adventures in housing, part three

[Previously in the saga: unhinged landlord explains things, more Monologuing Through Doors, and finally moving out]

So then I was homeless.

After that one moment of doubt in the hotel on the first night, I never for a moment questioned whether I was right to move out of the House of Diluted Wine (there is a house in Pimlico, they caaaalll Diluted Wine, and it's been the ruin of many a young life, but God, it won't be mine...) (stupid rewritten song lyrics for every occasion, thank you very much). I didn't have a home, but I'd take that over a home with That Guy in it.

For the first few weeks, things weren't so bad. I stayed in some dancer friends' spare room for a week, then on another dancer friend's floor for two. It wasn't even close to ideal, but I knew where I'd be sleeping every night. I mostly coasted through on a sense of sheer amazement that I had people who'd take me in. Six months ago I'd had almost no support system in London at all, and now I was being offered spare beds and sofas and floors, sent likely-looking roommate ads that people had seen, and contacted by friends of friends who had been told that I would be an excellent person to fill their spare room. I'm not sure I'd have exchanged all that for secure housing.

There was still unfinished business with my newly ex-landlord. I'd sent him a message asking him to get in touch if there were any issues with the return of my deposit, and he had told me (in possibly the world's longest ever text message) that yes, there were issues with the return of my deposit, the issue being that he thought he should get to keep it. He gave me three reasons:
One, that I had given my month's notice at a time he found extremely inconvenient;
Two, that I hadn't bought enough loo roll and cleaning supplies;
Three, that I hadn't been cleaning to his satisfaction whilst I'd been living there.

These hardships, he thought, entitled him to keep nearly a thousand pounds of my money. I rather disagreed. I told him that none of those things were things you get compensation for, especially when you haven't at any point said, "hey, housemate, you're not buying enough loo roll", and that if these were his only issues then I expected all of my money back. We had a tedious and stressful back-and-forth where we fought, then he would say something nasty, then I would stop responding, then he would apologise. Eventually he suggested we "work something out that's fair to both of us", and I asked him to break down exactly what material losses he felt he had suffered and how much of my deposit he was proposing to keep for each of said losses, thinking that maybe it would be easier to negotiate with him if I could just get him to write the words "compensation for inconvenient timing of notice: £500" and read it back to himself a couple of times.

He didn't. A few days later, via email that radiated martyrdom, he told me that he'd returned my deposit in full, because it just seemed like the easiest thing to do. I gave him a forwarding address (my parents') for any mail, and never heard from him again.

It felt like one of my greatest triumphs. I'd got my money back, without having to involve any professionals, and I didn't have to deal with That Guy anymore. But I still had nowhere to live. I was running out of options that would give me a place to sleep for more than two nights and dancer goodwill was drying up rapidly.

I redoubled my efforts to find somewhere and went to a speed flatmating event. Everyone with a room going wanted over £1000 a month for it, but I found a couple of potential flatmates to team up with. We viewed one place, which was in Clapham but also somehow in the middle of a wood, had a pitch-dark stairwell, contained only severely water-damaged furnishings, but was, we were assured, completely safe because "anybody looking to start trouble usually goes to one of the other flats."

I checked into a hotel.

[in part four: exhaustion and the exploding guest house]

adventures in housing, part two

[Previously in this story: a break-up, a new landlord, diluted wine, and the first instance of Monologuing Through Doors]

I knew within the first week of moving to this place that it wasn't a long-term option, but I thought I could probably stick it out for six months. My post-break-up social life had taken off in a way I'd never expected, so I wasn't in very much and he didn't try to communicate with me that often, so I just wouldn't go in the communal areas and we could ignore each other until Christmas. I could handle that, I told myself.

Six weeks later, I told everyone else that I was handing in my notice at the end of the month. I had nowhere else lined up, but I didn't care. I couldn't hang on til Christmas, I couldn't hang on til I had another option secured. I had to get out and get out now, before I woke up to find him in my room, draining my blood into a recycling bin because he was worried about the mess I might make on his carpets if I ever happened to cut myself. I couldn't stand it anymore. I couldn't stand living with someone who panicked so hard whenever anything was out of place. I couldn't stand being spoken to like a fourteen-year-old girl who knew nothing about the world. I couldn't stand having him repeatedly condescend to me about my own areas of expertise. I couldn't stand having any more basic concepts or household items being explained to me in ridiculous detail.

