Like all self-obsessives, I hide behind the belief that people offend me constantly but that I never have any adverse impact on them. I rely for internal security on the fact that I am disturbed, I do not do the disturbing.
It was profoundly shocking, therefore, to come home the other night and be pottering about my bedroom talking to the house rabbit when the upstairs neighbours pounded on the floor. Even BB, who is generally fearless, being the size of a King Charles spaniel, stopped chewing on a coathanger to stand on his back legs and sniff at the ceiling. What the hell was going on?
I popped a note through the door inquiring about the banging. Was I to take it from the stamping of feet that I am to refrain from conversing with the lagomorph after a certain hour? If so, I do not think this sustainable as the rabbit likes conversation in the evening. He waits for me to get home and when I come through the door bounds towards me, then hops around the flat after me making a grunting sound until I sit down and tell him about my day.
I got a note back minutes later. Apparently when I come home late at night I wake everyone in the flat upstairs…by walking around. This is devastating on so many levels that I do not know where to start. As documented here, I’ve made varied complaints about the tenants upstairs sending me out of my mind by doing all sorts of things on their bare floorboards. It had, I confess, never occurred to me that my footsteps might be disturbing them. As I have never, to my knowledge, walked on my ceiling I struggle to understand how this might be so. The only explanation I can devise is that sound travels upwards through walls. Possible, I suppose. But not obvious. You wouldn’t necessarily refrain from walking around your ground-floor flat in case you woke the neighbours upstairs.
But I don’t like the suggestion that I am the problem. So I put a note back through their door saying how sorry I was to be keeping them awake and that I would undertake to take off my shoes at the door in future. And while we were on the subject it would be nice if they did the same because, funnily enough, the sound of footsteps from above is quite annoying too. Almost immediately, silence descended. The exchange of notes had triggered a tense stand-off of noise complaint quick draw at the OK Corral.
Both parties were determined not to make the first sound. That night, I came home, took my shoes off and crept around my flat on tiptoe. The rabbit hopped about my legs grunting about his exciting day chasing a strange cat out of the garden but got only a desperate, ‘Shush!’, and hopped off.
Silence. I sat at the kitchen table and waited. A little later I heard one of my neighbours come home and shut the front door as if it were wired to a touch-sensitive atom bomb. A faint suggestion of a moving human aura could be detected as she padded shoelessly along her hallway. This was unbearable. Listening to the sound of people not making a noise has got to go down as one of the most nerve-racking things ever. I slid back down the corridor to my bedroom and eased the door open with two hands.
I sat down on my bed and pondered putting the lamp on but remembered just in time you need to rattle it to make the connection work. So I sat in the dark and listened. There was a slight muffled sound in the room above. I took the TV and radio off standby to eliminate the background hum then listened again. Very definitely, I could hear a drawer being pulled open so slowly I reckon it was only making a millimetre of progress every second. The air was thick with anticipation. Something was going to make a big, bad noise any second and when it did one of us was going to scream the house down with the mother of all self-righteous complaints. Maybe I should just smash a plate against the wall now to get it over with.
I took off my clothes in slow motion and got into bed. I’d forgotten to brush my teeth but walking back down the corridor to the bathroom was out of the question, so I would have to get tooth decay. I lay flat on my back barely breathing. Silence. An hour passed. I became dizzy with lack of oxygen. More silence. Then a tiny creak as she turned over in bed. I turned over in bed as well. Two can play at that game.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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