Still Life with Neighbours

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Placed second in the The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2024.

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During my twenties, I lived for a while in a room with a window that looked straight into the flat next door. It was only their staircase – their window was at the point where the staircase turned, so that I could see it going up to a landing on one side and on the other it went down to the lower floor, where I could just catch a glimpse into their living room and one end of the sofa.

I didn’t know the people who lived there. Our flats were in separate buildings so I never met them, and even if I’d seen them out on the street I may not have recognised them. All I had were glimpses through the multiple panes of glass, but I knew it was a man and a woman living together. I always assumed the two of them were a couple, though when I think about it now I never knew that for certain; it’s possible that the flat had more than one bedroom and they were simply housemates. I never saw them together, not in a way that might have confirmed their relationship one way or the other, but then I could hardly have expected to see them going at it on the staircase or anything like that. In my head they were certainly a couple, and I liked to think about them that way; that they had that kind of relationship, something romantic and real.

It was as if I was being allowed an insight into the very core of their lives.

I don’t want to give the impression that I was obsessive about watching them. I didn’t spend hours standing at the window keeping an eye out, but there was a thrill that came from the glimpses I had, and sometimes if I could see one of them sitting at the sofa on the edge of their living room, I would watch for a while, to see if anything interesting might happen. They’d be side-on to me, looking over towards whatever it was on the other side of the room – presumably the TV, since they would sit there for a long time in the evenings looking over that way, not really moving, as the light played erratically across their faces. It was as if I was being allowed an insight into the very core of their lives, and in a way I felt closer to them than to the people I actually lived with.

Back then I was still a student. I had just moved to the city, into a flat share I’d found on the internet, and I didn’t know the other two guys. They had busy jobs, lives that kept them out of the flat a lot of the time, whereas I was just at home doing my coursework and logging into classes, which were mostly online. Sitting at my desk by the window, I’d occasionally glimpse my neighbours out of the corner of my eye as they went up and down the stairs – almost like a game of hide and seek, although it was hard to be sure which role I was playing. Sometimes, when I turned my head to look, it wasn’t them at all but my own reflection staring back at me. That was mostly after it got dark, when the two windows facing each other created a kind of mirror that picked up my own movements and tricked me into thinking I’d seen someone else.

Even when it was dark, I rarely closed the curtains because I liked to sleep with the windows open so that the airflow was better and I wouldn’t overheat. Sometimes, I imagined that my neighbours could see me as I was sleeping, might glimpse me in bed as they went downstairs for a glass of water in the night, but I don’t know if they really could make me out in the bed. It was easy to imagine that my whole room was on display through the window, but probably with the darkness and the narrow angles of the glass there was no way they could see that far into the corner, it would all be in shadow. I never found out how much of me they were able to see.

*

On the evenings when my flatmates were out, I would often meet guys online and invite them over. I would let them fuck me with the curtains open. Not once did one of the guys suggest that they should be closed, maybe because they felt that since it was my bedroom it was up to me to decide; or maybe they didn’t care, it seemed inconsequential because it wasn’t their own neighbours who might be able to see. I’m not sure what it was that made me leave the curtains open. It certainly wasn’t that I got some additional, sexual pleasure from the thought that next door might be watching, but nor was it simply that I was careless about it; I was always aware that the curtains hadn’t been closed, and made the deliberate decision to leave it that way. Maybe I thought that I was bringing some excitement into my neighbours’ lives, alleviating the tedium of their heterosexual existence – though in truth, I never actually caught them spying, and anyway once we actually got started I wasn’t thinking about my neighbours at all. I was focused on the guy I was with: the feeling of him inside me, his kisses if he wanted to kiss me, the accelerating slap of
our bodies as he got closer to finishing.

After one of those hook-ups I walked the guy out, and when I came back into the kitchen of our flat one of my housemates, Will, was in there. In fact it was Will who owned the flat, I was renting the room from him. It took me by surprise, seeing him there: he was so rarely at home, and I hadn’t heard him.

‘Oh,’ Will said. ‘Hey.’

‘Hey.’

‘Who was that you were with?’

His tone was neutral, and I didn’t get the impression he was making any kind of judgement; but there was also nothing to suggest he had a genuine interest. Will was gay, too, but he had a boyfriend, who occasionally came over. When they were together, I stood sometimes in the hall, where I could hear them talking and laughing behind his closed door.

‘It was just some guy,’ I said, which was the truth: I hadn’t seen him before, and didn’t plan to again. I rarely met the guys I hooked up with more than once, because that was the etiquette. By that point I had come to accept that this was the case; it made it easier, to know that everyone was on the same page, whereas seeing someone again might imply something different.

