the sunlight of knowing

Living downstairs from me, on the ground floor of this old rundown beach house that I live in, is a bloke named Mick. He’s about forty, tanned and strong from surfing every day, and is a drinker by profession. So are most of his mates. I listen to them some nights, usually Fridays, when they party at Mick’s place. They drink and drink and drink, Mick, his mates and their women and kids, and the noise gets louder and louder, the laughter more obscene, guttural. Later at night the noise is frightening, not in volume, but in the zombie-like carnality of it, the feeling that nothing human remains down there, in them. They bray and hack and sound for all the world like hyenas, the noise coming up through the floorboards at me as if I'm camped one flight above hell.    
   
In the mornings, because they usually all sleep over, I hear the other side too, the morning lack, the laughterless time when their blood must be thinned by whatever they used up in it last night, and then they argue. Usually it will be one of the women who starts the scene, herself cranky, hungover, angry that all the smokes got smoked, or that the kids are awake too early. One of the blokes will climb in, unable to take her noise, and away they’ll go. It normally ends with a woman walking off down the street, wearing only her nightie, ear clamped to her cellphone, angry-walking her flip-flops to anywhere else. They’ve walked passed me sometimes, when I’m out on my own morning walks, and they look like all women do at that time of the morning when hungover and angry; storm's brewing. Worse, they smell like all the cigarettes, and internal decay, and the stink of being packed in tight together for the night, bodies sweating off alcohol like bourbon-can devils.    
   
It is hard to feel anything for them, those people, with their every Friday night ritual to shut the world out. They miss everything. They miss the beauty of this place. They miss the quiet. They miss the entire world, the universe even, their lives so closed and small and endlessly the same. I pity them, and pity is not something to feel proud of. Pity means that I have judged, found myself superior, so they are a test for me, my test to find the humanity in them, in me, to find a way to understand that they and I are just people, doing the best we can.    
   
It is not easy, and I cannot do it while they are drunk, but some weekends, in the afternoons, when they have all come to visit Mick again, and they are not yet so drunk, that is when I can go down to them. We sit outside in the sun and talk, laughter coming gentle, and I accept. We watch the children play, enjoy them too, and it is easy. I can feel the love they have for each other, the hopes they have, the future they see in their children. I see my own family, see all families, and it makes these people good. I see them, know them, know them as people like me and all the rest, here and gone on a spinning blue watery ball, in the eye of a young summer sun.