trouble next door — part 1

I did not know Clive was trouble at the beginning although I was aware there was something afoot. Walking into his house that first time reminded me of when I was introduced to the ocean as a kid it had felt like the water was spit, warm and viscous, there was something about the environment in the newly occupied house next door it was teeming with a similar strangeness. When I woke that night it was as if I were in the ocean again and the question of sanity came up, not mine but Clive’s, and just then I heard singing through the wall.

Strange are the hours the abnormal mind keeps. It was well after midnight before I heard a second voice rise in excruciating harmony half beautiful and half awful, but it was three weeks before I met her, his sister Emma I mean, I was hugging a brown paper bag of loose lemons, fifty of them they’d been practically giving them away at the close of the Sunday market and I was, still am, a sucker for a good deal.

I was jostling the bag trying to get my key from my pocket a single lemon spilled out as they came from the house next door – our houses were mirror images of one another, our steps and front doors side by side – three more lemons poured out as Clive said hello and introduced me to Emma who looked at the lemons on the ground and then at me – I don’t know if I expected her to sing or what I expected – but she smiled and said Clive calls me Lemon.

Hello Lemon I reached out to shake her hand and the other 46 poured from a sudden rip.

Later we were the three of us in my kitchen all the goddamn lemons rolled from the counter-tops, the kitchen table, it was as if we were at sea and I didn’t know what to do but find a bowl and capture a few, offer them to my juggling neighbours, later in the week our shared compost bin was teeming with spent yellow smiles, an empty bottle of tequila in the recycling, the late night duets explained.

At the time I was a retail sales associate at a men’s store and my early-to-bed-early-to-rise shtick had gone to shit that week. I hoped this empty bottle signified the end of the trouble next door, but it was only the start.