Damages
1
When I first came to see the flat, I passed on the first floor an apartment with the door kicked in and the letterbox sealed. I continued up to the third and to the place I was hoping to rent. The flat was tired and yet as I looked around I imagined without difficulty living there. I said I was keen, would wish to stay for a very long time and would they mind, if they were willing to rent it to me, if I were to change the furniture, paint the place, and put in some rugs rather than carpets, assuming the floors were in adequate condition. I expected a bit of resistance, perhaps even signs of irritation; instead, my request was met with relief. I was speaking to the wife as the husband was in the bathroom fixing the sink which had a choked pipe. We were in the living room and her two young children were picking away at a small hole in the settee that they were making bigger. They looked like twins, a boy and a girl. She probably hoped I wouldn’t notice the hole but there the pair of them were, taking turns to stick their fingers into the torn fabric as if it were a game. She said that would be wonderful; they were looking for a tenant who wouldn’t mind putting a little effort into it. They had bought the flat several years ago not long before she became pregnant and when her husband was offered a better-paid job up north. If she hadn’t fallen pregnant, they might have stayed, or at least stayed long enough to do the flat up so they wouldn’t feel so embarrassed at the state it was in when renting it. With two young children, they could never quite find the time to put into it the work needed. The rent was modest and I agreed to take it if they would take me. The landlords were selling nearby the place I was in; I had two months to find somewhere and this was the fifteenth flat I’d seen. I asked how many were interested. She admitted that there had been over a hundred enquiries but they had whittled the numbers down to eight viewings; all that day. It wouldn’t be fair to say yes without letting the others see the flat, she said, but promised she would let me know by evening. She did, and they agreed to rent me the apartment.
The move was done in a day and though there were a lot of things to transport, the distance was short, and I had the help of five friends and a van: we managed to get everything in by the late afternoon. In the initial weeks and months, the neighbours seemed to treat me with an odd distance, saying hello if I instigated it. One knocked on my door once, but only to ask about a stolen bike. He asked tentatively, as though afraid but obliged, as if others in the building had nominated him to do the asking. I said no, and wondered what happened. A bike was stolen a couple of days earlier from the landing and someone thought it might have been an inside job: perhaps a person from the building or a friend of theirs. I would have friends visiting: a few of us would watch a film on Friday or Saturday night; a friend teaching at a language school nearby came for dinner most Wednesdays. I said I would ask visitors to make sure they pulled the main door behind them when entering.
A few weeks after that I saw the caller on the stairs and asked if there had been any news on the bike. Nothing, he said, looking at me with a glance whose shiftiness suggested it came from what he perceived was my chicanery. I tried to engage another tenant or owner on the stairs a few days after that, using the missing bike as an opportunity for discussion. He said he knew nothing about the bike, but if I had any information to pass it on to flat 9 - he was the one whose bike was stolen. In the last tenement I was living in, most of the occupiers were friendly and some almost happily intrusive. One neighbour thought nothing of whistling as he went up and down the stairs. If someone new moved in he would make a point of knocking on their door and offering them homemade cake. Another owner, on the ground floor, worked for a year turning the back garden from a rubble and weed-strewn piece of land into an environment with a patio, a patch of grass and numerous plant pots, insisting it was a shared space we should use as often as we could. I sometimes arrived back from work during the summer months and she and others were in the garden, sharing a bottle of wine and, if I peeked in to see who was there, they often persuaded me to join them.
Perhaps I was just used to the conviviality this block lacked, and it didn’t look like anybody was interested in transforming the garden. It was slabs mainly of cracked concrete and sad shrubbery, and though it was an expansive space about six times the size of the garden in the old block, nobody showed any sign of wishing to use it for anything but a temporary dumping ground until the council took away their old washing machine, fridge or cooker. Unlike in the old place, there were no ground-floor flats; the street was a main road and there were mainly shops. I found myself wondering if I could get on the right side of the neighbours by transforming at least a patch of the garden and used it as an opportunity to try and draw several neighbours into discussion when passing them on the stairs. Nobody seemed interested and gave the impression of being in a hurry they showed no signs of it before I tried to engage them.
2
During these first three months, the flat two floors below appeared empty; I never saw anyone entering or exiting and the door remained unrepaired. It was then I saw a letter on the mat, and a day later saw it on the landing bannister, the next on the ground, and the day after back on the mat. After a week, I picked the letter up and planned to post it back either to the Royal Mail or to the sender. A few days later, when I went to look for it, I couldn’t find it anywhere and suspected I had binned it when dropping old letters and papers off at the paper bank.
