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.

She looked at me.

And then she said the only sentence anybody said to me in that yard all week.

She said: how long did it take you to be sure?

And I said: eleven weeks.

And she nodded, and said nothing else, and went in.

But they worked it out themselves. Every single one of them. I never said his name to anybody, not once, not even when asked directly, and I was asked directly six times.

Which meant he could not run his line.There was nobody to call the mad woman downstairs. There was a board with dates on it, and a building full of people who had done the arithmetic on their own.

He came down on the fourth morning in his dressing gown.

There were about twenty people in that yard. He got hold of my wrist and said it loud enough for every one of them:

Take it down. You’ve made me look like a lunatic.

Nobody moved. Somebody set a laundry basket down on the concrete.

He did not let go. He leaned in and said: take it down.

And I did not say anything, because there was nothing to say that the board was not already saying better.

He let go after about four seconds. Not because anybody made him.

Because he looked round.

And what he found was twenty people who were not doing the thing he had been relying on for seven years, which is looking away.

They were all just watching, holding laundry, waiting to see what he did next.

I have thought about that more than about anything else in this.He was not beaten by a pinboard. He was beaten by twenty people declining to be embarrassed on his behalf.

Every single one of those people could have done that at any point in seven years, including me, and none of us ever had, because there had never been a morning where we were all standing in the same place at the same time looking at the same thing.
PART 5

Then I found out why he had been doing it, and it is so small that I have not been able to tell it out loud without the other person thinking I have left something out.

He moved in seven years after me.

In 2019 there was a dispute about the parking bays. The residents wanted two bays reallocated to visitor spaces. He wanted to keep one for a second car.