The soap opera next door
One of the features (or downsides, depending on your outlook) of apartment life is that the close proximity to neighbours tends to turn day-to-day life into something of a soap opera. Old buildings have thin walls and sound-conducting hardwood floors, and conversations have a funny way of carrying down through the stove’s venting and into the kitchen. Most of the people in my building make only occasional appearances in this soap opera – the girl living directly next to me is so quiet that I often wonder whether she even exists, and the only signs of life from across the hall are the sounds of a key grinding in the lock every morning at 8:00 sharp and the occasional smell of pancakes cooking on Sunday evenings. It’s the lady living directly above me who always ends up stealing the spotlight in this show.
The Upstairs Neighbour – and her name is always capitalized; this is a distinction she’s worked hard at earning – is deceptively innocent looking. She’s short, slim, and middle-aged, with mousy close-cropped hair and the kind of glasses worn by elementary school teachers. Her personality, though, is not so innocent. When she’s not thumping around her apartment in what must be steel-toed boots or cement shoes, she’s refining the art of passive-aggressive communication by leaving little notes written in spiky red script on the lobby bulletin board: Once, a request that nobody runs water or flushes a toilet between the hours of 11pm and 7am lest her beauty sleep be disturbed by the sound of creaking pipes, and then a plea that nobody in the building cooks any bacon, ever (she finds the smell unpleasant). Needless to say, I spent a lot of time after that both flushing my toilet excessively after 11pm and opening all my windows while frying pans full of bacon. The Upstairs Neighbour is also an expert at communicating her musical preferences – or lack thereof – directly through the floor: I turn on my music, and no matter how quiet, or how inoffensive the genre (really, who could be offended by a playlist entitled “rainy day chillout”?), there will inevitably be a series of loud stomps centred directly over my living room.
There’s also a guest star in this little soap opera. Well, actually, an entire house full of guest stars. Several months ago, the house directly next to my building was inhabited by a crew of nearly nocturnal university students who all appear to be majoring in the science of partying – they are, without fail, out in their front yard almost every night of the week, accompanied by enough Lucky Lager to singlehandedly keep the company afloat and loud enough voices to ensure that the entire street can stay up-to-date on their drunken escapades. These next-door neighbours and The Upstairs Neighbour have, until recently, kept up equally annoying but completely separate existences.
Last week, on an otherwise completely uneventful Tuesday night, the two worlds collided. The next-door neighbours had been lingering on their front porch for several hours, working their way through multiple six-packs of Lucky and getting progressively louder with each one. The Upstairs Neighbour, judging by the sound of the heavy footfalls, had been pacing increasingly quick circles around her bedroom for the past half hour. The next-door neighbours’ conversation lurched loudly over to the topic of religion. The Upstairs Neighbour’s footsteps edged closer to frustrated stomps. Then, the sound of the window creaking open, followed by a nasal voice laden with frustration and dripping with contempt: “Excuse me, some of us are trying to enjoy a quiet evening. If you could just be kind enough to use your indoor voices, thanks.”
There are hastily mumbled apologies, and the window clicks shut. The rest of the evening is relatively quiet, punctuated by the occasional shriek or outburst of laughter and then the inevitable creak of the window and exaggerated shushing noises. I imagine The Upstairs Neighbour leaning out of the window in an oversized nightgown, wagging her finger and frowning down at the next-door neighbours while the rain splatters her glasses. The next morning, we pass each other in the hallway. I’m on my way to work, she’s got her arms full of dirty laundry. I nod a silent greeting to her, and she acknowledges me with a barely suppressed grimace. I’m fairly certain she spends her entire morning contemplating who she hates more: Me, the bacon-cooking, toilet-flushing, music-playing girl living beneath her, or them, the next-door neighbours and their inability to stay quiet for more than one night a week.
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