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“Personally,” said Blatta Vincent Zappa Jnr., “I’m rather attracted to dirt.” It was a well-memorised quotation from Flesch-Kincaid YaHozna VII and, as such, quite wasted on his illiterate friend, Kakerlak Ob’dewlla X. They had once found a gold ring in the dirt — in the cracks between the boards — and they were still reluctant to bring it to Bob’s attention. They kept it hidden in the grating behind their fridge. They were in their usual place listening to the sound of the apartment. The fridge had just started up again when Blatta Vincent Zappa Jnr. said to Kakerlak Ob’dewlla X, “You know Kak, no poet, artist or composer in history has ever committed a calculated, first degree murder.” Kakerlak felt duty bound to interrupt. “But what about...” “The artist might suffer an identity crisis, start asking, ‘Who am I?’ But the fact that they are an artist means that they can never murder.” “But what about...” “Sssh!” said Blatta. “What’s Bob muttering about?” Bob was indeed muttering. “Saw him again this morning,” he said. It was hard to believe that he was talking to anyone in particular. “Old guy at the subway station. Wearing a Nazi S.S. jacket, he was. Little fur boots like women wear in winter and a red hat like a ball cut in half with two black devil horns growing out of it. I don’t get it. Is this guy living in an endless carnival? Does he go to fancy-dress parties every day of his life, or what?” Blatta and Kakerlak looked at each other knowingly. Bob opened the fridge, removed a carton of milk and slammed the door shut again. He attempted to pour some of the milk into a mug of steaming coffee. A slimy, green diaphragm of skin slid out of the carton and splashed into the mug. “Darn it!” said Bob, screwing-up his nose. “How can this stuff be off already? I only just bought it.” He kicked the fridge door, which opened it again; the grating rattling like a curse. “Why does he always put the carton back in the fridge?” hissed Kakerlak. “Conceptual continuity,” said Blatta. “You know as well as I do that milk is always off. It’s just part of the way things are. Why try to change it? Best to leave things as they are. Life is complicated enough as it is.” “Get out there, Bob! Pull yourself together,” shouted Kakerlak, trying to spur him into action. “Do something — get yourself a girl, someone to look after you!” Bob was preoccupied with his radioactive coffee. He pulled a face, unable to stop himself from retching. “That does it,” he said, slopping the contaminated coffee onto a pile of washing-up in the sink, leaving the green skin stuck like an alien tongue on the side of a plate. “I can’t take it any more! I gotta get out of here!” He scratched at an oily fleck on his tie with a besmeared fingernail and pulled on a jacket that was not so much crumpled as screwed-up like a sheet of last week’s newspaper. On the way out he slammed the door and a print of a naked Spanish woman with a lily in her hair slid out of its lopsided frame and crashed to the floor. “Let’s go then if we’re going,” said Blatta in the aftermath of the slamming. *
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IT WAS CRAMPED and greasy and facing the wall but it was home and it was a big improvement on the other places that had smelt of secret smut and lost metal money; better than the dust and bodily fluids and old skin lost in cracks between the boards. Better than fluff and grit and belly-button lint; the discarded bits and pieces of mixed-up lives.