Which is how I came to be standing outside 4B again in late February, six weeks after the complaint, with a very different kind of conversation ahead of me.
It started with Mrs. Okafor in 2C.
She knocked on my door on a Saturday morning, which she had done perhaps a dozen times in the three years I had known her, and she had the look of someone who wanted to say something without quite knowing how to begin.“That man upstairs,” she said, once I had made tea, which I always made when Mrs. Okafor came by because Mrs. Okafor was not a person you invited in without making tea. “Hartley.”
“Yes?”
“He came downstairs and helped me with my shopping last week. Three trips, all the way up. Didn’t ask for anything.”
“That was kind,” I said. I meant it. It was kind.
“He looked tired,” she said. “I asked if he was all right.” She paused. “He said he was going through a difficult time. His mother is unwell. He moved to this building to be closer to her.”I held my cup.
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“He didn’t say more than that,” Mrs. Okafor continued, with the particular care of someone who is sharing information without meaning to gossip. “But he looked — thin. And tired in a specific way.”
I thanked her for telling me.
She finished her tea and went home.
I sat at the kitchen table for a while.
I want to be clear about something.
People who are going through difficult times are not thereby entitled to throw tea bags onto their neighbors’ balconies. Grief does not transfer the cost of ruined towels onto the person living below you. Hard circumstances explain behavior, sometimes, but they do not resolve the question of impact.
I know this.
I also know that the man who had leaned on his door frame and told me to be glad it was tea bags was, possibly, a man in a very particular kind of exhaustion — the kind that comes from driving to a hospital and sitting beside someone who is not getting better, and then coming home to a flat you only moved to because of that hospital, and being tired in a way that makes you careless and makes carelessness look, from the outside, like contempt.
I am not saying it excuses it.
I am saying it explains it differently.
