Who is my neighbour?

It’s 3am and I can’t decide between tea to wake me up or hot milk to send me back to sleep. Why not both together? I end up improvising Indian chai, brewing some tea with ginger, cloves, cinnamon, allspice and dark sugar all boiled in milk. It tastes authentic enough.

Decision-making is not my strong suit. A week ago I decided to post here every day: you can see that that failed. I can’t please everyone but sometimes I do manage to please myself, as with the chai.

A gentle rain patters on the windowpane and gurgles down the drainpipe. Otherwise it’s quiet, except when a car purrs to a stop and the driver gets out quietly. All the taxi-drivers in this town seem to be Muslims from Pakistan, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and many live on this street. One occupies a house facing mine and since I’ve never learned his real name, I call him the Assassin. One day he reversed his taxi to find a better parking space whilst I was crossing the road. It’s a one-way street so one tends not to look both ways: not, that is, until one has been hit by a car reversing the wrong way. I forgave him that and suffered no lasting injury, and we’ve often joked about it since.

Unfortunately, news gets out that I’m handy with tools. My next-door neighbour was very worried about a rat seen crossing his kitchen floor. His kitchen was recently renovated by some Poles but they didn’t finish the job properly. The outpipe from his clothes-drier shouldn’t have been left poking out of a jagged hole in the brickwork. But perhaps they felt they had not been paid enough. I’d told myself I would do no more little jobs for him but this one was obviously urgent as he was worried about the safety of his grandson. By way of return favours, his wife cooks occasional meals for us, delivers them on paper plates. She’s a good cook: curry, dhal, rice, parathas—that sort of thing. And he helped me with a tall ladder to fix some brickwork on my house. But when anyone asks my help, I’m careful to point out that I’m busy, now and in the foreseeable future. Then they say, “Oh, I don’t mean any time soon. But if you will just come over to my house, perhaps you could look at . . . and say what you think.”

The Assassin has looked worried lately. His name is Ali, like more than one on this street. We gave him a nickname when he was reversing round the corner and knocked me over. I wasn’t hurt, just a trifle shocked.. He’s the landlord of a property four doors down from mine, a mere sixteen yards away when you take into account that our houses are all twelve-foot wide and joined together. He was expecting a new tenant for a room whose lock didn’t work. So I took a certain pride in doing an efficient fix. He was most grateful. A few days later he knocked on my door, looking seriously worried. His downstairs tenants keep the heating on day and night, opening the windows when it gets too hot, resulting in heavy gas bills not covered by their fixed rent. I thought that in his shoes this would worry me too, so I agreed to try and help. He wanted a cover fitted over the timer switch to prevent the tenants altering the settings. I made a modest estimate for the work.

My search for a ready-made solution proved fruitless so I designed a box from aluminium sheet, hinged on one side and padlocked on the other.

The trouble was, I didn’t have free access to make measurements or fittings, and when I went to the house with the landlord, it was clear that the tenants, a young black couple, were not cooperative. They complained that this is England, the weather varies from day to day; and if it rains they have to dry their clothes indoors.

I may not be a good decision-maker, but I make up for it with an excess of imagination. Though I enjoyed making the box, I felt very stressed and didn’t understand why. I felt like “a certain lawyer” who asked “Who is my neighbour?” (Luke, 10:29) Consciously I was playing the Good Samaritan, helping the landlord neighbour. Unconsciously, I recoiled at the symbolism of restraining the tenants’ freedom: as if I were smithying manacles for a slaver’s voyage.

When my handiwork was complete, I discovered it was too tight a fit. So I told the Assassin that I was too incompetent to execute the contract, and moreover, my efforts to be a good neighbour would also make me a bad neighbour. He professed not to understand and asked if the tenants had been talking to me. Well, not directly, just with their eyes. I hope he puts the word around that it’s no use asking me for help.

I ask myself if I have learned anything, and if so, what; and how much it matters if I haven’t learned anything.