It happened at 4pm on the first Wednesday in our new house: an unexpected gift on my doorstep. Tucked in a brown paper bag was a pumpkin salad, a serve of tiramisu and a can of soft drink.
It wasn’t something I’d normally order, or had ordered, but I accepted it on the grounds that it was for “Sam”, my partner’s name. Sam wasn’t home, but there was a chance he’d surprised me between mealtimes with this very specific order for one. As a hungry, sleep-tortured new parent I was willing to suspend my disbelief – and the fact I don’t eat pumpkin. I don’t dislike pumpkin. I simply don’t cook it, order it in restaurants or think about it at all. Nevertheless, I carried my serendipitous meal inside.
It says it’s for “Sam”, drawled the devil on my burp cloth.
I was reaching for a fork when there was a hard knock at the door.
It was Sam. Not my partner Sam.
“Did you just take my food?” they asked, unpleasantly.
“Oh, hi! Sorry!” I was already bustling down the hallway to retrieve my ostensibly honest mistake, returning with the unopened bag. “It’s just that … my partner’s name is Sam!”
“Sure,” Sam said.
“It really is.”
“OK.”
It was worse than I thought. Not only did this person believe I’d stolen their food, they thought I’d go so far as to give my partner a fake name to cover my tracks. According to them I was a stone-cold psychopath. This from a grown human who drank Sunkist.
“Thanks,” Sam said, snatching the bag and storming the 12.5 metres between my door and theirs.
Mine and my new neighbour’s houses were separated by a nose-height fence that revealed a forehead-up view of one another’s lives. We were particularly exposed in our kitchens, where we quickly took to avoiding each other’s eyes at our facing sinks, a silent agreement to lend the other this one small dignity.
Unfortunately, we had less avoidable senses at our disposal. My neighbour heard every babble and demonic scream from my place, and I heard every exasperated conversation from theirs. Once they imitated my two-year-old’s tantrum after a particularly harrowing afternoon during lockdown. I retaliated by feeding the kid spoonfuls of Nutella before bedtime and leaving the windows open wide.
Late one night, my neighbour was entertaining guests in their living room, directly opposite my baby’s room. They were playing my favourite Hole album, appropriately titled Live Through This, and screaming to Courtney Love’s pearly vitriol. My baby was screaming, too. I tried texting and knocking in my pyjamas. When both tactics failed to get a response, I resorted to throwing six drink coasters at their window, first one, then two at once, then three.
The window flung open.
“Are you right?!” Sam said, in a tone one might adopt when addressing a stone-cold psychopath.
No. You’re playing an album that I’d forgotten about because I’ve disappeared into a life that doesn’t feel like mine and I’m profoundly lonely. Can we at least be friendly?
“I’ve got a crying baby,” I said, in the tone of someone supremely confident in their choices. “Can you please turn it down?”
The drink coasters appeared in my letterbox the following day, bound together with a disturbing amount of sticky tape.
Months later, when our frisbee went sailing over the fence, my neighbour claimed not to have it. I imagined they had big plans to cut it up and mail it back to us, piece by piece.
We had a lot in common, my neighbour and I, like the fact neither of us valued our privacy enough to attach a basic extension to the fence. Instead, we chose to peripherally hate-watch each other like an early-aughts, surveillance-style reality show like Britney and Kevin: Chaotic or Big Brother Australia, the season it got axed. There was a cosiness there, too. As the pandemic settled in and the world outside got less familiar, I knew my neighbour Sam’s life would be playing in the background. I knew they quit smoking whenever they were dating someone. They knew I almost got divorced over a fight about the laundry basket. Not the laundry. Just the basket.
One New Year’s Eve, I sat in my backyard with a glass of wine. Cigarette smoke curled into the air from the other side of the fence.
“Hey, Sam,” I said.
“Hey, Ashe.”
“Happy New Year.”
“You, too.”
“Can I bum a ciggie?”
Sam laughed, pleasantly. “You’re a scumbag.”
I laughed. “Look who’s talking.”
The air crackled with the spark of something new.
Me: “In another life we’d be friends.”
Sam: “Maybe in a parallel universe, we already are.”
• Ashe Davenport is a writer and author
