PART 1
The first time, he apologised.
The second time, he acted like it was nothing.
By the third, he actually laughed.
So I stopped asking.
Every single day, his tea bags came over the railing.
One at about seven in the morning. Another at about nine at night.
His routine got so regular that I barely needed to look at a clock, and I want to record that I noticed the regularity long before I did anything with it, because the regularity is the whole story.
At first I honestly thought it was an accident.
The first one landed near a flowerpot. I picked it up, binned it, forgot about it.
Then a week or two later I stepped outside and found one lying on a clean white towel I had hung over a chair to dry.There was already a brown mark soaking into it. Tea does not come out of white cotton. Everybody in the world knows that, including a man standing on a balcony with a wet tea bag in his hand looking down at a white towel.
My name is Sabetha and I am fifty-four and I have lived in flat 3B since 2014.
I say that because everything that follows depends on the fact that I am a completely ordinary person who was not looking for anything to happen.
That is when I went upstairs.
I knocked on 4B and held it up.
I said: does this belong to you?
His face went straight to apologetic, and it went there very quickly, which I did not think about at the time.
He said: oh, wow. Did that come off my balcony?
I said: it isn’t the first one.
He rubbed his forehead and said: I’m sorry. I’m half asleep in the mornings. Sometimes I finish my tea out there and just toss it without thinking.
He seemed genuinely embarrassed. He apologised twice more while I was standing there, and he asked about the towel, and whether it was ruined, and whether he could replace it.
I said no, honestly, don’t be silly, it’s fine.
Four words that I have gone back to about a hundred times.
Don’t be silly, it’s fine.
He had offered. He had put a small, cheap, easy piece of accountability on the table in his own doorway, and I picked it up and handed it straight back to him, because taking it would have made the moment last another ninety seconds.
