I am a solid block of shock. I cannot believe my neighbour would say that to me. That he would think it, even when angry. He couldn’t have said it if he hadn’t first thought it.
He did. Both. Said and thought.
I can’t find anything to say in response. It would serve Justin right if I were still standing here this time tomorrow, glued to the ground by his cruel words.
‘Leave it, Jub,’ Angie warns. She sounds anxious. I wonder if I look alarming: as if I’m considering climbing in through the window – a dripping, hooded black figure – and choking the life out of him. What an appealing idea.
‘She sent her seven-year-old son away?’ the dance teacher asks. ‘What the fuck?’
‘Would you rather I played classical music?’ Mr Fahrenheit taunts me. ‘Would you still be such a fuckin’ killjoy if I played, I don’t know … Mozart?’
I wonder why he’s imitating Hitler, with his finger in a line over his upper lip. Then I realise it’s not a moustache; he’s pushing his nose up to indicate snobbery.
‘Mozart?’ Walking Boots laughs. ‘Like you’ve got any.’
‘I have, as it goes,’ Mr Fahrenheit tells him. ‘You’ve got to have your classical music. Isn’t that right, Louise?’ To his friends, he says, ‘Wanna hear some, you lowbrow wasters?’
No one does. They groan, swear, laugh.
‘Looks like it’s just you and me, Louise – the cultured ones. Culture vultures.’ He leans closer to the rain barrier between us to wink at me.
I can’t be here any more. As quickly as I can without slipping, I climb the steps to the street and hurry home, to the riotous applause of Mr Fahrenheit and his friends.
‘Stuart. Stuart!’ Words alone aren’t going to do it. I push his shoulder with the tips of my fingers.
He opens his eyes and stares at me, flat on his back. ‘What?’
‘Can you hear that? Listen.’
‘Louise. It had better be the morning.’
I disagree. Until I have had at least six hours’ sleep, it had better not be. I can sleep in later now that I don’t have to get Joseph ready for school, which is why I never do. Every morning I switch on at 6.30, exactly the time I used to have to get up; it’s my body’s daily protest against the absence of my son.
‘Sorry. Middle of the night,’ I say. I cannot allow myself to define the present moment as morning, even though technically it is. I haven’t had my night yet. This is the Noisy Neighbour Paradox: does one say, ‘But it’s three in the morning!’ to impress upon the selfish oaf next door that it’s very, very late? ‘Four in the morning’, ‘five in the morning’? At what point does it start to sound as if, actually, busy people are already singing in the shower, pushing the ‘on’ buttons on their espresso machines, preparing to jog to the office?
Stuart reaches up with both hands for the two sides of his pillow, left and right of his head, and tries to fold them over his face as if he’s packing himself carefully for delivery somewhere. ‘Middle of the night,’ he says. ‘Then I should still be asleep.’
‘Can you hear the music?’
‘Yes, but it’s not going to stop me from sleeping. I’ve got a wife for that.’
‘It’s Verdi. Before that we had Bizet, a bit of Puccini.’
The security light on the St John’s College flats at the back of us comes on, shines in my face. A car must have driven too close to the building. I lean forward and drag our single bedroom curtain to the right. The curtain is too narrow; we have to choose which side of the window we want to leave exposed: the security light side or the students’ bedroom windows side.
‘Mr F must have got a “Best of the Classics” CD free with his Saturday paper,’ Stuart says, closing his eyes again.
‘It’s aimed at me,’ I tell him. ‘A melodic “fuck you”. He’s bored of attacking me with his music, so now he’s doing it with what he thinks of as mine.’
‘Isn’t that a bit paranoid?’
I could admit that I’ve been next door, had yet another argument with Mr Fahrenheit, that the subject of classical music came up. That’s the context Stuart’s missing. If I told him, he would concede that I’m right about the malice in this latest noise-attack, but he would also criticise me – critisult me, Joseph would say; his invented word that he’s so proud of, a hybrid of criticise and insult – for going round on my own: a defenceless woman without my husband to protect me. And then I might critisult him back, because I’m exhausted and frustrated and would find it hard to be tactful. I might raise my voice and point out that whenever I suggest we visit Mr Fahrenheit together to lodge our complaint, or that Stuart goes instead of me for a change, he always responds in the same way: ‘Come on, Lou, let’s not steam in there. Look, we don’t want a scene if we can avoid one, do we? He might call it a night soon.’
