Shenzi/banzai

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Sometimes I wake up at 3am. I’m not sure if I’m just waking up, or if some kind of racket is waking me. This is an apartment block full of people who work in the district, and the district is entertainment. So they could be getting home around 3. I know that in the next door apartment lives a woman who appears to have a vacuuming fetish, and a loud man who drinks a lot. Sometimes she vacuums at midnight, the whine of the machine and the thump of it hitting the wall, over and over. Then she’ll vacuum again about 7. That surprises me a little, I can’t really see the need for such regular vacuuming. I don’t mind so much because it mitigates my own noise making. The squeaking floor, the chair pushing away from the table, the ads between lame youtube movies.

People take their bicycles up in the elevator and park them in the hallway. The woman opposite pushes a pram out her door, and in it sits the fattest little dog, quivering. On the floor below or above is an old man on a respirator, he has tubes in his nose and drags the machine along with him. And there are mamasans from the bars downstairs, who seem bent on dragging some of their customers out of their beds for a singalong. Someone vomited in the lift before I went out this morning, that wasn’t so nice. I edged around the newspaper somebody had placed over it, and on my way back tried not to look to closely at the contents of the ashtray on the first floor.

The garbage is thankfully simple. There are no special taxed bags, that’s for the countryside. You can just put out your grocery bags. Monday and Thursday for burnables, Wednesday for plastics, Friday for cans and bottles. They have to go on a neat pile across the road, not the night before and not after 9am. It’s relatively easy compared to some of my garbage experiences – and believe me, garbage can be the breaking point of any neighbourly relationship.

I don’t mind this apartment. It’s a bit small, and drying canvases is going to be a challenge. Not nearly as much as no garden and no pets. This morning I found three cats outside the convenience store, fluttering their eyelashes at people coming out of the shop.