Asking a Neighbour About Noise

I live in a small flat. My neighbour is an old man. He is quiet and friendly. I sometimes hear his TV. I want my home to be peaceful.

Dear neighbour,

My name is Yusuf. I live in flat 7, just below your flat. I wanted to say hello and welcome you to the building. I work from home as a graphic designer, so I am usually here in the daytime. If you ever need help — with shopping, with directions, or with anything else — please knock on my door. I am happy to help.

I hope you will be very happy here.

With best wishes,
Yusuf (flat 7)

Dear neighbour,

I'm Maria, from flat 12, just below your flat. I'm sorry to write rather than knock, but I didn't want to disturb you in the evenings, when I imagine you have just got home from work.

I wanted to mention something small. Recently, perhaps three or four times in the last two weeks, I've heard heavy footsteps and what sounds like furniture being moved in your flat between eleven o'clock and midnight. I'm not sure what is happening — perhaps you are rearranging things, or perhaps it is something else entirely. I just wanted to mention it, in case you didn't know how clearly the sound carries to my flat.

I'm not at all upset, and I don't want you to think this is a complaint. I have a small daughter who sleeps in the room directly below where the sound seems to come from, and I'm only writing because she is sometimes woken up by it.

If there is anything I can do — if I can help you move something, or if I should perhaps move my daughter's bed to a different room — please knock on my door and let me know. I'm in flat 12 and I'm usually home in the evenings.

Thank you for reading this, and I hope to meet you properly soon.

With warm wishes,

Maria (flat 12)

I lived for four years above an old man called Mr Halim, in a building of small flats off a busy road. I never had a real conversation with him. I knew him through the small percussion of his life through my floor — the soft thump of his slippers in the mornings, the rattle of his kettle, the radio he played at exactly six o'clock in the evening, never very loud, always a station that played music from his country. He was the steadiest sound in my apartment. I used to time my own evenings by his radio.

I did not know how old he was, or whether he had children, or what he had done before he retired. I knew that he made bread on Sundays — the smell of it would come up through the kitchen vent, yeasty and a little burned at the edges. I knew that he took the lift slowly, always with one hand on the rail, and that he said good morning to me in two languages on the days we met, with a small careful nod. I knew that he had no visitors that I ever saw, in four years.

When I moved out, I left him a note. I said I had heard his radio every evening, and that it had been a kind sound to live above. I said the bread on Sundays had given me a small thing to look forward to. I said thank you, in the language I imagined he might prefer to read it in. I am not sure he ever read it. I never went back to find out.

What I think about, when I think about Mr Halim, is that I had four years of opportunities to knock on his door, and I never quite did. I told myself, at the time, that I did not want to disturb him; that he seemed happy in his routine; that I did not want to impose. I now think these were honest reasons but not accurate ones. The accurate reason is that knocking on his door would have meant becoming a person who knew him, and I had not, at that age, taken on that kind of responsibility easily. I am older now, and I would knock. Whether he would answer is another question, which I will not, in his case, ever get to ask.

I lived for four years above an old man called Mr Halim, in a building of small flats off a busy road, in a neighbourhood I would now describe as the kind of neighbourhood where people lived next to each other for long enough to know better. I never had a real conversation with him. I knew him entirely through the small percussion of his life through my floor: the soft thump of his slippers in the mornings, the rattle of his kettle, the radio he played at exactly six o'clock in the evening, never very loud, always a station that played music from his country. He was the steadiest sound in my apartment. I used to time my own evenings by his radio, in a way I only fully recognised after I had moved out and the new arrangement was missing something I could not at first name.

I did not know how old he was, or whether he had children, or what he had done for work before he retired. I knew that he made bread on Sundays — the smell of it would come up through the kitchen vent, yeasty and a little burned at the edges, and I always knew it was Sunday by the smell before I knew it from any other source. I knew that he took the lift slowly, always with one hand on the rail, and that he said good morning to me in two languages on the days we met, with a small careful nod. I knew that he had no visitors that I ever saw, in four years.

When I moved out, I left him a note. I said I had heard his radio every evening, and that it had been a kind sound to live above. I said the bread on Sundays had given me a small thing to look forward to. I said thank you, in the language I imagined he might prefer to read it in. I am not sure he ever read it. I never went back to find out.

