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The neighbour

Romance is not dead. At least not in the older generation. I could just die from laughing. Not from derision, no, those days are long gone, but from amusement and a sense of triumph. But this is not my story. Let me start from the beginning.

When my friend and I moved into this apartment complex, we didn't know anyone. We still don't. We meet our neighbours in the car park and hallway and nod and smile to each other and that's about it. So we have come up with our own names for them and speculate on what they do for their living and how they relate to the people who live with them, if they do have flatmates. The fact that our apartment is on the ground floor and our living room doors open up to the grass verge and the car park outside made it easier to spy on our neighbours when they came home or come out to throw out the trash. We're nosy like that.

Our favourite neighbour is someone who we call Cancer Man. He doesn't really have cancer (at least not that we are aware of). He's a man in his 60s, grey haired and balding but dresses well and looks like he looks after himself. He has that slightly tanned look as if he spends a lot of his holidays in the south of France or on his yacht somewhere. He drives a black Beemer and he lives alone.

When we're out in the driveway or in our living room with the doors open, we'd often hear him having quite prolonged coughing fits. At first, we thought maybe he had a bad chest infection or pneumonia or something. But after many weeks went by, his coughing continued but he never looked acutely ill. So it appeared that he has a chronic, but non-fatal cough.

My flatmate said,"I bet he's a smoker. He's got COPD."

(COPD is Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease - you get it if you smoke like a chimney or have a rare genetic disorder.)

Me, being the more morbid one said,"No, he's got lung cancer. His wife has died and he's had to downsize to this smaller apartment. But now he has discovered he's got lung cancer. That's why he doesn't go out to work regularly. Because he can't manage."

"That's not very nice."

"It's not like I'm wishing it upon him. I'm just saying that's how it looks like. I can't help but think of him as Cancer Man."

"That's terrible," flatmate says.

But the name has stuck and we can't call him anything else. Anyway, it's been seven months since and he's still looking hale and hearty and goes to work occasionally. We've modified his background story a little bit. His wife didn't die but actually divorced him. She got the house which is why he's had to come and live here, in an apartment more used to seeing younger couples instead of old, single men. He doesn't have lung cancer anymore but COPD, but we still call him Cancer Man. Flatmate has had the odd conversation with him about the weather and such. He told her that he's a retired surgeon but still does some part-time work. She thinks he works for Everton football club since he occasionally wears an Everton shirt.

"Maybe he's an Everton fan," I answered.

"But he doesn't sound like he's from Liverpool. People from outside Liverpool would normally support Liverpool, not Everton," Flatmate countered.

"Yeah, but he's a colorectal surgeon. What sort of work would he do on Everton's fine, young footballers? Remove their bowel tumours?"

"He probably repairs their hernias. Athletes get a lot of hernias," Flatmate replied.

"Do they?"

"Yes."

"Oh."

Pause.

"And remember," she added,"Mr C, the surgeon we both used to work for, he does work for Liverpool."

"No, he doesn't. He's just a fanatical Liverpool football fan who'd take a day off work to fly to Turkey to watch them play. Besides, he told us he gatecrashed the VIP party. If he did do work for LFC, he wouldn't have needed to gatecrash the party."

"Ah, but Dr.E does the MRI scan reports for the new players for Liverpool,"she said.

"Just because a doctor has a rich private practice doesn't mean they're all working for the professional football clubs, "I sniffed.

The argument ended there, but from then on he became, in our story of him, the surgeon who worked for Everton football club repairing footballers' hernias.

But we still don't know his name. Flatmate, being the gregarious person that she is, waves and smiles whenever she sees him out in the carpark. She waved at him again last weekend as he got out of his car carrying a box of paperwork. Me, I was busy watching Daniel Day-Lewis on the tube.

Late last night, we heard a knock at our door. We both freeze. Flatmate is wary because she's just naturally paranoid while with me it's a leftover reflex from my student days when we had a rigged electric meter and we couldn't let the meterman in the house. After a few seconds, I got up and looked through the keyhole. There was no one there. I locked the door.

This morning I woke up to find a text message from my flatmate on my phone. Someone had left a bouquet of flowers at our front door. Flatmate asked me to read the card and to redirect it to the correct apartment, because honestly, there was no one in our lives who would send either of us flowers.

I opened the small card. It was addressed to 'The Beautiful Unknown Princess' and it was signed. I raised my eyebrows at that. Sounds like some young buck wooing a lady who's caught his fancy. I then opened the letter that came with the flowers. The letter was half a page long and it was typed on thick yellow paper. The first sentence read, 'All stories start from somewhere.'

I was puzzled but intrigued. As I read on, I realised that this letter was from our upstairs neighbour, Cancer Man, and it was addressed to my flatmate. Of course, that didn't stop me from reading further. My grandmother used to say that a smile is a charity, and in the case of Cancer Man, rich as he was, my flatmate's beautiful smile as he got home from a tiring day from work was just the tonic to bring a smile to his own face and ease his worn self. I thought this was awfully sweet (after I had laughed my head off, of course). I called my flatmate at work who was horrified as I read out the letter to her.

"Uuuuuhghh, that's a bit creepy," she cried.

"Maybe, but it is quite sweet. Well, that's what you get for smiling at old, lonely men,"I chuckled.

"But what does it all mean?"

"I don't know, you'd have to go and speak to him," I said."His number's on the bottom of the letter."

Flatmate grunted, "Look, I can't deal with this right now. I've gotta go to teaching. I'll see you tonight."

I hung up the phone, still chuckling to myself. I looked at the bouquet of flowers. There were red roses in it. Aaah, the flowers of love. I poured some water and flower food in a vase and placed the flowers in it. I put the vase and the letter in my flatmate's room and went back to mopping the floors.

Watch this space.

Comments

Lily G said…
it would have been very romantic too had it not been an everton fan lol

so, where's chapter 2?
Kere said…
Romance from the unlikeliest of sources. My flatmate was hoping for attention from the bloke in the block across...perhaps some of her ardour has been misdirected. Just shows that you can feel ahem, excitement, at any age.

I'm afraid Chapter 2 has to wait till I get back home. I am away visiting family and friends. God knows what those two 'lovebirds' have been up to while I've been away.

Heck, it would have been very romantic if he had been a younger man, is what I say, never mind that he's an Everton fan.

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