The Interloper

Gary had awoken with an insatiable thirst for the velvety serenity of a cup of milky tea. Often one awakes with an unaccomplishable set of desiderata in mind, but sitting hulking and inanimate upon the kitchen work surface was a box containing seventy-thousand bags of Tesco’s Own Brand tea, acquired for a price so fractional that, as Gary fumblingly jammed coppers into the self-service checkout, he looked like a triumphant victor collecting his prize from the world’s least challenging slot machine; albeit an image that would be greatly enhanced were the teabags sculpted into the shape of a gargantuan stuffed bear.

                He drifted out of bed and towards the kitchen with tea on his mind, wearing his house as if it were a comfortable old shoe. At the stairway, he turned instinctively; bleary-eyed without his contact lenses, he could hardly see – and certainly had no reason to think about – the route he was taking and the place he was at. He navigated like a speedy vehicle on auto-pilot, mechanically avoiding the creaking steps not out of a conscious concern for the sanctity of the quiet, but because something in him told him the sound was irritating, and because when you’re waiting on a steaming cup, it’s unsettlingly easy to take for granted that you’ve got somewhere to drink it.

                The caffeinated monstrosity reared up through the kitchen door, its cardboard lid hanging open from the previous night, which dissolved into a heavy session on the tea. The kettle sat by the jumble of plates and, lo and behold, there was water left in it. As they do in the business world, Gary conducted a “time and motion study” and concluded that time would be saved were he to not bother refilling. He hit the switch and the kettle – which he had left plugged in; more evidence, he considered, that he was almost predestined to have this cup of tea – flashed orange and began to boil. Gary opened the fridge and–

Fuck! It had all lined up perfectly – the water in the kettle, the plug in the wall, the teabags in their Goliathan receptacle – until now. Gary’s heart skipped a thousand beats as it dawned upon him that he had no milk. He would have to walk for at least five minutes were he to shop at Eastern Bloc, its shop front lovingly adjourned by a promise to provide its customers with the best “Eastern Europe Foods” and, although two grammatical errors in three words is an impressive feat, he regretted the necessity of leaving the semi-detached world he’d built for himself.

***

Milk in plastic bag in hand, Gary sidled up the familiar street. He felt angst-ridden, uneasy; so libidinously was he clucking a mug that he began to sweat, the perspiratory drip clamming up his face and causing him to grimace alarmingly at somebody presumably in the employ of the Auto Repair Garage.  He swung the bag accliviously by its handles and clutched onto the milk, stroking the bottle through the bag’s flimsy skin. Approaching his front door from the opposite side of the pavement, Gary relaxed and let it hang, walking towards it in such an insistent straight line that it was as if he wished he would simply pass through his door like a translucent spectre. Unfortunately, as he emerged upon his side of the pavement, his gaze was broken. His eyes darting upwards diagonally, it became evident to him that there was somebody upstairs and, what’s more, they were having a damn good time.

I mean, Christ, the window was open. See, sound had a spooky way of travelling through Gary’s abode – toasting some toast or brewing a brew, one could seek to improve the overall experience with music, but would hear it better from the stairway. These architectural quirks lead him to make a point of closing his windows in order to really listen to music in the bedroom that faced the street, lest the neighbours be provided with a constant, and some might say unpalatable, DJ set. The current occupant(s), it seemed, had no such qualms about serenading the neighbourhood with the gangsta rap stylings of A$AP Ferg’s Trap Lord.

As Ferg helpfully contemplated whether a semi-automatic or a TEC-9 might best kill an unfortunate “motherfucker”, Gary felt a surge of emotion in which fury was tempered by confusion. He jiggled the keys around in his pocket, but he was extremely reticent about venturing into an unknown that had, about twenty minutes prior to these events, been his stomping ground. Call the police! you will say, but you must understand that that was not a possibility. Gary had left certain sensitive items around the house, and he could by no means justify handing the law enforcement a conclusive piece of self-incriminating evidence; a smoking bong, so to speak. He knocked on the door.

Before he saw anybody, a whale-moan could be heard coming from the stairway, or perhaps the kitchen;

“Yooooooooo…”

Gary stood as a guest outside his own front door. The man who answered was no doppelganger – no sick Dostoyevskian double, come to steal his life, his home, his image – nor was it a cop and, for the latter at least, he was grateful. The intruder – all Heffner smoking jacket and full-moon spectacles – lackadaisically stroked the subtly ginger follicular appendages that had engorged his face, their colour the only distraction from their burgeoning Hasidic dimensionsHasH.

