussy isn’t literal. There aren’t teenage boys everywhere looking at cats and thinking to themselves I’m so going to fuck the hell out of that.
I’d moved there in the winter. Top end of town. The wind whipping up off the harbour, up the hill. Fucking hell, the cold. A closed down pub called The Windy Corner told its own story. The day I moved in was proper Arctic. Your sweat would turn into frost on your brow. Me and Dead John moving my life one carload at a time to the only place I could get in January. No reference required, first month up front.
Dead John is called Dead John because he’s dead. He wasn’t then, but he is now. We called him Skinny John back then. Didn’t know any Fat Johns but we had Black John and Diabetic John so it only seemed fair to give him a nickname too. Since the accident we just talk about him as Dead John.
So, we’ve got the sofa in at last. Dead John’s car just about managed it. I’ve put the kettle on and found the teabags. Going to plug the telly in and stick a DVD on. Order a curry, get some beers in. Going to make a real night of it, me and Dead John.
There’s a heavy knock at the door.
Might be a hot neighbour says Dead John.
This sparks a surge in my energy levels and I’m brushing my hair back and running to the door just in case I’ve moved in next door to an unfussy girl who looks like that one out of Elf.
As I opened the door, an invisible truck of icy wind roared past. Before me stood a man who looked like he’d emerged from the business end of an abbatoir. He was comfortably older than me, in his sixties I’d guess. He had a face that told a thousand stories and none of them looked like ones I wanted to hear. It seemed thrown together from many constituent parts. Even his eyes were asymmetrical. In the middle a huge slab of nose was parked, broken at some point. This gargoyle stood before me in a pyjama shirt caked with flecks of blood and other crumbs of human waste.
“Hello, I’m Roy. I live next door.”
Reluctantly, I shook the grim hand proffered.
“Come in, come in” I found myself saying.
“No, no. I won’t stop. Just wanted to introduce myself. Everyone knows me round here. If anyone gives you any trouble, talk to me and I’ll have a word.”
“Oh okay, thanks. I’m Mickey by the way.”
“Nice to meet you. Right, I’ll be off.”
I shut the door.
“Who was that?”
“Roy. My next door neighbour. Covered in blood and bogies. So, that’s good.”
Dead John let out a big laugh. It was a good night, that. We watched this film where Will Ferrell has a yard sale of everything he owns outside the house that he doesn’t live in anymore. One of the last good times I had with Dead John too.
Roy was no bother really. Every few weeks he’d knock and ask if I’d seen anybody sexually interfering with his cat. Offering a cash reward for information. One time he turned up and asked if I wanted a stuffed monkey he had found in a skip. Then I didn’t see him for a while.
In the local paper one week there was a news story on him. He had been visiting his mother at a retirement home a few miles from here. She was close to 100 years old. Anyway, this one time he turns up and she dies whilst he’s there. According to the news report he then started punching her. She’s already dead, so he claimed, and he resumed the punching. He ends up being arrested and eventually sectioned. The house was his and it got sold by a niece of his or somebody. I saw her one day rushing in and out with cleaning products and talking on the phone about blood stains and excrement.
She saw me coming out of my house and walked up to me and asked if I knew him. I found myself saying that he kept himself to himself and almost laughed out loud at that cliche. She says he was an animal. There were bags of rotten fish and chips everywhere. And all these dead cats.
I felt bad. I offered her my condolences and explained that I did not really see him often, that he had just struck me as being a bit eccentric.
Maybe I should’ve gone to the funeral. But I didn’t. I didn’t go to Dead John’s either. I still feel bad about that. My friends fell out with me, and they were right to. The poor bastard slipped off an icy curb the near The Windy Corner and went headfirst under a lorry. It was quick I guess. No time to worry about it.
I don’t walk that way home now. I go the long way round and miss out that corner and Roy’s old house. I find myself sneaking in my own front door, like I’ve been somewhere I shouldn’t have. Close the door quietly, turn the telly on a low volume. I keep myself to myself. Next door have got a cat. It comes in my garden and tries to fuck up any birds that come near it. He is an ugly bastard. He sits on my kitchen windowsill and looks at me. He sits there and snarls at me in my own home and somehow I know that things are going to go wrong for me very soon.
