Tuesday 20 May 2014

The smell of rotting flesh

Oh man, the body might have been removed on Sunday night but now that the door has been broken in and the seal in it compromised the stench that is filling the hallway now is ridiculous.  It's so bad that I haven't been out of the flat today because I don't want to plough through the smell.

I've put scented oils in the hall near the door and that seems to have held the smell at any for now.  So anyway, since Sunday night when the police forced entry, there's been not activity there at all.  I don't know what protocol is for this sort of situation, not ever having been here before, but  would seriously thought that someone would have been in to clean the place up by now.  In the interests in environmental health, if nothing else.

Not the start to the weeks holiday that I was looking for...

Monday 19 May 2014

You couldn't script this shit...

Oh dude, where to begin?!  you couldn't script this shit if your life depended on it.  Straight to the headline, so to speak:

The od guy in the apartment opposite me is dead, he was lying in his apartment for 5-6 weeks, undiscovered.

OK, so that's the headline, but there's much more to it than that.  Basically, she I came home last night, I looked up at his window for some reason.  I saw it crawling with flies - I mean hundreds of them.  So I looked diagonally across from my bedroom window to his living room window - it's not a clear view, but it was more than enough.  The window ledge was covered with so many dead flies that the paintwork was hardly visible.

Backtracking, I hadn't seen the guy for a number of weeks - but then the last conversation that I had with him, he told me he had just bought a new house in another part of the city.  I've also been working pretty much every hour that I can at work too.  So combined together, I was aware that I hadn't seen him in a while,  but equally I wasn't expecting to, nor was I counting days since I last saw him.

What I'm really dealing with here are my excuses for not noticing quicker, that somehow might make me feel a little less guilty for the fact that I let my neighbours' dead body go undiscovered for 5-6 weeks dimly because I did not piece together all the clues.

And the clues were there, with hindsight.  Hindsight, always 20/20, never failing and completely logical and rational.  So, with such valiant vision, here are the clues:

He was unseen by me for many days, certainly weeks.
The communal hallways had a smell of "bins" that came and went over the course of the last few days.
Despite the last conversation that he was moving out, I never saw any real evidence that he had moved.

So there we go, with that miracle of hindsight, nice and easy to deduce, my dear Watson.  It should have all set alarm bells ringing far sooner than it actually did.   I feel so guilty for not realising sooner.  Yet also so angry that there were clearly no fiends or family that were there to help him..

So anyway, I called the police out last night on the basis of the evidence that I had seen.  they forced and entry and found what remained of him in there.  God rest his soul.

So we skip forward to today, and now that the seal is broken on the door and there is airflow thorough the apartment, the acrid, putrid stench is everywhere.  It is in the hallway and seeping into my apartment.  Not just mine, everybody else's for that matter.  It just seems such a dark thing ti happen, like something from a TV show.  My head can't rely cope with it, nor can my sense of smell if I am being flippant.

i feel so sorry for the guy, that it came to this - that his life ended like this.  He was only in his early 60's.  That said, he was a heavy drinker - to the point of having a problem with it - and he was really unsteady on his feet.  So what it really triggers off in me is this:

I feel upset that it has happened
I feel sorry for I'm and pray for his soul
I feel guilty that I did not piece together everything sooner
I feel scared that, in many years time, that could be me.

Right now I have no one who is of a similar age or younger that would be there to help me in old age, that could so easily be me in so many levels.  Ok, I am not an alcoholic, I have family around men at the moment but that can change.  I don;t think, God willing, I would become an d alcoholic, but all my family network are older than me.  At this rate the time will come then I am on my own with no one else around me to help me through.

I need to find a partner and spawn some offspring as soon as possible.

Arthur McCarten, RIP - I was 'only' a neighbour, Lord knows I tried to do that right, but you still passed and I could't stop it.

May the lord keep you safe in heaven for eternity.