The Lodgers

Moffa the town

from The Lodgers by Holly Pester

As a bored and nervous young girl I often imagined climbing inside a small case or container, like a piano stool or matchbox, a washing-machine drum or bread bin, and living in there. The soft foam bed at the bottom of a box of earring studs was arousing. I liked tool boxes with compartments, half-empty tubs of cotton buds, or miniature drawers, even car boots. For the fantasy to work, they had to be containers with strong interiors. A ledge of any kind got me going. I’d get excited by shapes that resembled steps. I could stare into little spaces for hours, feeling my body wishing itself transported into the tiny dwelling, not to be happy but to be hidden, packed away and secretly private, having a pretend little life. The open-plan kitchen and living room of my subletter’s flat reminded me of those spaces.

Now full of my bags, the room, already architecturally odd for the sake of marketable style, was chaotic. An absurdly awkward corner shape, its most extreme point was above a chugging boiler to the right of the sink. All the sides and optimism of the flat met there to disappear. I stared into the corner’s centre with parched, gritty eyes and felt sucked towards it. I had been travelling all day. Early-September sun flickering through the train windows had given me a strange head. Nothing felt real. What had I arrived at? The flat was arranged around a kitchenette and counter, a staffroomish table and chairs on the other side of that, a two-seater Argos sofa, a black MDF TV stand where there might once have been a TV but not now, not for me. Buy-to-let laminate flooring throughout. The flat was compact and hot and, like a lot of short-term adult accommodation, kitted out by small acts of shopping for low-cost utensils, designed to be nice enough but not to last long, like fat yellow cutlery that falls to pieces. The flat smelt of men’s shower gel and repeated nights of instant noodles. It was hard to do anything except linger with the odours, the actions of travel still churning in me. My mind wouldn’t settle, believing there was more journey to do.

There was too much to think about on the go, too many timetables and gestures to condition my thinking. Hauling myself up steps and over gaps, whipping tickets through slots, excusing my feet, minding clumsy people, whacking my increasing accumulation of bags on barriers, sweating on seats and smiling when it made sense to—all the time, my instincts hooked to directions. I felt nervous then sleepy, nervous then sleepy on and off all day. When I finally arrived at my destination—a ’90s new-build block of flats called Mills Hope Gardens adjacent to the high street of a small market town—I had to get on my knees and find a pretend rock near a bush, then wriggle a set of keys from inside it. I heard myself breathe heavily on the stairwell, all the while keeping hold of my bags, and lurched through a number of doors before reaching the last one, finally dropping my bags upon the sudden need to pee, squeezing it in and finding the bathroom that whirred when I switched the light on, saw myself in the mirror and that I was still a tired woman of train stations, rubbed my dry skin, sat on the toilet and sent a message saying, I’m in! When I came back from the bathroom my bags looked sad. They had been so heavy to carry, but when set down amounted to hardly anything at all—just a holdall, a rucksack and some canvas sacks, now deflated like invalid lambs. It made me feel stupid. If only it was only my armpits that cried. You would cry if you were my armpit, straining under that rubbish all day. Who was I afterwards? I had journeyed; had been myself in transit. I waited on concourses under difficult lights, squinted, put my coffee down on the floor between my feet and stared up at information. I flowed along the arbitrary lines of a route until my toes stung, then walked, semi-gallantly, into this building, then into this flat. Now who was I? Stood in some man-smell but still myself in transit. I wasn’t used to it. It’s hard to get used to the feeling of arriving somewhere I will live in but don’t yet understand, to know it will soon feel natural here but for now feels corpse-like. I aspired to this homely feeling, so paced around in the smell, and, being someone who can’t take their coat off, sat down to speed-read the contract left out for me on a table and cross-check an inventory which included a stain.

On one side of the flat was a pair of long, narrow windows with nice deep sills, on the other side there were three heavy doors in a row, one to the bathroom, the next for my bedroom. I went inside my bedroom, it was as featureless as a till receipt, but it would do. The bed was ‘small double’ or a ‘large single,’ depending on your outlook, there was a cheap white chest of drawers with the bottom drawer a little wonky, and next to that a wardrobe made of calico. I exited my bedroom spiritless. The final door was marked with a Post-it note saying ‘Kav’s Room.’ It had been suggested in my irregular communications with my young subletter that someone else would be in the flat at some point, but I’d imagined that someone being far away from me, down a long corridor. The smallness of the actual flat and location of the bedroom door adjacent to what was now my bedroom door made me less happy, less relaxed about Kav. Kav whose threatened presence now pertained to a person and a door that I would hear. When will Kav come? I pushed open Kav’s door and peeked into the room. It was blacked out by blinds. I shut the door quickly. Why was I so jumpy about the idea of a person? I’ll meet Kav and have business-friendly conversations about the heating or the post, or some other imperative of new roommates. The bedroom next to Kav’s was mine and that would have to be OK. I opened and immediately closed Kav’s door again. Kav could walk in at any minute.

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