Call it a night, call it a morning. Call it a party, call it a little get-together.
That’s why I go and complain alone. Because my husband always wants to give it more time, to satisfy himself that we’re not a pair of troublemaking hotheads.
‘I’m going to ring the police,’ I say.
‘What?’ Stuart hauls himself into a sitting position and rubs the inner corners of his eyes with his thumbs, his hands protruding from his face like antlers. ‘Lou, put the brakes on a second, please. The police?’
Yes, yes, the police. The Cambridge police. Not the SS, just a nice, polite, helpful PC in uniform, to say something soothing like, ‘Can I respectfully ask that you turn the volume down, please, sir?’ They’re hardly going to storm Mr Fahrenheit’s Farrow-&-Ball-reinforced drug den and riddle him with bullets. More’s the pity.
‘I can’t get to sleep with that coming through the wall, Stuart. What else can I do? I’ve tried talking to him more than a dozen times, and nothing changes. He doesn’t even pretend it will! He’s proudly, defiantly noisy, except he calls it “not noisy”.’
Stuart reaches for the chain on his bedside lamp and pulls. Then, as if the light is an affront to the room full of night that he ought to be sleeping in, he turns it off again. ‘Maybe ringing the police is a sensible next step, but not tonight, Lou.’
‘When, then?’
‘First thing tomorrow?’ Stuart says hopefully.
‘What, when Mr Fahrenheit’s asleep and there’s no music playing?’ I assume this will be enough to alert my husband to his temporary lapse into idiocy, but apparently not.
‘Yeah. You don’t need “Video Killed the Radio Star” pounding out to prove your point. You can explain the situation, the history. It’s not as if the police are going to doubt you.’
‘Really? You don’t think their first thought will be, “Hmm, I wonder if the neighbour’s music really is too loud or whether this woman is a neurotic spoilsport trying to make sure no one has any fun. If only we could hear the music and judge for ourselves – that would be really helpful”?’
‘All right, look, I just think … I need to go to sleep, Lou. Imran’s coming first thing in the morning. If you can’t sleep in here, go up to the attic and sleep on the sofa bed in my study.’
No. No. I want to sleep in my own bed. If I sleep anywhere else, Mr Fahrenheit has won. And I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep, anyway; I would lie flat on my back, rigid as a floorboard, with my heart pounding, and the knowledge that I had allowed myself to be driven out of my own bedroom buzzing in my brain like an unswattable fly.
Stuart says, ‘If you ring the police now and they say they’ll come out, that means me staying up God knows how long –’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ I say, in what I hope is a calm and helpful voice. I employ the same tactics with my husband as I do with my inconsiderate shit of a next-door neighbour: better not to let them see how angry I am in case they use it against me. ‘You can sleep. I’m awake anyway. I’ll deal with the police, assuming they can come at such short notice.’
Stuart jolts in the bed, as if I’ve dropped a hand grenade into his lap. ‘I’m not letting you do tha
t on your own,’ he says. ‘Please, can we just leave it for tonight? I’m knackered, Lou. You must be too.’
Him first, me second. It doesn’t mean he’s selfish, I tell myself. It’s only natural to think of yourself first. We all do it. I’m selfish too. It’s lucky no one can read my mind and see the list of things I would allow to happen to Mr Fahrenheit rather than have him disrupt any more of my nights.
Stuart hasn’t spotted that my pyjama bottoms are drenched from the knees down. I suppose it must be hard to see a detail like that in the dark. If he notices, he will accuse me of lacking a sense of proportion; he wouldn’t willingly get his clothes soaked unless someone’s life was at stake and even then it might have to be a blood relative.
‘You’re right,’ I say neutrally. ‘I’ll go up to the attic. You go back to sleep. Sorry I woke you.’
