[Previously in this series: some happy times and some more FOR FUCK'S SAKE]
Our time at the mansion was coming to an end. We were packing up (one suitcase, one laptop bag, some bedding, and an enormous pile of stuff from the emporium of "I Don't Want This, Do You Want This? Because You Can Have It If You Want It"), working out our new commutes, wondering if we should have a housewarming once we got there. Then a couple of days before we were due to move, the landlady emailed to tell us she would bring our contracts round on moving-in day, and we should give her our first month's rent in cash.
I was done ignoring the alarm bell, so I phoned Shelter for advice.
Her: That sounds weird. If you decide to do that, make sure there's a proper audit trail in case of any problems. Is she a live-in landlady?
Me: The ad says live-out, but she says she might need to stay occasionally.
Her: And she has a room for that?
Me: Yes. We can't go in it.
Her: That sounds weird and I'm a bit worried for you.
I asked the landlady to confirm that we would have a proper tenancy agreement. Landlady confirmed that actually, we would have the exact same agreement as I had with Wine-Diluting Shut-In, meaning that we had no rights to a confirmed length of tenancy and no real rights to get our deposits back either. She offered to return our holding deposits if we wanted to back out, but by that point it was the day before we had to move out. She knew we weren't backing out of anything.
We signed the shitty agreement and moved in. And in a way, it was alright. It wasn't too far to the station and my commute was less crowded and horrible. The night bus stopped more or less outside the front door. There was a convenient supermarket and 24-hour garage. My room really was very nice, and the kitchen and bathroom were both new. Even though our living room was a dingy box because the actual living room had been converted into an inaccessible landlady bedroom, even though our neighbours weren't the shiniest of characters, even though the music from next door was really, seriously annoying, even though I once got propositioned by an employee in the 24-hour Tesco at 7am on my way back from a house party, it wasn't that bad.
But she was.
We'd asked her for notice if she was going to be in the house, so she would text one of us five minutes before she walked through the door. If that person wasn't home or available to let the others know, too bad. We started freaking out every time we heard the door open. Somewhere in my Facebook message inbox is six months' worth of "was that you just coming in? Please say it was you. I can't cope with an invasion tonight." She'd be sweet and polite and not quite all there right up until we asked for something or implied that something was wrong, whereupon she would switch right into super-formal mode and tell us we weren't cleaning adequately or some such.
Before we moved in, we agreed that we'd need a strategy for dealing with her as a house. One would be the nice, normal one, one would be a bit of a ditz who could do things like check she'd given us keys that actually worked, and one (i.e. me) would be the pedantic, legalistic bitch who used long words and demanded everything in writing. This worked reasonably well until she thought she'd found the weak spot.
On the Wednesday before Easter, my flatmate said: "The landlady is coming to stay tonight. I'm going to ask her if she's staying tomorrow as well."
On Easter Saturday, quite late in the evening, I was about to go out when my phone rang.
Flatmate: Jen, I think I'm being evicted.
Me: What?
Flatmate: She's sent me an email headed "Notice to Terminate".
Me: Why?
Flatmate: She says I'm invading her privacy by asking when she's going to be in the house.
Me: What?
Flatmate: What am I going to do? I've got nowhere to go.
Me: It's OK we will sort something out you won't be homeless WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS WOMAN
We got some advice, looked at our options, and decided the best thing to do would be to try and talk her out of evicting our flatmate. A few days later the eviction was rescinded, with the landlady expressing surprise that the other two of us had found out this was happening.
We spent the next three months on eggshells. We didn't know what might set her off. We complained bitterly about her, getting up every five minutes or so to make sure she hadn't snuck into the house when we weren't paying attention. We wondered what on earth would make someone so paranoid about privacy. We may or may not have come up with several increasingly wild theories as to what she might be up to, which may or may not have been aided by several hours of Google stalking through page after page of increasingly irrelevant stuff. We may or may not have given up when we arrived at "trusteeship of a slightly rubbish-looking golf club".
We'd agreed to stay for six months. It wasn't written down anywhere, but from the point of view of eventually getting our deposits back, none of us could afford to piss her off. We accepted her five-minutes-ahead notifications, gritted our teeth and dealt with her announcements that her small children and elderly father would be staying in the house too, listened with strained ears for any sign of someone approaching the door, and spoke in hushed voices even when we were sure she wasn't around. We marked our moving-out date in our calendars and prepared ourselves to tough it out.
She tried a few times to plant discord among us. I was generally out at my dance classes when she dropped by unexpectedly, and after a few months had gone by in which she'd not seen me at all she began to remark to my flatmates that wasn't it a bit weird that I was never there? Wasn't it strange? They'd been living together for over a year, after all, and I was a relative newbie of only a few months - they didn't really know me at all, did they? What did they think I could be up to? This did not have the desired effect, partly because my flatmates saw me all the time and partly because out of me and the landlady, only one of us was holding onto large amounts of their money and sending them random eviction notices for no reason.
Eventually, the time to hand in our notice drew near.
"It'll have to come from you, Jen. She's scared of you."
"EXCELLENT."
Mindful of our deposits, we composed the most hilarious bullshit notice email. We told her how much we'd loved living there, how devastated we were to be handing in notice, but that our commutes were just too long and difficult and for the sake of our collective mental health, we would need to move somewhere more accessible. We wished her all the best, told her we would be taking away many happy memories, and wished similar happy times for her next tenants. We signed it "many thanks and kind regards", which is a level of contempt I didn't know I could reach. The whole thing was probably the greatest work of sarcasm I've ever constructed.
To our surprise, she responded like a reasonable human being. I can't quite tell from her reply whether the bullshit went straight over her head or whether she got it immediately and responded in kind, but the important thing was that we wouldn't have to fight her. Actually, that was the second most important thing. The most important thing was that she would be out of the country on our leaving date, meaning that her husband would come to do the inventory and I would be able to walk away from the tenancy with the triumph or never having to see or speak to that woman once in the whole six months we'd been there. Sometimes it pays to be the pedantic bitch.
[Next time: moving out, Rad Rod and the thrilling conclusion... for now]
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