Above the mirror in our lift there used to be a picture of Jesus; you might be picking your nose thinking you were alone, or admiring yourself in the mirror, but His eyes were always on you. I'd come home and tell Cristina we'd travelled up together. You and who? she'd ask; just us, Jesus and me.
Sometimes I came up in the lift with an elderly lady whose name, translated literally into English, was Mrs. Campsite. Wherever I saw her, at the fruit and veg market or barrelling along the main street (she had boundless energy) I couldn't help think of flysheets and tent pegs. She was indomitable and called me Steffie.
More often than not I take the stairs; the lift's interior is red formica and someone's taken down Jesus and I'm not really that fond of lifts anyway. I get to our landing a little breathless as we live on the 5th floor but I do enjoy the little details I notice on the way up. When we moved into this block twenty years ago the stairwell was a clearing house for gossip: the elderly would chat or shout up or down to each other, Mrs. Campsite among them, and one could hear where the cheapest apples or aubergines could be bought, who was dating whom, or who'd dared that morning to hang out their washing, still wet, on the line. These ladies have left the building - have left the planet, really - so as I climb the stairs I notice other things, and especially I notice the potted plants on the landings and can plot their sad demise as their owners inevitably overwater them. Although there aren't any of these particular plants in our stairwell, Orwell's aspidistra comes to mind from his book Keep The Aspidistra Flying where it somehow symbolized the unkillability of the middle classes in 1930s England. You can neglect an aspidistra, overtax it, starve it of water or let your cat piss in its pot and it will stubbornly live on against all odds, unfurling new leaves and staying green even in the darkest corner of the dingiest block in the East End of London. None of the plants in our stairwell can vaunt such remarkable resilience: they all succumb, in the end, after withering or wilting, to a putrid, rotten end.
We've lived here for nearly 20 years and I've seen scores of potted plants come and go. A vigorous cactus can in weeks be reduced to a quivering wreck. An impossible-to-kill rubber plant in a nice pot with healthy waxy leaves, can soon, with suitable overwatering and lack of light, keel over, wilt and wither into eternity.
On the ground floor live a young married couple whose capacity for articulate thought rivals that of a blancmange and conversation, should it ever occur, would be terse. They too have a potted plant located in the penumbra outside their front door and it is quite the saddest exhibit in the whole block: a large terra cotta pot filled with grey compost hosts a small, lost-looking cactus which meekly fights its corner. If exhibited at a contemporary art show it would be called either "Untitled" or "Futility." As people exit the lift they must see the pot, not the plant, and mistake it for an ashtray. A fortnight ago I saw a scrunched-up tissue impaled on the last two or three of the plant's remaining prickles and two days later a notice printed in black by an angry hand: "People who treat plants in this way are lousy low-life louts." The tone was accusatorial and the admonishing finger surely pointed at the family of non-European residents who live, as we all know, on the 3rd floor.
If anyone's wondering . . . it wasn't me.
