Flat 4B Shares a Wall

Joss knows three things about the person in 4B before she ever speaks to her. One: the person in 4B plays the cello, badly, on Sunday afternoons, in a way that is somehow more endearing than if she played it well. Two: the person in 4B receives an enormous number of parcels, and the building's delivery system being what it is, roughly a third of them end up against Joss's door instead, addressed to a P. Raman. Three: the person in 4B has a laugh that comes through the wall — the shared wall, the wall Joss's bed is pushed against — at unpredictable hours, a real laugh, a startled-out-of-you laugh, the kind of laugh a person cannot fake. Joss has built, off these three facts, a fairly complete imaginary version of P. Raman, and the imaginary version is annoyingly likeable, and Joss has been carefully not examining why she keeps building it. It is a Tuesday in March and it is raining and Joss has just got in from a closing shift at the bar, which means it is 1:10 in the morning and she is the specific kind of tired where you are also, paradoxically, completely awake. She is lying on her bed, which is against the wall, in the dark, scrolling, and through the wall she can hear that P. Raman is also awake — a chair scraping, the small sounds of another human being two feet and one wall away, also not asleep, also alone in the rain. And Joss does a thing. Joss has P. Raman's number. This is not as creepy as it sounds; they swapped numbers months ago, the dry administrative way neighbours do, *here, text me when a parcel comes,* and the entire history of their text thread up to this moment is four messages long and all four messages are about parcels. Joss types: *i can hear that you're awake. this is your wall neighbour. it's 1am. go to sleep, P. Raman.* She sends it before the sensible part of her brain finishes its objection. Then she lies there in the dark and listens, through the wall, and hears — clear as anything, two feet away — the buzz of a phone on a hard surface, and then a pause, and then, unmistakably, the startled-out-of-you laugh. The laugh comes through the wall and through the phone at the same time, slightly out of sync, like surround sound, and Joss grins at her dark ceiling like an absolute idiot. The reply takes a minute. *4A. are you SURVEILLING me through the wall.* *i am simply a wall. walls hear things.* Joss types. *you've been scraping that chair for an hour. i'm trying to sleep and instead i'm getting a one-woman radio drama. what are you even doing.* *i'm reupholstering the chair*, P. Raman sends. *at 1am?? you ask. yes. at 1am. i can't sleep when it rains and i've got a staple gun and unresolved feelings and you have to make do with what you've got.* Joss reads this twice. *unresolved feelings* doing a great deal of quiet work in that sentence, and she decides, lying in the dark, not to ask, because they have known each other for four parcel-related messages and you cannot ask a wall about its unresolved feelings on the first real night. Instead she types: *that's the most 1am sentence i've ever read. okay. wall solidarity. i also can't sleep, i just got off a closing shift, i smell like a bar and regret. truce: you put the staple gun down, i'll stop being a passive-aggressive wall, and we both lie here failing to sleep in companionable silence.* There's a pause. Through the actual wall, Joss hears the small definite sound of a staple gun being set down on a hard surface. *staple gun is down*, P. Raman texts. *companionable silence commencing.* *good. night, 4B.* *night, 4A.* And that should be it. That is the natural end of the thing. Joss puts the phone face-down on her chest and closes her eyes and the rain does its rain thing and the building does its 1am settling, and she is, in fact, nearly asleep, genuinely on the edge of it — — when the phone buzzes once more, against her chest, and Joss, who absolutely should not, opens one eye and looks. *this is going to sound strange*, P. Raman has written, *but the chair, the staple gun, the rain — i've been doing this lonely-at-1am thing for a while and you're the first person who's ever knocked on the wall back. so. i don't know. text me when you're home tomorrow? if you want. so the wall knows you got in okay.* Joss lies in the dark in a flat that shares one wall with a cellist she has never properly met, and reads *text me when you're home* about six times, and feels something in her chest that is much too large for a Tuesday. *ok*, she types back. Just that. Because anything longer would give away how much the something in her chest weighs. *ok*, P. Raman sends. Joss falls asleep smiling at the wall, which is, she is fully aware, a deeply alarming way for a story to begin.