I was still intrigued by the flat downstairs and would sometimes check if it was up for sale, and eventually, it was — about four months after I moved in. I found it on several property sites and the rest of the flat reflected the damaged state of the door. The place was beyond dilapidated: the radiators were rusted, the carpets stained and perhaps more than fifty years old: the one in the sitting room was a swirl of beige and brown; the bedroom carpet was a thick shag-pile, looking like green mould. The bath had plastic panelling that was indented, and the cooker had a hob covered in food stains. I phoned the agency and made an appointment. I had no interest in buying it, nor the money to purchase it and do it up. I just wished to know more about its history, as though somehow the animosity of others in the building was linked to it.
What I didn’t expect but should have was the smell; partly I suppose why the letterbox had been sealed. The agent apologised; they had been airing it for days and still, the stench lingered. Once the carpets were out all would be fine. I asked the agent if he knew anything about the former tenants. He said he didn’t know the specifics, but he supposed it had been a junkie flat for years. The owners had lived abroad for a couple of decades and they had since passed away and the kids were selling. Did the owners know they were renting it to drug addicts? They just knew the rent was coming in; the council he supposed paid it directly into the landlords’ account. He guessed that when one addict moved out, cleaned up their act or snuffed it, another moved in. I didn’t care to match his cynicism but I wanted enough complicity between us for him to tell me more. He said he worked for a while before this job with a property agent who dealt exclusively with rentals. What mattered was the rent coming in and people on long-term benefits were often your most reliable customers, especially if the rent bypassed the tenant. They might have been all over the place in their personal lives but whether they had enough to eat wasn’t the agency’s concern as long as the rent was paid. Sometimes he would rent to nice people, hard-working and without apparent addiction problems, but their job turned out to be precarious, they didn’t have much in savings and they ended up owing back rent. He looked around the apartment and said it might not look it but this place was probably a bit of a gold mine; that the misery of people’s lives had been the income of the owners. It was a claim that could have been angry and political but he smiled as though it was pragmatic and economic.
3
After returning upstairs I looked again for the letter, sure for some reason that it was still in the flat, and found it in the back of my desk drawer, half folded, having slipped between two shelves. I took it out and now felt oddly entitled to open it. Perhaps thinking it had been lost made me feel that in its rediscovery it was now my letter; that looking at its contents I was rescuing it from oblivion. To consign it now to the bin would have been more troublesome than opening it, and sending it back more pointless than useful. I also felt entitled to know a little bit more about who was to receive the letter, as if my status in the building was somehow linked to it.
The letter was immediately harrowing. It said the person to whom it was addressed had probably no more than months to live if she insisted on continuing to consume the quantity of drugs she was taking. The letter writer said he had tried to persuade her to leave Edinburgh, but knew when she refused that the dealers would be harassing her, that her own clients would be expectant, and the cycle wouldn’t be broken. I allowed my eyes to travel to the bottom of this densely written one-page letter and saw a male name, one that I will say more about in a moment, but then continued reading, assuming the sender and the addressee had been lovers. That might be a narrow assumption suggesting my gender expectations were as prejudicial as the agent’s social ones. But sometimes these are based on useful instincts and not always useless preconceptions. I felt if the name at the bottom had been a woman’s, it might have been a mother or sister, and I suppose even with the name it was possible it may have been a brother. The name of the person downstairs was Linda McColl. The name on the letter was Alex Bratney.
4
I’d never given much thought or even attention to drugs in the city. I had friends who liked to smoke hash, one or two who would on occasional weekends do MDMA if they were clubbing, but I usually met them in the afternoon in cafes, went around theirs for dinner or for a film night. I disliked the smell of weed and once when I joked that while tobacco might kill I quite liked its smell. Hash may have been harmless but its odour was nauseating. I don’t remember the couple to whom I made the remark ever smoking it again in my company, and I’ve occasionally wondered if that has been respecting my olfactory wishes, or if they realised the odour was indeed horrible. I suspect it to be the latter, as their flat no longer smells of a mixture of hashish and cinnamon incense.
