My neighbour

Once a week, usually on Sunday morning, I hear the man in the flat above mine emptying what sounds like a sack full of empty bottles into his dustbin. I don’t know if they are what he has accumulated through the week, or just the spent containers of Saturday night’s consumption.
I think his son lives with him, so he may be responsible for some of the glass that goes into the bin, or all of it for all I know.

I don’t think my upstairs neighbour and I like each other very much. I sense it in his attitude towards me, and I sense it in my attitude towards him. In the three years I have been here, I don’t think we have spoken to each other more than three or four times. The last time we spoke was when he was waiting outside for me to come home, he wanted to complain about my dog’s yapping in the daytime while I was at work. The sound carries upstairs very effectively through the boxing that encloses some pipe work, apparently. It was a very yappy dog and always had been, so I assume the problem had existed ever since I moved in; three years. If so, it must be the most remarkable instance of irony I have ever come across. To wait three years to complain about my dog, and then choose the day before it died to do it, is something that -as they say- you couldn’t make up. When I told him the dog was very ill and probably wouldn’t be around much longer it rather took the wind out of his sails.

If we don’t have a reason to communicate, which thankfully we never do, my neighbour and I tend to avoid each other. I certainly prefer this to any possible conflict. Not so much because we are neighbours and have to coexist, but more, I think, because he is significantly bigger and younger than I am.