The Other Side Of The Fence

I have almost always lived in an apartment. After my parents separated, white picket fences gave way to lift lobbies and access cards. When we went out we simply locked our front door and drove off. No windows to close (how can a robber climb so high?), no gate to lock and no security system to arm.

Life in the various apartments I lived in were an extension of my days at the golf club where my parents left me most of the time. Hours were passed in the pool, roller skating in the huge parking lots and exploring the staff quarters with expatriate kids.

People look at me sympathetically when I tell them of my formative years spent this way. But I was happy - no tuition classes to dread, no garden chores to attend to, and best of all, no neighbours to intrude in my life.

When I got married and moved into a house with a garden, it all seemed so picture-perfect. That is, until the walls started leaking, the roof started falling and the damned neighbours started poking their judgemental noses inside.

Yesterday, the doorbell rang two minutes after I rolled out of bed. It was an Indian woman in her fifties, a neighbour from a few doors down, complaining that my dog shits outside her gate all the time and when her husband drives out, he squashes it with his tyres and as a result, drives to work every morning with my dog's poo scenting his way. I apologised profusely and promised it would stop. I added that if it had happened so many times, that perhaps, she ought to have let me known sooner. Anyway - that was all sorted out amicably when her husband, an uptight accountant-looking man with numbers stuffed up his arse, who had not been listening to the conversation, stomped over and proclaimed in his most menacing tone that he had taken photographs and will send them to DBKL and how he and the other neighbours had all been thinking about what to do with my dog. Meanwhile, his wife kept hushing "Kumar! Stop it..!"

Nothing like a hostile episode to start the morning off. I think it was Kumar that needed to be kept on a leash...

On my left is Mrs C, a geriatric from the dinosaur age - a typical specimen of the first batch of homeowners who bought these houses when they first came up in the '70s. They have never moved elsewhere, never upgraded their homes and are now dying off one by one to be replaced by yuppies who move in and turn the houses into something befitting of a Wallpaper shoot. She lives next door with her anally retentive thirty-plus daughter who never smiles. We all know what that one needs. When we first moved in, my ex-husband bit her head off when she turned up at our gate at 7am complaining that the rain water from our roof had been channelled to her side and was pouring on her driveway. Since then, they have been very cold.

On my right is C and her husband O who live there with their two boys and mother, Auntie A. They are nice but am I imagining it or have they been less friendly since the separation? You never know people even though you live next to them. C has mentioned how thriving my social life has been (how would she know?) and I am not sure if she means it in a nice way. I suspect she sits by the window and keeps a log because she knows everything I do ("how come you have been out all day?"); who came, what time they came - even what they say when they stand at my gate. When my ex-housemate and buddy, Ming, came to stay for a month, I could almost read their thoughts.

Across the road, they are pretty quiet except the husband sits outside staring at my house every night - meditating or what I don't know, so he definitely knows my comings and goings like a personal security guard. But then again, I did make the mistake of accidentally reversing my car into his wife's Kancil last year...oops...

Am I the nightmare neighbour living with fellow nightmare neighbours? Sigh...I just want to live my life my way and be left alone! That's the thing about house-living that no one prepared me for - neighbours. Am very tempted at this point of time to move into a condo (even if it is 900 sq ft) and wait the next fifteen years for a strata title.