i was wondering when this would happen.

a young guy just got hit by a car outside my window. doesn't seem to have been too much damage done, the car clipped his leg, and there was some sort of grazing to his ankle. he was a tradesman with four other tradesmen to support him and the person who hit him was an older migrant woman with her husband whose english isn't great. so there has been a lot of screaming and shouting and now one of the guys is calling the cops after giving the woman a lesson on how to drive a car.

i live on a steep hill. people drive very fast down and very fast up the hill and i'm constantly surprised that there aren't more accidents, or at least side mirrors of parked cars being knocked off. i hold my breath every time i see a kid crossing the road.

it seems to have quietened down. it was a bit of a shock though. i think i heard the woman's scream more clearly than anything the guy said. the tradesmen sound like they're going back to work, the young guy's limping around with a piece of pipe.

i don't like the sounds of voices outside my window. this is different, of course, as something actually happened, but often i can hear people talking in the late hours of the evening or walking up and down the hill. it's completely silent at night, so the smallest sound seems amplified. it always sounds menacing for some reason.

one night there was a guy whose ex-girlfriend was living in the block of flats next door. he spent at least an hour in a drunken stupor walking up and down the hill screaming obscenities at her, her current boyfriend, speculating on what it is they might be doing inside, and what he would do to them if he got in. she screamed back occasionally. eventually he gave up and walked somewhere else, but you could hear him shouting for at least another ten minutes, getting fainter and fainter.

it's the sound of aggressive swearing i think. it's so hard and harsh. you'd think i'd be used to the sound these days, but it's all to do with the context. when someone swears in casual conversation it can be slightly jarring, or completely bland, particularly if they swear as verbal punctuation (like someone saying, for example, "i went to the f-ing shops"...i mean, what did the shops do?). but when someone is angry and aggressive the words take on a much more threatening tone. which, i suppose, is the point.

here come the cops. and an ambulance. and everyone's getting upset and the voices are getting heated again. people will play to any audience.