I remember also a chat I once had after giving five pounds to a person on a busy street nearby. He was honest enough to tell me he wasn’t homeless; that he commuted into town each day from a housing estate past the canal, and admitted he probably earned more sitting in the cold and rain than he could have working in a call centre or the supermarket he was seated outside. Sometimes people would tell him to get a job, and he reckoned he had one — if a job is somewhere you reluctantly had to be to earn enough money to live. He acknowledged he was an addict and that this job suited his needs better than most. He didn’t need to dress up and maybe the more dressed down he was the more pitiful he looked, and the more money he could make. He said his rent was covered by the council but he was constantly getting sanctioned, which meant any other benefits were withdrawn. The dole was a pittance, anyway, he said, and he could earn far more doing what he was presently doing. I asked him what would change things. He said if he could swap places with me for a month, maybe he would start to see life differently. He asked me what I did. I said I was a secondary school teacher. He asked me how much I earned, and we worked out I was no better off than he was. But I didn’t have a drug habit, he said, and giving him more money and opportunities wasn’t going to make much difference. That should have happened long ago, he reckoned — to his parents. He said unless cash is linked to hope, it is likely to be wasted. Or linked to self-discipline and purpose. Imagine, he said, if all that money he’d squandered on drugs had gone into starting his own business. He wouldn’t be sitting on a cushion covered in plastic and with a stained sleeping bag keeping him warm.
As I thought back to this exchange it somehow reminded me of the more recent one with the estate agent: that whether the victim or the beneficiary of certain social policies they both agreed that state funding was disastrous. The agent didn’t really care because he could see the profit in it; the beggar accepted that at least his rent was paid and they could sanction him all they liked as he made enough on the street.
5
A few weeks later the flat seemed to have been sold and the new owners started renovating the place, with the door one of the first things to go: its bright grubby red replaced with a subdued grey. When I passed, the door was sometimes ajar and I looked in to see the radiators being replaced, the carpets removed, the floors sanded and a new kitchen being put in. It took several months and it was around the time that the place was finished that a letter arrived at my flat. It was an official letter of probably no great importance; I could see from the envelope it came from an internet company. Yet what wasn’t irrelevant was the name on the letter: it was the same as the one addressed to Linda; Alex Bratney. I read the original letter again to check if I missed something, if Alex alluded in any way to being her upstairs neighbour and indeed there was one remark that may have suggested it. He said Linda must have known the neighbours were well aware of the flat’s status as an apartment of disrepute and, while I originally assumed this meant no more than that as a friend visiting he would have inferred this, now I suppose he would have witnessed it, and would have seen the responses of people in the building.
Another letter arrived and the neighbours put it on the landing, presumably hoping the postman would take it away, but I took it instead, claiming a responsibility towards the letter that may sound like an excuse for prurience, but I believed was grounded in concern. I didn’t want Alex ignored even if his letters wouldn’t be going to the intended recipient. I opened it and discovered that the reason why Alex had in the earlier letter commented on the flat as a place of disrepute wasn’t just because of the drugs consumed but that Linda had also been using the place for sexual assignations that funded her habit. He said he knew they couldn’t be together as long as she took other lovers, but he also believed that as soon as she gave up the drugs he could accept her past actions and see them as a product of the substances she was abusing and not at all about failures in their relationship. The letter made clear they had been lovers in the past and perhaps even seemed to propose they had been sharing Alex’s flat before she moved to the one on the first floor. This was a little vague but it seemed that Linda would take men back there and when Alex wouldn’t let her in she pleasured them on the stairwell. When the flat became available below, she managed somehow to become its tenant and more frequently took on clients.
I was beginning to understand better the diffidence of the neighbours, as if they were wary of getting to know anyone who might be a new problem rather than a new acquaintance. Probably when the person’s bike was stolen, several of the neighbours assumed it was associated with me; once again a flat in the building had gone to a dubious tenant. I recalled what the agent said: the flat downstairs was rented for years to people who didn't much care to look after it but the owners knew the rent would be paid. Their priority wasn’t good tenants as good neighbours; just good tenants as rent payers: the council paid the rent; hence whoever was in the flat was a good tenant. Yet looking at the condition of the place when I visited, nobody was going to take the flat out of anything other than desperation, so presumably for years and years the place was occupied by what could be called with some confidence bad neighbours. But had Alex been a bad neighbour; had the flat I was in also been for years an apartment for drug takers, dealers, sex workers and alcoholics? I suspected Alex was at least a drinker.
Two reasons led me to make this assumption. Firstly, a remark the landlords made when I moved in. They had mentioned the last tenants were only in for six months but the one before that for several years: after he left they shampooed all the carpets to get the stink of alcohol out of them. It was a remark they made after I mentioned the idea of lifting the carpet up. Now it seemed safe to assume that tenant had been Alex. There was also a brief remark in the last letter: that he admitted he wasn’t perfect; that we all have bad habits. It also made me recall a remark a tenant made when after a gathering at mine I was taking about eight to ten empty wine bottles down the stairs in a bin liner and the neighbour coming up, with a newspaper under his arm, said he hoped I wasn’t going to return with the same number of full ones. I took it to be a comment on the previous evening — though the eight of us, four of us teachers; the others working for the Scottish government — were talking quietly, with music in the background played low and where at no stage did we talk over it. We finished up by midnight. After reading the letter and thinking back to the landlord’s remarks, I supposed the other tenant’s comment was referencing Alex’s drinking and not my gathering.
