Perfection lasted exactly four minutes, and Oliver Russell had timed every one of them.
The morning light fell across the dust-free spine of a medical textbook on the third shelf, and the whole flat held its breath around him in a hush so pure it seemed to ring. He sat in his armchair with a china cup of Earl Grey in one hand and The Sunday Times open in the other, his ankles crossed, his shoulders down, and he breathed in the smell of tea and old paper and thought, with the grave happiness of a man who asked very little of the world: Perfection.
Then, THUD, THUD, THUD: heavy boots on the stairs. The ceiling vibrated. Somewhere above his head, a bone-deep tremor passed through the joists, and the surface of his tea shivered into a ring of tiny concentric rings.
Then the voice. It was a deep baritone, booming and resonant, and it came through the plaster as if the plaster had been put there for the purpose.
“…so I said to him, babes, you can’t wear Balenciaga to a food bank charity gala. It’s optically vile.”
And Georgia’s voice, light and bright, bubbling with laughter that Oliver had not, until now, been aware she possessed: “Did he listen?”
“Did he fuck!” The baritone was delighted. “He turned up looking like a dystopian bin-man. And then, you won’t believe who was in the VIP area. That girl from Love Island. The one with the veneers…”
Oliver closed his eyes. The voice was a sonic drill. It cut through his ceiling like a laser through butter, and it did not stop. He lowered the paper to his knee. His left eye twitched, once, exactly as it had at the sight of the plaster dust, and he put his fingers against it, lightly, as he would have done to a patient’s eyelid, and said nothing to it.
“…literally snorting a line off a coaster while trying to tag Dua Lipa in a story,” the voice continued, with relish. “It was tragic, Georgia. Tragic.”
Who is that? Who on earth is that? He found, to his irritation, that he was listening for the answer in Georgia’s laughter. No. Do not care. You do not care.
He reached for the pair of silicone earplugs on the side table, where they lived in a small steel dish, and jammed them in.
The booming muffled. The vibration did not. It travelled through the floor and into the legs of the armchair and up through the base of his spine, a vulgar, heavy, unrefined rhythm, the footsteps of a very large man who was not troubled by consequence. He sat with his jaw set and listened to the muffled thunder of his own life being trampled, and counted, as he had once counted breaths under anaesthetic, the seconds between each footfall and the next. There were far too few of them.
He told himself he was going to check the post. There was no post; it was Sunday. He went to the door. He had not meant to. His body simply did it, the way a hand goes to a wound, and he put his eye to the peephole and saw the hallway bent into a curved bright disc.
A mountain of a man was passing through it.
He was twenty-one at the most, Oliver judged, all broad shoulders and rugby player thighs and a square jaw like a block of chiselled Portland stone, and he was carrying two heavy boxes of solvents effortlessly, one on each forearm, as if they were bags of flour. He was the sort of young man who would be a nightmare in an operating theatre and a delight at a barbecue. Behind him came Georgia, carrying a light bag of brushes, grinning.
“And don’t get me started on her podcast,” the mountain shouted, to be heard over his own echo, an echo that bounced off the stairwell and came back doubled. “It’s just an hour of her mispronouncing ‘existentialism’.”
“Stop it,” Georgia said, grinning, “you’re making me wheeze.”
The mountain kicked her front door open with a size twelve boot. Oliver, who noticed these things, noticed the size twelve.
“I’m just saying!” the mountain said. “If you’re going to be famous for doing nothing, at least have good skin.”
They disappeared inside. SLAM.
Oliver stood very still with his forehead nearly against the wood. The hallway was empty again. It lay in his peephole, small and bent and quiet, and he found that he was looking at the place where she had been. Her laughter, he thought, with brutal distaste. Free of charge, with a stranger. He gets it for free.
He tried to name the thing in his chest. It was not envy, he decided, because envy was a thing for other men. It was a clinical observation. The sound of a person laughing without calculation was a rare sound, as rare as a clean wound, and he had simply registered its absence from his own life the way a doctor registers a pulse that is not there. Interesting, he thought, and irrelevant. It was neither. He knew that the way he knew the number of bones in the human hand.
He did not know where the thought had come from. He took his eye away from the peephole as if it had burnt him.
Silence.
He returned to the armchair and sat motionless, hands flat on his knees. He checked his watch. Five minutes had passed since the last footstep. Five minutes of an unbroken stillness so pure and so deliberate that he could have laid a spirit level on it.
He cautiously removed one earplug.
Nothing. Just the distant chirping of a bird, somewhere in the wet branches of the garden, brave and unreasonable.
