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The Ups And Downs Of A Green Fingered Lady.
I am always waiting for something; today it happens to be the lift.
Living in a high rise does sometimes have its little trials and this was one, waiting. I sighed heavily each time an orange odd number lit up,
5, sigh, 7, sigh, 9, sigh, I looked down at my bike, and I’ll have to clean off that mud, sigh, sometime. I heard the security door sighing and I turned ‘round to see a small, rotund lady wearing all red waddling towards me like a penguin with bad corns.
In each hand she carried the iconic blue stripped corner shop carrier bag, these bags I find from experience to be one notch up from being useless, they’re so thin they’re almost not there and these bags were under serious pressure from the two 3 Litre bottles of White Star cider contained within.
‘ Lift’s knackered again?’ she hisses getting closer, ‘Council eh? Fuck ‘em and their lifts,’
I nodded and shrugged, anyone who’s ever had the good fortune to stay in a high rise will be aware that when there are two lifts, one is usually ‘OUT OF SERVICE’ as it says on the sticker, I always think that a thicker elastic band would solve the problem.
She put her bags down gently, she took out one of the cider bottles, a big smile appears on her face, she opens it and I hear the hiss as the liquid chemical cosh escapes.
She turns to me and winks, she raises the bottle to her hairy mouth, I can see that her mouth contains two teeth, both in the top, yellow and black like she’d swallowed a couple of tired bees.
She takes a long swig, her eyes water, it’s fizzy stuff, she blinks, her bright red lipstick leaves a ring around the rim,
‘Want a slug?’ She offers me the bottle, I almost take a step backward, and I can feel the shiver looking for a home in my spine region,
‘ No thanks, I’m driving’ I say looking down at my bike, she shrugs and puts the cider back in the bag, the smell of alcohol from her is overpowering, I think she must bathe in the stuff.
I look up at the odd numbers; I do not really want the lift to come now. My nearly new drinking buddy reaches into one of the bags and brings out a white paper bag,’ Freshly Baked,’ says the logo above the picture of a mince pie with little squiggly vertical lines escaping from the top, my pal takes out a mince pie and a well fired roll,
‘Bastard! Hot, Hot, Hot!’ she shouts juggling the pie between her hands, she quickly manages to open the roll and place the pie inside, she squashes the pie down inside the roll, hot grease and mince shoot out from the sides. She licks her fingers and hands, the two tired bees sink into the carefully prepared culinary treat, I can tell that she is enjoying it from the various loud grunts, ahhhh’s and mmm’s, I hear a female voice coming from the lift,
‘ Kylie-Chantal! Ah’m gonnae fuckin’ hammer you girl when we git oot o’ here’
The lifts doors open and a young girl, about six, shoots out of the doors followed by a young pit-bull, about one year old.
The girl and the dog wait by the security door, the mother follows pushing a buggy, she storms up to the door.
I look down at my colleague, she seems completely unaware of anyone else, I watch as she licks the shiny grease from her fingers, she looks up at me and nods for me to get in first, I flip the bike onto its back wheel and roll it in, careful to avoid the puddle of piss,
‘What floor?’ She asks
‘15 please,’ I reply watching as a greasy digit presses 11 then 15.
The doors close, slowly. My companion looks up at me, in between a m’mm and a a’hh she smiles, I smile back and look down at the front wheel, I give it a spin and watch as it whirls ‘round. This is the moment, and I knew it would eventually come, when I could kick myself for not signing that consent form the council sent out saying they were thinking about installing the new rapid N.A.S.A style lifts.
I can’t avoid her staring powers; I turn and look at her,
‘ Would you like a munch off my pie? ‘ she says offering me her pie roll, this offer was music to my ears, the kind of music you hear when all the lights go out in the house and cousin Billy, the badly damaged teenage relative you’ve never heard about ‘cos all the older members of the family have vowed never to mention his cursed name, has found his way to your house from the supposedly secure unit he’s just escaped from after decapitating two guards and shoving his arms up the arse of a Doberman and strangling it, is waiting for you in a hockey mask, boiler-suit and carrying a chainsaw in your cellar where the fuse box is situated, not only that, but he’s holding his most favourite stamp album in the world which happens to be the very album that last night you somehow managed to spill a large glass of Ribeena over whilst reaching for the remote control because Eastenders was about to come on and you think it’s crap.
‘ Thanks but I’ve eaten’
The lift stops at 11. The woman winks at me and leaves. I sigh with relief as the door closes and the lift moves upwards.
Up behind me I can swear I hear laughter coming from the 24 hr surveillance unit, the lift eventually reaches 15 and I’m happy to get out.