"Now, I'll show you something that's really useful. These are excellent." [produces a roll of paper towels] "And all you do is tear off a sheet, like this - see? - and then you use it to wipe up any stain on the counter top..."
"Yes, I bought those."

Once he heard me singing and thought it was the radio. He argued with me for five straight minutes that I couldn't possibly have been singing, and finally walked away confused as to how he'd been unable to make me understand that I hadn't been making that noise. Every interaction I had with him was stressful, and I came to dread the mere sound of his voice or his footsteps, even his breathing.

When my fainting problem started to get worse, I was off sick and stuck in the flat more often than I'd like. My tolerance for the man reduced to essentially zero, and I tried harder than ever to keep out of his way. Once when I was off sick, he asked me what the matter was. I explained it - I faint, it's a long term problem, it's my blood pressure, it's a pain but there's not much that can be done about it.

He said, "Maybe it's epilepsy."
"No, it's not epilepsy. They know what it is."
"But if it was epilepsy," he said, "that would be great, because then you could be cured. Maybe you should test for epilepsy."
I struggled past the sheer volume of wrong in those two sentences and told him that no, it wasn't epilepsy, I'd seen specialists, the problem had been diagnosed, and I'd appreciate him not trying to diagnose me.
"Oh no," he said, "I'll still keep thinking of things, and coming to you with ideas." He gave me a satisfied smile. "I'm a journalist, you see."

DUDE. YOU FREELANCE FOR CANMAKERS MONTHLY.

"Yeah. Please don't," I said, and scuttled back to my room.

I sat around running through a list of excuses for moving out, trying to find the one that might cause the least amount of drama. I've lost my job. I'm emigrating. I'm dying. I've been accepted onto a reality show. I've converted to a niche religion which requires me to live in a commune. The one thing I really didn't want to have to do was tell him I was leaving because of him and have him explain to me why it was wrong of me to not be compatible with his personality.

In the end, I told him I was leaving because I couldn't afford to live there, and because I was ill. He suggested that both problems could be solved if I just stopped dancing, which is very much the wrong thing to suggest to me. He fought me on my decision to leave for a little while, and eventually I lied, appealed to his perception of me as an irresponsible child, and told him I was moving back home. From then on he stopped trying to convince me to stay, and communicated with me pretty much solely by Monologuing Through Doors from that point on, or by sending me text messages that said nothing except "PLEASE REPLY TO THIS TEXT MESSAGE." He would kick me out of the house whenever he was conducting a viewing no matter how sick I was and complain (Through Doors) about what terrible timing all of this was.

Finding somewhere else to live would be easy enough, I was sure. After all, there were hundreds of places last time. I just needed to find one that was slightly cheaper and preferably not owner-occupier and I'd be set. I fairly quickly discovered the actual truth about the London rental market: at any given time, there are approximately four habitable places for rent, and eighty-six thousand people applying for each one. Almost everything was extortionate, or infectious, or not in London at all. None of the semi-decent places I wrote to replied to me. None of my friends knew of anybody looking for a flatmate. My notice ran out and I still had nowhere to go and no leads at all.

I booked into a hotel for the night after moving day. My father came to help me move out, and to take most of my belongings back home. When he got out of the car I could see he was judging me; he thought I was being melodramatic and that I probably could have stuck this out a bit longer, at least until I'd found somewhere else to live. After all, the guy had seemed perfectly nice before. An hour or so later, Through Doors, he got to experience the landlord I'd been living with.

"Jen. I'm very concerned because I don't know when you'll be moving out."
"We'll be gone by 6.30 at the latest."
"Because I have other things to do and it's very difficult not to know when you'll be going."
"It'll be 6.30 at the latest."
"This whole thing has been very difficult for me, you know, with you giving notice and leaving when I'm having a very stressful time with my work and when I don't know when you're leaving - "
"Yeah. 6.30."
"Because I'm not able to plan the rest of my day, not knowing when you're - "
"I have said THREE. TIMES. We're leaving at 6.30."
"...oh. OK."

My dad, who asssesses everything and everybody on a scale of "not bad, actually" to "not quite the thing, really" looked at the door, then at me, then back at the door. "Yeah, he is a bit of a funny bugger, isn't he?"