‘Good,’ Stuart says with relief. He is so gullible. I love my husband, but there is no doubt that my life flows more easily when I tell him as little as possible. This isn’t a new development; I first noticed it shortly after Joseph was born, though I would find it hard to point to any actual secrets I’ve kept – it’s always tiny things I’ve forgotten by the next day. I have the form of a deceiver without the content.
Stuart makes his ‘I’m too tired to say goodnight’ noise. I know he’ll be unconscious again within seconds, loud Verdi notwithstanding. His talent for sleeping in almost any conditions is the reason he is able to be so sanguine about Mr Fahrenheit’s weekend disturbances: his sleep is not threatened, only mine.
‘This … Imran, tomorrow,’ I say. ‘Can you … delay him?’
‘Not really. He’s coming at eight-thirty. Realistically, he’s going to be here an hour at least, and we have to be at Saviour for ten –’
‘No, I mean … can you tell him not to come at all? Just … I mean, we don’t have to rush into it, do we?’
‘He’s supposed to be starting a week on Monday. What?’ Stuart turns on his bedside lamp. ‘What does that face mean? Louise, we’ve been through this.’
‘Thirty thousand pounds is a lot of money to spend on a house we might not be staying in, especially when there’s no real need.’
‘Might not be staying? Since when? Is this about Mr Fahrenheit?’
‘I don’t want to live next door to him,’ I say.
Stuart expresses his displeasure by leaning forward and falling on to his side across the bed. He picks up my pillow and covers his face with it. ‘That’s the opposite of what you said yesterday. You said, “I’m not being driven out of—” ’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’
‘Well, look, if you’re serious about moving, definitely don’t ring the police. You have to declare any official noise disputes with neighbours when you sell a house, or your buyer can sue you.’
I wonder if this means we could sue our vendor. She told us she wanted to move because the house was too big for a woman living alone. I wonder if that was only part of the reason.
‘I can’t live next door to Justin Clay,’ I tell Stuart. ‘Even if he never plays a single song ever again, I can’t stand being so close to him, not now that I know what he’s like. It’s like … living in enemy territory. Seriously, Stuart, can you text Imran now and cancel him?’
If I told him what Justin said about our sending Joseph away in order to have a quieter house, would it make a difference? For the moment, I can’t face it. All I want is to push as far away from myself as possible the knowledge that it happened, the memory of it.
‘I’m not making any decisions now, Lou, and neither are you. We both need to get some rest. Please?’
Which means he is not going to text Imran and tell him not to come tomorrow. By the time he wakes up it will be too late: Imran will be on his way.
A sharp spurt of disillusionment dulls and solidifies, as they tend to these days, into a small grey stone that rolls slowly down a spiral slide – one that narrows as it descends – until it falls off at the bottom and into the pit of my stomach, and then I don’t feel anything any more, once the slight discomfort of the dropping and landing is over.
Obviously I know that there isn’t really a spiral slide inside my body, and that a flattened hope cannot transform into a grey pebble. It’s funny that sometimes you can only describe something with perfect accuracy by being wildly inaccurate.
‘Tomorrow afternoon, soon as we get back, I’ll go next door and have a word with Fahrenheit, the ignorant tosser,’ Stuart promises. ‘I’ll tell him, final warning, or we’re going to make an official complaint.’
‘Why wait till the afternoon?’ I ask. ‘Why not eight in the morning, before Imran gets here?’
Stuart chuckles. ‘Have you ever known Mr F to surface before midday?’
‘So … you don’t want to wake him up?’
He looks caught out. Then he says, ‘We might as well give the peace talks a chance, Lou. If we wake him at eight, he won’t be amenable to anything we say.’
Cowardice dressed up as strategy. Another little grey pebble loops down the helter-skelter, slowing as it goes, contrary to the laws of whatever the scientific term is for the acceleration of small things rolling downwards.
I pat Stuart’s arm. ‘Go to sleep,’ I say. ‘Busy day tomorrow.’
The phone rings once before I pounce on it. ‘Hello?’
‘Mrs Beeston?’