“You here for the meeting?” he asked. The accent he spoke with had travelled one way or another between England and the US, seemingly settling smack bang in the middle on some rock west of Ireland.

“What meeting?”

“Well, I hope it’ll be a meeting of the minds, baby.”

Gary spluttered and stared. The intruder tipped his chin upwards and titled his head. His eyes narrowed as he examined this new specimen. Gary thought he saw something behind them too; a crazily efficient clockwork mechanism spun inside that beardy head, and right now it was analysing him, sussing out just what his whole raison d'etre was in this kerfuffle. The usurper stopped stroking his beard for a second, and this broke his concentration; he abandoned the eye contact and immediately returned to the beard for another round of fidgeting.

“Are you…like…squatters?” Gary asked.

“Nah, we don’t need to squat. We got seats!”

“…and wh-”

“Let me break it down for you. Come in, come in…”

He welcomed Gary into his own home.

“I’m with an organisation called Junkies for Jesus.”

Dumbfounded, Gary could only hazard “is that… some kind of recovery group?”

“Oh no, I have absolutely no interest in kicking the smack. I have a lot of resolve in my belief that there are no two things more compatible than the Zen of heroin addiction and the theological guidelines of evangelical Christianity.” Gary was in a daze, but the current occupant guided him into his kitchen. Where was the tea? “You want anything to drink? Anything to smoke? I can hook you up with a radical bowl…”

“Tea?”

“We don’t have that. I’d give you a hit of my heroin but, ahhh…then I wouldn’t have as much heroin. SALLY! SALLY! SALLY!” he rose to his feet and began screaming at the ceiling, lobbing projectiles against it – although nothing more likely to crack their skulls in their subsequent descent than a box of Coco Pops. “SALLY! HEY, SALLY! YO!” Upon that last “yo” he seemed to have a change of heart, stopping dead in his tracks and reaching into his pocket for something. He pulled out a beat-up iPhone and began to text with a dead-eyed look of total focus and concentration, and then he jerked back to life;

“Ok, Sally’s not going to bring the bong down. Not to worry-” he began to thumb a crumpled Zig-Zag rolling paper, winking at Gary “Bun big zoots, keep smilin’. Whaddya wanna know? I got a whole life to talk about, and a whole life to talk about it in. I can tell my origin story – growing up in the Deep South lonely, ostracised, not knowing the love of Jesus. The only Jew in the whole of Savannah – how about that?! Even my family, they were gentiles! I still don’t know how that worked, but I can tell you I poured my despair, my woe, into the world of drugs. Taking drugs. Selling drugs. Manufacturing drugs.  Drugs were the best goddamn thing Judaism ever did for me. Met Sally at a crackhouse in Minneapolis. Passed out by a river and wound up gettin’ baptised…”

Gary was in no mood for this invasive raconteur. He snapped, grabbing a pint of water off the kitchen table and lobbing the contents in his face.

“How’s that for a baptism, you mad prick? What the fuck are you doing in my house?!”

The proselyte did nothing but smirk. He finished up the joint he was rolling, lit it as he puffed upon it, and sedately looked Gary dead in the eye;

“This is my place now.”

“Tell me…” Gary seethed with clenched fists “…what you did to the tea?”

“I drink coffee.”

“It was a bargain!”

“I know it was. I like to shop at Tesco too. I’m aware of their reasonable prices.”

“And if you were to get milk?” Gary was incensed, but the truth was all coming out. First this hustler had taken his house, now the extraneous parts of his everyday environment?

“There’s a place round the block that sells some real good Eastern Europe Foods.”

Gary began to throw things around the room, recklessly decimating dishware until the settler peacefully restrained him, holding his flailing arms.

“Why don’t you stay for this joint? It’s hella fat. You haven’t even met Sally yet.”

But Gary had hung his head in despair and was walking towards the door.

“I haven’t kicked you out! Stay for a while.”

Gary stopped by the door and turned to face his adversary.

“Can’t.”

“Why not? I got some weed, I got some hip-hop, I got coffee, hell, I’ll even crack into my Henry the Horse if it’ll wipe that frown off your face.”

“The place,” said Gary with a great sense of resignation, “doesn’t feel the same as it did.”

“Places erode – even the stuff humans built. If the bricks don’t crumble, the spirit will. Time changes everything.”

“Yeah,” sighed Gary, and he let himself out.

Time, indeed, had changed everything.