6
I don’t think I am usually inclined to paranoia but, without looking at Alex’s letters, I would have felt a comment like that one, and the looks I would sometimes receive, would have helped to create a feeling of persecution. Instead, it made me more and more interested in discovering aspects of Alex and Linda’s life. Putting this down on paper may give the impression the interest was more focused than it was. Over those months I wouldn’t have given Alex and Linda much thought, and perhaps thinking about them didn’t do more than alleviate the paranoia that could have developed. But when I next passed the neighbour who commented on the bottles, as I went down the stairs, he said he didn’t mean to be rude the last time; it was just a remark by way of acknowledging a fellow tenant. I said not at all, adding I thought it may have been a comment on a previous tenant, that hadn’t there been a heavy drinker in my flat a while ago? He looked at me oddly for a moment, no less so perhaps than the person who asked me months earlier about the stolen bike, and said that would have been Alex. He added he was a heck of a nice man but, yes — he drank too much. He supposed he had his reasons. He didn’t say more than that and I was in a hurry — I was on my way to school, a brisk fifteen-minute walk away. I gave him my name and he gave me his: Malcolm.
While walking, I thought about the tenants I’d met and those I had passed on the stairs without saying hello to at all. At least half seemed to be students, and they were presumably staying for a year or two and not much longer. Then there were professionals who left for work around the same time as me, and I’d include amongst them the person who inquired after the bike, and also what I assumed was the bike owner. The ones who I couldn’t seem to label as students (who were all in their twenties), and the professionals (who were around forty to fifty) was Malcolm. He was probably in his fifties but looked older and may have been a drinker himself. He lived on the top floor. I imagined him sometimes going downstairs and sharing a few beers with Alex. Something in his comment suggested friendship.
The school where I taught was probably one the most sought-after which wasn’t a private establishment. It was a comprehensive school in a good catchment area, as people say, with almost no council houses nearby and most of the apartments owned by career people or rented to students. I liked working there and liked to walk there, a pleasant stroll each day that took me past Marchmont where I would often stop and get a coffee, sometimes sitting and reading for half an hour, before continuing to work. I got the job after teacher training college and had been working there for twelve years. I would be surprised if any of my pupils ended up homeless or selling their bodies but that might have been my prejudice or my expectation — which might amount to the same thing. If I saw myself as political, canvassing for the Greens, it may have been because I was assertively egalitarian. Rather than empathy with the poor, I wanted their eradication; I wanted the impoverished as an extinct category, as we would all live in a society which aimed to have what many now see as the privileges of the middle classes: solid, damp-free housing, healthy food, schools that were all deemed ‘good’ and an enlightened social policy that saw crime as a social ill rather than a personal failing.
I was idealistic some friends would say but I asked them why if we send kids to private schools to make connections, and send people to university to meet like-minded people, why would prisons function differently? Don’t people leave there having met the like-minded and gained new skills through meeting others with qualities that can improve their own? The burglar meets the fraudster; the drug dealer from one community meets one from another, and they expand their trade on release. Why spend so much money on training people in skill sets society claimed it didn't want?
7
Such thoughts had long been in my mind but they seemed bolstered by the experience of talking to the agent of the first floor flat and the person I met begging. Money spent on making people still more oppressed didn’t seem to be an answer, even if apparently it was to help them out of their predicament or cope with it. As the person on the street said, giving him more money wasn’t going to solve the problem; his parents should have had it and been given it in the form of housing and education rather than handouts and temporary accommodation. When I taught the children environmental issues alongside my main subject, English, I was careful to keep the politics out. Yet I also wondered if I needed to do so since the political was often based on assuming a stance that wasn’t about finding a solution to a problem, but finding a viewpoint from which to blame others. If the left thought we needed to throw more money at an issue, and the right remove the cash, I suppose I was proposing its recirculation — that sometimes the same amount of money well-allocated could potentially resolve a problem the left and right wouldn’t wish to do anything about, because they were interested in the continuation of the debate. When I would say such things to friends, I was deemed no longer an idealist but a cynic.
It was an accusation levelled at me at the gathering I had a while back, the one where after it I took out the bottles and I passed Malcolm on the stairs. During the chat, one of the others accused me of cynicism, and I gave as an example the money that the poor get blamed over and the wealthy get to benefit from: the example of the flat downstairs and what the agent had told me. I said politically politicians benefit from our cynicism or our idealism, with those of a cynical persuasion assuming the worst from people and those with an idealistic disposition insisting on the best. But this was just an argument, I insisted. It didn’t mean that anything needed to be done, and all the while politicians pocketed the money pretending they had solutions that were often only instead counter-arguing each other.
