storybook

I was the weird kid who liked books. I came to school already knowing how to read, and I read everything. Everything we were assigned, anything I was given, anything I might have found myself next to in a quiet moment. When I was about seven years old, I spent many an instructive hour lying on my nan’s bed reading her Bible, having exhausted all the kids’ books in her house.

[several years later]
Mum: We all thought you were finding religion.
Me: What? Have you read that thing? Everyone is horrible to everyone and everyone dies. And God is an arsehole.
Mum: Why did you read the whole book, then?
Me: It was a book.

I knew exactly how stories worked. The structures, patterns and flow became second nature to me, and I started to think in stories, silently narrating mundane things that happened to me and wondering at what point in the book this particular mundane thing would occur if my life were a story that others might read. I understood adventure and mystery and romance, at least as they related to storytelling. I didn’t really understand romance. Boys were weird and they picked on me. As I hit my teens and started reading a few contemporary romance novels, I concluded that romance was a slightly unpleasant thing that existed between an annoying woman and an arrogant man who didn’t like each other very much. But it was still something I wanted, because it seemed as though I ought to want it, such was the importance given to it by everyone and everything around me.

When I was seventeen, my storybook came along. I met a boy at my Saturday job in the supermarket, and after a few months of talking bollocks and very definitely not flirting, we were a couple. We went from ‘friends’ to ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’ almost immediately. It wasn’t long before he bought me a ring and we planned to get married.

It didn’t work out, and the reasons for it not working out are the kind that make it very difficult to tell this story from the perspective I’m about to tell it. It’s difficult to tell this story from any perspective other than “Here is a list of six years’ worth of horrible things”. I’ve written that story before, and thousands of other people have written it too. It’s a common, unpalatable and necessary story. But I haven’t seen much of the story I’m about to tell: our relationship was a storybook, even though it didn’t follow the patterns and flow that I knew from what I’d read, because he seemed to be genuinely convinced that that’s what it was. The story of him, playing Man, and me, playing Woman, Falling in Love and living Happily Ever After.

When we fought, which was a lot, he would reach for the script of Man and Woman Fall in Love and flip to “Fight Scene”. Man would cast his eyes downward mournfully (Man did a lot of things mournfully). Man would speak slowly, evenly, in a voice suffused by grief that he and Woman were fighting. Man would respond to tearful complaints with “I know”, and launch into a grave, melodramatic speech about how Woman’s love was everything to him, and of course if she wanted to leave that was up to her, and he would simply live out the rest of his life as a lonely, shattered man, wouldn’t he? He would never find anyone else, just grieve for their love for ever and ever.

I want to be clear here: he said every last one of these things to me on a regular basis. There were times when pretty much this exact Fight Scene would happen multiple times a week. I don’t think we ever went longer than a month without it. Sometimes he would recite it even when we weren’t fighting. “Hey, Jen. Here’s what I’d be doing now if you left me.” There was manipulative intent, I’m sure, but I also think part of him really believed it, that he really thought this was what you were supposed to do. He would sometimes comment on what passers-by would think his income was based on his being with me, always viewing us from the outside and not the inside.

He came to realise that I didn’t really know the characters of Man and Woman, and would quite often attempt to educate me. The characters of Man and Woman are constant, and played by everyone. All men are Man, and all women are Woman. Their traits do not change. He would tell me stories about Man’s slavery to his own uselessness, his inherent inferiority to the emotionally strong Woman and his gratitude that she would put up with the terrible Man-behaviour that he knew was carved into his soul.

My favourite of these was during my second year of university, when he announced to me that my then-flatmate and sole good male friend (Woman does not have male friends) was in love with me.

