I have wondered since whether that was a test. I do not think it was. I think he offered in good faith that morning and then found out, within about four seconds, that offering cost him nothing.
That is a thing you learn about a person very quickly and you do not forget it.
He said: it won’t happen again.I thanked him and went back down, and for about an hour I actually wondered whether I had made too much of it.
The next morning answered that.
Another wet tea bag, two feet from the door.
I said nothing. I waited nearly three weeks.
I have lived in that building eleven years. I have always tried to be an easy neighbour, and I was not interested in bad feeling over something that could be sorted with one conversation.
I told myself that three-week wait was patience.
It was not. It was hoping the problem would solve itself so that I would not have to go up those stairs a second time.
And in those three weeks I did something that I now think is the most ordinary and most damaging thing anybody does in a situation like this.
I moved my things.
I took the white towels off the drying rack and hung them inside on a radiator.
I moved the green chair four feet to the left, into the corner where the overhang covers it.
I stopped putting the good cushions out.Nobody asked me to do any of that. I did it quietly, over about ten days, and I did not notice I was doing it until I stood on that balcony in the autumn and realised I had reorganised my own home around a man’s morning routine.
That is the actual cost. Not a towel.
Eleven days of a woman rearranging her furniture rather than have a second conversation.
Then one evening I was sitting inside with the television on and I heard a soft plop.
That one landed on the cushion of my favourite chair. The green one, which was my mother’s.
By the time I picked it up, the fabric had taken it.
So I went up again.
PART 2
I said: you’re still throwing tea bags onto my balcony.
He shrugged. He said: it’s just tea.
I said: it has already ruined a towel. Now it’s my chair cushion.