As we drove away from the flat for the last time, he said, "Jesus Christ. No wonder his wife left him."

He dropped me off at my hotel with a suitcase and a laptop bag and left with everything else that I owned. I had a bed for the night, but no idea at all where I'd be going tomorrow. Maybe all the sensible people were right, and I should have stuck it out a bit longer. Maybe I should have waited until I knew I had somewhere else to go.

That night as I slept, my brain registered a clattering from the hotel kitchen and I sat bolt upright and shaking in the bed, terrified that I'd just dreamed the part where I moved out and I was actually still living in the flat. I looked down at the hotel bedsheets, at my suitcase on the floor, at my keycard on the table next to me, and fell into the most comfortable sleep I'd had in months.

No, they weren't right.

[in part three: dancers' floors and the fight for the deposit]

adventures in housing, part one

[People have been suggesting for some time that I write about this, because it is completely ridiculous, so I'm having a go. This will be a saga in several parts. Everything in this story is true; names have been omitted for the sake of plausible deniability]

For my first two years in London, I lived with my partner. We had a slightly scruffy flat that I loved fiercely. I loved the chipped tiles on the front step. I loved the awkwardly positioned bathroom. I loved the garden we could never get anything to grow in. I loved the living room that could comfortably sleep my whole family, I loved the loo roll holder that fell off the wall literally any time anybody touched it, I loved the needlessly complicated back door, I loved the kitchen that just felt like mine. I loved the six-minute walk to the tube, I loved the Saturday farmer's market, I loved the cooked breakfasts at the café across the road. I loved our landlords, who rarely bothered us but would sort out any problems as soon as we asked (I miss them. Oh God, I miss them).

But living together got harder. We fought, and I hid, and he would ask me what the problem was and I would tell him and he would try to fix it by explaining to me why that thing wasn't actually a problem, and then we would fight and I would hide some more. When we split up he seemed surprised; like he hadn't seen it coming.

We had a big flat in zone 2 with a cellar and a garden, and I was the well-paid one (which is saying something). There was only one bedroom. Neither of us could keep it. We gave notice to our regretful but understanding landlords, and lived in a state of incredibly confused normalcy for a month, where it took two weeks for us to realise we shouldn't be sharing a bed anymore, because we'd been lying next to each other and not touching for six months already. I set up an ad and started looking for a room.

I was spoilt by that first flat hunt. Everywhere I viewed was at least decent. Everyone I met seemed nice. There must have been an unusual shortage of people looking for rooms that month, because I got dozens of messages every week from people wanting me to come and live with them (spoilers: you will not be reading that again). I found somewhere without too much hassle: not the prettiest but incredibly well-located, with two guys: the landlord, who seemed perfectly nice and easy-going, and another man who was in London maybe three nights a month at most. It seemed fine.

I had my first clue that things weren't fine on my first night there. He suggested we have dinner together, and offered me a glass of wine. When I accepted, he poured half an inch of wine into two tumblers and walked over to the sink.
"Do you want yours diluted?"
"Beg pardon?"
"Do you want your wine diluted?"
"Diluted? ...no thanks."
"Oh. I'm having mine diluted. It's how the Romans drank it."
"No thanks."

So he handed me the glass with half an inch of liquid in it and sipped, slightly defensively, at his strange alcoholic squash drink. I knew that a man who a) dilutes his wine and b) is quite comfortable giving someone half an inch of drink to show his disapproval of her excessive ways was not likely to be a soulmate of mine. (He then told me that he'd "observed that some of our greatest literature... is about change" and I think I deserve some kind of award for not telling him that yes, essentially, that is what a plot is.)

He told me he worked in PR. My next clue that this was not my forever home came during my first week in the flat, when he went out to a launch of some unspecified thing and returned with tales of free alcohol and a really interesting bar. "I've been telling everyone all night, 'My flatmate's a novelist'," he told me, with the air of a fully satisfied man. "I think that bar would be a great place for your book launch. I know exactly how I'm going to organise it."

