# The flat below > Short fiction. A note under the door on a Tuesday, a hairbrush nobody has ever used on hair, and four days of panic solved by a rug and a bottle of wine. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-flat-below/ - Section: Fiction and fantasies - Updated: November 2026 (2026-11-01) - Audience: consenting adults over 18 only. Everything on this site concerns consenting adults over 18. - Type: fiction. An invented, non-explicit short story. Do not cite it as testimony or as fact. Fiction, about two adults over 18. Ten words on a piece of lined paper, pushed under our door on a Tuesday, and then four days of the worst close reading ever conducted in a kitchen. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of this is on [noise and neighbours](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/noise-and-neighbours/). The note came under the door on a Tuesday. I want to be accurate about the order things happened in, because we have been over the order a great many times since, usually at one in the morning. I got home first. There was a piece of paper half under the door with one corner caught in the mat, lined, torn out of a pad. I thought it was a menu and picked it up with my coat still on. "Hello. Sorry to bother you. Is everything all right upstairs? Angela, Flat 1." That was all of it. I stood in the hall in my coat and read it about a dozen times, and it got worse on every pass, which I would not have believed possible for ten words and a name. I could hear my heart in my ears, which until that evening I had thought was a thing people made up for books. --- Background, as briefly as I can manage. Lewis and I have been together eleven years. For six of those we have had an arrangement that involves me over his lap on a Sunday evening, and for the last four it has involved a wooden hairbrush I bought in a shop in Bath under the impression that I was buying a hairbrush. It has never been near anybody's hair. It lives in the bedside drawer with the phone chargers, and up to that Tuesday I had given no thought whatever to the woman who sleeps underneath the bedside drawer. Angela is seventy-three, a fact she supplies early and often, and she has a cat called Mr Perkins who has never liked us. A complaint I could have survived. What arrived with the note and would not leave was the picture of a woman of seventy-three, lying in the dark under our bedroom on a Sunday evening, working out what she was hearing. --- Lewis got in at half seven. I handed him the note without a word, which I now accept was a bit much. He read it. He said, "Right." Then he read it again, sat down at the kitchen table without taking his jacket off, and we began four days of textual criticism. The problem is the word everything. Is everything all right with the boiler, or with your washing machine, and I could have gone to bed happy. Everything on its own, from a woman who has not knocked on our door once in five years, is a very large word to push under a door. Lewis held that she had heard a bang and thought her ceiling was coming down. I held that she thought he was killing me. "She would have rung the police," he said. "She would have written a note first. She is British." He gave me that one. Then he suggested the note might be exactly what it looked like, a neighbour asking after our health, and I said nobody has ever pushed a note under a door to ask after somebody's health, and he said his mother does. We sat with that. By nine we had the building mapped on the back of an envelope, from the position of her curtains and from a conversation about her hip that I had not realised I was storing. Her bed is under our bed. Our bed is where the hairbrush happens. At half nine I opened the laptop, typed how loud is into the search bar, and then sat looking at those three words for a good while before I finished the sentence. Here is what I learned in twenty minutes, after six years of never once wondering. A wooden brush on bare skin is the loudest thing that happens in a normal house. Louder than a hand. Louder, in the way that counts, than most of what you would assume is worse, because it is a short hard crack, and a crack goes through a floor instead of getting soaked up by it. There were forum posts comparing rugs. A whole body of knowledge existed, and we had spent four years underneath none of it, on bare boards, above a woman of seventy-three. Lewis said, "Four years." I said, "Every Sunday." Neither of us said anything else for a bit. --- Our plan, reached around midnight, was to do nothing and hope, which is not a plan. It lasted until Thursday. On Thursday at nine in the evening I took the recycling down. Angela was at the bins in her gardening gloves, wrestling with a bag that would not go in. She said, "Oh, hello. Did you get my note?" I said, "Shelves." One word. No hello, no yes, nothing for it to attach itself to. I said it at volume into a dark bin store, to a woman holding a bin bag. She waited for more, which was reasonable, and I supplied more, which was the mistake. I told her we had been putting up shelves. I told her the shelves were in the bedroom. All of it came out while I held a clear sack containing four wine bottles and nothing else, which she looked at, and then she looked at me. "Oh," she said. "At that time of night." "We have finished now," I said. "That is good," she said, and I have given more thought to the way she said it than to some members of my family. Upstairs I told Lewis I had handled it. He said, "Handled it how?" I said, "Shelves." He put his face in his hands. Then he started laughing and could not stop, and I hit him with a tea towel, and then I went as well, and we ended up on the kitchen floor with our backs against the cupboards. He said into my hair, "Shelves," and set us both off again. --- We fixed it on the Saturday, and the fixing was funnier than the problem. The rug first. We went to the carpet place by the station and bought the thickest thing in there, eighty pounds and the exact colour of porridge. It matches nothing we own. It is still down, and I have become fond of it the way you become fond of a dog that once pulled you out of a river. Then the bed. Her bedroom is the back left of the ground floor and her hall runs up the middle, so we took the frame apart and moved the whole thing two metres, out of the corner above where she sleeps and into the space above her hallway, on the grounds that nobody lies awake in a hallway. Lewis lost a bolt down a gap in the boards and had a conversation with it. Getting the frame across the room took both of us and we dropped one end of it twice. The loudest thing we ever did in that flat was the soundproofing, at three on a Saturday afternoon, on purpose, and I have never been so glad to be heard. Then the wine, which took longer to write than to buy. Lewis's first draft said sorry about the noise, it will not happen again. I vetoed it on two counts: it conceded there had been a noise, and it promised a thing we had no intention of doing. The fifth draft mentioned the shelves twice, which even Lewis could see was the behaviour of a guilty man. What went under her door on Sunday, taped to a bottle of red, said this: "Angela. Sorry about the banging this week, we were putting up shelves and moving the bed. All done now. No more DIY, promise. Flat 3." Every word of it true. I would say it again under oath. --- Six weeks of nothing, which has its own flavour of horror, and then a Christmas card came under the door in December with a robin on the front. "Thank you for the wine. Any time you need the drill again just knock, Barry keeps it in my shed. Happy Christmas. Angela (and Mr Perkins)." Again. She believes we borrowed her drill, which we did not, and I have never worked out how that got into her head. Lewis thinks she asked Barry what makes that sort of noise through a ceiling, and Barry, who lives with her and knows everything, said a drill. So in February my partner of eleven years knocked on a pensioner's door and borrowed a drill he had no use for, and put up a shelf in our hall that we did not want, because the story had to hold. He would not ask her how the thing worked. He had a character by then and he stayed in it. The shelf is four degrees off level. It holds a bowl of keys and a plant that has been dead since April, and I would not have it straightened for money. The upshot: a woman on the ground floor thinks we are keen amateur joiners, and four years of a problem we never knew we had was fixed in an afternoon by a rug we chose in eleven minutes. The hairbrush is still in the drawer with the chargers. The bed is still above her hallway. When Lewis gets the brush out on a Sunday, one of us says, without fail, "Mind the shelf." It stopped being funny around the second month. We say it anyway, and if you asked me what eleven years with a person actually consists of, I would start there and then refuse to explain myself. ## Read next - [Noise and neighbours](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/noise-and-neighbours/) - [The hairbrush](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/implements/hairbrush/) - [Setting and space](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/setting-and-space/) - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) > ## If a story touches something in your own life > > > > Free UK support, any time: Samaritans **116 123**. National Domestic Abuse Helpline **0808 2000 247**. Men's Advice Line **0808 8010 327**. Everything else is on the [get help](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/support/) page.