Though it’s not customary to receive the bin man with celebration, in the early hours of Sunday 16th February it was not a customary position that I would find myself in. For amongst the empty packets of quail eggs, gooseberry yogurt pots and other banalities of general waste, lay the ashes of my dead neighbour.
She’d been in there for at least a week, that I knew of, and was somehow proving to be more of a menace to me in death than she ever was alive – even when she was at her liveliest and pursuing me with libel and litigation.
The event wasn’t without ceremony as an assemblage of pigeons had solemnly formed on the wall above the bins. When only a few weeks ago, in her material form, she sat in the patio aiming cigarette buds at the birds like darts, I don’t imagine she expected the poor creatures were to be her only mourners, nor that the closest she would get to a eulogy would be their pale excrement now running down the lid of her provisional coffin.
To give an account of how her ashes came to be there, I’m afraid I must forgo that maxim that says we must speak no ill of the dead, for if there were any charitable qualities to my neighbour then they were kept remarkably well hidden.
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