A few weeks later and I find myself in the lift again, bike propped up on its hind wheel, I stare vacantly at the floor, the silver walls, the ball of phlegm between the number 3 and 5 which looks remarkably like Davina McCall, but slightly more attractive, I wonder at the mentality of someone who could have done such a thing, perhaps a disgruntled postie pissed off because the even numbered lift is still’ OUT OF SERVICE,’ suddenly I feel like I too would like to leave my own interpretation of Dav through the medium of a sample of bodily fluid in this metal sputum box, but before I can snort up any of my own delightful mucous membrane the lift stops and I
automatically exit backwards with the bike .It’s only when I have both wheels of the bike on the same level that I realize something is wrong, the large number 11 on the wall behind me tells me I’ve been hoodwinked by this temperamental lift, I reach for the button but I’m too slow and the lift is away on its travels.
‘Bollocks ‘
This isn’t the first time it’s happened, and it won’t be the last. I look over to my left, the usual landing, doorless fridge and shopping trolley, nothing different there, then I realize that this floor smells funny, most landings all have the same aroma, fags and piss and bad human smells, and bad cat and dog smells, rumour has it that there’s even been the bad sheep smell, Aberdonians eh? I turn to the right and I see the plants.
‘ Jesus ‘
I’m so shocked that I have to look twice, I rest the bike against the wall and walk to the landing door, I press my face to the cheese wire security glass, inside it looks like a rain forest, there are plants everywhere, it’s hard to believe that in this vertical desert such an oasis could exist.
I can see Iris’s, Primrose, Poppy’s, Heathers, these are the plants I recognized but there were other plants I’d never seen before, plants that looked like something you’d see in a hot house in a Botanical gardens, Cacti with bright pink flowers, long red flowers, it was beautiful, a mass of rich vibrant colours, there was a huge Umbrella plant, I have one myself.
There were Ivy’s creeping up the walls in blue plant pots, I hadn’t really noticed at first but there were a lot of things made of the blue plastic, mobiles gently turning in the soft breeze coming from the open window, blue birds cut from the plastic, sunlight shining through the wings, sparkling, sending out beams of light around the walls of the landing.
There are three flats on each side of the landings, there was a little path through to each of the flats doors, it looked like something from the jungle book, I expected Mogli to pop up any minute, I was mesmerized, I couldn’t take it in, and then I saw a shadow at one of the doors, 11/ 1, I jumped back from the door and grabbed my bike, I pressed the lift button frantically thinking that the harder I pressed it the quicker it would come.
The door opened and I sneaked a look, it was her, the bright red, pie eating cider woman, I watched as she moved slowly through the dense greenery with a bottle, a blue cider bottle and proceeded to give the plants a drink of cider, of course I realized that that’s why there were so many blue plant pots and mobiles, she’d recycled the cider bottles.
I had one eye on her and one eye on the lift, I could hear it approach, the woman suddenly disappeared, I stretched my neck trying to see where she was, the lift arrived, the doors opened, just as I was about to get in she was there, her face at the window, staring at me, her red lipstick smearing the glass she was so close to it, she began to shout at me,
‘ Was it you? Was it you? ‘
I leapt into the lift and I pressed 15 gratefully.
About three weeks later I was coming into the building and I notice the plants lying scattered on the ground, I could see the blue plastic pots in amongst the dark brown compost, pink and yellow flowers and cactus plants spread over the concrete entrance, I looked up and saw that the window to 11/1 was open, I took the lift to her floor, the landing had been cleared, inside there were three distressed council people, they’re easy to spot with the big council anoraks, I pretended to ring the doorbell to one of the flats opposite but I kept sneaking a look at what was going on over in the cider lady’s landing.
I could hear her pleading with the council workers not to take away her plants, I heard a female tell her that she had been sent out at least six letters, and that she’d had ample time to remove them herself, I could see four black bags, the umbrella plant sticking out of the one on top.
The cider lady was screaming at the council employees, trying to retrieve the plants from the black bags, she was throwing some of the plants from the stair window, the council workers were trying to calm her down, the police were mentioned, I turned and pressed the button for the lift. I felt embarrassed, leave her with the plants, they’re not harming anyone, they bring a little bit of beauty to this concrete nightmare.
I took a last look at the sad scene to my left and got into the lift.
The next day I spoke to the concierge, someone had been complaining to the council, saying that it was a safety issue, saying that they were worried about a fire risk, some kind of jealousy risk more like, so the council came and told her to get rid of the plants right away, told her to bin them, to clean up the landing and make it look like every other one in the building.
About a week after that, the cider lady went out and bought herself 3 bottles of cider, after she had drunk the third bottle, she opened her living-room window and joined her plants.
THE END.
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