Mrs. McGraw
“We wouldn’t want our furry friends to come visiting again, now would we?”
That. Right there. Some borderline of feasibility has flashed suddenly past, like the unseen frames of a comic movie, and brings up fourth and, like, seventy-two on any hopes of a plausible relationship, sending the kicking teams on the sidelines of my mind into paroxyms of cleat-grinding anticipative fury.
“Furry friends, furry friends.” I murmur, as if trying to put a face to the name. I give up. “What furry friends?”
I realise that it is a linguistic trope that nosy, bossy, middle-aged spinsters twitter like Tweety Pie’s gramma: but it is also a lazy piece of characterisation which has strange old women refer to animals in alliterative terms as friends, four-legged or feathered, and if she can’t be bothered to avoid stereotypes then why on Earth should I? So she twitters.
“Rats, rats!”, widening her eyes in the false alarm of a kids’ storyteller. “They creep up the paths at night, and tear open the binbags, and dirty the doorsteps…”
“And lick the soup from the ladles?”
She doesn’t get it, but seems to construe the basic sentiment of the statement as being sympathetic, and goes on. I am hungry and impatient and not really listening, but can tell from the sing-song affectation of airiness which some people employ to talk to children that I am being Ticked Off: as near as I can tell, for using the wrong colour of refuse sacks.
And I should JUST. Leave. It. I have already spent two minutes standing in the doorway of my new flat listening to this woman, who has introduced herself but whose name is of no interest to me and whom I have therefore silently designated Mrs McGraw in the grim certainty that I shall one day need a phrase to explain the recurrence of daft circumstances to visitors. (”Oh, that’s just Mrs McGraw.” “Don’t mind old Mrs McGraw.” “Sounds like Mrs McGraw’s at it again.”) It occurs to me that the first stage of persecution suffered by Kafka’s heroes was that they always had inquisitive, interrogative, downright idiotic neighbours. Still! Blue binbags! What the fuck?
“Sorry, what was that about blue binbags?”
“… the council only leaves two actual bins outside, you see, and one of them is mine and one of them belongs to the lady across the hall, so everybody else needs to put their rubbish in…”
“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” She does not wait a minute, but I am growing reasonably adept at not caring. “Why do YOU have bins? Why don’t I have a bin?”
“… and when I saw the binbags and I realised they must be yours because they weren’t blue…”
“How do I even know if any of this is true? For all I know, one of those might be MY bin. In fact, I bet it is.”
“… so you have to keep remembering to ask for the BLUE binbags, because the black ones won’t do…”
“Come to think of it, they’re both mine. I wonder what I’ll do with them. What sort of food do rats like?”
“Rats! Rats!” Her body quivers, as if with the trembling of imaginary whiskers. Once again her eyes widen, and for a horrible moment I think she is going to lay her hand on my arm in the way feeble people do to supplement their earnestness. “Awful creatures! But that’s why you have to ALWAYS remember to use the blue binbags, you see?”
By now I’ll have time to eat my lunch on the way back to work. “Okay, okay.” I mutter, demonstratively thrusting my arms back into the sleeves of my jacket. “Alrightalrightalright. Blue binbags. Council. Ladles. Got it.”
“It stops the rats, you see. They tore apart the black binbags you left out yesterday night. Tore them to absolute shreds. Such an awful mess, all over the doorstep.” I sigh wearily, but try to make it look like a natural part of the door-locking process.
“Did they? I’m sorry about that. But I didn’t know there were any rats.”
“Oh, everyone knows about the rats! But it’s a very nice building apart from that. We have such beautiful views! I’m sure you’ll like it.”
“I’m sure I will. Bye.” The spiral staircase winds down a level or two to a dark blue door of naval tint where you can already hear the rushing river drowning out the faltering footsteps, and outside there is light, glossy and uninterrupted on the untorn, shiny black binbags and beyond to the bridging night where, yes, the view is lovely.