In what had become a regular occurrence, I was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of voices outside my door – a man and a woman, their words slurred. I’d naively assumed the rain and cold would keep my neighbour indoors and quiet. But clearly I hadn’t reckoned with his prodigious libido and love for groove. I scurried out of the warm bed, wincing at the iciness of the floor, and closed the door of my en-suite. It wasn’t much, but it would hopefully muffle the drunk loud moans that were sure to filter through our shared wall. It was the kind of thing that made one stir crazy and contemplative, – not a great combination for sleep. After a long, cold week of commuting to and from work vis-a-vis cold mornings and equally cold early evenings, the dull ache creeping into my tired bones warned me to get enough rest before my body surrendered to flu and exhaustion.

Finally, the jingle of keys and giggling manifested into a stubborn door being shoved open. With a second thud, the voices were snatched out of the night. And not too soon either as a wave of rain started up, humming a soft lullaby on the roof, the window, and the now-empty porch outside, sending me to sleep.

“Luvo, Luvo, open up!” A woman’s voice, different from the one I’d heard sometime before, yanked me out of sleep. The rain had died down again. Another regular occurrence was unfolding, though this one happened less regularly. Nonetheless, I’d rented enough rooms and backrooms, and lived with enough strange men and women in backyards and houses that I knew too well the scene that was taking shape. There was no way I’d be able to sustain the delicate drowsiness that gave weight to my eyelids. Even though the storyline was a tired one, it was like lazing on the couch watching television without a remote at hand.  I wasn’t able to press a button that would instantly increase the distance between my door and my neighbour’s, or make my room soundproof. I would have to sit through what was to come.

“Luvo, I know you are in there. Open the door, it’s cold out here!” the woman said, giving his door a few good thumps this time. A yawning silence answered her. I searched for my phone beneath the pillow, curious about what time it was. 3:42, the devil’s hour. How did she get here at this time? I wondered, unable to believe she’d risk walking the township streets by herself. Or maybe that was the brilliance of it, skollies are people too aren’t they. They shiver in the cold too, they also need sleep like the next man.

“Luvo! I’m cold.”

“What? Who’s there?”

“It’s me, open up.”

“What?”

My neighbour was hamming it up more than a bad actor on a soapie – acting dazed and confused, delaying the inevitable. The woman was probably already reciting in her head the details she would recount countless times to her friends about how she caught him with another woman. “Tshomi, I knew he was in there with someone. l just knew it. Something had driven me there, I just wanted to see it for myself.”

“I can’t open the door, it’s stuck.”

I was laughing before I knew it – loud volcanic eruption that emanated from the deep pit of my stomach. The more I tried to quell it, the more it seemed to shake me at the core. I gasped for breath, regaining it in intervals before being overcome by another wave of pure unadulterated laughter. Through it all, a part of me that wasn’t convulsing heard the stunned silence on the porch, and imagined it turning to acid which only fuelled my fit.

“Do you think I’m stupid Luvo? Am I an idiot to you?” I heard her say.

“What do you want me to do? It’s raining!”

Finally, my stomach sore, I felt sheepish guilt settle with my breath. My laughing could only deepen the woman’s hurt. I felt regret, a sudden anger at myself for participating in some stranger’s humiliation. I decided to redirect it to my neighbour. He was too old for this. Despite a year of living close to each other, we weren’t close. We never spoke much beyond the odd greeting and small talk about the weather. We were too different for anything beyond that. Outside of work I lived like a recluse while he had a steady rotation of visitors, a variation of thirty-something-year-old alcoholics that hadn’t managed the tremendous feat of growing out of their late teens.

“Do you think I don’t know you have someone in there with you?”

I got up from bed this time welcoming the cold sting of the tiles. I fished out my flip-flops from the dark and headed for the door. It  had grown thick and stubborn because of the moisture, but I was able to pull it open at the second tug. The bright porch light stung my eyes.

The woman on the porch stared at me with a mixture of confusion and venom – pupils dilated and glassy-eyed. I tried to think of something to say as I twisted my keys to open the security gate. In the end, I ignored her and addressed my neighbour cowering behind the door.

“I’ll push from the outside while you pull.”

He didn’t answer back immediately. The thought that he might be seething as well on the other side of the door filled me with a warmth that almost negated the cold.

“Cheap doors, a little rain, and they swell up in the door frame,” I said to the woman, who was looking at me, more confused than hateful now.

“Sure,” my neighbour said.

“Okay, I’ll count to three and I’ll push while you pull, just be ready to move out of the way of the door when it opens.”

“Sure.”

I put my hands close to the door handle between the bars of the security gate. I wondered what the other woman inside was doing, or even thinking with all this happening. Didn’t these things sometimes end violently? Alcohol, infidelity, betrayal, the ingredients were there. Why had I involved myself?

“One. Two. Three.” The door barely budged.

They needed to confront their ridiculousness in the cold dawn and if I couldn’t sleep. I would be the devil pushing the moment to its most catastrophic end.

“Again. One. Two. Three.” I pushed harder this time. Still, the door didn’t budge.

“Is your door unlocked?”

“Yes.”

“No, it isn’t, I can see the latch going into the frame,” I said, squinting but sure.

“Luvo, open the door,” the woman on the porch said.

“Luvo, open the door,” I repeated without really thinking.

I think the four of us all realized at that moment that the situation had devolved into a very strange madness. I was suddenly seized by a series of throat-tearing coughs, so bad they bent me over, hand on thigh. Before I could breathe again the woman on the porch started laughing too. The ring of her voice rang through the night. My breath caught as I joined her. The night stood indifferent to our suffering as we degenerated into laughter.