Nobody had ever put them next to each other, because to do that you have to first say out loud to a neighbour that you are having a problem, and every single one of us had decided that would be embarrassing.
And now my part, and there is no honest version of this without it.For eleven years I have been proud of being the easy neighbour. Plants, parcels, cats, a spare key in a drawer.
But three years ago the elderly woman in 2A stopped me by the post boxes and said she was being kept awake by noise at night. From 4B.
And what I said was: I think you must have misheard. I’m right underneath him and I’ve never heard a thing.
I had not heard anything because I sleep like the dead, in a flat at the back, with a fan on.
But I said it as though my not hearing it were evidence.
I made her doubt herself in a lobby, in about nine seconds, with a friendly voice, and then I asked after her hip and went to work.
She moved out eight months later. Her daughter came and did most of it in a van.
I helped carry a chair.
Her name was Mrs Vasilopoulos and she was eighty-one and she had lived in that building since 1994, which is nineteen years longer than me.
On the day of the van her daughter said something to me that I did not understand at the time and understand perfectly now.
She said: she didn’t want to go, you know. She just got tired of not being believed.And I said something about how it would be nicer for her being closer to family.
I have the sentence I should have said and I have had three years to assemble it, and it is nine words long.
What did you hear, and what time did it happen?
That is all. That is the entire thing I owed an eighty-one-year-old woman and did not give her, and it would have cost me about four minutes in a lobby.
Eleven years of being kind in the ways that cost me nothing.
Watering a plant is easy. Taking a parcel in is easy. Standing next to somebody is not.
I only ever did the easy ones, and I called it being a good neighbour, and the building called it that too, which is how I never had to notice.
