by Jennifer Johnson
When the Council owns the building you live in
you may find that the front is detaching itself from the back,
the underpinning needed too expensive for that Council.
You may find that large cracks are continually monitored
but the delays in repairing your flat seem endless.
You may find you need duct tape to fill in the gaps
where the glass no longer fits the frames
and that you may have to ignore the odd cracked pane.
You may find as you look at the ceiling, yellow marks
caused by urine coming from the flat above.
The residents keep buckets ready to catch this.
You may also find darker marks which the builders say
are caused by beer leaking from rusty cans upstairs.
You may hear stories about the armed gang
that used to live in the flat above and that
when the police raided the place, they broke
into the wrong flat, not checking their details.
You may hear that it took a long time
before they took any action, only spurred on
when it was known the gang had a gun.
You may have heard that one of them hospitalized
a resident who shouted at them, fed up with
having their doorbell rung over and over.
You may hear that an alcoholic then lived in the flat above
and that his mates from the soup kitchen used to come round,
telling everyone how concerned they were
that he was drinking but no longer eating.
You may hear that he died sometime after getting a stroke
and that everyone, including a Muslim,
went to his funeral and was welcomed. The priest
reminded everyone the man once worked hard in construction.
You may hear how the next gap-toothed resident
used to re-enact, each morning, a whipping
he almost certainly experienced as a child
and how he would ask a woman to hold his hand,
thank them and then say he’d be alright.
Lots of people from the majority black church
used to come and check up on him each day.
You may hear how addicts used to take drugs
outside the downstairs flat’s front door.
There are no back doors to these flats, no safe escape.
You may also hear how the other residents would ring
the police time after time and how the addicts
would scarper when the uniforms came into view.
You may also hear how the police already seemed to know
the two silent characters who froze everyone who saw them.
You may, early one morning, be woken by falling plaster or worse
when the Council owns the building you live in.
Jennifer Johnson has been widely published in poetry magazines (including Stand and Acumen) and anthologies (including ‘We’re all in it together’ eds. Stewart, Ely and Campbell. In 2022 she won a Bread and Roses award for a poem in ‘The Shouting Tories’ (Culture Matters).
