Offcuts by Patrick Hartigan

Author:Patrick Hartigan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gazebo Books

22.

Having arrived ten minutes early, I took a seat on the low wall, its row of mailboxes spewing out unwanted flyers. I sipped my takeaway coffee and looked at a cat. It was resting on its haunches beside a bowl of water and a green dish, staring at me with a thoughtful, almost beseeching expression. I whistled, puss-puss-pussed and made clicking sounds with my tongue, but it didn’t move, its body and gaze as focused as a sphinx’s.

I looked up at the apartment block I would soon be entering, its upper floors set ablaze with early morning sunshine. Every apartment was the same from the outside.

When my friend opened the door to the apartment of his sister-in-law, a woman who had recently been admitted to hospital with heart problems following years of depression, severe obesity and hoarding, I put my arm over my nose, wove my way through the living room, slid open the glass door and stepped onto the balcony. From outside I surveyed the apartment. The floor was knee high in boxes and rubbish, a layer of rat-shredded newspapers spreading across everything like confetti. On the few visible sections of carpet were large stains and white powder – what looked like some kind of poison or cleaning agent. It was hard to believe that twenty-seven tonnes of rubbish had already been removed.

On the walls there were hundreds of shiny pellets – cockroach eggs – large mould-coloured smudges, a meat pie with a beer coaster pressed into it and brown finger marks made with what might have been human faeces. There was also a photo of the cat I’d seen outside, attached to a calendar with a paper-clip. The cat was sitting on its haunches near the same bowl of water and dish, staring at the camera in exactly the way it had stared at me.

My friend came out onto the balcony with a box containing rubber gloves and fume masks. I expressed my shock at what I was seeing before putting on a mask and following him inside. As we cleaned and filled rubbish bags, I considered the large smudges on the walls. The position of each of them told a story of how the woman now in hospital had existed here – how she had moved between these rooms as the junk took over her life. Below one of the marks, and beside the pie, for example, was an outline of her now absent bed frame. In my mind I saw her slouched in her bed, semi-paralysed, with her shoulders against the wall, oils seeping from her skin into the paintwork.

A similar mark in the living room, below the calendar with the photo, had me imagining her shoulders – right shoulder going one way, left shoulder coming back – as she was squeezed towards the edge of the room by the junk. I took a closer look at the calendar – it was eighteen months out of date.

From the physical evidence and the scenes it led me

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