Wednesday, 15 October 2014

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]

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