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31
Rebecca
I didn’t usually get the lift because it felt lazy, but I’d gone a bit mad in Tesco in the village and badly regretted it now that the handles of the cheap plastic bags you had to pay for the privilege of using were cutting into my fingers so sharply that the tips were white, with angry red stripes gouged through the middle of my flesh. This was a regular occurrence; I always seemed to buy more than I needed and then wondered why it was such a struggle to get home.
I dropped the bags by the lift doors, shaking out my hands to get the circulation going again and pressed the call button. Nothing. I pressed it again. For fuck’s sake. What were the chances, the one time I needed to use it? I’d heard residents complaining about its unreliability before, but I’d never experienced the frustration of it myself and therefore had only ever made empathetic noises in commiseration. Now I knew exactly why it manifested such fury.
I stomped up the stairs, stopping at each landing to catch my breath and to give my fingers a break. What had possessed me to buy a four-pack of chopped tomatoes and a six-pack of mineral water in the same trip? Never again.
When I reached my floor, the culprit of the missing lift was staring me right in the face: some idiot had left the door open. Everybody knew that if you left the door open, it wouldn’t work. And, according to Clive, it was often someone on the sixth floor who’d failed to close it, meaning that somebody had to climb about a hundred stairs to rectify somebody else’s mistake/selfish act. To be fair, it was sometimes visitors who left it open, and perhaps they didn’t realise, but still.
I’d gone from being sympathetic but unmoved by the affairs of the lift to absolutely incensed by them. I reached out and yanked the lift door, intending to pull it shut, but it didn’t budge. I tried again, jarring my shoulder in the process. It appeared to be stuck, which meant that nobody would be able to use the lift until further notice, which meant that if, for example, the lady with the baby on the fifth floor was still out, she was going to have to lug her pushchair up five flights of stairs.
Without thinking too much about, it I knocked on Jack’s door. The second I’d done it, I realised it might not be the best idea. It was as though I wanted someone to vent to and just because he was the closest, he was about to be the unhappy recipient. Since Clive’s accident we’d been chatting more, which was nice. It felt good to have a friendly face just across the hall and also very useful at times like this. Of course, I should probably have had a go at fixing the lift myself first, but it was too late now.
Jack’s door opened. There he was, in another odd ensemble of a zipped-up tracksuit top and white football shorts. For the first time, I noticed that he wasn’t as tall as I’d thought – 5'10, maybe 5'11. If I wore my highest (only) pair of heels, we’d be about the same height. Not that we’d ever be going out together, especially not with me in heels. I glanced into his flat. There were three pairs of trainers lined up in the corridor, two white and one black.
‘Um, I just wondered if you were any good at fixing lifts?’ I said.
He stuck his head out into the hallway and looked at it. ‘What’s up with it?’
‘The door’s stuck halfway across, so no one can use it.’
He glanced at my two bulging bags of shopping and grimaced. ‘You had to walk up, did you?’
‘Yep,’ I replied, trying to hide my frustration. It wasn’t his fault. Unless he’d had a visitor who’d used the lift, in which case …
‘Let me get my tools,’ he said, disappearing down the corridor. ‘Come in for a sec if you like.’
Unsure what to do, I followed him inside, not wanting to seem rude. Also, I’d never actually seen the inside of any of the other flats except Clive’s and I couldn’t miss this opportunity to see how different they were, particularly the ones on this side of the building. Would his be identical to mine in layout? Would his decor give the space a whole different vibe?
I slipped off my shoes, leaving the front door open, and headed into the hall.
‘I’m in the lounge,’ I heard him call.
My lounge was second on the right, so assuming his was, too, I made my way there.
‘Wow,’ I said, looking around. ‘This is lovely.’
I immediately felt a pang of jealousy at how cosy and lived-in the room looked. A Bosh recipe book was open on the coffee table and there was an issue of Equity magazine on the arm of the sofa. A couple of dirty coffee cups and a pile of scripts had been discarded on the twirly multicoloured rug. The bookshelves were full to brimming and there were all sorts of bits and bobs above the fireplace: old theatre tickets, framed photos, a couple of houseplants that were flourishing and healthy (something I’d annoyingly always failed to achieve with my own plants). I immediately got a sense of who he was. And I thought that if somebody came to my flat, they probably wouldn’t get any sense of me at all.
‘Won’t be a sec,’ said Jack, who was scrabbling in a drawer. ‘Sit down if you want.’
I perched on the edge of the sofa. When I looked behind me out of the window, I noticed his view was completely different to mine, of course. He looked out over East Heath Road and to the multimillion-pound houses that had back gardens the size of small parks. The whole of Hampstead Village was laid out in front of him, curling upwards to the peak of the hill where the tube station was.
‘Lovely view,’ I said.
He looked around. ‘What’s yours like, then?’
‘The heath off to the side. And then other people’s flats, mainly.’
‘You can see into them?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah.’
He laughed. ‘I’d love that, to be honest.’
‘It’s perfect if you’re quite nosy like I am,’ I admitted. ‘You can gather information on these people that you’ve never actually met, except perhaps to say hello to if you happen to take the rubbish out at the same time. It would be good for you, being an actor.’
