One
One
Everything I own fits into a rucksack and one carrier bag, and for about a year now I’ve been telling myself that’s a choice.
It isn’t, obviously. But there’s a version of it that sounds fine when you say it out loud. Minimal. Unencumbered. I met a bloke at the job centre in March who’d got rid of everything he had on purpose and talked about it like a religion, and I remember thinking he was an idiot, and then I remember thinking about him quite a lot afterwards.
I moved into the flat on a Tuesday afternoon. I picked the middle of the day because the street’s quiet then, and because I didn’t fancy hauling my life past anybody’s window at six in the evening while they’re getting the tea on. It took one trip. That’s the thing about owning nothing. You’re very quick.
Here’s what I brought. A rucksack with clothes in it, four T-shirts and two shirts and the jeans I wasn’t wearing. A laptop and charger. A phone and charger. A sleeping bag, the good one, three seasons, bought in a different life for a walking holiday I never went on. A towel, folded. A carrier bag with bread, teabags, a jar of coffee and eleven tins. And the lamp.
I put the tins in a row against the wall by height. I don’t know why I do that. I’ve always done it. At the old place I had a cupboard where the labels all faced out and I once spent most of a Sunday on it, and I’ve never told anybody that, because there’s no way to say it that doesn’t sound like a diagnosis.
It’s a shitty flat. I want to be straight about that from the off, in case any of this starts sounding like I’ve landed on my feet. It’s cold, it smells of dust and something older underneath the dust, nothing in it is ever going to get fixed by anyone ever, and it’s not the sort of place you could have people round to. But it’s dry and it’s out of the weather, and after fourteen months those were the only two things on my list.
I didn’t spend long looking round.
There’s a way of standing in the middle of wherever you’ve ended up and really taking it in, properly, having a good long look at the whole situation, and I’ve done that before and it doesn’t do you any good. I did it in the Corolla in November. Sat in a car park behind a garden centre and took a full inventory of my life, and I got about nine minutes into it before I’d have taken any way out that was going. So, no. Not again. I unrolled the sleeping bag, put the lamp down next to it, and got on with my afternoon.
The lamp’s older than most of my friendships, which isn’t the achievement it sounds like.
My mother bought it for a Scout camp I didn’t want to go on and cried about in the car park. Then it lived in her garage for about twenty years doing nothing. When she died and we were clearing the place out, Beth took the photographs and the good crockery and I took a camping lamp, which she thought was me being difficult, and it wasn’t, or not entirely. It’s not sentimental. If it wasn’t useful I’d have got rid of it years ago. It just happens to be the thing that’s been with me the whole way down, boot of the car included, and it still works, and there’s not a lot else I can say that about.
The batteries are a problem. It takes the big ones and they’re four pound something for a pack of two and it eats them, and I’d been putting off doing the maths on how many I’d get through in a year, because the answer was going to be a number I’d have to think about.
That’s most of my thinking these days. Small numbers, over and over.
So. The money, because money’s been the entire story of the last fourteen months and I’d like to put it down once and then stop.
There’s no lease. Nobody asked me for references, or a deposit, or three months of payslips, which was lucky, because I couldn’t have produced any of it. Nobody ran a credit check. I’d been looking for something like this for months and I’d started to think it didn’t exist, and the best of it, the part that made any of this possible at all, is what it costs me.
I’m not going to put a number on that. What matters is what it did to the arithmetic. Before, I had about three weeks in my account. Three weeks isn’t an amount of money, it’s a countdown, and you can feel it going even in your sleep. After, the same money came out at something like nine months. I did the sum four times on my phone that first afternoon and got the same answer every time, and every time I felt that odd loosening across the chest, like somebody letting a strap out a notch.
Nine months. I sat with that for a while.
The internet came with the place, which was the one thing I’d genuinely been worried about. I have to be on a call at half nine every weekday morning and reachable in between, and you can do that on a phone hotspot for about a fortnight before somebody works out what you are. I ran a speed test twice. Better than I had any right to expect. I sat there looking at the number on the screen feeling about as pleased as I’ve felt in a year, which tells you where the bar is these days.
The job’s a company called Rapport. Nine of us, customer relationship management, which is software for keeping track of the people you’re meant to be nice to. There’s a joke in there about me and I’ve made it to myself more than once. I’m not going to claim I’m good at it. I’ll say I’ve been there seven months and nobody’s stopped me yet, and Monday’s standup is at half nine, and I need to be on that call with a plain wall behind me and a face on.
It got cold around two. Colder than I’d planned for. I had the lamp on for a bit and then I put it out to save the batteries and got into the sleeping bag with my coat over the top and both pairs of socks on, doing the thing where you tell yourself you’re fine because there’s a version of this that’s much worse and you’ve already had it.
Because there is, and I have. There’s a particular cold you get in a car with the engine off that goes into the bones of your hands and stays there all the next day. This wasn’t that. This was ordinary cold. This was a cold room, and a cold room is still a room.
So I lay there and listened instead.
The floors are thin in these old houses. I’d worked that out within ten minutes of getting in. I could hear the boiler going on and settling, and the pipes doing that ticking they do, and at one point a tap ran for a few seconds and stopped. There’s a board or a step down there that creaks, and you can tell where somebody is in the house by whether they’ve hit it yet.
There’s a family. I had that much already.
Two adults and a child. The child goes to bed about half seven and then talks to herself for another twenty minutes afterwards, which I found more charming than I expected to. She was telling somebody a long story with a great deal of “and then” in it. I couldn’t get the words, just the shape of it, and the pauses where she was waiting for an answer that wasn’t coming.
A man’s voice now and again. Low. Not much of it.
And at about eleven, a woman laughed.
I don’t know what at. Something on the telly, probably, or something he said. It came up through the floor properly, not muffled, one of those laughs that gets away from a person and runs on longer than they meant it to and then breaks off into a sort of wheeze at the end. The kind you’d be a bit embarrassed about if you ever heard yourself do it.
I lay there in the dark in a sleeping bag with my coat on top and found I was smiling at nothing.
It had been a while. I want to be accurate about this, because it’s the sort of thing you can talk yourself into afterwards, so I’ll put it plainly. I hadn’t had a conversation that wasn’t work or a shop in nineteen days. That I’d counted is probably the more telling detail. And here was a stranger laughing, at nothing to do with me, not knowing I was there, and it went through me like a hot drink.
She did it once more, quieter, the tail end of it. Then the telly went off and there were footsteps, and the creak twice, one heavier than the other, and a light went off somewhere and the last of it came up and then didn’t.
The house settled. Old houses do that. They tick and shift for half an hour after everyone’s stopped moving, like they’re getting comfortable too.
I thought: I can live here.
And I slept better than I had in months. I know that’s the sort of thing people say. In my case it was true and I remember it, because when I woke up it was light and I hadn’t moved all night, and for a few seconds before I opened my eyes I didn’t know where I was, and it didn’t frighten me.
Downstairs, somebody put the kettle on.
