Confrontation may be unpleasant, but relying on a faceless authority is childish

After a short wait in the dark heat – unsettling for London, given it is September – the door opened and we bustled inside, wheelie cases clonking awkwardly over the bumps in the wooden floor.

The expression on our host’s face should have been the first warning. It wasn’t late, but he was clearly distressed by the sound, eyes darting toward the apartment door to our left. “Ours is at the very top,” he whispered, and we bashed up the stairs with the bags to his apartment.

I was first into the living room. “Oh! It’s lovely!” I made this statement with gusto, but no louder than the etiquette of standard social discourse allows. “Ssshhhh!” he said, the whites of his eyes flashing.

Standing there, still wearing my coat, I felt baffled. Had they had a baby – who was now sleeping – in the short months since I’d last seen them? The mathematics of gestation proved that to be impossible. My friend and his wife were radiating tension and tiptoeing around their own home at 9 pm. I looked up at my partner, and he looked anxiously back at me.

He is an enormous sort of person in almost every way. Very tall and very large, he does nothing quietly. He also has an unfortunate tendency to clumsiness which makes quietude an unattainable state for him. He excused himself awkwardly to go to the bathroom, and a smashing sound quickly followed from the hall – he’d walked into some metal object, and it had fallen against the radiator, and our host almost left his body.

Verbal abuse

It was explained later (in anxious whispers) that the neighbour downstairs was somewhat unhinged, and would scream abuse through the ceiling if she could hear them moving around. They couldn’t watch TV, except at a sound level that required you almost to sit beside it. They’d witnessed her verbally abusing an elderly lady in the building in a shocking way, and throwing objects around.

My friend’s wife was rather frightened of the woman, who would stop and stare unblinkingly at her while sneering if she passed in the hallway. The woman appears to have a drug problem and a lot of other personal problems. She sounds like the worst neighbour you could think of, and in a wish to avoid confrontation or any further provocation, my friends decided it was best to capitulate to this person’s completely unreasonable standards, and feel trapped and tense within their own home.

Formal complaint

It got me thinking about the relationship between repression and confrontation, and how we will avoid behaving like adults when there is a faceless authority to appeal to. The evening my friends moved in, they put the washing machine on at a not-at-all unreasonable hour, and the woman downstairs started to scream frighteningly and bash the ceiling, so they turned off the machine. Two days later, they got a letter saying the woman had made a formal noise complaint against them.

She had chosen to do this because it saved her from direct confrontation. Instead of knocking on the door and politely pointing out that the washing machine was disturbing her, at which point my friends would have apologised and turned it off immediately, she had escalated the problem and gone instantly from zero to 10, skipping all the points in between.

We can all emulate a version of this, though in a less extreme way. Avoiding confrontation is quintessentially Irish. Nothing is a problem until it is such a problem that we snap completely and need, as my aunt says, to be “dug out of” whoever has wronged us. Why do we tolerate constant small breaches of decency without the perpetrator ever realising, and then suddenly respond in a way that seems wholly disproportionate to the crime committed? We choose what seems the easier option, we avoid looking someone in the eye like an adult and telling them that they are bothering us. It seems simpler, and in the moment it is. But in the long run, willingly enduring a thousand cuts will cause you to lose as much blood as the twist of one small knife. Reliance on the faceless authority might comfort us, but it makes us behave like children.