“What are you basing that on?”
“Just trust me.”
“No.”
“Alright.” He sighed the sigh of a reluctant martyr. “There’s an unwritten code among men. When you’re introduced to another man and he’s with his girlfriend, you have to nod to him and take a step back. That shows you respect his territory, you’re not going to try and make a move on his girl.”
“Um.”
“When we met your friend from school that time, that’s what I did to her boyfriend, nodded and stepped back. It’s a sign of respect.”
“It’s – huh.”
“And when you introduced me to your flatmate, he didn’t do that. He folded his arms. He looked at me with folded arms. And that’s a challenge. That’s how I know he’s in love with you.”
“Because he folded his arms?”
“All men know this code. It’s just how it works. He didn’t show me that respect.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said.”
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you. Women just don’t understand men.”

This conversation happened nine years ago, and sometimes I’m still compelled to turn to men I know and say, “Hey, so when you meet another guy, do you take a deliberate step back from his girlfriend to show that you respect his ownership?” I have many male friends these days and I know that men are not Man, that Man was just that one specific weird guy, but I keep asking. Just in case.

As we got closer to the endgame of Happily Ever After, when I’d graduated and we could be openly engaged instead of hiding it from my mother (who had Views on people being engaged before they’d finished educating themselves), when he could see marriage and mortgage and babies within touching distance, when my reticence on the last two points didn’t make a dent in him, he began to see me as Woman rather than me more and more often. He was confused as to why I wasn’t playing it correctly, why I didn’t say or do or want the right things, and that’s where I stop being able to tell the story this way.

We broke up over the phone one day in mid-August, after previous attempts to break up in person had led to him listing the overwhelming amount of work I’d have to do to extricate myself from the relationship. I told him I couldn’t do it anymore, and tried to explain, again, what was wrong with us. He cut me off.

“It doesn’t matter. Nope, nope, no need to discuss it, you’ve made your decision. I’ll go now and you’ll never hear from me again. Goodbye.”

At that point we were almost breaking up every week. We almost broke up every time we spoke to each other. I was ill at the time, so ill that I barely left the house, and sometimes I pretended I was too ill to take any of his five daily phone calls (Every. Single. Day. For nearly six goddamn years) so that I didn’t have to almost break up with him again. Every time he made a speech like this, and every time he was expecting what normally happened, which was for me to phone back five minutes later yelling about how he never listened to me, to which he could whisper, “I know,” and with that out of my system we could get on with the happy business of having completely opposing life goals.

But this time, it was the last thing I ever heard him say. That low, whispered, dramatic “Goodbye” that he didn’t mean and I knew even at the time he didn’t mean. It was an empty threat, a babysitter closing the book with his finger on the right page, telling his misbehaving charge that if she was going to cry and say she didn’t like the story anymore, then he was just going to put the book away for good and then she’d never find out what happens, would she? I never found out what would have happened, though I can probably guess.

I expected this story to look different when I wrote it down. From the inside it looked like light absurdity, funny things that happened in a situation that wasn’t so funny, with the situation mostly excised. I was expecting it to read like the time I wrote about my wine-diluting landlord. But it doesn’t. Written down it’s still absurd, but sad and harsh. I’ve written elsewhere about the more destructive dynamics between my ex and me, and it’s not a fun read, but it at least makes some kind of sense. Anger is a motivator we’re all familiar with, even if we don’t experience it, so while it felt transgressive at the time to write publicly about scary experiences I’d had, that story – where I emerged triumphant from adversity – is a much more comfortable narrative than this one, which reads like two people having a relationship with nothing (and that’s not a reading I could reasonably dispute). But my storybook is long closed, and I don’t need to follow those conventions anymore. This is a story about a story, one that consumed everything while not ever really existing at all. It’s a sad, weird story that I needed to tell, despite its lack of Happily Ever After. There was an ending, and that’s enough.

hair logic

If right side = ringlets, then left side = frizz explosion
If left side = ringlets, then right side = flat to the ear then sticking out perpendicular to head
If left side = wavy, then right side = strange figure of eight shape
If right side = wavy, then left side = totally lank with weird kink halfway down
If left side = straight, then right side = frizz explosion
If right side = straight, then left side = unknown quantity THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED

the best pun ever

I'm trying to write more often so that I stop attaching enormous importance to everything I post. This is not a blog of wider readership or influence or cultural impact, so I'm allowed to post stupid shit if I want to. That said, here is a story about a pun.

