A squirrel eating a ham sandwich out of a bin

Neighbours. Everybody needs good neighbours.

This is a song that is the theme tune to the television programme Neighbours. It is about people who live next door to one another and the impact they have on each other’s lives every day. In real life neighbours aren’t that interesting or as frequently good looking as on the TV. But it is important to get to know them anyway because that is the right thing to do.

If you are lucky they will be no trouble at all, like my old neighbour Beryl. I knew her from when my second house was stuck on her house and she called me Emily even though my name is really Amy. She used to feed my cat Tiger and she told us he preferred the posh biscuits she gave him so we should buy some. Tiger is dead now and probably so is Beryl but I will never forget either of them, and I often think of Beryl’s garden which was so full of colourful flowers there was barely any room for her to move amongst them with her watering can.

Beryl was so much nicer than my first ever neighbour whose house was stuck on to the first house I lived in. I do not know what he looked like or remember him at all but my mum sometimes speaks about him and so I picture a shadowy figure in the doorway telling us his chip pan caught fire when he passed out drunk, smoke rising off his shoulders. Or I picture my mum pacing the living room at three a.m, the sound of his music inside the walls like an arrhythmic heartbeat.

Luckily we moved next to Beryl after him and since then most of my neighbours have been Neither Here Nor There, even though they were right next door. But now where I live the street is very small and all of our gardens are connected. On my left are the Good Neighbours. I do not know their names, they do not know ours, but we know each other’s cats by name and stop in the street to share stories. They say, Sheldon was on our roof today, he is a mad one! And I will laugh and tell them Betty was in our garden. We will both tut at the Staffordshire bull terrier that runs off the lead and wave goodbye. He is handsome, handsome enough even to be on Neighbours or another early evening television programme, but that is not so important to me because I mostly like it that he talks about cats.

My cat Sheldon, enjoying a tree

But on the other side…

You probably already guessed from that shift in tone and dramatic ellipses that the other side is a Nightmare. Well, some of her favourite things are drinking, screeching, hooting and having a lovely fag. Especially if she gets to do all these things in her garden at two a.m on a Monday. Her friends all love these things too, so they gather at hers so they can all do them together at least twice a week all summer.

Lying in bed, sweating because I have to keep the windows shut to dull the noise, my sleep sounds on the highest volume, I imagine what I would like to say to her. I picture walking over there, plucking the cigarette out of her mouth and crushing it under my bare foot. I go, Can it missy, some of us have work in the morning. And I walk off without looking back.

In real life I lean out the back door and I whine, Please can you be quiet? It is a Sunday night! Please! And I quickly shut the door before I can hear any of the mean things they might shout back.

Then I’m wound up and my whole skin is buzzing on my bones and I will never sleep. I think about how sad it is we can’t get along. I think that I hate her and then I remember how she was the one who called my boyfriend when the lock broke and I was stuck inside my bathroom. It took me ages to flag down a passing jogger (it is shocking to see how many people wear headphones all of the time) and convince him to alert her to my predicament. So it was such a relief when she got in touch with Rhys and told him to come home so he could let me out.

This memory softens my heart. The rumble of thunder on my sleep sounds app is followed by the crack of shrill laughter coming from her garden. I decide that if her house is on fire I will only wait a few minutes before I call the fire people because it was good when I wasn’t stuck in the bathroom but bad when she laughs.

Bad Neighbour’s dodgy Christmas lights

I don’t know the whole of the song of Neighbours (I don’t watch it, it is rubbish) but I know the ending because it goes, That’s when good neighbours become good friends. I don’t know if we will be friends but I like to imagine we can be good neighbours and that one day she Calms Down and prefers to have a quiet read of a summer evening, or a nice bit of TV inside.