‘Yes, it’s me.’
‘It’s Trevor Chibnall, environmental health officer for Cambridge City Council, returning your call.’
‘Yes.’ Who else would it be at two in the morning? And he isn’t returning my call; that makes it sound as if I left a message for him.
‘I believe you contacted the police with regard to a noise nuisance issue, and they advised you to contact the council?’
He believes? It’s what I told him when we spoke a few minutes ago. I’m tempted to say, ‘No, that’s completely wrong,’ to see if he says, ‘But … it’s what you told me yourself, before.’
‘Thanks for ringing me back,’ I say instead, though I don’t understand why he created the need by ending our first telephone conversation. He didn’t explain, just asked for my name and number and said he’d be in touch shortly. I assumed the worst – that he meant days, maybe even weeks – and asked what ‘shortly’ meant, only to find that my outrage had nowhere to go when he said ten to fifteen minutes.
He is as good as his word, and now I have nowhere to put my unsubstantiated feelings of abandonment. They flap around my heart like empty sacks of flesh after liposuction.
‘The number the police gave you is the out-of-hours emergency number. Do you have a noise situation that you’d classify as an emergency?’
I try to focus on Chibnall’s question and not his tone, which, in isolation, would be enough to convince me that nothing will happen soon if he has anything to do with it. His voice is deep, serious and devoid of drive. It would be great for telling a coma victim not to resist, to move towards the light.
‘It’s an emergency in the sense that I’d like something done about it now,’ I say. ‘I’m still hoping I might get some sleep tonight.’ In my own bed. ‘Can you hear that music?’
‘Yes.’
‘Loud, isn’t it? It’s not playing in my house. That’s my neighbour.’ Knowing nothing about Chibnall’s musical preferences, I do not add, It might be Rachmaninov at the moment but it was Wagner ten minutes ago.
‘Your address, please?’
‘Seventeen Weldon Road.’
‘Cambridge?’
No, Southampton. That’s why I rang Cambridge’s environmental health department. ‘Yes.’
‘Your full name, please?’
I’m not liking the way this is going. His reactions seem off. Or rather, he’s not reacting at all, when he ought to be. I was hoping that our dialogue might go as follows:
Loud, isn’t it? It’s not playing in my house. That’s my neighbour.
You’re kidding me? Seriously? Wow, that is beyond app
alling! There’s no way you should have to put up with that at this time of night! Right – sit tight, and I’ll come round and sort the bastard out.
What’s the point of having an emergency noise officer if tidings of inappropriate noise don’t send him over the edge into vengeful hysteria?
‘Louise Caroline Beeston,’ I tell him.
‘And your postcode?’
‘CB1 2YL.’
‘Your neighbour’s full address?’
‘Nineteen Weldon Road. Same postcode, I assume.’
‘Yes, it is.’
How does he know that? Is he sitting next to a whiteboard covered in photographs of Cambridge’s most malevolent noise pests, with the details of each one scrawled in blue wipe-off pen beneath his or her mugshot: the public enemies Chibnall and his team have been hunting for years, but they’ve never been able to make anything stick?
Either that or I watch too much television.
‘And you’ve lived at number seventeen for how long?’ he asks me. No intonation whatsoever.
‘Five months.’ What does it matter how long I’ve lived here?
‘And your neighbour’s been at number nineteen for how long?’
I take a deep breath. Then another. How long is he going to linger over boring, unimportant details? ‘Since we moved in. That’s all I know.’
‘What’s your neighbour’s full name?’
‘His name’s Justin Clay. I don’t know if he’s got a middle name.’ Wanting to remind Chibnall that I’m a person and not merely a data source, I say, ‘My husband and I call him Mr Fahrenheit. You know, from the Queen song, “Don’t Stop Me Now”? He plays it all the time. So … please do. Stop him now.’ I fake a laugh, then feel like an idiot.
‘And Mr Clay has been resident at number nineteen since you moved into number seventeen?’ Chibnall asks, his bland manner unaffected by my attempt to make our conversation more interesting.
‘Yes.’
The Orphan Choir Page 2