Two years ago I responded to a mundane message on OkCupid which led to him flying me out to Tuscany for the weekend two days after meeting me, and then again to Paris for a night a couple of weeks later. This is nowhere near as romantic as it sounds, but I can't say it wasn't fun. However, along the way, this exchange happened.

[Scene: we are out for dinner in Paris. He is eating the frog's legs I goaded him into ordering and complaining about the quality of the food in his hometown, a suburb off Melbourne somewhere]

Him: I went into this pub near my house, and I ordered a pie. I wasn't expecting much, but how badly can you fuck up a pie? Anyway, this thing turned up, and it was so watery inside it was more like soup. It was shocking.
Me: Well, at least they managed to organise a pie soup in a brewery.
Him: [blank stare]
Me: That was a pun.
Him: Was it?
Me: You know the expression, "couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery"?
Him: ...no.
Me: Oh. Do you guys not say that?
Him: Nope.
Me: Oh. Dammit. I am NEVER going to get to say "pie soup in a brewery" ever again.
Him: ...I'm going to get more wine.

This still annoys the shit out of me. I mean, PIE SOUP IN A BREWERY. That is an AMAZING pun. And it actually happened, in conversation, without my having to twist anything to make a joke out of it. This sort of thing just doesn't happen. And then it did, and bastard Australians don't even SAY "piss-up in a brewery". To cap it off, we were in France, surrounded by French people who also don't say "piss-up in a brewery". The universe came together in this beautiful way and I was surrounded by people who didn't even see that anything at all had happened beyond some English girl making Pun Dog face for no apparent reason.

I don't think I've ever needed to speak to my dad so urgently in my life. It was the first thing I did when I got home the next day.

Me: Dad. Dad Dad Dad Dad Dad Dad.
Dad: What's the matter?
Me: Listen. You listen to this.
[pun is explained]
Dad: Hah! That is WONDERFUL.
Me: I know! The Aussie didn't get it.
Dad: What??
Me: I KNOW. PIE SOUP IN A BREWERY.

It is entirely possible that my father has never been quite so proud of me.

adventures in housing, part seven

[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]

30

I had all sorts of ideas about the kind of person I'd be on my 30th birthday. At 30 I'd be a grown-up. I'd be doing what I wanted to do with my life, or at least know what this thing I wanted to do was and how I was going to get there. I'd have a decent selection of skills, both essential and useless, and be good enough at a couple of them to stand out in a group of people who also had that skill. I'd be happy with my body, with my hair, with my style. I'd have a handle on all the things adults need to do to function comfortably, and I'd be pretty OK with where I was.

What actually happened was that I spent the first few days of my new decade in a state of inexplicable and slightly scary depression, where I cried more or less constantly and felt like the world was caving in. Despite having woken up on my 30th birthday in goddamn Florence.

I had a flurry of half-baked, panicky ideas of how to fix everything that seemed perfectly logical from inside the half-baked panic, then freaked out even harder when they didn't work. I watched myself go through self-destructive behaviour after self-destructive behaviour and gave myself spectacularly ineffective pep talks.

"You see this thing you're doing? You should stop that."
"I agree."
"You're still doing it, though."
"Yeah, I am, aren't I."
"You should stop. You'll feel better if you stop."
"That's true."
[three days later]
"So you're still doing it."
"Yes. I thought about what you said and I decided using logic that the best thing to do would be to carry on doing it."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"No, it doesn't, does it. I'll think about that."

I feel better today, for no real reason. Maybe because I managed to make a phone call I needed to make. Maybe because I've decided that phone call is the one that will magically fix everything. But I've been thinking without crying, and I've made a couple of plans, and I've had a couple of realisations.

This year is going to be really, really hard. I can't even coast this year, because I actually hate coasting and it's making me sick. If I coast, the bottom will fall out of either my job or my health and everything will get exponentially worse. I don't want that year. I've already had the year where apathy fucked everything up, and I do not want it again. Which leads me to the conclusion that I need to make things harder for myself.

