I asked my upstairs neighbour three times to stop throwing used tea bags onto my balcony. The third time he laughed at me. So I stopped asking, and I spent an afternoon getting ready instead.

He holds the door. He calls out good morning across the car park. He once helped a woman on the ground floor get a mattress up a stairwell and would not take anything for it.

And at the summer thing in the yard in 2022 he brought a tray of something he had made himself and went round with it.

I want that in here because people always want the man in these stories to be obviously unpleasant, and he is not, and that is precisely why fourteen complaints sat in a file for seven years without anybody comparing notes.

Everybody in that building liked him slightly. Six flats had a problem with him and every single one of us assumed we were the exception.Because for eleven years I had been the one who waters plants when people travel. Who takes deliveries. Who feeds cats and signs for parcels.

I took that man’s parcels in all last winter. Fourteen of them. There is a box in my hallway that I kept for it.

And standing outside his door I worked out one more thing.

Getting angry would achieve nothing.

If I raised my voice, if I hammered on that door, if I said one sentence I could not take back — he could tell the whole building that the woman downstairs had completely lost it over a few harmless tea bags.

And the building would have half believed it, because that is a very easy story about a woman in her fifties who lives on her own.

I know that story is easy because I have believed it about other people.

There was a woman in the flat above me in the building before this one, in about 2009, who used to knock about the washing machine, and I remember telling a friend that she was a bit much.

I do not know now whether she was a bit much or whether her ceiling was actually shaking at eleven at night, and I never once got up and listened, and I cannot go back and find out.

I was not going to hand him that.
PART 3

So I gave him one last chance.

I decided, properly, sitting at my kitchen table on a Tuesday night: if nothing lands tomorrow morning, I let the whole thing go. Completely. No sulking about it.At four minutes past seven, I heard it.

Plop.

I went out. There it was, next to my flowerpots, still steaming very faintly in the cold.