Hole In The Floor

When I started university, I set out to host regular parties in my flat. Two dozen people arrived for the first one and crammed themselves into my living room. We played music, talked loudly and drank, and danced.

Around midnight, someone said to me, “Kate, your neighbour downstairs is banging on her ceiling. I think she wants us to be quiet.”

I shrugged and increased the volume of the music.

An hour later, one of my guests shouted and pointed at the floor.

We fell silent. In the middle of the room, the vibrating tip of a jigsaw blade had appeared above a floorboard. The blade cut a hole the size of a dinner plate and stopped. The wooden circle fell into the room below and a girl’s head appeared through the hole.

“Whose flat is this?” the girl asked.

I stepped forward. “Mine, what of it?”

“You may not be at university to study,” the girl said, “but I am. I need peace to concentrate—at all times.”

“Hard luck,” I said.

The girl took a deep breath. “I’m an architecture and construction student. The floors of these flats are chipboard on wooden beams with plasterboard ceilings. Noise insulation is non-existent. And since you won’t acknowledge this fact and keep your racket down, I’ll have to remedy the situation.”

“You do that,” I said.

“Yes,” she replied and withdrew her head.

I looked at my guests. “Ignore her.”

For the next two hours, I heard the noise of a saw and hammer from the girl’s room below. I drank cheap wine and didn’t give the matter much thought.

The next day, I woke with a headache. I stumbled to the living room and saw the girl from the flat below. She emptied the contents of a sack into a drum that revolved on a stand. She then added water.

“What’re you doing?” I asked.

“Someone left your door open. So I’m here to lay a concrete subfloor for noise reduction.”

She turned a wheel at the side of the churning drum. Concrete slid out and into the hole she had cut in the floor.

“You’ll flood your flat,” I said.

“No. I’ve put up shuttering to hold the concrete.”

“Is that right?” I said, and went back to bed.

I re-emerged hours later. The girl and the concrete mixer had gone. Moreover, she’d cleaned the living room and plugged the hole in the floor with the wood she’d cut from it the previous night. On a chair, she’d left a note: ‘Tread carefully. Give the concrete a few days to set.’

The situation had begun to intrigue me; consequently, I did what the girl advised. A week later, though, I held a themed party night at my flat with everyone dressed as a builder.

People entered into the spirit of the idea, and while they danced in work boots, overalls and hard hats, I decided to check on the girl downstairs. I knocked on her door. She yanked it open.

“Hello,” I said. “Are things any quieter?”

The girl didn’t have time to answer. I heard a crack and looked behind her at the ceiling of her living room. Chunks of concrete loosened and fell. One flattened a table; another crushed a chair.

The girl spun round and made to go into the room. I grabbed her T-shirt and pulled her against me. We collapsed backwards into the safety of the communal hall and watched a concrete lump drop onto a pile of books.

After the final piece of the subfloor had fallen, I stood and held out a hand towards the girl. She knocked it away and said, to my surprise, “Can I come to your party? I need a night off.”

“Why not?” I said, and added: “We’ll tidy your flat tomorrow.”

By K. J. Watson

From: United Kingdom