In my 30th year I need to face things I'd rather ignore, force myself to do things I hate, learn to do things I've been complacently telling myself I'm terrible at. I need to set myself difficult restrictions, forgo things I want to do, and be uncomfortably honest about the person I am. Not because I'm trying to punish myself, but because I deserve better than this. I deserve more than fear and sickness and frustration and aching. I'm better than this.
I am going to have a difficult, scary year, so that when I'm looking 31 in the face I can smile at it.

adventures in housing, part six

[Previously in this series: Southend and an honest-to-God house]

Before I carry on, I feel I ought to state that the past five parts of this saga only covered six months of my life. Six months. No wonder I was cranky.

I moved into the mansion in early December. I put my own sheets on the bed, the couple of books I'd been carrying around on the shelf, my clothes on actual hangers in an actual wardrobe. I did the happiest food shop I've ever done in my life, whizzing down the aisles of the supermarket with a huge grin on my face, picking up anything that even slightly took my fancy, loving the Christmas music more than I had done in years. I had a shelf in the fridge, my own space in the cupboards. It was one of the happiest days I can remember.

The journey into work wasn't the easiest, but beyond that the place was a dream. We cooked things. We did clothes swaps. My friend and I went to dances together thrilled to have someone to come back with on the night bus. I bonded with one of my new flatmates over the Christmas decorations. We all went for drinks and did pub quizzes together. We had a tiny Judeo-pagan Christmas party. When I went home for the holidays, my friend sent me a message telling me she was really glad I'd moved in. The universe was finally being nice to me.

Of course it didn't last. How could it?

I'd been told before moving in that the landlady was trying to sell the house. I'd also been told that it had been on the market for quite some time and it wasn't anything to worry too much about. So I didn't really think about it at all. Maybe it would get sold in six months, a year, but I didn't need to worry about that now.

A month after I moved in, the landlady contacted us to tell us she was going to "pop by for a chat." My flatmate saw her later that same day, sent round a message headed "IMPORTANT" and gathered us all in the kitchen to tell us the place had been sold.

It's probably OK, she said. The landlady is nice and wants to make sure we'll be OK. She's chosen a buyer who's willing to take on the existing tenants, so we probably won't have to go anywhere. She'll send us notice to terminate our current contracts, and the new landlord will draw up fresh ones for us. I nodded and shushed the alarm bell in my head because it was fine, it had to be fine, there's no way I'd have to leave this place already because that would just be ridiculous.

We got an email from the woman who'd bought the flat. She told us that yay, she would take us on as tenants at the same rent we were currently paying. Only now it wouldn't include bills, thus pushing the overall cost well out of everyone's budget. We explained this to her, got a snotty email including the phrase "substantially below market value", and gave up.

Me, to everyone I knew: I have to move.
Everyone: What?!
Me: Flat's been sold.
Everyone: For FUCK'S sake!
Me: Yeah.

We decided to try looking for somewhere together, third flatmate having revised her instant hatred of me, as well as separately. We all independently went to view a place down the road, which had several spare rooms as well as a handy built-in Sexual Assault Tunnel with no lights in it, a kitchen that stank, one room we couldn't get into because there was a broken bed and a stack of wallpaper strippings in the way, and a room which contained nothing except a huge pile of cigarette butts.

"So... people smoke in here, then."
"Oh, no," said the twelve-year-old public schoolboy playing at being a landlord. "There's no smoking in this house."

The twelve-year-old public schoolboy upset my friend somewhat. "Who the fuck rents out a cesspit like that? Complete contempt for his tenants, that's what that is. Oh, you don't live here? With the scum? Live in Richmond, do you? See, this is what was wrong with Margaret Thatcher."

Shortly afterwards my friend found somewhere with one free room and decided to take it, leaving the other three of us to look together. We found a house in an area we weren't sure about with a landlady we weren't sure about, but it was clean and had a big kitchen and cost exactly what we were each paying currently. Also I was paying the most and would have the big pretty room with the sofa in it. We had a week until our notice ran out, and none of us wanted to be living in uncertainty anymore. We told the landlady we'd take it.

