You'll get used to it.

"This apartment stinks Tricia."

"Well don't blame me."

She doesn't want to hear it again. None of us want to talk to our creepy landlord.

I'm Rad, that's me with the funny hair wearing nightwear in the afternoon. I have an excuse though, working the comedy circuit, late nights, next to no pay, and currently not much prospect of anything better.

Trish is a nurse. Student nurse I should say. Her hours are worse than mine, and the pay isn't much better.
"You could try wiping everything with bleach again?"
Disinfecting things is her back-up plan for all life's problems.

She's watching daytime tv, but her eyelids keep shutting.
"Go to bed?" I suggest, but she's already asleep.
The weird, slightly rotting apartment odour is turning my stomach. I don't think adding chlorine to the mix is going to improve things.

We'd laughed about Mr Henderson stacking up bodies in the elevator shaft, previous non-paying tenants maybe, but in reality, it's a garbage problem.
Too many tenants shoving their waste down a trash-chute which just wasn't designed for pizza boxes, plastic bottles, and all the other twenty-first century packaging our low income, time pressured life generates.

Valerie walks in.
"I'm going out", are her first words.
"Someone needs to ring the landlord". I plead.
 Not me, not me I whisper to myself.

I'd bumped into Mr H once only, and that was enough, during a rare daytime trip outdoors, trying to persuade a nightclub owner to give me a gig. For some reason our property owner recognised me, as I hurtled in rejection out of the 'Sim Cat Pleasure Rooms' office. 

"Oy tenant!" He yelled.

Blinded by sunlight I burbled an incoherent reply.

"No bicycles or I'll 'ave you for it!!"

I was too terrified to defend myself before he vanished.

"He accused Jo of keeping goldfish". Val says as she scuttles out the door.
Jo was the sharer I replaced. I knew she'd been thrown out, but whether that was for keeping unauthorised pets I wasn't told. That couldn't be the reason though, as the guy on floor three keeps a python in his bathroom. I'd seen it when he left the door open to run to the mail-box in a pair of tatty wrestling shorts.

I couldn't sleep. There were loud rustling noises under the floor. It had to be rats, there was no other explanation. Probably dragging bits of deep-fried chicken back to the nest from the over-spilling trash chute.  I had two choices. Go home, admit I couldn't hack it on the comedy circuit, or ring for maintenance and risk being evicted as a troublesome tenant.

Some guy in a bib suit turns up quicker than I expect. He must live in the building.
"OMG it's python guy!"

For some reason he thinks our dishwasher is causing the stench.

"You gotta scrape the plates".

He repeats this mantra while waving around a large wrench.

"They don't put salt in it." This remark is spoken to the fridge, and he continues to talk to our appliances, the wall, in fact he manages to avoid eye contact for a good forty minutes while coming up with various ways to blame us for the smell.

Eventually Maeve came out of her room. She hardly leaves the duvet since she broke up with her boyfriend so this is a rare event. She looks angry.

The yelling wakes up Trish.

"They've got history". She explains.

It turns out python / maintenance guy IS the ex. Though why Maeve would give up on life after splitting up with this loser is beyond me.

The row has wakes up the grumpy shift worker from next door, and he pounds on the wall and threatens to call the police. I try to break up the fight, but it's hopeless.

Then, for reasons that make no sense at all, Maeve gets dressed for the first time in a week, brushes her hair and disappears off with the ex, and it seems they've made up. Maybe all the yelling cleared the air. Not the smell though. That lingers on unaffected, or is maybe worse.

"City life". Says Callie when she and Val get back from work later. "You'll get used to it."

Yeah well. Callie grew up round here, she was born used to it. 

"Eat more garlic" Val suggests, "works for me, or hot chilli, that's good too, numbs your sense of smell."

I think the whole building took her advice, it's an odour arms race.

Trish is still so shattered she sets off to work in her pyjamas.

"Shouldn't we run after her?"

"Naw, no one will notice, people wear all sorts of weird stuff in the city."

"Everything is so different here to small town life, they say I'll get used to it".

"Oh boy, I hope I will."