The dog next door

That nice looking local we see about the place with the big dog we learned was Angel's brother is standing at their gate, chatting with Kay. "Aaaaynjuull" he says affectionately and later he points to a flower growing in their newly hacked at front garden. It's borage, the seeds having blown over from ours. The flymo was sat outside for at least 3 months before it miraculously came to life that day when our suspicions were raised by Tony attempting something.

I tell him: "they look like they might even be some kind of friends!",I am thrown askance. The local walks his dog off the lead, it sits outside Akbars off-licence quitely waiting. It's a huge hulk of a thing, but he has it under such authority, there's no threat or menace in their soft brown eyes.

Kay's face reminds me of a garishly decorated birthday cake. All fondant icing in thick sickly layers stuck together to resemble something from sponge bob square pants. I've seen colour photocopies of those kinds of things in sticky plastic sleeves on the counter of a local bakery.

Angel wasn't just for Christmas some time ago. The pokey tarmacked back yard is strewn with broken old furniture, a scooter never used, piles of rubbish and a wicker sofa wedged outside the back door where the kids sit smoking skunk with Kay whilst Angel lurks inside in the darkness. They told us in a rare moment of neighbourly interaction and in shocked voices, that the old bits of broken bicycle had been stolen, mentioning strangers spotted in the alley and said to make sure to lock up our (not broken) bikes just in case. Like their rubbish was in some way precious, and the stranger had somehow missed ours. One man's gold is another mans back yard. He said: "it must've been the scrap man". The duplicity of thoughtfully warning us of this and the invasion in to our lives of theirs astonishes me, foolishly. "They are just living their lives" he says. "It's our problem not theirs, they aren't doing anything wrong in the eyes of the general populance", he says. I've never seen any of them ride a bike. Liam used to walk Angel once a week on a Sunday, then he discovered and later introduced his family to skunk. That was after his dad's cider made him act on his Freudian malevolence.

The flies from Angel's multiple piles of dried and fresher excursions come in to our kitchen.That's after they've also landed on the cat food I've bought and left out for their skittish scabby cat. She only walks on the tops of the yard walls, the same walls that fail so pathetically to separate our lives. We close the windows and the door against the flies but they make their way in to the bedroom. He sometimes tries to shut out the shouting, the incessant skunk fumes, and the stench of cheap washing powder. But a terraced house that is smoked in all day every day leaks its woes next door to us. The fat, lazy old things loudly buzz around my head. I squash one against the window with surprising ease and the white eggs of its inside stick and show its hopes smashed. It becomes a familiar unfortunate scene. Some days, especially Mondays, Angel barks us barking mad. Once I was home, off work for some reason and I went round, hammered on the door and was greeted after a loud thrusting against the inside of the door and a slipping of unclipped nails on the tiled floor by Alicia, all of 13 who is the most socially presentable, even pretty some might say, though with that dumb scowl of a child who has learned not to go to school. She is also the most likely to say the obligatory "orright" of the familiar - out of the 5 of them. "Can you PLEASE stop your dog barking?" I said.

Sometimes blocking the broken back gate with the empty recycling bin is forgotten and Angel lurches at the top of the steps greeting my return with the same menace that Liam used that time when he told Tony "I'm gunna fuckin stab you up, I'm gunna kill yer, yer useless lazy fat fucker".

Once, I got fed up with Tony talking about me in the front garden whilst I was watering my flowers, and I confronted him: "are you talking about me?" I was overcome with adrenaline, all fight and no frontal lobe restraint. He insisted on coming round, breathing cheap cider and re rolled tobacco all over us, telling us they have problems, Liam has ADHD and it's difficult to cope; he's depressed, he was made redundant. He told us he feels we look down on them, and he just agreed with him that we do. I told him, desperately scared of the intensity of my fury: "I just want to sleep through the night wihtout being woken up by you".

It was across the road where that second stabbing happened. We'd been away at my sister's for the weekend and we came back to Police tape and the sickening news of revenge murder. Two murders over one weekend, the second one at the wake of the first. It made national news. A party about one back alley altercation ending in another but this time with music, take away pizza and booze. The fear of what might be going on in those houses even before that used to jump me out of bed to the window, and as I dialled for the Police one night, I heard what sounded yet again like furniture being moved around next door at 3am and the bumping of someone falling down stairs and them fighting.

There's a wierd little flat faced chihuahua-cross-staffie lives in that row across the road now. Once I found it by itself, roaming free down the Dale. Angel never takes that chance. Outside the alley is unknown territory to her, she's the housebound unwalked and untrained kind of pet of those who have babies one after the other without the anxious soul searching introspection and agonised decision making of the likes of me: mentally ill-since-when and former to my accidental pregnancy considering myself incapable of such a weight of responsibility. When I had my baby, I changed my life to try and make sure she wouldn't be damaged at my hands: I'm a compliant patient now, I've tried to be sensible and good. But that's never fool proof. The stale smoke and Akbar's reduced bacon sizzling in their sticky kitchen somehow comes through the terrace when the wind is blowing in the right way, even with the windows closed. Their coughing betrays the tarred lungs of those that are surviving so far, and our little world is polluted by their chaos. As if I didn't have enough, and theirs needed to be shared out amongst the local community, or else: as if I needed to be reminded of the bad choices and missed opportunities I'd had in my life which lead me to live in a rented house - here - next to them.

Angel is now never walked. Tony said once that they'd wanted to "get rid of her - but the children wouldn't let me". I wasn't sure what "getting rid" he was referring to. There was one paranoid night where we lay awake listening to their insomnia and he thought he heard talk of guns from Tony. That was before we moved the bed to the other wall and put the wardrobes in the way.

The fat lazy shit flies I ruthlessly bash, echo something I put my ear plugs in against these days and sometimes I take the precription anti psychotic I have in my bedside drawer so I can sleep. That's as well as my daily anti depressants. Kay's "Malisss - arrrrr!' and "Leeeshaaarrrr'' isn't funny to mimic any more and instead can incite homicidal rage. Angel seems to be rotting in hell next door with that cake faced skunk bitch.