Chapter Text
Looking back on the man that I used to be, I know that he would be furious over the man I am now. He was simple and straightforward and was set in his ways. He used to think that my faults and my problems were my burden to carry and mine alone. I thought that the control over order and chaos in my life was entirely up to me.
I was wrong.
Now I didn’t come to this conclusion over night, it’s actually a very long story with a few good twists of fate along the way. I’m not even sure that it’s over or that who I am now is who I will be in a few months or years time. But I do know for sure when it all started. It was the day that the neighbors upstairs moved in. The day they changed my life.
July 2012
I was sat on my couch drinking tea—the most British possible way to spend my Saturday afternoon—enjoying the temporary peace and quite that came from the apartment above me ever since the noisy girls that had lived there before had been forced from building.
They had kept me awake for countless nights. Their midnight conversations, heard easily through the thin walls and ceilings. Their loud techno music thumping my walls and making my drinks vibrate like a scene from Jurassic Park. Their terrible television shows that they watched on the highest settings blaring in the latest and earliest hours of the day and night. Everything they did bothered me, in fact they bothered me and I was glad to be rid of them.
It was unbeknownst to me when I had signed my lease that the walls through out my apartment and apparently no other were so terribly thin. I could hear the footsteps of my neighbors on either side, I could hear when then turned their dishwashers on and even when they flushed their toilets. It might have been an invasion of privacy to know things about people like I came to but I couldn’t have helped it. Why would I have wanted to know these things? It was never my intension to know that the man under me only showers on Tuesdays and Thursdays and that he watches Dance Moms when he gets home from work and shouts angry comments at his TV as if they can here him inside (You can only listen to “shut up Jill your kid aint that special” and “you go Maddie kill that pirouette girl!” so many times before it drains you entirely). It was never my intention to know that the couple in the apartment next to mine had sex every Monday night at exactly 7:45pm, or that they both had no skill in cooking given from the horrible burning curry I could smell wafting up from their kitchen on the rare days that they didn’t do take always. And it was certainly never my intension to learn about the strange and vulgar sorts of things that those girls above me did with webcams for money. Really after I pieced it together I had no choice but to call the landlord and inform him of their breaches to the conduct code of the building. They claimed that they were “film-makers” and “video artists” but the truth came out and I am proud so say that I should never have to live below “film-makers” ever again.
When those two moved out, the landlord posted a notice telling the building that the apartment was back up from rent. I knew that it was temporary but the silence that I enjoyed was ever the sweeter.
A few days before the landlord had come around knocking on doors to let us all know that two boys had just put in a payment on the apartment above and that they would be moving in Saturday afternoon.
I recall saying something to the extent of “as long as they’re not like those last two” and us both chuckling awkwardly, avoiding the subject.
My tea was about half drunk and near Luke warm when I heard foot steps in the hall. They were hard and sturdy steps, as if they came from someone being weighed down by something enormously heavy. I sighed as I came to the realization that the moving in had begun, and my peace and quite had gone.
It went on for several hours. By the time they were done moving in the boxes and cases and whatever else, it was long past the afternoon and deep into the night.
I was just settling back into the couch after dinner and a shower getting ready to wind down for the night when I heard a knock at my door.
I rolled my eyes and puffed out a great sigh as I forced myself from the sofa cushions and onto my feet. I walked slowly to the door muttering about how could possibly anyone possibly be ringing me this late at night. The nerve of some people.
I opened up the door and found two young men standing on my doormat.
They were a peculiar duo. They had strange modern haircuts, near identical mirror images of the others. They were outlandishly tall and had lanky builds. One of them looked about 20 year old and had dark brown hair and dimples; the other had dark black hair and looked a few years older. This was the first time I ever met my upstairs neighbors.
“Hi!” They both said in unison, oddly reminiscent of the twins from the shining.
“I’m Dan.” Said the brown haired one
“And I’m Phil,” Said the other “We’re your new upstairs neighbors.”
I felt my eyes widen. They were so young, not at all what I had pictured. This building was in an expensive part of London, rent was high and I myself could only hardly afford it. How was it that these young just barely twenty-somethings could afford to live here?
“Oh, um hello,” I said reaching out my hand to greet them “I’m Matt.”
They both smiled “We just wanted to come around and introduce ourselves.”
“Well welcome to the building,” I said trying to close my door and escape from the conversation before my curiosity got the better of me “So what do you boys do for a living?”
They were young and had funny hair, that was probably the first sign that they did something unusual—but surely whatever it is, it must be better than those girls before them. What do young people do now a days anyway? Web development? App Design? Computer Coder? I had no idea but that was all I could seem to think of that would give them the kind of capital to move into a building like this one.
They both shrunk back a little as if they suddenly felt awkward and didn’t know how to answer the question. They made eye contact and there was a moment of panic and confusion that passed between them. It was as if they were asking each other what to say.
“Umm…well,” said Phil awkwardly rubbing the back of his neck “I guess you could say that we are film-makers. We make and upload videos to the Internet.”
“What.”
“Yeah, video artists.” Dan agreed trying to add flourish to their title
Goddammit.