13. Anger Part 2 Adventure on Fuming Island

 

I am sitting on top of my next-door neighbour. He is trying to squirm away on the cold concrete floor outside my front door.  My arm draws back ready to release a punch. Holding me back is his adult son. He is about twenty-five and pretty strong. He is trying to put a stranglehold on my arms from behind. Off to the side my wife is on all fours searching for her glasses in the wet grass.

This isn’t the wild west, this is a semi-detached house in Stockport, it's dark, I’m shoeless and wearing yoga pants. 

Six months of sober self analysis, introspection and learning and I am about to get violent. What was all this for if this is the result? 

It is a torrid and sad tale of a boundary war that has been on a back burner for over six years . We inherited the setup of our house and gardens and have done nothing really to change it since moving in. We have only continued to maintain what was previously there. Next door has never really spoken to us and they try to avoid eye contact at all times.

Their house shares its border with ours. They have graveled their front so they can park very expensive cars. Even the bins have been moved to the back so they don’t detract from the cars. So much so they have to drag the bins through their house on bin day.

In the future when the floods come and sweep people's Mercs and BMWs away you can lay some blame at their feet for yet another house without something to soak up all that rain.

At the front a new fence stretches near to the house but stops two feet before the drain pipe and leaves a gap. A gap that would fit a person, but you would wonder why as it borders our drive. 

The house wall starts and he has no path, it is then our path all the way up to our shed only there is a gap at the back of the house that would allow him on to our path. Midway down the outside wall is a tap which has a hose pipe on it. This hose pipe was often left randomly thrown on our path. So to use it they would have to walk on our path to turn on this tap. Why they did not fix the tap to the back of their house only they could tell you.

I used to move the hose pipe and throw it down the gap between his house and our shed. I never said anything for six years and allowed it to happen.

Our shed backs directly onto their garden. Then there are two fence panels and a big laurel bush that extends about 14 feet to the back.

The first fence panel became broken and we mended it for three years. It eventually blew over and I saw it collapse inward into their garden. Instead of mending it or putting back up they would throw the entire panel over to our side and act like it had blown over that way. It would wreck the flower bed and cause more damage to the panel itself. This went on for three years.

The laurel hedge is a nightmare as it grows like mad. Until four years ago I started to really get hold of it. I bought a hedge trimmer and it took me a month of green bins to get rid of it and get it under control. The hedge trimmer I bought cut nearly all the way over to their side. I used to cut it as far as I possibly could. It was way over the halfway point between our properties. All he had to do was easily trim half a foot. He didn’t. He let it build up and paid some people to do it two years later and they left an annoying clump in no man's  land that would have been easy for a professional to cut down, but nye on impossible for me to get at. Why? Again you would have to ask them.

Then they had the garden landscaped. It must have cost around six grand. Flags put down, new turf laid, raised beds, a raised seating area. Groundforce couldn't have done any better. Did they replace the broken and now impossible to fix fence panel? Yep you got it. They left it. Worse than that the panel was falling down as the concrete support that held it in place was skew-whiff. It was leaning side wards, but instead  of getting the landscapers to straighten it they concreted it more into place as they laid the new stone flags. So now no fence panel would fit properly. So eventually this panel gave way and we had to break it up. Then there was a gap.

I did think briefly of buying some gnomes with their arse out, but reason prevailed.

Eventually they got a panel when they realised we had given up fixing it. The panel went up but the landscapers had to splice it with wood to secure it which you can still see through.

He then decided to prune the laurel bush. But instead of disposing of it like I had done over weeks. They left rotting at the side of our shed. And every time I drove home from work I could see it.

No lie, that did wind me up. The sheer laziness was enough to annoy me. He had no problem filling up his brown bin with empty bottles of wine.

Then came the night of the incident.

We were getting ready to do some yoga in the kitchen. I popped upstairs and noticed their new Colditz style lighting was going on and off. I popped  in to my daughter’s room to see bushes disappearing one by one. I went downstairs to hear smashing and banging down the side of my house so I opened the front door to see what was going on.

He was in the gap of the front garden next to his green bin having obviously dragged the bushes down my path and through the gap back onto his side. No it seems petty on my behalf but I had six years of no communication apart from laziness and passive aggression so I said quite reasonably

“What the fuck do you think you are doing mate?”

