He was quiet for a moment.
“Most people would have connected them,” he said.
“Most people let their grievances become general,” I said. “I try not to do that. It’s a waste of energy and it makes you someone you don’t want to be.”
He looked at me with the expression of a person encountering a way of thinking about things that had not previously occurred to him.
“You planned it all out,” he said. “The complaint. The documentation. The video.”
“Yes.”
“You sat down there waiting for the bag to come over.”
“Yes.”
He almost smiled. It was a grey, tired almost-smile, but it was there.
“I heard my door in the morning and then I went out with my tea and I thought I’d look down and apologize. And you were just sitting there, very still, in your coat.”
“I was waiting,” I said.
“I know that now. At the time I thought it was a coincidence.” He paused. “Then the management letter arrived and it was very much not a coincidence.”“No.”
“It was very thorough,” he said. “The letter.”
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“I know. I’m taking it as one anyway.”
He looked at me.
This time the smile arrived fully.
It was a good smile, under everything — the kind that suggested that in different circumstances, with less weight on it, Daniel Hartley from 4B probably smiled often and to good effect.
“I’m going to try to be a better neighbor,” he said.
“You already are,” I said. “The shopping for Mrs. Okafor.”
“That’s easy,” he said. “She’s very kind and she sends me home with food.”
“Most kindnesses are easy,” I said. “That’s the thing. They don’t cost what we think they cost beforehand.”
He thought about this.
“The tea bags were easy too,” he said. “Stopping them, I mean. Once I actually stopped — it was nothing. It cost me nothing.” He looked at his hands. “I don’t know why I made it so difficult.”
I thought about this.
“Because you were tired,” I said. “And when we’re very tired, the things that should be easy feel like one more demand on a very long list. It stops being about the tea bag.”He nodded.
He knew exactly what I meant.
He moved out in August.
Not because of anything that had happened between us — because without his mother as the reason for this specific location, the flat no longer made sense. He told me in the lift one Tuesday, matter-of-factly: he’d found somewhere closer to his office, smaller, somewhere he could actually afford to furnish properly.