‘Oh,’ Will said. ‘Right. Well, good to see you.’

‘You too. See you around.’

I started making faces, contorting my mouth into exaggerated smiles and grimaces, trying to tell if any of the expressions were real.

Later that night, when I came out of the shower, Will’s boyfriend appeared all of a sudden and spoke to me. I think he had been waiting for me, loitering between the kitchen and the little corridor that connected to our rooms.

‘I know what you’re doing,’ the boyfriend said.

I only looked at him, wondering if perhaps he meant that he knew I sometimes stood in the corridor and listened to them, their giggles that would descend very often into groans, what sounded like sex. But I rarely stood outside for very long, and there seemed no way he could have known that I did it.

‘Going after Will,’ he went on to say. ‘I’m onto you.’

Still I said nothing. There was no need for me to contribute.

‘Keep your distance, I’m warning you.’

He pushed past me, going into the bathroom and locking the door. I hadn’t thought that he, the boyfriend, was aware of me at all, and yet apparently I existed quite prominently in his head – or a version of me did, a version he had created and had allowed to take over.

I went back into my room. Over the way, the lights were out in my neighbours’ flat, and it seemed that they had already gone up to their bed. I stood in my towel in front of the mirror, looking at myself closely, and then I started making faces, contorting my mouth into exaggerated smiles and grimaces, trying to tell if any of the expressions were real. I couldn’t be sure.

*

In the whole period I lived in that flat, only once did I properly make eye contact with either of my neighbours. They kept a row of plants on the windowsill on their side, succulents and other houseplants that could survive pretty well without much attention. I suppose they kept them to brighten up the trip between floors, although it was nice for me too, when I was working at my desk, to look to the side and see the regular line of the plants. I don’t remember ever seeing them watering those pots, except for a single occasion when I came into my room and glanced across out of the window, as had become my habit, and saw that the woman was standing there. She held a small stainless-steel watering can, but when I came into the room she stopped what she was doing and looked up at me. I looked at her. In that moment, it seemed that the whole history of the relationship we had, living side-by-side, passed between us. She really did see me. I wondered whether I should smile at her, or do something else to acknowledge her presence, but nothing would be sufficient, and I had the sense that anything I did might break whatever it was that existed between us. The moment extended, might never have ended, except that suddenly while I was watching she winked at me, so quickly I might easily have missed it, and then she turned away and left me standing there alone in my room, not sure what had happened.

Not long after that I came home to find that the plants were gone from the windowsill. When I looked closer, I saw that the corner of my neighbours’ living room that I could make out was empty, and all of their things had been taken away. I realised then that they must have moved out. To them, it would have been the culmination of weeks of planning, and they would have known about it for a while – maybe the rent had been put up too high, or one of them had got a job out of town, or they simply wanted a change. If they really were a couple, it might even have been that they had broken up, but I hate to think of that being the case. Whatever the truth, I had known nothing about it: for me there had been no hint that they were planning to move, not in the look I exchanged with the woman or at any other time. It came as a shock, almost like a betrayal, and it took me a long time to get over.

The people who moved in afterwards put the blinds down on the staircase, and around the same time Will told me that his boyfriend was going to move in with him. I was welcome to stay, Will said – the other housemate was planning to – but also he would understand if I preferred not to: he knew it wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, living with a couple. If I did decide to leave, the boyfriend could turn my bedroom into his study, so there would be no need for me to sublet the room or to find a replacement.

I thought about it for a few days, but really the answer was obvious: my studies had come to an end, and there was nothing else to keep me in the city. It made sense to move out. When I told Will he nodded, and said okay, and that his boyfriend would be pleased – because he worked mostly from home, it was nothing against me. I packed up my things and booked the coach back to the town where I had grown up, where I would move into my mother’s spare room. It would only temporary, to tide me over until the next thing came along.

I never saw them again, my old neighbours – the man and the woman – but sometimes I wonder if they still think about me, and the period in our lives that we shared. I think of them often; in fact, sometimes I struggle to get them out of my head. It was nice, that was the thing – to be a part of a group like that, of each other’s lives. That kind of thing doesn’t come around very often.

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Eddie Creamer is a writer and part-time lawyer living in London. A graduate of the Goldsmiths MA in Creative and Life Writing, his work has appeared in various online magazines, including Queerlings, The Interpreter’s House and The Fruitslice. He writes stories and flash fiction, mostly about queer Londoners, and is currently editing his first novel, Now You’re Flying, an intergenerational campus novel about a mother and son.

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