I hear them fight

I hear them fight every night. The voices struggle to make
themselves heard over the sound of slamming doors and beating fists:
hands that pound the floors and the walls, angry voices insistent in
their anger.
I do not know what they have been fighting about, but I have heard the
sounds of violence for many months.

I don't know how they maintain their anger. I listen to them for hours,
waiting, half expecting them to collapse into exhausted respite at the
end of their fury.

One day I expect it to all end, but each night the same violence
returns.

She returns home from work, and I hear her close the door, gently, and
the latch clicks shut against the door frame. She puts her keys down,
on what I imagine to be a small table in the hallway, and then she
walks through the flat to the kitchen. The keys don't make much noise,
like there are only one or two keys, and one of those leather key tabs.
But I can still hear them through my wall.

I hear the sound of her pulling back the chair - always, each night,
she does this within a minute of her arriving home - dragging the legs
across the wooden floor.

And then I hear her wait in silence. Twenty minutes, then half an hour.
Until the door opens again, and I hear him arrive, brusquely pulling
the door open.

Where she lingers in the hallway, I hear his steps marching across the
floor. When he enters the kitchen - every night like he is playing his
part in a repeat performance - he slams back the door to announce his
arrival.

He expects confrontation and I can imagine him pulling off his coat as
though he is preparing for a fist fight.
She starts, always she starts, with the same question.
'Where have you been?'

There is something in the way she says it. A banal question but it is
sneering, anxious, and it is jealous. Each time she invites the truth,
not because she wants it over, but because she wants to re-live the
sharp pain of the deceit.

Often he doesn't answer. His courage, his anger, disappearing between
the front door and the table. He turns away and towards the tv. Not
tonight, I hear him say. Not tonight, not now, can't we just
relax.
But she is insistent. The more he walks away, the more she fears he is
slipping away from her. She wants the angry response, she wants to open
the wounds and make him feel the pain again.

And you realise she has not just been waiting for half an hour. She has
been preparing herself for his return, getting in the mood for a
fight.
She throws something against the wall, a cup maybe, or plate.

It explodes across the silence of the room. It falls to the floor, and
then there is a moment of calm, terrifying calm, when you expect the
worst.

Her voice is shrill and breathless through a veil of tears. 'What are
you doing back here? Why do you come here every night after what you
do? Every day, you go and you betray me again, and then you come back
to rub my nose in it. You come here, you spit on my pride, like the
dirty animal you are. You smell of her, and you know I wait for you to
return. I can't get on with things because I know you are coming back
each night. It's been three months. Three fucking months. Can't you
just leave me?'

If you could hear shrugs, then it would be the sound of his corduroy
jacket hunching up. Too familiar with the anger, too scared to confront
it.

'Where else do I go?'

'Anywhere'

And for a moment you think he will move, that he will back down and go,
this sad man in his school teacher's jacket and hush puppy shoes.
She starts at him again, the same desperately insistent voice.

'What do you tell your friends? Do you tell them that you are shagging
two women? That I won't leave you because I love you too much? Are you
the big man - or do you tell them you come crawling back every night
because you can't afford the rent? Do they know that you come back here
every night, because you are scared, because you've got nowhere else to
go.
'Do they know what you do to me every night?'

'You could leave,' I hear him mutter faintly, his conviction
disappearing.

'You fucker.' And she asks him what he does to her, she makes him tell
her why he hits her. He makes him talk about how he hits her.
And he knows she is driving him towards it again. Night after night,
she forces him to do it. It is not my fault, he tells himself.

There is the sound of a smack, flesh against flesh, followed
by a scream, a loud, violent scream, followed not by her tears but his.
She cries later, when he has gone to bed.

But he is always the one to cry first. Ashamed and angry, he drops to
his knees and weeps, whimpering for forgiveness.
He walks out at this point, goes to his room, but closes the door more
quietly.
And only now does she allow herself to cry. Her hand raised to the side
of her face where he hit her so hard, she cries. The noise tears
through the paper-thin wall.



I think about going around to put an arm around her. I used
to think I wanted to protect her, but now I am not sure.
I feel like some kind of voyeur. It is months since I first allowed him
to hit her. It feels like I am sharing in their masochistic
hatred.

I have not missed an instalment for three months. Sometimes, I see
myself inching the door open, peering through the six inches of open
door, and seeing her rive around in torment, knowing that she is just
waiting for him to return. In my mind, I never arrive before he has hit
her, only afterwards.

Then I see myself comforting her, my arm around her shoulder, her dress
half-ripped, blood running down the side of her lip. When he returns,
angry and jealous, I avenge him.

But I am scared to go round and see them now. Not because of that man,
but because I worry that they want it this way, and I do not want to
intrude.

But more, I worry that I want it this way. I am worried that she
doesn't want me to save her and I am worried i don't want to save
her.