Six or seven months before I saw Anne for the first time, I started smoking cigarettes. It gave me something to do during my rest break. A quarter of an hour isn’t long enough to read more than a couple of pages of anything, and I don’t own a phone. But it’s the perfect amount of time to smoke a cigarette if I really take my time with it.

Do cigarettes make you feel better? It’s hard to pick up on and pin down— whether the way they make you feel is calm or just the way you used to feel all the time before you started smoking them. The old fryer oil barrels left out in the alley where we took our breaks used to stack up for months before they got cleared, leaking a thick yellow scum that would solidify between the cracks in the tarmac during winter. The cigarettes might not have calmed me, but they were good at blocking out the smell. 

My unit’s the last one in a long concrete strip built sometime in the last sixty or so years, just the one story, running to the end of the street and split up into a dozen other dark little shoeboxes. I think they were originally council units. Anne must have lived in the unit next to mine for a while before I moved in, but our paths didn’t cross for months. That’s not unusual; I get home late, and I’ve only ever even seen a few other people who live on my street outside their homes. The picture of her in my mind was composed of the sounds that would make it through the wall: footsteps, the TV, occasionally music. Most of the time, I could tell when she was at home because I could hear her shuffling around the lino tiles in her kitchen—in my mind, our units are laid out in the mirror images of each other— while the phone would go on ringing and ringing. I wondered who called her so often. An ex-partner, maybe, or someone she owed money to. I don’t know which would have been better. I used to wonder why she didn’t just turn the phone off if she didn’t want to answer it.

I think Anne is lucky I’m her neighbour because I’m particularly forgiving about her violin. I’d lie in bed listening to it in the mornings after I had night shifts in the absence of anything better to do. I lived there for months before we met, and she played regularly all that time, though she never seemed to improve a great deal. The sound was always grating and slow, mostly muffled by the wall that separated her unit from mine, so I had to strain to hear it. She’d get stuck on certain phrases and play them over and over, occasionally hesitating for a few moments between each repetition so that I’d just start to think that she’d stopped—but then the sound would come again and again.

When the days were longer, the sun would light up the whole strip of units in a bright orange that would peel back from each roof as the sun dropped lower. There were days when I would get home to see our two units caught up in the light together at the end of the block, and I would wonder what she was doing inside, if she was cooking dinner, or in bed, or watching TV, or cooking.  Sometimes, as I unlocked my front door, the corner of my eye would catch her blurry shadow moving around from behind the curtain, and I would have an unplaceable impulse to knock on her door or even to see whether my key would work in the lock.

In February, a few months before I met Anne, I lost my job. I kept on with the smoking, though, even though I no longer had lunch breaks to occupy. It meant I spent most of my time in my apartment, reading less than I used to, mostly watching TV or sitting at my desk, waiting for my body to turn the computer on and look at job openings. I only really left the house to get food, and it was on my way back from the supermarket that I saw her for the first time.

She had just arrived home too, going off the plastic shopping bags dropped on either side of her as she fumbled with her key, bent over against the rain. As I approached, she flinched and spun around, her eyes furrowing in confusion and then understanding as she realised I was just another tenant. Her short black hair was sticking to the side of her face with the rain, and she wore a disposable poncho ripped at the neck like she’d pulled it on in a hurry. Water ran down her face, and I realised that some of it was tears, that she wasn’t just slightly upset but crying, her breathing quick and sharp, almost angry. An immense and vague impulse to move or to speak rose up inside me, and at the same time, a sense that everything I had imagined about her was now so clearly meaningless and wrong. Seeing the face of someone I had pictured for months was unsettling and almost uncomfortable; her outline and movements were familiar, but they were tied to totally unfamiliar features I’d somehow lived with side-by-side for two years. She struggled again with the key, her hands shaking. Words rose up in my throat, thick and uncomfortable, but I couldn’t say any of it aloud, couldn’t stay on this doorstep for another moment. It felt like someone was physically pushing me away; wordlessly, I unlocked the door of my unit and fled inside.

That evening, I watched TV to distract myself. I wanted to go outside, but my unit didn’t have a back garden, so I would have just been sitting on the footpath. I blew smoke through the window and tapped my foot against the wall, thinking of all the things I could have said to her instead of leaving her to struggle with her keys. I should have offered to help her with her shopping or told her my name and asked hers, or that I was her neighbour, that I hadn’t always lived by myself, that the stack of mail that she let stack up for weeks by her door was getting wet. Was she still there, alone? For hours, there was no sound from her side of the wall, not even footsteps in the kitchen as she put away her groceries.

The silence grew as the night went on, and I think I must have eventually fallen asleep on the couch, or maybe I was just so tired that the room began to shift and warp around me, feeling less and less like a real place as the night went on, and more like something I was remembering and seeing at the same time. Finally, after hours, I heard her start to play the violin.

I rolled off the couch and walked towards my door, through it, then in front of her door, where I could just hear her playing the same five notes again and again. I laid a palm flat against the door and stood there, listening, blinking the rain away from my eyelashes. I thought about the place I had lived before I moved here, and then the last conversation I had had in my old flat— the last time I had lived with anyone and the last time I spoke to my sister.

I knocked, and the violin stopped.