I think a couple of friends were surprised at the vehemence of my position, presuming I had always been a person on the left. I said I was of the left, but a left-wing that could make a point rather than score one. I finished the conversation frustrated, wondering if all I had done was do exactly that: scoring points but not making them. What I did believe however was that the anger was real enough, and if it was premised on the conversation with the agent and the meeting with the homeless person. I knew what I wanted to talk about wasn’t politics, in yet another discussion about how to change things while doing no more than imitating politicians’ discussions with even greater pointlessness, since none of us could even begin to implement policy, no matter the four who worked in lowly administrative roles for the government. I wanted to speak about the tenant who previously occupied the apartment, and about the former tenant downstairs who prostituted herself. I felt an odd loneliness overcome me as I believed I couldn’t find a way to talk to them about this, and wondered if most political discussions people had weren’t supposed to solve a problem but give the impression that, because people were talking, they weren’t lonely. And yet these were my friends, I liked their company, and the evening would have been a success. We laughed, we drank, we talked. What more can you ask of an evening with people you’ve known for years?
I found some sort of answer a few weeks later when I met Malcolm again on the stairs. Neither of us seemed in a hurry and we chatted for ten minutes and, as we parted, he suggested I come up for a tea soon. I asked if he was free the following afternoon, about five; he could pop down to mine. He could see the changes to the flat since Alex had been there. He joked and said it couldn’t have been much worse; merely occupying it sober would be a great improvement. Mind, he added, on occasion he probably added to the mess since there were plenty of nights when he sat drinking with Alex.
8
I finished work, was home by 430, and, as I passed the first-floor flat, the door was ajar and I could see how close it was to a complete refurbishment. New radiators were in, the floors had been varnished, the walls painted. Arriving home, I made a pot of tea and put some biscuits on a plate, fanned and neat. When Malcolm arrived he admired the flat’s transformation, saying the only thing the place had in common with Alex’s decor was the books. I hadn’t seen Alex as much of a reader, though his letter suggested a level of literacy I hadn’t thought much about. But when Malcolm said this, I asked what authors Alex liked. Americans mainly, Fitzgerald, Carver, and Bukowski he really liked — maybe because they all wrote about drinking. But he would read many others and, like you, he said, he had the box-room full of books. I didn’t tell him I’d read two of Alex’s letters and wondered that if anybody should have picked up the first one from the stairwell it should have been Malcolm. I wanted to try and find a way of asking him about this without putting myself in a position where I was lying and, realising that I couldn’t, didn’t say anything about that letter at all. But after a while, he brought it up saying a letter arrived some months ago and it was on the doormat for some time. He meant to pick it up and write on it return to sender, but he knew that Alex would have recognised his handwriting, and knew he could have just sent it to the right address. Malcolm fell out with Alex before he left and, if he were to return the letter, he should also have included one of his own. By the time Malcolm thought he might just do that, the letter was gone. If I thought I might have been respecting Alex by opening the letter, I now saw that I’d relieved Malcolm of the pressure of sending one himself.
That afternoon he told me a few things about Alex, and also about Linda. They moved into the flat a few years earlier and she was pregnant when they arrived. He didn’t want to exaggerate their happiness; they argued a lot with Alex saying Linda shouldn’t be smoking while pregnant and Linda telling Alex that she would stop if Alex went easy on the drinking. Alex would then say his drinking wasn’t doing any harm to the child and she would say it might, once the child was born. Alex said they could sort that problem out when she gave birth and so on, and on. He could hear some of the arguments and, when he and Alex became friends, three months after they moved in, one reason Alex would spend time in his flat was because he didn’t care to get into yet another barney below. But they weren’t unhappy, he supposed, and a lot less dysfunctional than they became.
They lost the child, of course, he said, and the accusations became quieter but the melancholy greater. Not once as far as he knew did Alex directly blame Linda for the death, and he wouldn’t have needed to as Linda blamed herself. Malcom knew this when one evening, a while after the loss, after he invited them both to dinner, Alex fell asleep on the couch sozzled, and Linda and Malcolm talked for the first time beyond the smallest pleasantries. Now they were discussing the largest of unpleasantries and she admitted she had started to take both anti-depressants and sleeping pills. It was how she got through the day and made it through the night, she said, though wondered if she should bother. Malcolm asked as gently as he could if she might try for another baby and she shook her head violently, saying she had already killed one child; she didn’t want to kill another. He wanted to tell her that she may have made a mistake smoking through the pregnancy, but she now had the chance to rectify it, being more careful this time. But the words wouldn’t come out, as though he knew they would have sounded too simple and at the same time condemnatory.
