Nuisance Neighbours from (Muswell) Hell

 

  Between 2002 and 2008 the house next door to my in St Pancras bedsit had three tenants. Each of them gutted the house from roof to basement. The work each time took at least six months, the third rebuild lasting well over a year.

  The third tenants had the drilling and stone-blasting done at skewed intervals and not nicely all at once to get it over with. I asked their nanny (in Sainsbury's) why they were choosing to timetable the work this way.  She was sixteen, with wispy dark hair falling in front of her face, rouge with no foundation, shoes with no socks, twin set with no pearls. She said it was because back home in Eastern Europe the builders had all been nuclear fissionists (or some such) and found menial work dull.  

  'We're staggering the different kinds of work to give them a bit of variety,' she clarified. 'Surely you understand the concept of renewed and renewing novelty, being a performer?' She put quinoa into her trolley alongside the hemp milk and miso paste. 

 ‘No, I don't,' I said, prettifying in my own basket the six value baked beans tins. 'I’m school of what John Le Mesurier told Wendy Richard when she was starting out: "Try and do the same material for seventy-five years, if possible wearing the same blue woolen suit".’ 

  A week or so later, through the estate agent I e-mailed the owners next door:     

 What can have possibly been so wrong with the house in the first place that you've needed to do such a never-ending amount of work on it? Is the house perhaps like the Tardis, with a Great of China's worth of Wall inside to be whacked with an entrenching tool? Are the walls themselves like the heads of the Hydra – do away with one and another springs up in its place? And is the amount of time your builders seem to be spending irrelevantly smacking tiles on the roof perhaps some kind of outreach percussion project? 

  

 I didn't get a reply. 

  

  It wasn’t just their building work that was frazzling me, either. There was a child who practised kick-flips on his skateboard below my window until someone put a stop to him (yes, me).  And another that played acoustic guitar until well past nine o'clock.

  At a quarter to eleven one night I rang their bell. The door was opened by a with a wine rash and grey hair in a tendril display, wearing a leather gherkin over linen trousers tucked into DMs. I told him that I lived next door and that, please, we’d had bang crash wallop all day every day for months – we'd all really had enough now, thank you – so could whoever it is stop the guitar strumming right on the other side of the wall from my anti allergen pillows?

  He frowned and asked which one was my room. I told him it was the one with the lights on. He said it wasn’t very late. I told him it was when I was getting woken up at eight every morning. 

  'Not Sundays,' he analised. 

  He was joined at the door by his wife. He put an arm round her, smiling at me. She wore a pink dressing gown. 

  ‘Surely you didn't want to meet us in this way?’  She spoke as though she were visiting me in hospital and was about to tell me that my illness was fatal.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, here we are and all you've done is complain.'

  ‘That's because there's been an unacceptable amount of disturbance for an unacceptable amount of time.’

  She jerked her head back over her right shoulder.

  ‘These children have to practise,' she said.

  ‘They're not practising.’

  Another jerk, this time back to me. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Practise is making exercises out of a specific technical difficulty in a piece of music, so you can get round it safely in performance.’

  She looked pitying. Clearly my illness was going to be lingeringly agonising on its way to being fatal. She said, 

  ‘Perhaps what they're doing is simply more creative than that. And perhaps that's what's sorely needed in this street: more creativity.’

  ‘I wouldn't have thought so,' I said. ‘For just one example, next door to you is me. I'm the son of a Country and Western singer and of a stage psychic mother - who was banned from theatres up and down the country for passing on messages from the other side that she shouldn't.  I’ve just auditioned by accident to entertain troops in Iraq with my character Madame Galina, a modern take on the White Face Clown, sent on tour by the Russian Mafia partly to fleece the Arts Council and Lotto of funding and partly to give Mrs. Putin time to cool her heels. Vlad isn't called Put-In for nothing, nudge nudge, wink wink. Does that sound creative enough for you to be going on with?  Good.  So, enough with the guitar, please.'

  As I was leaving I saw a toddler version of the skateboard kid looked out of an upstairs window. He was holding a guitar. And grinning at me.

  He stopped grinning when I mused aloud on those things that are never to hand when you need them. Policeman, taxis, remote controls, the end of the sellotape, car keys, Rizlas, working cash points, condoms, clean knickers, wet wipes, glitter spray guns...

