Eight months of living with the Housemate from Hell and I’ve had enough. Perhaps you remember: he burnt the house, threatened me, stunk the place out… I’ve had enough. I sling an ad for my room on gumtree and it goes within the hour. I’ve already got the next place lined up and – ho, ho – what a place. While all my friends are shacking up in bijou apartments, this is the flat that represents my station in society: my joke part-time job in the crappy language school gets me one room in a two-bedroom flat above a busy bus route. What’s amazing is that, on paper, I’ve actually taken a step upwards – from zone three to two, from Harringay to Highbury. It’s actually just a mile down the road but in London that makes all the difference. This is, um, social climbing.
When I say ‘climbing’ that’s a pretty relative term, given that I moved from Turnpike Lane, a place where the only community interaction was up the narrow slit of Dogshit Alley and the only reason anyone ever knocked on your door was to rob you, hassle you, or convert you to Christianity, or perhaps all three at the same time… When I say ‘climbing’ I’m talking about the kind of climbing that a bloke in a balaclava does up a drainpipe on the side of a family house. This isnt social climbing, it’s social crawling. It’s social breaking-and-entering.
So here I am – collecting the keys, two weeks ago, from the landlord – and setting foot in our private paradise: four stories up a piss-stained concrete staircase past the barred windows of lower apartments. Every flat has a maze of steel covering the door, a little personalised prison to lock yourself into. I get a friend to help me move and sling my stuff on the floor. Moved at last: me, twenty cardboard boxes and a force-six gale banging on the walls, suspended four stories above the crappy city. Large bay windows smiling down on the angry trunk-road below. Social climbing indeed.
So, how’s the flat? First distinctive feature: I have no bed. Did it say unfurnished in the letting? Did it say furnished? I don’t remember. Anyway, I have no bed, just a mattress the thickness of paper mache. I’m currently a big slug on the carpet shivering beneath three duvets. Having no bed is harder than you might think… I feel like somebody’s worked me over with a nailgun when I rise in the morning. Shrugging my shoulders now produces a symphony of bone-clicks. But the worse thing is the cold. The radiators burn twenty-four seven but the wind still seeps through the windows. Wind gets through whatever at this height. Glance out of the windows and all you see is gloom. The flat is a submarine that doesn’t want to be sealed: you jam those windows shut but the cold gets in all the same. Open them up and you get the anger of the road below. And Jesus, is the place cold at night. I get refrigerated during my sleep every night by the draft from the window. When I wake up I can count the icicles on my arse with two fingers. A hundred and ten fucking quid per week…
What a flat, eh! No bed, broken shower, a carpet the colour of a fungal infection… Tiny stains, burn marks, pockmarks everywhere from half a century’s worth of previous tenants. This flat’s certainly got character alright, it’s got character oozing out of the woodwork. On his arrival my flatmate stamped his distinctive footprint on the flat by burning a big streak on his bedroom carpet with the dodgy heater that came with the flat. He complains of the cold too. The cold makes sleeping pretty hard: I slump fully clothed onto my pile of sheets in the corner every night. I feel like I’m homeless in my own home. I’m developing that heroin-addict posture. What kind of idiot pays a hundred and ten quid a week to live in this?
So I call the ‘management’ agency in charge of the flat – Bastards Plc, a corporation in Bow – to let them know about some of the problems we’re experiencing. ‘Yeah,’ the secretary says, filing her nails as she cups the phone in one shoulder. ‘Send an email to Repairs.’
I send an email to Repairs. I wait a couple of days. There’s no reply from Repairs. I send it again. More time passes. Repairs don’t care. My emails now lie buried, no doubt, beneath the million-strong inbox of some twenty-two year old in a suit hoovering coke off his desk in a bendy-straw while he wriggles inside the secretary. Fuck social climbing. Just give me a bed to sleep on.