He shouted similar stuff back and said it was his path and pointed to the six inches of gravel along the end wall of his house. You would have to me a 2D version of Mario to walk along it.

There was much shouting about how we haven't paid them for a fence panel and how I always park outside his house (we have never done this). He then moved through the gap of the fence. I was still in the doorway and he came over to stand in front of me and basically started to shout “Well fucking make me move”. “Go on then dickhead make me move ''. I really don't like being called a dickhead. It's a bit of a trigger. 

Still, I retreated into my pussy bloke that doesn’t fight mode and said 

“I’ll call the police ''. And tried to go back inside an avoid this escalating.

His son at this point had come out and was shouting to his dad to get back inside their house.

 At this point my wife was behind me. He was still shouting “Move me then dickhead, go on."

His son had come outside and moving into the gap and was shouting

"Dad get back here, dad come inside".

By this time my wife had moved to my side. On hearing the umpteenth round of "move me then"

She said “ I’ll move you” and slipped past me as I retreated. She was about to try and turn him around when he lashed out at her, knocking her glasses to the floor. 

It was then I saw red and I can’t really remember what I did.

This was the red button moment. The moment Captain Carl Majors presses the button for Godzilla to appear, the moment Bruce Banner turns green.

The next thing I remember I was on top of him. I think I had punched him, but I honestly cannot remember. I had him pinned and I was going to give another jib in the face for good measure. No one touches my wife. His son was round the back of me now trying to hold me and saying stuff like “please just leave him I will take him, I will take him back inside”. 

Anger was raging inside me. I was incandescent. Hate pounded in my temples and my blood was on fire. I was going to punch him in the face and he would deserve it. He asked for it. His son pleaded “just let me take him, let him go”

I looked down into my neighbors eyes. For the first time I looked him in the eye. His eyes were swimming and red. His breath hit me. The sour fumes recently consumed alcohol. He was pissed. Up until this point it had never crossed my mind. The smashing around outside, the blatant abuse he had given me all made more sense. It was only six o'clock in the evening which meant he had been drinking all afternoon in the house. I suddenly remembered the image of his bottle bin overflowing, then I remembered seeing him secretly transferring empty wine bottles from the boot of his car to the brown bin once it had been emptied. He used to go running and I hadn’t seen him run in months.

The thought began to crackle inside me. The realization fizzed to the surface, I was fighting my old drunk self. This was my shadow self, the dark loner who just wanted to turn off the thought generating machine. The guy who shuts down after work with a bottle of wine. The guy who hasn’t any time to exercise and has no time to cut hedges.

I let his head drop to the floor and released the tension in my drawn back arm. I stepped off him. His son scooped up his father and moved him through the gap in the fence and into the house. I collected my wife and we went back inside our house.

My feet were black and cut to ribbons. I had minor cuts on my hands. My heart pounded out of my ribcage as adrenaline still ripped it way through my body.

Right at that moment when I saw the humanity in his eyes I couldn’t do it. He was struggling. Maybe in some way like I struggle, maybe in some ways exactly the same. Although we feel unique in having our emotions, the same emotions are held thousands of times over by millions of different people. Like the same air is breathed by different nostrils the same feelings are experienced by everyone.

When fighting in the Spanish Civil war George Orwell had the enemy in the sights of his rifle and was about to pull the trigger. He noticed the soldier he was about to kill had his pants around his ankles and was taking a shit. In that moment of shared humanity he couldn’t do it and lowered his weapon.

When anger passes you are left to pick up the pieces in the same world you lost it in. That anger makes that world a worse place to be for everyone. That energy pulls in bystanders and innocents. It asks for sides to be taken and flags to be raised. 

The pettiness I showed leading up to this was avoidable and so was the way I approached it at the end. However,  I don’t think I could control my primal urge to protect those I loved even though my inability to deal with my own anger had led them into harm in the first place.

We all have to be mindful of the story we tell ourselves about how badly done we are by the world out there. I know I carry stuff to this day. Turn on the TV and there are a few thousand right there.  Minor annoyances caused by witnessing injustices cling to me like barnacles on the hull of a ship. They hamper my progress and keep me from living a life in peace. I will chip away and try and do better and hope that my neighbor does the same.