Alex started drinking even more and Linda started taking not just the prescribed pills but some unprescribed ones too as the flat on the first floor was occupied by a couple of dealers who saw the state she was in and thought they could add to it: why work on the strong when you can prey on the weak, Malcolm believed, and over the fifteen years he’d been living in the building that flat was always occupied by dealers, and visited by those preoccupied by the drugs they could procure there. To pay for the drugs Linda took on clients, mainly going off in their cars, sometimes, in the winter, having sex with them in the alleyway next to the building, when it was dark enough for no one to see. Once or twice he knew she took clients into the stairwell since the automatic stairwell lights often came on long after it had become dark. Malcolm once overheard a conversation between a client who came into the building and Linda, with the client saying he had arrived on foot and Linda saying it was too bright to go into the alleyway. He proposed they go into the flat but she said they couldn’t; someone was in there. They came up to his floor, Malcom said, assuming everybody was out, and had sex there.
A couple of months after that, the dealers on the first floor moved out. Linda moved in and there she stayed for over two years, servicing clients and getting more and more addicted to the drugs she was taking. Malcolm assumed it was mainly heroin, which she smoked, and would have been an extension of the opioids she managed to persuade a doctor to give her, after a fractured ankle she suffered after missing a step on the stairs while drunk. The ankle healed easily enough but Linda didn’t, and she would sometimes say if only a loss could heal like an injury. As Malcolm told me these stories about the people whose flat I was now living in, I wasn’t surprised by the mistrust of the neighbours and wondered if anybody had sold up or moved out when Linda and Alex were living in the building. He said he didn’t know but was tempted to move himself, though chiefly because he didn’t want to see two people destroying themselves over a child they couldn’t have that led to a life they couldn’t control.
I had more questions for Malcolm but most of what he offered, he divulged without much prompting from me, as though the point wasn’t about my enquiries but in his need to talk. I realised as I departed that Alex’s leaving had left him not just without a friend but perhaps friends, with Alex the one regular contact that represented for Malcom a social life — even if they never went out. I knew I couldn’t be that friend for Malcolm. It wasn’t that he was some years my senior, nor that I wasn’t one to sit around in a flat though of course I would sometimes have friends around, it was more that he possessed an energy that troubled me, an air of melancholy that thickened the atmosphere, making of time a permanent dusk. It was so prevalent that I knew if we were to talk again it would be in my flat and not his; I had the feeling his place would envelop me in a despair that would permeate more than his person.
9
The following weekend, I was walking with a few friends up past Blackford hill and we continued on for some lunch and a beer at Mortonhall. With its cobbled courtyard and wooden benches outside, it usually filled up when the sun was out but the cloudy sky allowed us to get a table and to linger as it wasn’t cold. One of the group asked how I was finding my new flat since he’d only seen me briefly since the move. So I told him and the others about my upstairs neighbour Malcolm, the downstairs flat that had been a drug den for many years, and of the alcoholic tenant who had been living in my place, whose partner had become a prostitute, and moved into the drug dealing flat on the first floor after the previous tenants had moved out. As I described these details quickly and without any sense of a story developing, only a few sordid details expounded, I found myself strangely alienated from these friends who were very much part of my world even if, as with the one who asked how I was settling in, I could go months without seeing them. They were just part of a broader circle and when I thought about it I must have had around thirty friends and never found myself without company when I sought it, even if I lived alone and didn’t have a partner.
I thought about this a great deal over the next few days and noticed that while all my friends were friendly I wasn’t sure if any of them were concerned. Maybe there was no need for this concern, as I hadn’t taken to drugs, prostitution or consumed vast amounts of drink daily, but it was more than that. It seemed like there was an atmosphere as light as the one I perceived around Malcolm was heavy, and that no amount of crisis or tragedy could alter it, just as no amount of lightness could alleviate Malcolm’s burdensomeness. When I told the others at Mortonhall of the apartment block events, they saw in them mainly amusement, with one friend saying it is always interesting to hear how the other half lived. I came away feeling I had betrayed Malcolm, Linda and Alex, and, opening Alex’s letters that I wished to see as evidence of concern, now looked like the cheapest of curiosity. The next couple of occasions when I saw Malcolm on the stairs I was relieved I was in a hurry and had no time to stop, aware that if I had more time I would have no doubt sought an excuse. He was returning from picking up the newspaper; I was off to school. Yet it wasn’t only Malcolm I wished to avoid; apart from seeing my colleagues at work, I wasn’t in contact with anyone over the next few weeks.