What I think about, when I think about Mr Halim, is the small pretexts I gave myself, over those four years, for not knocking. I told myself, at the time, that I did not want to disturb him; that he seemed happy in his routine; that I did not want to impose my busier life on his quieter one. I now think that these were honest reasons but not, I think, accurate ones. The accurate reason — and this is the one that I have come slowly to believe — is that knocking on his door would have meant becoming a person who knew him, and knowing him would have meant taking on, in some small way, responsibility for the life I could already hear through the floor.

The responsibility I could have taken on was not, in retrospect, a heavy one. I could have asked him about his radio, accepted bread on a Sunday, sat in his kitchen for half an hour at most, and let him be a person to me rather than a soundtrack. I did not take it on. I have, in the years since, occasionally wondered what difference my small refusal made to him — whether he noticed it, whether he had refusals of his own that the building was full of, whether the four years of careful radio-quietness on his side was, in fact, a long act of tact in a building that had never quite reciprocated. I will not, in his case, ever get to ask. I would like to ask you, though: how many doors are there, in the building of your life right now, that you have decided not to knock on, for reasons you would not, on examination, find convincing?

When I was nineteen, my landlady gave me a form of words I have used many times since. The flat she had rented to me had a small problem with damp in one corner of the bathroom, which she had not mentioned during the viewing and which became evident in my second week. I went to her, in the way nineteen-year-olds do, with a kind of nervous formality that exceeded the size of the problem. She heard me out, nodded, and said: 'Right. I'm sorry it wasn't mentioned. I'll get it looked at this week. If you notice anything else over the next month, please write it all down on one piece of paper and bring it to me at once, rather than coming over for each one — that way we can fix everything together, and you don't have to spend your weekends being a tenant.' She paused. 'You don't have to spend your weekends being a tenant' was the line. I have used it, with small variations, for almost twenty years.

The form has done a particular kind of work for me. When I have employed people, I have used it on them: do not bring me each problem as it occurs; collect them, bring them once a fortnight, and we will fix them together. When I have lived in shared houses, I have given it to housemates: please do not knock on my door each time the heating is wrong; write things down, and we will solve a list. The form has saved, by my rough estimate, several hundred small awkward conversations, replacing them with one slightly larger and considerably more efficient one each month. I am, in respect of this small piece of social technology, in my landlady's debt to a degree she will never know.

I am writing this in the register that this kind of essay calls for, which is a careful adult one in which the writer tells a small story, draws a small lesson, and refuses to dramatise either. I am aware of the register, and I am aware that the awareness is itself part of the register. There is something faintly suspicious about producing the form even as I write about being given a form, but I do not think the suspicion is fatal; we generally inherit and use the forms simultaneously, and the alternative — pretending one has invented one's own register — is worse.

The form I have not yet found is the one for the slow ending of a friendship that is no longer working. I have a friend — I will not say who, because the writing of the essay does not give me the right to say — whom I have known for nearly twenty years, and whom I have, over the last three or four, come to see less often, with less pleasure when we do see each other, and with a small accumulating sense that I have been performing the friendship for some time rather than living it. I do not know what to do with this. I do not have the form. The conversations I have had with myself about it have run, by now, into the hundreds, and they all dissolve before they reach a conclusion, partly because the situation does not have the shape of a complaint (he has done nothing wrong; I have done nothing wrong) and partly because I do not know whether the right move is the slow drift, the formal conversation, or the patient continuation of a friendship that may yet renew itself. I have, in other words, three possible forms and no confident way of choosing between them, which is its own kind of formlessness.

My landlady is dead now. She would, I think, have known what to do. I would have liked to ask her. The cost of not having had the conversation in time is the kind of cost the form would have addressed, except that the form was the wrong one for that conversation as well — it works for problems with bathrooms, not for problems with friends. I would like to ask you, since you have read this far, whether there is a form you have been given that you now use, and whether there is a form, just out of reach, that you have not yet found. And whether the form, once you find it, will turn out to have been there for the using all along, by anyone willing to receive it.