THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON

I awoke one morning to the sound of our neighbour wanking. It was six o’clock. While my wife slept, I lay there in our still-dark room listening to the slow, rhythmic slap … slap … slap. A man, obviously. That made sense: our neighbour was indeed a man, and he lived alone, as far as I knew.

Through our bedroom window, which faced our neighbour’s property, I could see a portion of grey sky and a slice of his corrugated-tin roof. The rain that had poured down most of the night continued to fall, but lightly now. The sound of our neighbour wanking seemed so close. Not surprising, perhaps: if I were to lean out the window and extend my arm over the grey timber fence, I would almost be touching the side of his house. And as far as I could tell, his bedroom was right next to ours. Still, it came as a shock, being privy to such an intimate act – more intimate than sex, really. The mechanics of it were laid bare. And it was oddly mechanical, even for a highly mechanical act, because the pace never varied. You’d expect it to get faster and faster, or maybe slower then faster, or faster then slower – various combinations of fast and slow, accompanied by grunting and moaning, or at least heavy breathing. But the tempo remained consistent, monotonously so. There was something inhuman about it, as if our neighbour were hooked up to a machine that did his wanking for him; as if he’d thought, I’ve already removed the other person from the equation – why not eliminate the hand as well?

What, or whom, I wondered, was he thinking about? Some fantasy woman? Or man? A lover from years past? Something more sordid? I thought, At least he’s having sex, if only – fundamentally – with himself. Overhearing a solitary person arouse himself seemed a mere step away from listening to him think. I wondered if I should leave the room, retire to a place where I’d be out of earshot. Who was intruding on whom?

If asked to describe our neighbour’s face, I’d be at a loss. To me he was little more than a figure in shorts and workboots – a man I’d noticed, from time to time, single-handedly restumping his house. He worked with the grim, solitary obsessiveness you see in old-school handymen, a far cry from the expensively overalled DIY types on television. And yet he seemed no older than I. A few feet away, I thought, but miles apart. He was fixing things, maintaining the home. He was comfortable with power tools.

I lay there, looking through the window at the fence-grey sky. The rain seemed to have stopped altogether, unable to compete, as it were, with the persistent beat of our neighbour’s masturbation – pathetically mundane and yet disturbingly unfamiliar in its pump-like regularity, as if everyone and everything had suddenly fallen silent, only to reveal the thrum of the engine that kept the world turning. I knew that before long, my wife would wake up and hear it too. When she realised what was happening, she’d make me go out there and ‘have a word’ – as she would no doubt phrase it – with the man next door. ‘What if Ella were to hear him?’ she’d say. ‘What then?’ Well, she had a point. She’d also say that having a word with our neighbour would do me good because I needed to be more assertive. That was also true; I’ve never been one for confrontations. But what if this situation was just a one-off, never to occur again? I favoured a wait-and-see approach: if it happened a second time, then yes, do something about it. She’d say that was typical of me, and that choosing to defer action was no choice at all.

I lay there thinking, God, I hope he reaches the finish line before Nat wakes up, before this becomes an issue. But by the sound of it he was just getting into his stride; that is, he’d been in his stride from the outset, only to remain there, like a drill press stuck on one speed.

And supposing I did go out there? What was I meant to say? I didn’t even know our neighbour’s name. ‘Hello. Sorry to knock so early, but I’d like to talk to you about …’ About what? How do you bring up masturbation with a man you’ve never met? Our neighbour was an unknown quantity. Not an imposing man, but he could restump a house. A man of action, definitely. A self-sufficient man, clearly. But perhaps lonely too, underneath it all. Divorced, maybe. Children? I thought yes, although I wasn’t sure why.

By this point, the sound from next door had gone on for so long I was almost getting used to it; it had been absorbed into the soundtrack to another day, along with the magpie larks and the feathery rain that had just started up again. But a voice in my head kept saying: You’d better go out there and deal with this, before your wife wakes up, before your daughter wakes up. Ella was probably too young to understand, but it would save me the trouble of inventing some explanation.

I lay there, trying to motivate myself to take action; that is, either go out and have a word with our neighbour, or conclude that the best course of action was to do nothing, and stand by my decision. My wife always tells me I need to be more decisive. I have to agree that if I were, things might be better between us. But it’s not just a question of making a decision; you’ve got to make the right decision, or the best decision. To be able to decide and to decide well – that’s what it all comes down to.