What changed was a knock on the door. It was Malcolm, who asked if it would be terribly impertinent if he came in. I saw on his face a look that suggested it would have been more than rude to have said no, and in he came. I made some tea and he just sat, while the kettle boiled, shaking his head. It was bound to happen he finally announced and told me that he was flicking through the newspaper that morning when he saw a small article announcing Linda’s death. She was living in a ground-floor flat in Pilton, one of the outlying housing estates and neither the worst nor the best of them. A friend of mine was involved with the community centre there but it was also known for high incidences of gang crime, drug dealing and unemployment. She was found dead and the police assumed no suspicious circumstances. She left no children, the article added, and sometimes the most objective facts can carry the most understated despair, Malcolm said. It wasn’t for the newspaper to know that this closing comment would have been the reason for the article in the first place, but Malcolm didn’t doubt that if she hadn’t lost the baby she would be alive today. He said the level of regret Linda must have felt, smoking through her pregnancy, he understood in the most minor way and yet was still a painful regret he felt nevertheless. When he saw that letter sitting on the doormat all those months ago he should have picked it up and sent it on to Alex, but he didn’t, and now he had no way of telling him his ex-partner had died. Didn’t he have an email address for Alex, or a mobile phone number? He shrugged, saying Alex had never used either.
10
I of course did have that address, and I should probably have said that the reason the first letter disappeared was that I had taken it, but I didn’t and thought over the next day or so what to do; and decided I would write to the address on the envelope. I bought a copy of the paper, tore out the piece on Linda, and I typed up a letter and. without offering my name, said I was someone who knew of Linda and heard of her death in the newspaper. I said I had no idea of the funeral arrangements but I was sure he could inquire about them himself. I posted it first class and hoped it would reach him long before the date of the funeral. While writing it I wondered why I hadn’t said anything to Malcolm and felt that my idle curiosity next to Malcolm’s sadness would have seemed like an affront, an insult to his present loss and that our friendship, however tentative, even reluctant on my part, was predicated on a lie. Sending the letter quickly meant Alex would receive it no more slowly than if I had told Malcolm and he would have contacted Alex. I offered a decent deed I suppose from within an indecent past decision.
Five days later I saw Malcolm again on the stairwell. I had just returned from work and was planning to go for a bike ride. He was happier than I had probably ever seen him. He had some news from Alex; someone had written to him about Linda’s death, and he would be coming up for the funeral in two days. I said that was great news, no matter the event it would be commemorating, and asked when he would arrive. The following afternoon, he said; he was just going to the shop now to make sure he had things in for his visit. He asked me to come to his place for tea and biscuits when he returned; I said without thinking about it that would be nice. I’d pop up after my cycle, around 630. Perfect, he said. While cycling over to Portobello and along the seafront past Joppa and onto Musselburgh, I wondered why I agreed to visit after determining it was a place I didn’t want to enter; that I anticipated perhaps a flat a little too close to the dilapidation and despair I found when visiting the one downstairs that Linda had made, like many before her, the most rough-hewn of homes. Yet Malcolm was always neat and tidy in his appearance, and in some ways fastidious. When he visited my place for tea, I noticed how carefully cut his nails were and couldn’t help but comment. He said he would cut them after a long bath, when they were softer and it was easier. I looked at my own after he said this and promised I would take his advice.
11
The cycle was gentle, I had no immediate need of a shower and went straight up to Malcolm’s place on my return. It wasn't directly above but next door to mine and because it was a floor higher received far more light than my apartment as our building was taller than the one opposite. The sun was streaming in and what I noticed at first were the innumerable books, but then noticed, too, rugs on the floor, paintings on the wall and half a dozen large house plants. It wasn’t dark and gloomy at all and I realised that I had seemed to project onto Malcolm the worst perceptions I had of Linda and Alex, based, I suppose, on apartments other than his: mine before I moved in, and the one on the first floor. I asked him a little about the flat, about the early retirement he took after lecturing in publishing at Napier University, and hoped he might reveal a little more about his past. He said he moved into the flat twenty-five years earlier, leaving Napier after everything became digitised. He had no interest in marking essays online, though he did it for a year or two, using a computer on campus. Retirement, for him, he said, was about escaping the advances of technology more than the fret of advancing age. He paid the flat off the year he retired and lived off the small work pension that this year would be augmented by the state pension now he was sixty-seven. How did he keep in contact with people, I asked? He pointed to a phone in the corner, he said, calling it an immobile. He didn’t use it that often but, when he did, it was to talk to friends from elsewhere, sometimes for hours. It was how Alex contacted him the other day.
