Gone...

As I've said, The garbos weren't the only nutters we shared a plot of land with...
One bright Sunday morning I staggered out of bed, woken by fiendish screams and shouts, coupled with the banging of fists on metal. I pulled the curtains aside. A heavily muscled woman was spreadeagled on the boot of a car reversing at high speed down the driveway. The Nissan bumped down onto the road and the slim girl at the wheel with the crew-cut hair slammed the brakes on. She seemed to be crying.
The fiend on the boot clutched the sides of the rear window, arms spread out wide, muscular legs beating against the metal of the bumper, feet trying to find some grip. Even in the sparse morning light - it was barely dawn - I could see the neck muscles standing out thick as cord, the massive biceps bigger than Popeye's after a tin or two of spinach. With a chirrup of badly worn tyres the car suddenly accelerated and despite the fiend's best efforts to hold on, her fingers popped loose one by one and as the car shot off she lost grip and rolled into the road. I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding and then I quickly took in another as the fiend leapt up off the road, seemingly unhurt, and then like a scene from Terminator the legs began to pump, the arms rotated and she ran off up the road after the car, screaming, "You bitch! I'm coming after you. Be ready, be very ready. I'm fucking pumpin'!"
Let me introduce you to the lesbian neighbours. They were bodybuilders and they suffered from Roid Rage.
Now when we first moved in it was during the week, so I didn’t meet them because I was at work.
But one day I was standing there, slouching around I suppose, eating an apple and looking at the flowers in the garden as Jade hung the washing out. This short but very muscular bloke in tight running shorts and a tight vest comes striding into the garden. The close-cropped hair was bleached blonde and I held the apple inches from my open mouth as he advanced towards me and I realised he was a she. This was The Bloke, as we soon came to call her, to differentiate her from her girlfriend.
"How ya doing mate," she said and stood so close to me I could feel her intense heat. Her face was just inches from mine and her eyes gleamed unnaturally. She smiled insanely at me and said, "You wanna stand up straight, matey. Get some backbone in yer body. And look at yer belly! Jesus it's a bloody disgrace, mate!"
And then she slapped my stomach so hard it imploded and any apple that hadn't yet worked its way down into my stomach was ejected, splattering all over the clean tea towels hanging on the line. At the same time her other hand went to the back of my head where she smacked it hard against my skull. It was like being straightened on a rack (I've never actually been on a rack but this is how it would feel – I just know it). I'm sure something cracked deep inside my body. Anyhow I didn't eat an apple again for around a year.
We soon discovered that all was not well in the lesbian household. Regular as clockwork on Friday mornings, and usually before the sun rose, the arguments would start. And because they were both body builders they had the necessary strength required to pick each other up and throw their hard bodies against the walls. The arguments were loosely based around The Bloke's belief that she knew everything there was to know about every subject under the sun and that her girlfriend knew exactly the opposite. You know, nothing.
Now, The Bloke was actually very thick and knew just about nothing about anything. As a case in point, one day The Bloke tried to learn to drive, using the girlfriend’s car. She reversed at high speed, aiming for the entrance to the driveway, which went down the side of the apartments. She hit the wall and scorched a trail of bright paintwork right down the brickwork. She never slowed for a second, in fact I think she actually increased speed as she stared wide-eyed out of the side window, sparks flaring up in front of her heavily muscled square face. It looked like she thought someone else was driving. Anyhow, that was the end of learning to drive.
Then she bought a pedal bike, one of these really racy ones with 48 gears and a rack of plastic bottles in the front. I think she filled the bottles with some kind of drug cocktail - probably cocaine or something mixed with vodka - and then she just inserted a thin plastic tube into the bottle and snaked it up into an artery in her arm. She was off!
Once I saw her on the Pacific Highway. She overtook me and a whole line of other fast moving cars, her legs pumping so fast on the pedals they were a blur. She once got clocked by the police doing 80 in a 50 area, admittedly downhill, but the case never came to court. They thought the equipment must be faulty.
Of course it had to end in tears and one day I saw her limping towards her back door, the mangled bike bent across her shoulders like some modernistic Jean Paul Gaultier creation. One complete side of her body, from her ankle right on up her leg and including her hip and side, and even the side of her face, was rubbed bloody raw where she'd obviously come off at high speed. It looked like she'd slid for maybe half a kilometre.
"You alright?" I asked.
She fixed me with her glassy blue eyes and said, "Why'd ya wanna know. Something wrong with me? Something you can see? What’ya askin' me for Pommy?"
I smiled nervously and said no, everything was clearly fine and she looked at me like she was going to fix me later on and then she just threw the bike off her shoulders like it was a shawl and it crashed down on to the grass and she left it there and strode on into her flat. I tell you, she was sucking diesel.
Of course, the Lesbos were not the only weird ones in our block of five apartments - as I've said, they were all very bizarre. Take the woman who lived above us - many a visiting man apparently did. She was this small 40-ish Chinese woman called Doris (I still haven’t figured this out. Why do all Chinese people who live in the west have first names like Doris, Maud, Claude and Peter but their surnames are always something totally unpronounceable like Xzinhpxen or Wzakaou? This has always baffled me. One Chinese woman told me once her name was Shirley, only that was her English name. I asked her what her English surname was and she looked at me like I was bonkers.) Anyway, this Doris had different men around all times of the day and night and we thought, oh yes, we know what she's up to. One day I said, you have a lot of visitors at night and she said, yes, so many friends, and I said, okay, but what puzzles me is why you scream out in the middle of the night, "Oh God, I'm coming, I'm coming!" And she said, "Yes, that's when someone else arrives. I have to go let them in". Indeed.
Doris had also ripped up all of the carpets in her flat and she had a penchant for wearing high heels. In fact this, I assume, was more to do with the needs of the men who visited her than any desire of Doris's to wear high heels all hours of the day and night, but whatever the reason, it drove us mad this constant tattoo of spikes on the ceiling above us. She also got involved in persistent and ever increasing door slamming competitions with the idiots who lived next door to her. Sometimes these competitions would go on until three or four in the morning as they each tried to outdo each other in the door-banging decibel league. Jade said it didn't matter what time of the day or night it was, there was always some kind of banging going on up there.  

to be continued...