[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]
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