Malcolm was originally from New Zealand, he said, though there was no trace of it in his accent, and there were reasons why he left at thirty. He said it as if there was a clear explanation but he wasn’t likely to divulge it and I sensed this was the basis of his strength even if I suspect it came out of what was originally a weakness. I suppose he built his solitude on that decision and there may have been something too paradoxical about him disclosing what it was predicated upon. He brought in the tea and apologised for offering nothing with it. He had some biscuits but if I could wait ten minutes the brownies he’d baked an hour ago should be cool enough to eat. I’d noticed the smell when I arrived and wondered what Malcolm had been making.
While eating the brownies he said that he was grateful to whoever wrote to Alex. Alex assumed the anonymous person was Malcolm, and Malcolm didn’t tell him otherwise on the phone but would speak to him about it in person. He supposed it was someone who knew Linda, perhaps a member of her family, though after the miscarriage she was hardly in contact with them at all. It was that moment where she was going to become part of the bigger family, enjoying Sunday lunches with her brother and sister and their children. But how could she go after what happened; it would be like turning up to a party, she said, empty-handed. It didn’t matter who sent the letter; what mattered was that it arrived and that Alex would be in Edinburgh in time for the funeral. Our world has enough regrets as it is; why create any more? I agreed, nibbling on the brownie, finding in each mouthful several chocolate bits as I looked around at the sitting room walls. As I observed the books and looked at a few paintings, I noticed there were no photographs, nothing at all that would suggest a personal life, though the flat was as personal a dwelling as I’d seen. It was full of Malcolm’s personality but not at all of his history. I knew far more about two people I’d never met — Alex and Linda. It seemed odd, sitting there knowing about the deceased and the unseen but not the living, convivial person in front of me.
I expected I might see Malcolm and Alex on the stairs over the next few days but didn’t, or at least didn’t see them together. Coming back from the supermarket across the road, I noticed someone I thought must surely be Alex standing outside the block, smoking a cigarette. He was dressed in a dark suit, wearing a black tie and perhaps Malcom was hosting the wake. He looked about ten or fifteen years younger than Malcolm but in the texture of his skin, in the frown lines on his forehead, he seemed more wizened. I wondered how aware he happened to be of standing in the side alley where his partner would sometimes take clients, and of smoking a cigarette, whose substance may have partly been responsible for the death of the child. It was an unusual feeling knowing so much about this man, if it was he, and odder still that I was responsible for his presence there. As I crossed the street I wondered if he would look up but he didn’t. I entered the building passing the first floor flat and said hello to the young couple who now owned it or rented it. They were exiting, and as they turned towards me I noticed the woman was pregnant.
12
When I next saw Malcolm on the stairs I told him I thought I might have seen Alex, described him, and Malcolm said that yes that would have been him. Malcom added that nobody could work out who had contacted Alex, none of them had his address. Alex said the letter he received came from an anonymous source but he presumed it must have been sent by the present tenant in his old flat. When he moved out he’d left a forwarding address with the owners, and guessed that was how he was contacted, but he was surprised that the tenant would know of his relationship with Linda and discover that she had died. Alex was sure, Malcolm said, that he had sent it: that Malcolm had been in touch with the present tenant and asked for the address. When Alex proposed this, Malcolm said that no, it wasn’t him, and later that evening, when everybody else had left, he talked to Alex about it, admitting he saw a letter on the landing that he ignored. Perhaps he should have picked it up and sent Alex a note saying at least that Linda had moved out. He didn’t and there was no point lying now just to make him look better in Alex’s eyes. He would still feel bad in his own.
Malcolm also more or less knew when Alex mentioned the landlord had the address that it must have been me who sent the anonymous letter to Alex, and he was grateful that I had. He was of course right but not quite for the reasons he supposed and there we were, a good friend who had let Alex down, and a stranger who had done more than his duty or a dereliction of it - at least according to the law. By opening Alex’s letter I had committed an illegal act even if it led to a good deed, and kept silent as Malcolm said Alex didn't think it mattered who sent it or the reasons behind how he got to hear of Linda’s funeral. What did, he said to Malcolm, was that he was there and perhaps their friendship could survive even if Linda was dead. I said I very much hoped it would, and believed, in refusing to reveal the full facts, I may have been retreating from a friendship's potential with Malcolm, aware that in my own small, criminal and concerned way, I had been a good neighbour in a building that was full of suspicion over the notion.
© Tony McKibbin