How to Establish Cordial
Relations with
Your Cephalopod Neighbour
by
A giant squid has moved in next-door and the walls are whisper-thin. He plays techno and raves, a flummoxing splash, 24-7, and he shouts at himself in disparaging tones. ‘Everything’s shit,’ he wails, flinging cups at the windows.
I slip a note beneath his door: ‘Please could you keep the noise down, thank you.’ But maybe squids can’t read because he turns up his radio and buys a drumkit to batter with flailing limbs. I retaliate with full-volume Radio 3, Stravinsky spitting strings at his urban beats.
He’s got a cuttlefish girlfriend, and I hear every slosh of their sucker-slap and squirt before they siphon vodka, neat, from the bottle, and her sepia voice starts to slur and swear. My bed hides beneath itself, hands over its ears to the beat-beat-thump of Ibiza FM and the beat-beat-bruise of her tentacled eye. I call the police and they blue-flash arrive, have a word, but same night he’s pounding the walls, screaming, ‘Nosy bitch, keep out of it.’
The mice pack up and leave, ink-dipping their scrabble-claws to write a squeaky note, ‘Thanks for the cheese.’ And in the attic the pipistrelles are looking up rentals, penthouse suites, but I’m scared of change and I love my house, arched windows overlooking the downs, dawn light illumining green through trees. I used to feel safe here.
I ask the ghosts, ‘Can’t you spook him out?’ but they’re grumpy from being kept awake all day and they say, ‘Not haunting there, it’s filthy, have you seen?’ And I have, a glimpse of beer cans and ashtrays and brackish aroma of oil-slicked ocean, rotting crab, stale gulls, lonely tides.
I take a deep breath and knock politely with a lump hammer, say, ‘Please, it’s not neighbourly,’ but he stares with his dead, flat dinner-plate eye, poly-arms dread coiling, roll-up clamped in his salt-rimmed beak, and he says, ‘Fuck off,’ as he propels away, farting ink in my face as he slams the door.
Stumbling half-dressed from a nap one day, and I see him in his yard, a sweat-stained singlet clinging as he wrist-curls eight barbells, muscles bulging. He glances up and I back away in a hot tingle. I shake it out, fold it in a drawer, but that night it slithers free and into a dream of soft popping suckers on thighs, multi-arms reaching, touching, exploring. I shock awake, take a cold shower.
His mates come around, long-drowned, with coral skin and oyster eyes. They smoke skunk and boil kraken-crystals on a hob-hot spoon, I hear the crackle, calamari crisp, and the music swells louder, louder, louder. The line snaps and I scroll on Amazon, place an order.
Next morning, when he opens the door, pale-mantled and sag-eyed, his tentacles limp, I take aim, tremble-fingered on the trigger, and I catch a whiff of his barnacled fear as he floats back, fins wavering, and says, ‘Please, don’t shoot.’
I lower the harpoon.
We watch each other. Wary.
The Molotov Cocktail 