I Wish You Would Stop

Olivia Grant had lived in her second-floor flat in a narrow Victorian building in east London for exactly nine days when the drumming started. It was two minutes to midnight on a Tuesday. First came a slow, heavy beat, like a giant climbing the stairs. Then a crash of cymbals that made her bookshelf tremble. She lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking, very clearly: I wish he would stop.

He didn't stop. He played until a quarter to one, and he played again the following night, and the night after that. Olivia, who started work at a bank at eight every morning, began to recognize the songs. She did not begin to like them.

On Friday she wrote a polite note and stuck it to his door. "Hello! I'm Olivia from Flat 2. I'd rather not complain, but I wish you wouldn't play the drums after eleven. Some of us have to get up early. Thanks so much!" She drew a small smiley face, then wondered if the smiley face looked passive-aggressive, and then decided she didn't care.

The reply appeared on her own door the next morning, in green ink. "Hi Olivia, sorry! I'd rather practice in the daytime too, but I work in a restaurant kitchen until eleven. Midnight is my evening. I wish these walls weren't made of paper. Sam, Flat 3." Underneath, he had drawn a drum with a sad face.

That did not solve anything. The notes continued, and over the next three weeks they became more and more creative. Olivia sent a list of quiet hobbies, including knitting, chess and meditation. Sam replied with a drawing of himself meditating while playing the drums. Olivia wrote: "It's time you bought an electric drum kit with headphones. I'd rather you spent your money on that than I spent mine on earplugs." Sam wrote back: "It's high time you learned to love jazz."

Her friends found the whole thing hilarious. "You've never even seen him," said her colleague Priya. "He could be eighty. He could be a famous musician." "He could be a very inconsiderate man with a lot of free time," said Olivia. "I'd rather not find out." But secretly she had started to look forward to the notes. The drumming she could do without.

Then, on a stormy Thursday night in November, every light in the street went out. Olivia was in the middle of cooking pasta. She found a candle but couldn't find any matches, and the water in the pan was slowly going cold. She was standing in the dark, wishing she had bought a torch like a sensible adult, when someone knocked on her door.

A tall man in a chef's jacket was standing on the landing, holding a large camping lantern. "Hi," he said. "I'm Sam. Flat 3. The drummer." He held up the lantern. "I thought you might want some light. I'd have come down sooner, but I was trying to work out how to make the drums run on batteries." Olivia laughed before she could stop herself.

He had a camping stove as well, so they finished cooking the pasta on her kitchen table by lantern light. The power didn't come back for three hours. In that time, Olivia learned that Sam had played in a jazz band at university, that he missed it terribly, and that the drums were the only thing that helped him relax after twelve hours in a hot kitchen. Sam learned that Olivia hated her job at the bank and had once wanted to be a cartoonist, which explained the smiley faces.

"I wish I'd knocked on your door in the first week," Sam said, as the lights flickered back on. "I'd rather you had," said Olivia. "It would have saved me a lot of paper."

The following Saturday, a large box was delivered to Flat 3. It contained an electric drum kit and a pair of enormous headphones. On the box was a note in green ink: "It's time I listened to my neighbor. Dinner on Friday? I'll cook. You draw." Olivia wrote her answer underneath and added a very large smiley face.