?I have no memory of what I was accused of.?

  — From The Printer

  A year ago, the tenant who lived in the flat above mine died.

  I didn’t know him. I’d crossed paths with him at most ten times, coming or going from the building. We’d exchanged nods and the occasional tentative hello. But I had never appreciated one of his finest qualities as a neighbour — which was his extraordinary silence.

  I never heard a sound from him, never a moment of disturbance. It was almost as though he floated above the floor and never dropped anything. No music at full volume, no strange scraping of furniture. An absolute godsend.

  His family put the flat up for sale, and after a few months I realised it must have found a buyer, because one night I was woken by an alarm. I assumed at first it was mine, but picking up my phone in a half-sleep I saw it was five in the morning. Concentrating to locate the sound, I realised it was coming from the floor above.

  Curious, I thought — I hadn’t even noticed anyone moving in. And I went back to sleep, glad to have a few more hours.

  At the time I was leaving the flat at nine in the morning and not returning until nine at night, so it was perfectly possible I’d missed the whole move. Besides, my flat had its entrance on the north side of the building, while the one above opened onto the internal courtyard. Our paths were unlikely to cross.

  As the days passed, I came to understand the difference between a silent neighbour and a noisy family with young children.

  I still hadn’t met any of the new arrivals, but I was getting to know them through their sounds. From the voices, there seemed to be four of them. A man, a woman, and two children — a boy and a girl. The man made the least noise. The mother and the children, on the other hand, operated at a volume somewhere between very loud and outright screaming.

  I couldn’t make out what they were saying — they were foreign, Indian, I thought. The father rose early, always around five, except on Sundays, and without fail he woke me too: first the alarm, then his heavy footsteps on the floor, the water running through the pipes, doors opening and closing.

  I didn’t know what time he came home, but by the time I got back in the evening he was already there. The children ran almost constantly, producing a dull rhythmic thud that followed me through every dinner. The girl had a habit of singing a tuneless little chant — always the same melody, which I could never quite place.

  I couldn’t make out the words, but the tune would lodge in my head. I’d find myself humming it in the shower without realising. The boy, meanwhile, had a toy — a train or a little car, perhaps — that he dragged back and forth across the floor with a rhythmic, almost hypnotic sound.

  Trrrr-clack, trrrr-clack, trrrr-clack. Every evening, from seven until nine.

  I don’t know what other games they had, but there were also very loud thuds — sometimes so heavy I wondered if they were rolling bowling balls across the flat. Every two or three thuds came the mother’s shout, which I took to be some version of “keep it down” and “stop running.”

  The first few months were hell. At first I let it go, hoping it would pass — that once they’d settled in, the children would calm down and the noise would reach some tolerable level.

  It didn’t.

  Every evening until eleven it was a constant stream of running, crashing objects, and shouting.

  What bothered me most, though, was the father’s alarm. I was waking up at five every morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, dragging the exhaustion with me through the rest of the day.

  One evening in November I decided to go upstairs and ask him to change the alarm — or at least to move more quietly in the mornings. I climbed the stairs and knocked, hoping they’d understand my language.

  The moment I knocked, the sounds inside the flat stopped dead, as though everyone had turned to stone.

  I knocked a second time, but no one came to the door. Irritated, I went back down, disheartened by their rudeness. That evening, though, I heard nothing more from above — so I thought maybe they’d taken notice and simply hadn’t dared open the door, for whatever reason.

  The following day the noise started up again as usual. Clearly they were the sort of people who didn’t care about anyone else. One evening, while I was banging on the ceiling with a broomstick, I thought I heard a voice — thin, childlike — saying something. But that was impossible. It must have been the pipes.

  I figured I had two options: find a way to live with the noise, or start a drawn-out war of petty retaliation with the neighbours.

  I chose to let it go.

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  I bought earplugs to block out the upstairs alarm — that, really, was the worst of it. The children’s shouts and thumping were bearable enough if I turned up the television.

  When they really pushed it, I’d grab the broom and bang on the ceiling. Every time — and this only struck me as peculiar when I thought back on it later — the noise stopped instantly for the rest of the evening. As if they knew. As if they were listening for me. Some weeks I’d bang the moment I got home, if I needed complete quiet.

  By Christmas I’d almost stopped noticing the noise. It had become part of my daily routine, like the traffic outside the window or the ticking of the clock. But one Saturday morning in January, leaving earlier than usual for an errand, I heard voices on the landing. Children’s voices.

  I ran up the stairs, heart pounding. At last — I was going to meet them. At last I’d put a face to the family that had been living above my head for months.

  But when I reached their floor, breathless, there was no one. Only the echo of a door closing. Or perhaps that was just my imagination. The landing was deserted, silent as a tomb. For a moment — just a moment — I had the feeling someone was watching me through the peephole.

  I knocked. No one answered. I walked back downstairs feeling faintly ridiculous.

  Reassured by this kind of wordless communication with the neighbours, the irritation had slowly faded and I barely thought about it anymore. The girl’s little chant had become almost comforting; the trrrr-clack of the boy’s toy marked the rhythm of my evenings.

