I stand on the edge of my passing. I saw a murder you know, same time as I saw a woman give birth on the other side of the curb.

It was horrid looking baby, bright blue and lame, only good thing was it didn’t scream for the first few minutes, I’d been thankful of the silence. Miss Moore looked happy with her baby, and so I was glad. She was airy, wan young girl of a rich father, and she’d had it off with the married maintenance man in my building.

A bullet blew through my first-ground window. Single plane of glass and splintered wood, that one had been my favourite of all my windows. Though I can’t pity myself too much, for knowing of the red spilling grouted in the pavement. She’d be so upset, she’d never get that out her pores. Mr Locksley was an old man, the body splayed on the concrete slab was as bright blue as the baby. Gaudy in the face, black all over in a hood and still in his overalls from work. He was fixing the radiator inside and fell through the window along with the bullet. I saw who’d done it, I think I was the only one. Walls have eyes, myopic like an owl and I saw everything.

The police are coming now. They scraped him from the pavement and put his body bag in the same ambulance as mother and their baby. Because it was his baby, and right now, they looked much the same in blue hue and lameness. Miss Moore was crying with the babe latched to her breast, “He did it! My father, he’s killed my Joe! I’ll kill him!”

The green suit closed the back doors of the ambulance with her mudslinging only muffled inside by the siren. The ambulance pulled off and so did the policemen, they went to arrest Mr Moore, her father was on the loo in the family home while they’d done it, I heard gossip that evening under the streetlight of my building, that he was tucked into the copper’s backseat bare-arsed and a toilet roll square caught in his cuffs.

They’d all been wrong, you know. The walls tell me a much different story. That no man killed the maintenance man at all. See it couldn’t have been Miss Moore’s father, he was no where in sight of my building. I’d told the walls, I’d guessed the dead man’s wife as the smoking gun but the walls shook in indignation; the walls liked Mrs Locksley very much, she’d painted them pink.

I’d kept quite still after that, and silent while I waited for them to speak again. I wait all day. Then, as the moon lay a crescent shadow at the north of my red brick, and glowing the red blood stain on the pavement, a mocking body shape of the maintenance man gone-too-soon, the walls whispered to me, so low if barely caught it.

There had been a woman living on the top floor of my building for the past 10 years. A quiet sole who I’d seen sneak bread to the highest flying birds, she was lonely, I’d never seen a visitor nor seen her smile. But I’d heard music playing every third week of the month when she’d need her meter read in her apartment. The walls told me that Mr Locksley would read her gas meater alright, and he’d read it all night ‘til the morning.

On that Saturday morning, Ms Bird left her door unlocked as she descended the three flights down to the first floor, plucking the dyed-fur of her faux fox stole around her neck for mental perch. A gun tucked in the fox’s gaping mouth. She pulled it out only as she reached the radiator, Mr Locksley leaning over it with his tools.

She’d asked him sweetly to give her one last kiss then blew his brains out as soon as he turned to look, making sure to sun out the window, as not to upset the pink paint work.