I worked in sales once – a good example of a bad choice, one made after my own business had officially collapsed. I learned a variety of closing techniques: the Apology Close, the Sharp Angle Close, the Assumptive Close, and all the rest. Nice in theory but not always so easy to pull off when it came to the crunch. The technique I liked most was known as the Duke of Wellington Close, where, when faced with a wavering customer, you suggest that they write a list of the cons of buying the product, while you list the pros, and then you compare your respective lists. You have to make sure your list is longer than theirs – by one item, at least. If the pros outweigh the cons, then it follows – in theory, anyway – that the only reasonable course of action for them is to buy. I don’t know whether the Duke of Wellington, that great military strategist, actually used this balance-sheet method, but I’ve always admired the simplicity of it, so much so that I still use it when I can’t choose between two possible options.

I climbed out of bed, quietly, carefully, so as not to wake my wife, and crept into the kitchen. I sat at the table with a pen and paper and prepared a balance sheet: ‘Pros and Cons of Confronting Neighbour’. I tried hard to be honest and objective; the duke would have expected nothing less.

PROS	CONS
Sleep uninterrupted on Sunday morning	Embarrassing
Protect family from offensive behaviour	Neighbour might deny any wrongdoing
Establish boundaries from outset	Permanently sour relationship with neighbour
Practise assertiveness	Risk physical assault

That was all I could come up with; anything else was merely a variation on existing themes. So it was even, a stalemate between me and myself. I returned to the bedroom and lay down, listening. Our shadowy neighbour, abusing, or amusing, himself at my expense, showed no sign of slowing down. I had to admire to him – his approach to wanking reflected his approach to home renovation: humourlessly industrious, slow and steady, never needlessly rushing a job, as if all of life were a DIY project without end.

Some choices simply cannot be made according to the dictates of the balance sheet. But given that life is, essentially, a series of decisions, large and small, sometimes you need a strategy, a system, however flawed. Contrary to what I’d always expected when I was young (when was that?), the older I get, the more difficult it is to decide between one thing and another. Maybe that’s because the less time you have left, the higher the stakes. I’ll admit now that it wasn’t the sound of our neighbour that woke me up. It wasn’t the rain, either. The fact is that I’m often lying awake at this time of morning while everyone else sleeps. I lie there thinking about another decision, the biggest decision of all, one I’ve been wrestling with for longer than I care to admit. That is, stay or leave? When nobody’s particularly happy, and the various small remedies you’ve tried don’t seem to work, you start considering more drastic measures. Some houses are so far gone, there’s no point trying to renovate; you have to find another house. And yet, for all that, I can’t decide.

Since I’m being completely honest … recently I went so far as to compile a list: pros of sticking around, cons of sticking around. When the two columns were neck and neck, I thought of our daughter, and squeezed out another pro and deleted one of the flimsier cons. It wasn’t as if I had any real intention of not staying; I just needed the authorising power of the balance sheet. But even then I couldn’t help thinking: this hasn’t really decided the matter, the decision’s merely been postponed until next time, when it will no doubt be deferred once again, and so on into the future – unless some new development causes me to see things differently.

Which was what happened in the case of our next-door neighbour. As I lay there, watching the new day grow older by increments, I began to realise that the sound I was currently listening to wasn’t the man next door wanking at all; it was, in fact, the sound of last night’s rainwater falling from the gutter onto the stone path just outside our bedroom. The water hit the path in such a way, slapping against the slabs in a steady rhythm, that a person not quite awake might mistake it for … well, something entirely different. At that moment I felt utterly foolish; how could that sound be anything other than what it was? But at six in the morning, in the semi-darkness, when you’re lying there in a new rental, looking out the window while your wife and child sleep, you imagine all sorts of things. And to think that I might – just might – have gone out there and knocked on the poor bastard’s door.

I smiled as I pictured myself relating this story to my wife when she woke up. Meanwhile, the sound of water hitting stone, with that reliably even tempo, had turned into a sort of music, a comforting if predictable song that would continue until the gutter finally stopped overflowing. No doubt our neighbour had been fast asleep the whole time, dreaming dreams of home renovation. My wife dreamed her own dreams, inhaling, exhaling, just out of step with the falling water. I closed my eyes and did my best to join her, grateful that I’d been spared this decision at least.