  On a Sunday in March I spotted a removal van outside the building. A few workers were loading the last boxes and pieces of furniture from the flat above mine. Finally. They were moving out.

  The era of screaming and running was over. Or so I hoped. I stayed at the window watching the comings and goings of the workers, curious at last to see the noisy neighbours I’d never managed to meet in an entire year. But I saw no one. Only workers in blue overalls emptying the flat with mechanical efficiency.

  The next day I noticed a young couple talking to an estate agent in front of the building. They had the look of people about to take possession of a new home. I went downstairs and introduced myself.

  They were the new tenants — quiet, pleasant, no children. I told them I was glad to meet them and that they couldn’t possibly be worse than the last lot. When they asked why, I laughed and told them what the past year had been like.

  The noisy Indian family. The children charging about like buffalo. The shouting. The five-in-the-morning alarm. The girl’s chant. The boy’s toy.

  But they had stopped smiling. They looked at each other, then back at me, with an expression I couldn’t read. Concern? Embarrassment? Something else?

  “Excuse me,” said the woman, her voice uncertain, “but… did you say a family was living up there?”

  “Yes, of course. Until yesterday. I heard them every day for a whole year. Why?”

  The husband cleared his throat, visibly uncomfortable. “We bought it directly from the previous owners. The flat has been empty for almost a year. The agency confirmed it.”

  I laughed, but the laugh came out wrong — high-pitched, unnatural. “No, no. You’re mistaken. I heard them. Every single day. Every night.”

  The couple said nothing. They were looking at me the way you look at someone who has just said something very, very wrong.

  I said goodbye quickly and went inside. A metallic taste flooded my mouth. My hands were trembling as I searched for the building manager’s number. I called him.

  “Hello, it’s the tenant on the second floor. I wanted to ask… who was living in the flat above mine? The one they’ve just cleared out?”

  A pause. Too long. Long enough to turn the blood cold in your veins.

  “No one,” said the building manager at last, in an embarrassed voice. “It’s been empty since the previous tenant died. Almost a year ago. Why do you ask?”

  My voice broke. I hung up. My knees gave way and I had to press myself against the wall. A cold sweat soaked through my back.

  A year. An entire year.

  The broomstick banging on the ceiling. The sudden silence whenever I knocked at the door. The five-in-the-morning alarm that had woken me for three hundred and sixty-five days. The children’s footsteps. The mother’s shouts. The girl’s chant. The trrrr-clack of the toy.

  But if there was no one there… who had stopped making noise every time I banged with the broomstick?

  Who had answered me?

  Who had I heard that Saturday morning on the landing?

  I went to the window on legs that barely held me. The vertigo made me sway like a drunk. I looked up, towards the windows of the flat above mine.

  Empty. Dark. Empty for a year.

  From the floor above, now, came a perfect silence. The silence of an empty home. An unnatural, oppressive silence, pressing against the eardrums like something solid.

  But for a moment — perhaps it was just the mind playing tricks, perhaps not — I thought I heard the faint sound of small footsteps. A child running. And then that chant, barely audible, like a whisper carried on the wind.

  Then nothing.

  I closed my eyes and held my breath, listening. My heart was hammering so hard in my chest I was afraid the whole building might hear it.

  Silence.

  A silence that now frightened me far more than all the noise I had heard across an entire year.

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake in bed, eyes wide open in the dark, listening. Every creak of the building made me flinch. Every gust of wind against the windows sounded like a whisper.

  At five in the morning, the alarm went off.

  From the floor above.

  Empty.

  I sat bolt upright, heart in my throat. I grabbed the broom and ran out of the flat, taking the stairs two at a time. The blood was pounding at my temples. The alarm kept ringing — insistent, impossible.

  I reached the door of the flat above mine. I lifted the broom to bang — to make that damned sound stop, as I had done hundreds of times before.

  My hand froze in mid-air.

  From behind the door, I heard something. Footsteps. Light ones. A child’s.

  Then a thin, childlike voice, singing that chant.

  And the trrrr-clack of a toy being dragged across the floor.

  The alarm fell silent.

  Silence returned, absolute.

  I stood motionless in front of that door for I don’t know how long, the broom still raised, my breath locked in my lungs.

  Then, slowly, I lowered the broom and went back into my flat.

  I said nothing to the new neighbours when they moved in the following day.

  What could I have said?

  Two weeks later, the young couple knocked on my door. The woman looked tired, deep shadows beneath her eyes. The husband seemed on edge.

  “Sorry to bother you,” she said, her voice hesitant, “but… do you hear strange noises? At night? Voices? Footsteps?”

  I looked at her for a long moment. Then I smiled.

  “No,” I lied. “no noise at all.”

  I closed the door before they could say anything more.

  That night, at five in the morning, the alarm went off again.

  And I, as always, picked up the broom and banged on the ceiling.

  The sounds stopped at once.

  As they always had.

  As they always will.