The new neighbour

Source: an original fiction extract.

“For three mornings, the man in the flat opposite had left a wooden chair outside his door. On the fourth, Elsie found two chairs and a small table. She had lived in the building for twenty years and knew that the corridor was not a sitting room. At nine, she wrote a note asking him to remove the furniture. She chose a blue pen because black ink looked unfriendly, then underlined REMOVE twice.

The corridor was a long, dim throat of a place, swallowing the sound of her slippers. Behind each identical door, a separate morning ticked and clattered. The man's chairs stood beneath the weak window at the end, their curved backs almost touching. A clean cloth covered the table. In the centre sat an empty sugar bowl, white and expectant as a small open hand.

Elsie slid the note under his door and returned to her flat. By lunchtime, the furniture had gone. She felt relieved, then irritated that she kept looking through the peephole. At three, a knock came. The man stood outside holding her note. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I thought people might like somewhere to talk.' Elsie explained about access and fire safety. He listened carefully. Then he asked whether there was a common room downstairs.

There had been, once. Elsie remembered a room beside the laundry, with a noticeboard and a kettle that took too long to boil. It had gradually filled with broken furniture until the door was kept locked. She told him this as though describing a problem in another building. 'Who has the key?' he asked. Elsie looked towards the drawer where she kept old committee papers. She had not opened it for years.

The following Saturday, they cleared the common room with two other residents. The man brought his chairs; Elsie brought the slow kettle. The corridor remained empty, as it should. Downstairs, the sugar bowl filled and emptied, and someone wrote a list of things the room still needed. Elsie added a fire-safety notice at the top. Then she crossed out the word REMOVE on her old note and used the back for the shopping list.”

Refer only to the second paragraph. Analyse how the writer uses language to present the contrast between private isolation and the proposed meeting place. Support your ideas with quotations from that paragraph. You could consider words and phrases, language features and techniques, and sentence forms.