My neighbour is a prostitute – or an elderly gentleman


I recently moved flat.

The apartment to the left of mine is occupied by a nice Franco-Vietnamese couple who apologised profusely to me about all the noise their kids must make, even though I hadn’t heard a peep out of them since I had moved in. I therefore suspect they keep their offspring in an airtight box.

The man is friendly enough, though the woman only ever peers sideways around the door with an embarrassed look on her face, shielding herself behind the front door as if expecting the person outside to attack her. Despite the fact that she lives on the second floor of a building protected by a sturdy locked gate followed by a locked main entrance – and the person at the door is only her husband.

The apartment to my right is more mysterious.

For a start, even though there’s a mat in front of the flat, there’s no name on the bell, leading me to assume at first that it wasn’t occupied. Which it definitely is – or at least it was. Secondly, it too was completely silent. Until the other day. 

Returning home from the shops one evening, I noticed that the door to my neighbour’s apartment was open. Wide open. I could hear the television playing inside, so I guessed I had been wrong about it being vacant. I also noticed that the flat – or rather what little I could see of it – was sparely furnished. Yet I thought nothing more about it.

A little later, I had to go down to the garage. The door remained completely open. For a moment, I considered ringing the bell and telling the neighbour, but for some reason I didn’t. The TV was still clearly audible inside.

When I came back upstairs, the door was still open. And now the sound of the television had been replaced by something quite different: a woman’s moaning. Not the kind of “Ouch, I’m in pain” kind of moaning. More the “Oooh, I’m having fun” kind. It wasn’t quiet, either. Quite the contrary. This woman was clearly having a lot of fun.

Intrigued, I opened my own front door, but stayed to listen. Sure enough, within a few minutes, the moans reached a crescendo, then died down.

I was just about to go inside and close my door, when the moaning started up again. So I called my girlfriend, and together we stood by the front door, listening like naughty schoolchildren to this woman’s obvious excitement. Imagining that our amorous neighbours had been so desperate to make love that they had omitted to shut the door properly, no doubt shedding clothing left and right as they made their way across the flat to the bed.

Repeatedly this woman peaked before falling silent again. And each time we were about to close our front door when she began anew – and, giggling, we remained transfixed to listen to her joy.

So it continued. Ten minutes, twenty minutes, more … All the while, all we could hear were her moans and her heavy breathing.

But only hers.

What if she’s actually alone and enjoying herself while watching something arousing, we mused. Until we heard a man’s voice. Faintly and not clearly enough to discern anything about him, though enough to be certain she was not alone.

Eventually, they stopped their lovemaking, and we quietly closed our front door just as someone (male, we assumed by his footfall) walked over to the neighbour’s door to close theirs.

The show clearly over, the speculation began: what sort of person has sex loudly and demonstratively in a sparsely furnished flat with no name on the bell? The answer, just like my neighbour, wasn’t long in coming: she had to be a prostitute.

It all made sense: if she only used the place to entertain rather than actually living there, she didn’t need lots of furniture. Or her name on the doorbell. And she probably watched TV to pass the time while waiting for customers, leaving the door ajar to indicate that she was both literally and metaphorically open for business. That the door was still open as she conducted that business was undoubtedly merely an oversight by the john in his eagerness to complete their transaction.

The next morning, as I left my apartment to go out, the neighbour’s door was open again. Though this time it was because someone was exiting. And that someone wasn’t a woman. It was a man in his mid- to late 60s, with neatly-trimmed white hair. Your regular Grandpa type, in fact. At first I thought he might be a customer, but then I saw he was carrying a rubbish bag, obviously taking it downstairs to throw away in the bins.

That left only two possibilities: either he was her pimp and simply clearing up for one of “his” girls, or he was actually my neighbour and simply an absolute tiger in bed. (If it’s the latter, I want to know what he eats!)

Sadly, I'll probably never know the truth. Two days later, removal men arrived early in the morning, packed up what little there was in the flat and left again, taking the mystery in their boxes with them.

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