  ‘And where, at the mewling and puking stage of that grouting-faced, transported-eighteenth-century-whore-haired, bling bedecked, soya milk and peanut butter reeking, BUPA tooth capped, wannabe It Girl and Hobbit begotten freak up there, is King Herod!?’

  His mother, wrapping the pink dressing-gown tighter round herself, called down the steps,

  'Oh, you horrid, horrid man. Do you realise how lucky you are to have such beautiful boys living next door to you?'

  ‘And who are you, their mother or their pimp?’

  I wondered if I might have a legal case against next door for noise pollution and rang blond Andy Garcia look-alike barrister Daniel. 

  Daniel had worked at Covent Garden during his law conversion. And, co-incidentally, attended Dawn Oliver's lectures. I knew Dawn from Aldeburgh. Dan was able to verify that she did, yes, treat the new intake each year to the same two jokes.

  ‘When I mention the crown, I mean that in the sense of the prosecution and not in the sense of what a queen might wear on her head.’

  Thank you.

  ‘And when I mention the cabinet, I mean the highest ranking people other than the Prime Minister in the government, and not something in the corner of the sitting room with sherry, napkins and Kerplunk in it.’

  Thank you, again.

  'Unlikely that you'd have a case, Iestyn,' Daniel said. 'Building work can go on for however long as long as it takes place within proscribed times. Oh, there's a ban of odours.'

  'From the work or the workers?'

  'Sorry, chap, I think we're talking a no-go here.'

  I thought back to the evenings when Daniel and I used to sit on the sofas in the Royal Opera House foyer. He would read accounts of Lord Denning's trials to me and I would have to apply my Miss Marple brain to guessing LD's ruling. 
  One of the cases was about some people ‘coming to a nuisance’. Lord Denning ruled that the plaintiffs, people who had moved to live beside a cricket field, aka ‘the nuisance’, were not entitled to compensation for smashed windows because the land, aka cricket pitch, had always been intended for such use, i.e. for the playing on of cricket, and therefore it was reasonable to assume that balls might be hit for six, and if the aforementioned windows of the aforementioned people were in the way of the flight of the ball, tough titty.

  I may have paraphrased.

  I decided that next door had bought a ‘derogating from grant nuisance’ to me - follow me here - because the ‘intention’ for the houses in my street was that they be sub-divided into bed-sits, to be rented by a banker on behalf of a ballet girl with whom he was, as my Nan Silcox would have said, having things to do.  The intention was not whole-house use by a single family. 

  I included all of the above in a second email to next door, and continued: 

  An Edwardian city boy installed his ballet girl mistress in the bedsit I am now renting. He hopped on the five nineteen out of Euston via Hampstead Garden Suburbs, hopped off at Camden Road, hopped on his bun-headed beauty, hopped off back to Camden Road, hopped on what would by then be the six nineteen out of Euston and home.

  I look out of the same second floor window as he did while (I imagine) he was leaving her some tights money, combing his hair or sniffing his shirt collar for whiffs of her perfume. The view would be the same, other than for the electric street lighting, parking metres and your skip, still!, stuffed with crayon-fouled MDMA, the complete set of Terry Pratchett and, poor and bloated from the canal, that fox corpse. 

 In the room itself, she would have looked in the same mirror as I do, and switched on either one or both bars of the same Belling heater. Both bars only if she wanted to fry her head while her feet remained frost-bitten. Also, from the look of it before I finally talked my landlord into replacing it last year, she might well have got burns from the same carpet.

  I'm continuing history. I perform as my ballerina in the regional theatres my dancing Edwardian forebear would have done – the Sheffield City Hall, Leeds City Varieties, the Theatre Royals at Margate and Bury. 

  As she would, I save money by staying in B. and B.'s run by the type of landlady people wistfully and mistakenly think has died out. Details on request. 

  And talking of my landlord re the new carpet: when he fitted my new wardrobe, he found some sheer ballet tights and a jar of the Leitner stuff chorus girls used to spit on to use as mascara. 
  For your type of resident to belong in this street as I do - similarly the sculptor two doors down and the Danish church organists opposite - you would have in theory needed to find a bottle of Napisan, back issues of Trusts and Trustees and a packet of sunflower seeds. 
  These here are the back streets of Kings Cross - where I belong -  not of Muswell HIll. 
  Where you clearly do.

  

  Again, I got no reply.

 At least, not until the first edition of Trusts and Trustees Magazine arrived as per the annual subscription next door had taken out for me...