“Yeah, it’s great,” my friend tells me on the phone. “My parents are clubbing together to help me buy this little flat in Islington.”
“That’s great,” I say.
“You should see it,” she says. “It’s really nice. I’m so lucky to have such wealthy, generous parents.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“So how’s your place at the moment?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s, er… great.”
Well, what could I say?
So how are things back in the flat? Recently my housemate moved one of his mates in, this relentlessly ‘cool’ girl with grungey clothes who DJs and works for NGOs and, like, regularly ‘checks out’ the UK hip hop ‘scene’. She’s so cool that her cool mate ended up coolly smashing our bathroom window. Coolly not apologising for the smashed bathroom window, she coolly mumbled vaguely about paying for it to be fixed, but so far, coolly, hasn’t. (Now that’s cool).
This has got me pissed off. I’ve only just smashed that window. This is becoming a seasonal rite. You should see it for myself. The hole’s right behind the toilet: crouch down for a session and you get a vomit-shower of freezing hail in the small of the back. Every time you go to the loo you feel like you’re doing it for a reality TV endurance contest. It’s Pay-Per-Piss, or Pissing for Public Entertainment through a 'windowcam': a horrendous, low-tech equivalent to internet porn.
Only yesterday I unzipped my flies to hear a shriek of horror from a family getting into their car. I gazed out. Children stood looking up behind tears of lost innocence, parents faces freezing with mob violence as they beheld me exposing myself. I screamed and hopped out of the toilet, pissing drips on the brown carpet, then stood shivering in the hallway with my trousers down awaiting the flaming bottle of parafin to come sailing through the window. Except that you cant terrorise us by smashing our windows. They’re already broken.
Oh, and guess what? I now have a crack in my room running directly above my head. Every time I look up, it seems like the upstairs family is about to fall on top of me. Exactly how much does a single-mother council estate family weigh? Will it feel like an especially strong Panadol if it lands on me, or might it be a bit more serious than that? These were all questions I put to Bastards Plc, the management agency in charge of the flat, when I phoned them to complain.
“There’s a crack,” I said.
“Right,” the receptionist said.
“It’s right above my head,” I said.
“Oh, right.”
“Right now, I’m sitting at my desk, phoning you, and it’s right above my head.”
“Cant you move?” she said.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean I were you, I’d sit somewhere else.”
“Oh yes… I suppose I could do that.”
“It might be a good idea,” she said.
“But are you going to do something about it?” I asked.
“Yes, sure,” she said. “We’ll look into it.”
And they did. You know what they did? They came and took a photo of the crack. Why I don’t know – perhaps they’re hoping to build up a whole album, and we can get it out when my tenancy’s up and snuggle up together to laugh at old times. But I suspect not.
What happened to me? All my friends are working their way up career ladders, buying property… What do I do every day? I pedal my way through a stream of pizza-delivery boys every day to “teach” in my Crappy Language School for a paypacket that would make a self-employed poet clap his hands with laughter and order out for home-delivered pizza and champagne. All my friends are doing better than me. A friend of mine animates ferociously complicated CGI sequences for Disney for loads of money. Another presents TV reports for an international news agency for loads of money.
I tell the sons and daughters of Asian sweatshop bosses how to say “dog”.
Sartre said that hell was being trapped in a room with other people for the rest of eternity. Well you know what my life feels like? My life feels like slowly wanking for hours into a half-empty styrofoam cup in a run-down Bristol B'n'B.
God, please. Save me.
