In four years I have never once heard the man upstairs come down the stairs.
I said that to my sister at Christmas and she gave me a look I'm still thinking about, so let me be normal about it. I'm not saying he never leaves. I'm saying I've never heard him leave.
I hear him get home. You can't not. The stairwell in my building is bare concrete with a metal handrail and it carries everything, so when he comes in at some point between two and four in the morning I get every single step. Eleven up to the landing, then a pause, then eleven more. Then his door shuts. Then nothing.
I moved in during a really bad year and I wasn't sleeping, and I started counting because when you're lying there at 3am with nothing else going on you count things. That's the only reason I know the number. As of last Tuesday I've heard the guy in flat 4 come up those stairs nine hundred and six times.
I've heard him go down zero times.
For ages this was just a thing about my building, like how the third ring on my cooker doesn't light and the post comes at eleven. I had an explanation and it was fine. He works nights, he's a quiet guy, he goes out the back. There's a service stair by the bins and I never used it because it smells like a wet dog, but he might. People are weird about their routines. I'm weird about mine.
That worked for three years and then in March they took the back stair out.
Not repaired, gone. The landlord found rot in it and the whole thing came out in three pieces on a Thursday, and for nine weeks there was a plywood board where the door used to be with about forty screws in it and a laminated sign saying the only way out of the upper floors was the front stair.
Nine weeks. Eighteen arrivals. I counted.
Eighteen times up. Zero times down.
I should probably explain the noise as well.
He's not loud, I want to be fair, in four years he's never had a party or played music through the floor or had a row I could hear words in. What he does is walk.
He walks at night, only at night, and always the same. From about one in the morning he goes across the room above my bedroom, corner to corner, diagonally. Eleven steps. Then he stops for just under two minutes, I've timed it. Then he does it again.
Eleven steps, two minutes, eleven steps, all night.
You'd think you couldn't sleep through that and for the first year I couldn't, but your brain files it under weather eventually. It just became the sound of my building the same way traffic is the sound of a city, and I stopped hearing it, the way you stop hearing your fridge.
I only started hearing it again because in April it changed.
It got slower. Not loads, just slower. It went from walking to more of a shuffle, like how my grandad moved in his last couple of years when he had to think about each foot before he put it down. And the stops got longer, three minutes, then five.
And the number of steps went up.
Eleven turned into thirteen, thirteen turned into sixteen. I was lying there in the dark counting sixteen steps across a room that's the same size as mine, and I know how many steps my room is because I've walked it in the dark about a thousand times going for a wee.
My room is eleven steps.
You can't take sixteen steps across an eleven step room. Not unless something's changed about the room, or something's changed about the walking.
Then I did nothing for six weeks and I genuinely can't tell you why.
In my head I'd already gone up on day one and knocked and it was an old bloke with a bad hip and a night job and we'd end up friends and it'd be a nice story about being lonely in a city. I thought about that version constantly. I practised it. I even wrote a note, just "Hi, I'm downstairs in 2, no complaints at all, just wanted to say hello", and I got as far as the landing holding it.
I didn't post it, and the reason is stupid.
The door to 4 has one of those old brass letter slots with a flap on a spring, and when I crouched down to push the note through, the flap was warm.
Not sun warm. There's no sun in that stairwell, it faces a light well, it's the same grey temperature all year round, I've lived there four years. It was warm like the inside of a mouth. Like something on the other side of it had been breathing on it for a long time.
I put the note back in my pocket and went downstairs and sat on my kitchen floor for about an hour.
In May I finally did the obvious thing and asked. Not him, the landlord.
I rang up and did that thing where you pretend it's about something boring, said I was worried about a smell in the stairwell, asked whether 4 was occupied. And he said, straight away, no pause, not looking anything up, "Four's been empty since 2019."
I laughed, because what else do you do.
He didn't. He said it again with more detail, the way people do when they think you didn't hear them. Empty since 2019. Held off the market. Something to do with the estate of the last tenant, some family thing, lawyers, an argument about the contents. He sounded bored. He said "we're not allowed to go in it" in exactly the same voice he'd used to tell me the bin day.
I asked who was allowed to go in it.
He said nobody. He said that was the whole problem.
So then I did something stupid and I know it was stupid, I've had a lot of time to think about it.
I waited up.
I sat in my hallway in the dark from midnight with the door open a crack and my phone in my hand with the camera going, because I'd decided the sensible explanation was a squatter, and a squatter is a thing you can photograph and report and let someone whose actual job it is deal with.
At 3:14 I heard the street door.
I want to get this bit right. The street door has one of those closers on it and it takes about four seconds to swing shut, and in those four seconds you get all the noise from outside, and then it seals and you don't. What I heard was the door open, four seconds of a wet street, and the door seal.
And then nothing, for ages. Long enough that my leg cramped up and I had to move.
And then the first step.
He came up slowly and there was something dragging, and I've gone over and over what that dragging was and the closest I can get is a coat that was too long for him. Fabric on concrete. Step, drag. Step, drag.
I didn't look. I want to say I looked. I had the phone up and it was recording and my hands were shaking so badly the footage is useless, it's just a grey smear and a light and me breathing, and when he went past my landing I had my eyes shut so hard I was seeing colours.
He did the second eleven. He stopped at the top.
And then he said, in a totally normal voice, the voice of a bloke at a bus stop, "You don't have to sit on the floor."
I moved out in June and I'd like to tell you that's the end of it.
New place is across town, carpet on the stairs, I sleep like a person again mostly. I got a cat. I painted the kitchen a colour my sister called "aggressive". I've been fine.
Two more things and then I'll shut up.
When I handed the keys back I asked the landlord about 4 one last time and he corrected me. He said 4 isn't the one above me. He said the numbering in that building is wrong because of a conversion in the eighties, and the flat above 2 is actually 5, and 5 has had the same family in it since before he owned the place. A couple and their grown up son. Never a problem, never even asked him to fix anything in twenty years.
I asked what the son was called.
He said he'd never met the son. Said the parents always sorted everything out. And then he said, and I remember it exactly because of how normal he sounded, "I think there's something wrong with him. He doesn't go out."
The other thing is smaller.
Last week, in the new place, on the fourth floor of a building where I am the top flat and there is nothing above me except a flat roof and forty years of pigeon mess, I woke up at ten past three and lay there listening to something go across the space above my bedroom, diagonally.
I counted.
Sixteen.