I am a novelist, in the sense that there are half a dozen or so first draft novels sitting on my hard drive. I am not a novelist in the sense of having published anything, or having anything about to be published, or having an agent, or having sent anything off to anybody ever. I am certainly not a novelist in the sense of appointing a PR guy to do my launch party. It was a small incident, and not really enough to point to any conclusions - either that he liked to bullshit, and might have been doing so during the viewing, or he really thought this was reasonable, and maybe his grip on reality wasn't quite what it could be - and so I let it go. By the time I noticed that he hadn't left the house for anything besides food shopping in the month since that launch, and was possibly both bullshitting and delusional, other signs had begun to pop up all over the place.

It had become clear pretty quickly that he didn't want anyone, least of all me, in his house. He was used to the other guy paying him silly money for a barely-used room, and every time he saw me in the kitchen in the morning it was an unpleasant surprise. He wanted to talk about the things he'd heard on the radio or seen on the internet, but he couldn't bring himself to have a conversation about them. He regarded me as though I was a friend's teenage daughter that he'd taken in as a favour, and couldn't comprehend that I'd have anything to contribute to anything.

Once I came home late, had a pizza, and left the box on the table. The next morning I came into the kitchen to find him staring at it with an expression of sheer despair on his face.
"You left this on the table," he said.
"I came in late. I was going to - "
"You see," he said desperately, "it's best - it really is best - if you fold it up immediately and put it in the recycling. It's best to do it immediately. You see, if you fold it up like this - " as he demonstrated exactly how best to fold up a cardboard box " - and put it away in the recycling immediately, that really is best, if that's OK. Is that OK? Because it really is best - "
"I have to get to work."

We repeated this any time I left evidence of my existence out. If I left a cup in the living room, if there was a fingernail-sized blob of tomato sauce next to the stove, if I had a shower and prioritised drying myself above giving the bathroom an immediate and thorough clean. Because I'd just come out of the shower, was lacking in clothes and therefore keeping my bedroom door shut, he developed one of his weirder habits, Monologuing Through Doors.

"Ah, hah, Jen, you are going to clean the bath, aren't you?"
"Yes, when I'm dry."
"Because it's a mess, you know, it's a mess. I can see - there's shampoo - I can see a blob of shampoo in the bath. And I know - I know it's you, because you're the only one in the house with any hair..."
"I'll clean the bath when I've dried my hair."
"Because I can see it, you know, the shampoo, and I don't mind cleaning the bath, I don't mind it, but I think really if you could clean the bath when you've used it, if we could all clean the bath when we've used it, I think we - we should all clean the bath... there's shampoo."
"When. I'm. Dry."
"Shampoo... in the bath."
"I'm turning my hairdryer on now."
"...shampoo..."

[in part two: "if you had epilepsy, they could cure it", and how to leave your scary shut-in landlord]

call centre

Caller: [explains problem]
Worker: That's not something we deal with here, you'll need to speak to [relevant people].
Caller: But I phoned YOU.

Caller: [explains problem] I'm thinking I might sue. Should I sue?
Worker: Well, that would be your decision to make.
Caller: So I should sue! Would I win?
Worker: There's no way for me to know that.
Caller: Fantastic! [away from phone] Honey, she says we should sue!
Worker: I didn't say that.
Caller: It's so great that you said that.

Caller: Don't tell anyone I said this. I don't want it attached to my name.
Worker: That's OK, you haven't given me your name.
Caller: YOU ARE THE GOVERNMENT I KNOW YOU

Caller: Last time I called I spoke to Trevor. Can I speak to Trevor this time?
Worker: I'm afraid we're not set up to direct people to specific advisors.
Caller: [pouts audibly] I liked Trevor.
Worker: I'm sure I'll be able to help you.
Caller: Is Trevor there?
Worker: Not in this office.
Caller: Fine. I'll keep trying until I get Trevor.

Worker: OK, so you have four options here. [explains options]
Caller: So you're saying there's nothing I can do about this?
Worker: Well, there are the four options...
Caller: So, nothing, then.

Caller: Thank you so much for your help, Jezebel.
Worker. My name's Jane.
Caller: Yep! Bye, Jezebel!

Worker: So that's all you need to do, and you'll be set.
Caller: Why can't you do it?
Worker: ...
Caller: I phoned you for HELP.

Caller: So I called before, and you guys told me to use a filter to get rid of my junk mail, and I got drunk and punched a guy in the pub, and now everything's got worse. I'd like to complain about your service.

Worker: [call centre], may I help you?
Caller: Trevor?
Worker: ... no, this is -
Caller: [hangs up]