Leah used to go up there sometimes, knock on the door late at night, and ask them to turn it down. They were nice, she would tell me when she came back, brushing her hands together to indicate a job well done. Very apologetic about it, I like them. They left the TV on at night to keep the cat company, they’d turn it down, no harm no foul. The noise from the television never altered but I don’t think Leah even particularly minded this. Going up there seemed, to her, to be almost the whole point of the exercise, telling the neighbors to turn it down more important than the turning down itself. After she went away, I quickly became grateful for a noise I had previously regarded as irritating. Sunday mornings I would stand on the kitchen table and listen to soap opera music, to upbeat voices selling nasal sprays and Lyle’s Golden Syrup and nonstick Teflon pans.
“I can’t stand this,” Leah says suddenly. She’s been sitting in the corner of the room for upward of an hour, chewing on the collar of her jumper in an odd, reflexive gesture, like one might gnaw at a hangnail. I ask her what she means and she doesn’t say anything, only gesturing upward as the noise from the neighbors’ television fades from the closing credits of a program to a splash of advert music in a frantic major key. I go upstairs and hammer on the door, but the neighbors don’t answer, the noise of the television oddly quieter in the corridor than it seems in the flat below. It occurs to me that I have never actually laid eyes on the neighbors, that the whole time we’ve lived where we live I’ve taken their presence as a given on the basis of evidence that is, at best, circumstantial: the footsteps and the muffled music, scrape of furniture being moved around at night. I never asked Leah a single thing about the neighbors, never once after any of the times she went up to ask them to turn it down. Is that odd? I start to wonder to myself and then disregard the question. It barely matters, after all, since my issue is not so much with my neighbors as it is with their TV.
I’m only gone a total of six minutes but by the time I get back, Leah has moved from the corner of the living room and is locked in the bathroom, running both taps. This isn’t entirely unusual. Quite often these days I will wake at odd hours and hear the bathtub being filled. Four A.M., gray twitch of morning in the sky about the telephone wires and water running in the bathroom, in the kitchen, in the room where the washer-dryer sits. More than once, I have come in to find Leah sitting on the edge of the bathtub, staring into the water with the fixed expression of someone barely awake. She is, as I often think at these moments, deliberating whether or not to get in, though at other times I interpret her expression as something more uneasy—the look of a person who has let their gaze drop too deep and now can’t seem to retrieve it.
Standing outside the bathroom, I think of knocking, think of asking her to let me in. I imagine I can hear the water spilling down across the floor, pooling thick across the lavender linoleum. She has, it appears, taken the electric box she uses to sleep into the bathroom, the one that arrived in the post, no return address—a parting gift from the Centre—along with a pair of decompression socks and a book of aphorisms bound in PVC. I hear her turn it on, hear the shiver of sound it produces—swell and oom of something spilling, something seething, judder and groan of something building to a roar.
* * *
A long time ago, we met. I think that’s important—the fact of a meeting, the fact I remember a sense of before. Meeting implies a point before knowing, a point before Leah and I became this fused, inextricable thing. We used to make a game of remembering, elbowing each other about it: d’you remember the time I sent flowers when you were living in another city, d’you remember teaching me to swim, d’you remember the time we went out for my birthday and you spilled water all over the table and the waiter looked at us like we’d crawled from a hole in the ground. Every cou ple, I think, enjoys its own mythology, recollections like note cards to guide you around an exhibition: Fig. A. Portrait of the couple dancing at a colleague’s Catholic wedding. Fig. B. Charcoal sketch of the couple fighting over who said what at a cokey dinner with acquaintances （note fine lines beneath completed sketch, indicating places where the artist has repeatedly erased and redrawn）。 Things are easy enough to recall, in isolation. Scenes appear complete unto themselves: the time we went to the fancy dress party, the time someone stole my wallet in a club, the time our train carriage got stuck underground for an hour and forty-five minutes and Leah kept hold of my hand until we started to move. You can wander the exhibition this way, picking favorites, placing dots by the frames of the pictures you most want to keep. Trickier is the task of pulling the pictures together, of connecting the points in a way that makes tangible sense. I remember the first time we kissed, the first time we slept together, the first time she told me she’d once seen her father appear at the foot of her bed as a ghost. I remember fucking—or the abstract sense of fucking—the fact of doing it often and cheerfully, though with little recollection of one time over the next. I remember the first time she went away, the first time I traveled to see her off. I remember the last time—the fact that she was supposed to be gone for three weeks and disappeared for six months, the fact that none of us knew what had happened, the way the Centre called several times to give out contradictory information before ceasing to call at all. All of this is easy enough, at close range—bright flashes, a relationship borne out by evidence, the bits and pieces that make it a fact. What is harder is stepping back far enough to consider us in the altogether, not the series of pictures but the whole that those pictures represent. I don’t particularly like to do this. Stepping back too far makes me dizzy—my memory, like something punched, reeling about with its hands clapped over its face. It is easier, I think, to consider the fact of us in its many disparate pieces, as opposed to one vast and intractable thing. Easier, I think, to claw through the scatter of us in the hopes of retrieving something, of pulling some singular thing from the debris and holding it up to the light.