Neighbours and Noise

The noise had been going on for six weeks. It came through the ceiling of Delia's flat between four and half past six in the afternoon, and it sounded like somebody moving furniture very slowly across a wooden floor.

That would not have mattered to most people. But Delia worked nights at a care home, which meant that four in the afternoon was the middle of her sleep. By the end of May she was permanently annoyed.

She had never met the man in the flat above. She knew his name from the buzzer, Petersen, and she knew that he wore heavy boots, because she could hear every step he took from the door to the window.

In her head he became a particular kind of person: young, careless, the sort who would drill a shelf into a wall at ten at night. She built this man out of noises, and she disliked him a great deal.

First she wrote a note. She spent an hour on three sentences, took out the word "unacceptable", put it back in, and finally pushed the paper under his door on a Wednesday. Nothing changed at all.

Then she rang the landlord, who said that he would look into it and who clearly did not intend to. He explained that the building was old, that sound travelled, and that he had heard nothing from anybody else.

On the ninth of June, after a bad shift, Delia went upstairs at five in the afternoon. She had a short speech ready, and she had practised it twice in the hallway, which felt ridiculous and helped anyway.

The door was opened by a woman of about seventy with paint on her hands. Behind her, in the middle of an almost empty room, stood a wooden frame the size of a door, half covered in canvas.

Her name was Ines Petersen. She had moved in at Easter. She painted large pictures, and because she could not lift them, she pushed them across the floor to turn them, which she did roughly every ten minutes.

The whole speech went out of Delia's head. She said, awkwardly, that she worked nights and that she had left a note. Ines said that she had found no note, and then she looked at the gap under her door.

There was a thick carpet on the other side. Somewhere under it, six weeks of Delia's careful sentences were lying face down, and both women started laughing in a way that was mostly relief.

They made an agreement at the kitchen table. Ines would not move anything before six, and Delia would knock on the ceiling with a broom if something was urgent. Ines also bought four felt pads for the frame.

The noise did not disappear completely, but it moved into the evening, where Delia was not asleep. What surprised her more was how quickly she stopped hearing it once she knew what it was.

In August she was invited upstairs to look at a finished picture. It showed a grey street in the rain, and Delia said she liked it, which was true. She also apologised for the word "unacceptable".