[in part seven: new house and more evidence of my truly terrible landlord karma]

adventures in housing, part five

[Previously in this series: exploding guest houses and a large dose of FOR FUCK'S SAKE]


I ended up spending a month in Southend.

On the one hand, it's a long way away. The walk-bus-train-tube-tube-walk to work every morning was an adjustment I hadn't been quite prepared for, and I am singularly bad at mornings. Most of the time I would wake up about seven minutes before I needed to leave the house and would remain not really woken up for the rest of the day. I have songs on my iPod that take me straight back to sitting on a bus stop in Southend in the November drizzle, hoping that I was awake enough to spot the bus arriving and remember to get off it in the right place (I wasn't always). I did not end that month full of the joys of the suburbs and planning my own future as someone who would happily trade living in London for being able to buy an actual house.

On the other hand, I had a bed for an entire month. I had a room. I had somewhere to leave my things. I could eat actual dinner instead of takeaway or sandwiches in my office. I stopped ping-ponging between hair-trigger irritability, slightly manic hyperactive chirpiness and sullen depression and started acting like a human again. The aches in my back and shoulders faded, and I got some peace inside my own head. I didn't noticeably piss off either of my friends and I left their hospitality with relationships intact.

Living with a married couple was strange. It was like walking back into the same situation I'd just left, only now it wasn't mine. Of course, it wasn't exactly the same situation, since my friends are a functional couple who didn't spend entire evenings sitting on opposite sides of the room attempting to ignore each other, but occasionally I would watch them and remember when this was my life, when I couldn't really separate "my life" from "our life", and I knew his habits and preferences so well that they almost belonged to me. It was a confused nostalgia, a reminder that things weren't always the way they were at the end, and a kind of dreadful, frightened triumph at the thought that I could still be in this place, still living this familiarity that looked so comfortable from the outside but itched like crazy when I was wearing it. I envied the security while wanting to scratch it off my skin at the same time.

My friends are possibly exactly unlike me and my ex, which is why I'm now going to take a moment to say hi, Tom, everything is fine. You are the very best of all the friends and didn't accidentally cause me bad feelings by going about your life in your own house.

I continued to message people advertising rooms. I continued to go to viewings of what turned out to be tiny cesspits hidden away in alleys lined with drug dealers, with front doors that didn't lock and seven people crammed into two bedrooms, that the estate agents and landlords felt perfectly comfortable offering for rent at £160 per week.

"Very reasonable, we think."
"...um."
"The window will be replaced at some point with one that doesn't have a hole in it."
"That's nice."
"And don't worry about Susanne, she's just like that."
"...um."
"You won't find a lot in an area this accessible for this cheap a price."
"That does seem to be true, yes."
"So, are you interested?"
"Let me get back to you."

One morning I got a message from a friend. At the time she was a friend in the way that many people I've met through the dance scene are friends: connected on Facebook, would go and say hi and possibly give them a hug if I saw them, but not close enough to go out for dinner or email stupid videos to each other. She said there was a spare room coming up in her house in a few weeks and would I be interested?

I restrained myself from trying to leap directly through my laptop screen at her and said yes, yes I would be.

After rearranging several times to find some mutual free time in our clashing dance schedules, my friend met me at the closest station and took me to see the flat, which turned out to be a mansion flat with the most ridiculous huge fuck-off living room full of enormous sofas and giant mirrors and Sky TV. And it was cheaper than the drug den box room with Susanne who was just like that, don't worry. I thought perhaps I'd fallen into a mirage. I met the other two flatmates, one of whom was sweet and friendly and the other of whom seemed to dislike me on sight, but I was barely paying attention. Yes, I am going to live here. I am going to live here. I am going to live here.

I sent a "please let me live in your house" message the next day, and both the girls and the landlady accepted me. Shortly thereafter I left Southend, bought myself some bedding and took it and my suitcase to my new home.

[in part six: the mansion and FOR FUCK'S SAKE yet again]