And instead of apologising he leaned on the doorway and folded his arms.
He said: well, you live underneath me. Things fall. That’s apartment life.
I said: they aren’t falling. You’re throwing them.
And he smiled.He said: look. You should probably be grateful it’s only tea.
I said: what is that supposed to mean?
He gave a little laugh and said: could be worse.
Then he shut the door. Not slammed. Shut, politely, in the middle of my face.
I stood in that hallway for a good while.
There is a radiator on that landing and I put my hand on it, which is a thing I do, and it was cold because it was September.
And I stood there and did the calculation that every single person in this situation does, which is: how much of the rest of my life do I want this to be?
I am fifty-four. I have a job I like and a mother in a home forty minutes away and two friends I see properly.
A man on the fourth floor throwing something onto a balcony twice a day is, on any sensible reckoning, about the eleventh most important thing in that life.
And that is exactly the calculation he was relying on.
Not fear. Arithmetic. He knew that for a sane person the cost of the fight would always be higher than the cost of the tea bag, every single morning, for as long as he cared to keep going.
That is how it had worked on six other flats for seven years.
That conversation bothered me far more than any tea bag, and it took me two days to understand why.
It was not the rudeness. It was that he had changed his story and did not mind me noticing.
Three weeks earlier it had been I’m half asleep, I toss it without thinking.
Now it was things fall, that’s apartment life.He was not defending the same account of himself. He had simply picked up whichever one was useful that day, in front of me, knowing I had heard the first one.
That is not carelessness. That is a man telling you he does not have to be consistent for you.
His name is Roderic. Flat 4B. Forty-one.
I knew four things about him before any of this and all four of them were pleasant.
