‘It’s the raw material,’ he said. ‘It just isn’t there.’
He stood staring out of the kitchen window at the small garden, where the concrete slabs had risen up at jagged angles, prised apart by tree roots that had tunnelled underneath them. There was an apple tree that drooped amidst its own rotted, fallen fruit and a dominating conifer that had forced the surrounding trees to grow at strange angles, so that they appeared frozen in postures of madness or distress. Some of them had been driven sideways across the fence and had broken it where the garden was divided across the middle.
The further half was ours and was reached along a narrow walkway from the back door. The nearer part belonged to the people who lived below, in the basement flat. Their half was full of things that were all at different stages in the process of decay, so that the boundary between ornament and junk had been obscured. There were lengths of torn plastic sheeting and broken furniture, dented saucepans, smashed flowerpots, a rusty bird feeder, a metal clothes line that lay on its side, all matted with rotten leaves; as well as a number of statues, little chipped men with fishing rods, a brown shiny bulldog with drooping jowls, and in the centre of it all the strange fabricated figure of a black angel with lifted wings that stood on a black plinth. That part of the garden was overrun with pigeons and squirrels: the bird feeder was replenished daily to its brim, despite the evidence of squalor and neglect. The animals would crowd into the heaped dish, skirmishing, and when it was empty would clamber out again and take up positions nearby, apparently waiting for the cycle to be repeated. All day, sick-looking grey pigeons sat hunched along the outside window ledges and guttering. Sometimes a noise or a movement would disturb them and their flailing wings would make a whooping sound against the windows as they rose heavily into the air and then settled again.
The back door to the basement flat stood directly beneath my kitchen window. Twice a day it would open to release a shrivelled, hobbling dog into the filthy courtyard and then slam shut again. I would watch as the creature dragged itself up the broken concrete steps to the garden, where it would release a stream of liquid from between its trembling legs that slowly trickled back down the steps again. It would sit at the top, panting, until shouts from inside compelled it with agonising slowness to make the return journey. The floor between the two flats was very thin, and the voices of the people below were clearly audible. Beneath the kitchen in particular the sound of their sudden shouts could be startling. They were a couple in their late sixties: I had met the man in the street one day and he had told me they were its longest-standing residents, having lived there for nearly forty years. They were also its last remaining council tenants, the people in our flat having conferred that honour on them by leaving.
‘They were Africans,’ he had said to me in a hoarse, conspiratorial whisper.
The council were selling these older properties, the estate agent had told me, the instant they were vacated. It was the maintenance, he said: with an older property, there were always things going wrong. As far as the council are concerned, he added, this lot can’t pop their clogs soon enough. He winked and pointed down at the floor. You never know, it might not even be that long. If you can stick it out, he said, one day you could buy downstairs and turn this back into a single house. Then, he concluded, you’d really be sitting on a gold mine.
The people below had evidently remained unreconciled to the fact of others living above their heads. On our second or third morning in the house, a startling series of ferocious thumps had shaken the floor beneath our feet. We had fallen silent and stared at one another and eventually my younger son had asked what it was. No sooner had he spoken than another volley of thumps came from below. Hearing it a second time, it was clear the basement ceiling was being forcibly struck by our neighbours as a form of complaint.
‘Can of worms,’ said the builder, turning away and casting his eyes around the kitchen, where the units rode up and down on the undulating floor. The doors had been painted, but inside they were chipped and grey with age and the shelves wobbled loose on their brackets. The walls were covered in thick paper with a rash-like raised design: they too had been painted, which had caused the paper to blister and to come away in places, pulling lumps of old plaster with it. The builder fingered one of the lolling tongues. ‘I can see you’ve had a go at patching things up,’ he said, tamping it back against the wall. He drew his breath in sharply between his teeth. ‘My advice now would be to leave well alone.’
He had a kindly face that nonetheless wore a curious look of torment, like a baby’s face in the moments before it begins to cry. He folded his slab-like arms and looked down ruminatively at the floor. A purple vein throbbed against the bald, shapely dome of his skull.
‘You’ve done exactly what I’d have told you to do,’ he stated, after a long silence, ‘which is to cover everything up in a nice thick layer of fresh paint and close the door.’ He tapped his foot on the floor, which dipped badly in the middle and was covered with plastic tiles laminated to look like wood. ‘I dread to think,’ he said, ‘what’s under these.’
A stirring and murmuring of voices rose from downstairs. At the very least, I told the builder, I had to do something about the floor. It needed soundproofing. I had no choice: it couldn’t stay as it was.
He gazed at it silently, his arms still folded, apparently pondering what I had said. Presently he moved to the centre of the dip and gave a little jump. Immediately a furious sequence of thumps erupted beneath us. The builder gave a wheezing laugh.
‘The old broom handle,’ he said.
He looked at me directly. He had small, watery blue eyes that were always half screwed up, as though the light hurt them, or as though he had looked too often at things he didn’t want to see. He asked me what I did for a living and I said I was a writer.