He exhaled. It was a long, slow release of tension that started in his shoulders and travelled down through his spine to the soles of his feet. The invasion was over. He lifted his tea. It was still warm, which was a small miracle, a courtesy from the universe. He opened the newspaper to the Arts section and relaxed his shoulders, and the world, for a precious moment, was right again.
Then, DOOF. The tea in his cup rippled. DOOF. DOOF. DOOF. A heavy, distorted bass line kicked in through the ceiling. Techno. Relentless, mindless, mechanical, the heartbeat of something that had never been alive.
“YES!” came a muffled scream. “TUNE! ALEXA, VOLUME TEN!”
The floorboards above creaked as two people began to jump.
Oliver stared at his tea. The ripples were small waves now, slopping against the china rim. He did not get angry. He did not shout. He did not leap to his feet and take the stairs two at a time, as he had on the afternoon of the sledgehammer, because he had learned a long time ago that anger was a loss of control, and that the people who won were the people who stayed cold.
He went completely cold.
He set the cup down on its coaster. Precise. No clatter. Then he rose, crossed to the landline on the console table, and picked up the receiver. A landline, in this day and age. He liked it for exactly this reason: a man could not be recorded saying please. He dialled 101.
“Good morning,” Oliver said, calm and clipped. His voice was entirely pleasant. It was the voice that he used on relatives in corridors. “I am reporting a significant Breach of the Peace…” He listened. His eyes did not leave the ceiling, where a fine thread of dust had begun, once again, to trickle from the cornice. “It sounds like a rave. And I should mention, there is a distinct, pungent odour of a Class B substance permeating the communal areas.”
He hung up.
He did not look at the ceiling. There was a particular pleasure in it, one he did not examine: the absolute smoothness of a procedure carried out correctly, a form filled in, a line cleanly drawn. He picked up his book and returned to his armchair and opened it to the marked page. And he waited, as he had waited in a thousand theatre anterooms, calm, patient, hands steady, for the outcome that the laws of cause and effect had already ordained.
Cannabis. Class B. On the balcony, the other night, she was so proud of herself. The memory of the smoke came back with unpleasant force, sweet and thick, drifting down through the lantern light. He remembered the hot flush of rage that had gone through him as he had stood there with the Petrus order still on his tongue. He remembered turning his back on her. Retreating. Retreating, from a girl on a balcony in a blanket.
You heard a fox screaming. He had been rather pleased with that one. And yet the glint in her eyes as she had said You were speaking RP, the cheerful, vicious certainty of it, was lodged in him like a splinter he could not locate.
She knows. She knows the shape of it, if not the shape of the rest.
He set his jaw. Almost nobody in this village had ever heard him speak in that other voice, and certainly nobody who owned a sledgehammer. He had come here to be a man without an accent. He had come here for the tea, the rain, the sensible shoes, the dull and honest bones of ordinary people, and a girl on a balcony with a joint and a gift for impertinence had put her finger, without even trying, on the seam.
He turned a page he had not read. Then he turned another, and the paper whispered under his thumb like a small, repeated apology, and still the quiet did not come to rest.
The knock came faster than he had expected. He did not hear it, of course, not through the floor, not at this distance, but he heard what followed it: the abrupt, total cessation of the music, as if someone had cut the throat of the building. Then the faint, flat crackle of a police radio, passing through the ceiling like a pulse. Then footsteps that were not the footsteps of the mountain, heavier and more measured, the tread of officials, going out.
He did not need to see it. The silence that followed was heavy, and it was a very particular kind of silence. It was the silence of defeat.
Oliver permitted himself a very small, thin smile.
He turned the page of his book.
He read three lines and found, to his irritation, that he could not have said what they were about. His eyes moved. His hand did not. And in the quiet that had been so expensively purchased, a thought crept in, slowly, like cold water under a door: that he had not, in all honesty, wanted the music to stop. Or not only. That some mean and ancient part of him had wanted her to hear the knock, to feel the cold dread of it, to look down through the floor and know exactly whose finger was on the button.
Humiliation, said the quiet voice at the back of his mind. Be honest. That is what that was.
That was a lawful report.
That was a lawful report made with a smile.
He did not answer. He read the same three lines again, and the bird outside went on chirping, brave and unreasonable, and above him the floorboards were silent. And for the first time in a very long while, Oliver Russell found that the silence of his own flat was not quite the thing he had thought it was.
It was only the sound of a room with a hole in it, waiting to be filled, and above that hole, somewhere in the dark of the floorboards, a girl with a splinted wrist was crumpling a pink piece of paper in her fist, and he was not supposed to know that, and he knew it anyway.