Psychological horror · 6 min read ·
The Neighbour Upside
Her flat and her memory of the flat above stopped fitting each other, and she has begun trusting the memory, where the carpenters' marks agree.
- perspective: close-third
Ilse had lived eleven years under the flat above and had never once complained about it, which she counted, in the employment of her own mind, as evidence of her good temper. The floorboards carried. Early riser, whoever it was: the first footfall often came while the street lamp outside was still lit, a soft irregular tread to the kitchen corner, the pause, the tread back, the long settling before the radiator ticked and the rest of the day woke up. She had built her mornings around it without deciding to. The tread was the first thing she checked for the way some people check weather.
The trouble began in the wet week of February, and it began with arithmetic, which is the worst way for trouble to begin, because it leaves you nothing to be angry at.
The gas company's scaffolders had their stands erected against the whole terrace, and from the cupola scaffold the upper flats were measured. Her flat: 61 square metres, the survey said, with the plan attached. The flat above: 47. Ilse read the number four times over cocoa. Her flat had been measured twice, by two firms, over the years of a rent dispute that had gone her way, so she knew her 61 the way she knew her birth date. By that account the flat above — same footprint, obviously, the terrace was one box of brick — was fourteen metres small.
She did what a sane person does. She found the discrepancy interesting, and then she found the building interesting, and by March she had measured her own rooms again with the tape and a pencil stub, and her flat came out at 61 by every method she owned, and she wrote to the scaffolders, who wrote back the surveyed figure, 47, with a polite assurance of instrument checks.
Now, the reason Ilse did not go round and knock on the flat above — and there were reasons, before this, that pushed lighter than arithmetic — I will set down as she set them down, in the notebook she began to keep, because the notebook is the only account and the account has to be honest. She had never met the neighbour. Not once in eleven years. Letters went into the communal tray at the stairhead and left it. The door of the flat above had two of everything — two bells, two letterplates, brass and steel — as if the building could not decide what to send it. And the sounds, the tread, the kitchen corner: the tread went to the kitchen corner on her right, and the kitchen corner of the flat above, if the flat was the same shape as hers, was on her left.
She measured the sounds next, which is the sort of thing a person does instead of sleeping, and the notebook has it: tread, three metres into the flat; table; three metres back; pause of about four minutes; and then the sound of a chair going through the floor as a chair does, two legs, tilt, seat, and a person sitting to a deadline or a meal. Under her, reversed in plan, that kitchen sat where her bedroom was, and there is no arrangement of two identical flats in which a three-metre walk to a kitchen, going right, comes from above going left.
She took the buttons of doubt one at a time, as she would have advised anyone. Mirror-plan flats exist on old terraces; some clerk could have mirrored the plots at registration and the brick would have been none the wiser, since a kitchen is a kitchen. But the tread went right, going in from what should have been the stair-shared hall on her left; mirror that and you get a walk to the left; the walk went right. So she let that button go, and picked up the next: perhaps the overhead flat was entered from the rear, off the wheel-passage, a plan of its own, fourteen metres the larger or the smaller at will. She had the land registry at the town end print her two entries, and the entries returned one plan, drawn twice, identical, one household and above it the second, and on the second entry the occupier's name was the name that had been on the tray since before her time, and the ink of the second entry was fainter, as if the entry had been printed fewer times than her own.
At this point a person telephones somebody, and Ilse did telephone, the canopy scaffolder, the registry clerk, and her sister, and got along as far as the sister, who said, with the kind joy of sisters: Mem, either you are being had or the flat above you is fourteen metres smaller than your memory of it, and measuring is the wrong instrument either way — you remember your own flat. Which is the sentence Ilse sat with. Because that was becoming the position. The flat had to go; either the brick gave up 61, or her memory of her own rooms did. She had the memory of her own rooms the way she had her name, constantly, uselessly, and all of it fit the survey, and none of it fit the sounds, and she was not fitted to hear a sound out of place in her own house after eleven years of listening at it.
The carpenter's marks were the find that ended the argument with herself, the way good finds do, by belonging to neither side. She had the skirting off in her hall for a drip-pipe repair in April, and the back of the boarding, near the stud, carried the joiner's chalk: a number. The flat numbers on the Terrace run from the ground, 1 to 12, odds right. Hers is 5. The chalk read 5 when the board was up as it stands in her hall. The chalk read 8 when the board was turned.
She turned every board in the hall that week, with the tape, and kept count on the notebook page. Her 61 metres had an identity crisis of chalk: eleven boards, and four of them, by the marks that would not match her house number in any arrangement, belonged to no flat numbered on the terrace plan at all.
She has stopped trying to choose between the survey and the memory, which is what the notebook now says, in a hand steadier than in March. She listens for the tread, going right; she leaves her own kitchen light on late to see whether her own kitchen corner casts a shadow upward; and she has begun, quietly, without telling her sister, to keep the memory of the flat above the way you keep a lodger nobody has ever met — fed with attention, never named, and owed the courtesy of never being knocked for.