EITHER SIDE OF THE WALL

Other than their curious house-parties, there are three kinds of noise I often hear through my neighbours’ wall.

One is mystery-movie-night - you know, where I try and guess what movie they’re watching from the muffled soundtrack. I’m  terrible at that game because they seem to prefer awful films with both bouncy soundtracks and the Hans Zimmer Inception boom, if you can believe it.

Two is the resonant click of their pull-cord bathroom light. It sounds exactly like mine, and is weirdly loud. It clicks twice (ca-lick) and reverbs. You know the kind of thing.

And three is the sound of a phone vibrating. Not ringing - just buzzing. I hear it in the mornings and imagine it’s my own alarm, then remember that it’ll be a miracle if mine has charged up overnight. It’s next door. How am I hearing that through the wall?

I never hear them talking, or putting toast in. There’s no sound of a vacuum cleaner, or running water or a kettle or a washing machine. They don’t seem to argue, or sing, or recite the Presidents and Capitals in order like normal people. And weirdly they don’t ever seem to rush round their flat going, “Well where do you think I would have put them?” or “They’ve just got to be here somewhere; how did I unlock to get in?”

I wonder if it’s possible that only certain sounds get through - like the wall is acting as a sort of filter, absorbing all the frequencies except for buzzing phones, movie noises, and the bathroom light switch.

I kind of hope the filter works better the other way around. I could cope if all they heard was my phone (when it works), my bathroom light, and YouTube! The other day I was pulling faces at my reflection and putting on the voices of cartoon villains; I scared myself with the whites of my eyes (“Perhaps you’d like to sssee how sssnake-like I can be...”) and had one of those laughing fits and went for a lie down. I’d be mortified if anyone beyond these walls knew that.

Anyway, the chances are they’ve heard me playing the Star Wars theme (blues remix) on the piano. They’ve probably heard me muttering about punctuation, or listening to BBC Radio 4, and they may well have listened in to me rehearsing my recent presentation: ‘creating a functional documentation portal’ which is exactly as Earth-shattering as it sounds. I hope they enjoyed it, with or without the Disney voices.

Tonight I’ve been deliberately quiet, and so have they, I think. I listened to Just a Minute (it’s a radio show), they watched an episode of Friends. It occurred to me that as humans, we all laugh, regardless of culture or tradition - we don’t need to be taught how to do it.

It’s nice to know that we’re all different on each side of most walls, divided, and yet, really, very similar in lots of ways. A lot of people could stand to learn that lesson.