We got back from Berlin at around 2pm. It had been one of those trips. Getting to the airport at 8am only to find that the flight was delayed an hour and a half. Getting to Luton and buying bus tickets only to find that the bus was delayed by half an hour. Traffic. A grumpy bus driver. A tiff. Rain. The typical comeback comedown.
When I got home I checked my mails or something. Within twenty minutes there was a knock at the door. Two women from the tenancy company asking if I’d seen my neighbour. It’s been about six weeks now I’ve been back in the flat and I haven’t seen head nor hide of him. A few weeks ago my former tenant came round to pick up his post and asked if I’d run into him. When I said I hadn’t he said he must have gone away for a bit. It’s been years since I lived in this flat and I have a vague memory of a man who was quite kindly but who I never got to know.
I explained to the women that I hadn’t seen him. They started shouting through the letterbox. There was no reply. They seemed concerned. About half an hour later, C told me that the police had arrived. I looked through the peephole at the very moment that a policeman kicked the door in, surprisingly easily. It was, indeed, like a cop show, seen through a fish eye lens. A little later I opened the door. There were four policemen and the two women. The most senior policeman said that, unfortunately, he had to inform me that my neighbour was now deceased. Again, he asked if I’d seen anything and again I explained that I hadn’t been living here long and hadn’t seen my neighbour since I’d been back.
About an hour later I looked through the peephole again. Two men were lugging a body-bag out of the flat. They were struggling and telling each other off, like angry removal men.
When we left the flat later to watch the football, the smell coming from next door was overpowering. The sickly smell of death. The smell we read about in the papers when they talk about massacres; in countries gripped by war; when planes fall from the sky and crash on the earth. This smell, the most universal of smells, the smell that unifies all mankind, from babe to veteran, was completely alien. As though to show how us how inured we have been to that which it means to be alive, which is to die. Inured through the accident of history, through luck, through the privilege of living in times when death is a stranger.
I wondered how long my erstwhile neighbour had been dead. It was presumably weeks. As we left the building, Jose, the Spanish concierge, made a comment that they only find out you’ve died when you haven’t paid your rent. It’s true. This is the anonymous city, where no-one notices your absence, where your death will go unheralded, if you haven’t managed to convince people it’s worth something. Death has a currency like everything else.
I trust he rests in peace, the unknown neighbour who has now moved on.
