COMMON DECENCY

Susannah Dickey

(Doubleday, £14.99)

It must be stressful enough to carry on an affair with a married man, with all the uncertainty, anxiety and insecurity that it entails. But if, at the same time, you’re unknowingly having your mind messed with by a downstairs neighbour who has a copy of your front door key – that’s more than enough to push a person to the brink.

To begin with, both of the central characters in Susannah Dickey’s achingly poignant second novel seem to have a lot in common. Both live alone in the same Belfast apartment block, and both are allowing attachments to unattainable people to drag them down.

There’s Siobhan, who is so completely invested in her affair with married father-of-one Andrew that daily life, including her job as a primary school teacher, is just something to be endured until their next hook-up. There were danger signs from the start that she was getting too involved: she would pretend to have read the books he talked about and to get the references he made, becoming so fixated on being his ideal partner that “she was losing her grip on any notion she’d had of her core personality”. Over time, all the skulking around, empty promises and the strain of sharing him with another woman have taken their toll on her health and her ability to manage her life.

In the flat directly beneath Siobhan lives Lily. By nature a reclusive person, she has grown even more withdrawn since the death of her mother, a biology teacher with a sharp philosophical mind. In her head, she relives, over and over, the last few months she spent with her dying mother, remembering the conversations they had and imagining new ones.

Lily’s fixation with Siobhan begins when she realises that their occasional brief meetings in the hall haven’t registered at all, and that her neighbour is oblivious to Lily’s very existence. Looking upstairs, she sees that Siobhan keeps a rack of shoes in the landing outside her front door, and envies “the blithe naivety required to abandon her shoes outside her home, potentially prey to the interference of others; the quiet assuredness of her own dominion over this space.” Lily would like Siobhan to teach her how to live like that, to be “a person who could restore her to what she was before”. But she has a strange way of going about it, stealing Siobhan’s spare key from a neighbour’s kitchen drawer and sneaking into her flat when she’s out, making subtle changes to it on each visit.

Chapters from each of their perspectives run alternately, with occasional crossovers where we see the same incidents from different viewpoints. But, although Lily and Siobhan never meet more than fleetingly, they have more in common than they know. Obsessing over people they can never reach has made them prisoners in their own lives, and brought them to the point where these two strangers have become sources of torment for each other, unable to lead fulfilling lives away from the object of their affections.

The stress has brought out the worst in both of them, but Dickey judges, correctly, that showing them in all their self-centred fallibility and pettiness will win over our compassion in the end. It’s hard not to be struck, for instance, by the grieving Lily’s yearnings for a humdrum life, as it leaves her “with a greater capacity to keep vivid those moments that mattered”. Throughout, Dickey’s prose thoroughly inhabits their stalled and stagnating urban existences – dark and sombre, but nevertheless pulsing with unexpected bursts of mischief and shot through with insight and empathy.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT