There was a letter. Eleven of us signed it.
I signed it fourth.
I read it for about six seconds on my way out to work, standing in the lobby, while a woman I liked held a pen out and said it’s just the parking thing.I do not remember his objection. I do not remember there being an objection. I genuinely could not have told you, before the board, that there had ever been an argument about parking at all.
Seven years of tea bags onto the balcony of the fourth signature.
I went and found the letter afterwards. The management company had a copy.
It is one page. It is polite to the point of being limp.
My signature is the fourth of eleven and it is the only one where somebody has written the flat number in a different hand afterwards, because I had forgotten to put it.
Somebody added 3B next to my name in blue biro.
That is it. That is the entire inciting incident of seven years of my mornings.
A woman in a lobby, in a coat, holding a pen for six seconds, and somebody else filling in her flat number for her.
And then the building manager showed me the file.
There are fourteen complaints about that man. From six different flats.
Two of them are from before I even moved in.I thought I was the only one. I was the seventh.
I asked to see them and he let me read four, with the names taken off.
They are all the same document.
Every one of them opens by apologising for raising it. Every one of them contains a sentence saying the writer does not want to make trouble. Three of them say it’s probably nothing.
Six adults, separately, over seven years, all reaching for the same apology first.
And every one of them describes a thing so small that it sounds ridiculous typed out. A bin bag left against a door. A bike moved. Water off a balcony.
That is what that file is. It is six people individually deciding they were probably overreacting, in writing, and then filing it.
The management company did nothing with any of them and I am not even sure I blame them. Fourteen apologetic notes about small things, spread over seven years, in a company that handles nine hundred flats.
They only became a pattern when somebody put them next to each other.
