0.
When I was a kid my mum considered the entire house her project. My mother had, and RIP, but the worst taste in interior design ever in the world. The front room was painted a deep, ominous red. The dining room was a sort of dirty terracotta with a head-height gold line – less than an inch thick, like a twinkling string – running the entire circumference of the room. The kitchen was white, then wood panelling painted blue, then a lurid pink. The staircase, her final masterpiece, stripped of wallpaper and left bare for years while I was a child, before one day I came home as an adult and, oh, it was vomit yellow. My bedroom was cobalt blue until I was allowed to paint it neon green. When I abandoned the nest it was wallpapered in a turdish brown. We painted over all of it when she died, to better sell the place to normal people. Layers and layers of white.
In a way I crave that now, living as I am in my ninth consecutive plain white room. Paint colours are a mark of ownership. You do not get to paint walls as a renter, not without express written permission and a promise to paint it back over, white again, when you leave. White walls, they tell you, are a blank canvas on which you can project yourself: put up prints, they say, hang pictures with special adhesive hooks that don’t leave marks on the plasterwork. Be here, they say, make it your home, but leave no trace of yourself behind when you go or we will take it out of the deposit. I now understand that unusual craving to paint a bedroom cream w/ ornate streaks of orange. For ten years now, I have lived under a singular monster, a hive brain with many bitter limbs. For ten years I have lived under landlords.
1.
The first landlord I ever had was called Nigel and used to come over on the first of the month every month – knuckles on the door but then immediately keys in the keyhole anyway – to demand his monthly rent was written, in front of him, and handed to him as a cheque. Like: direct debits were invented, then, my dude. They already existed. We might have been students but even we knew this. We could have wired the money to him every month automatically. There was no need for him to be here, at the door, at 8 a.m. There was no need for anyone to knock on a door at 8 a.m. He would knock on my door, first, because I had the downstairs room (in student house-shares, in small grey northern Welsh towns, on terraced streets pebble-dashed with student house-share after student house-share, where all the back gardens were grey-tiled over with weeds leafing up in between, and on top of that, bin bags full of old chicken bones and beer cans, in those homes there is no concept of a shared living space, a leisure room: only an additional room that could be rented out as accommodation, and that was my room). Four of us lived there and he went around collecting the cheques from each, then wordlessly sauntered off. At one point over Christmas of that year he hired builders to erect a plasterboard wall that dissected our open living room/kitchen space and instead turned it into a smaller living room, a smaller kitchen space, a small narrow corridor between the two, slightly less space than we had before because it was now taken up with drywall, and also one of the main windows and therefore main sources of light was now blocked. He told us this was to comply with fire regulations. I do not believe him. I believe he made our home uglier and less functional for perverse reasons beyond fire regulation. I believe he did it out of spite. He kept 100% of my deposit, £280 pcm.
2.
My second ever landlords were an eerily smiling couple renting a dissected student house around the corner from the first. Student housing in small university towns is high demand/low supply, so to get the best places you have to band together with your friends as a sort of impenetrable gang, but our group had disbanded: one guy dropped out, one guy moved in with some girls in the vague hope he could sleep with one of them, and one guy punched me full in the face, the pub has the CCTV footage, after I made a tame joke about his goatee beard, which to his credit he maintains, the beard, I just checked on Facebook, he maintains it even now, a decade or so later (a goatee beard). This meant I was left with no choice but to move into a sort of waifs-and-strays house-share, where I had to live with no-mate third-year students who cooked plain boiled rice at insane hours of the night then ate it, alone and insanely, in their own bedroom, while somehow using all of the broadband supply at once, occasionally leaving their bunkers to leave passive–aggressive fridge notes that detailed every noise made after 9 p.m. in the last fortnight. It wasn’t the best.
The landlords were very keen to stress when I was viewing the house that they were Reasonable People, which I have learned to now take from landlords as an immediate red flag that actually means ‘I am insanely deranged’, but I didn’t know this then; I was but a young bear cub, tiny and clear-eyed and full of trust, and plus desperate. There was a back room in the house that was ostensibly a garage but had been cleared and roughly plastered and, we were told, when we returned after summer’s end (you will see a recurring theme where university landlords would change the very structure of our house for no immediate reason to us but meaning they could charge more rent to the next cohort and that we, the current renters, would have to put up with the building sounds and building smells and the building dust being marched through our house followed by builders, we would have to put up with the inconvenience for someone else’s reward), would be a gleaming new lounge, with sofas and carpet and a large TV, and curtains and no drafts and a coffee table off which to eat our dinner. This was a lie. When we returned the garage was in more or less the same state although maybe with slightly more tools in it, and on odd Tuesdays or Thursdays the landlord, Mark, would turn up and start sawing and swearing and playing a game with himself where – as best I can tell – he would repeatedly drop a jigsaw into a bucket of old nails, from a large height, repeatedly, for hours, while swearing. Very little progress was made on the whole thing despite the regularity of him standing in our garage-lounge and trying. And then so one night around January, when at 8 p.m. he still hadn’t left our house, still sweating and swearing in the lounge-that-wasn’t-a-lounge, we asked him as a household when the work might be finished: and he went absolutely full-throttle mental, jumping at us, me in particular because I was tallest, and screamed directly in my face, ‘IF YOU WANNA FUCK OFF, THEN FUCK OFF!’, only there was as aforementioned no more available housing in the entire city, so we didn’t fuck off, and we had to go through the humiliating ritual of this spurned man, his chiding wife standing behind him, turning up a few days later to shake our hands and manfully apologise, and long story short the lounge ended up getting finished about eight weeks before our tenancy was up, and it was a shithole, so what exactly we were paying that extra £50 a month for all academic year I don’t know. £340 pcm, 100% of the deposit withheld.
3.
If the universe is just it will, just once, let me watch my landlord die. Or a landlord, any landlord. But I would like it to be my own: I would like it to be one that wronged me. And as they die, their heart rage-exploding in their chest, their body under too much fiery pain to make a noise, every muscle contorted and engaged, every nerve alight, as they collapse to the ground silently at my feet, eyes pleading, arms extending in desperate prayer towards the sky, I will watch them, blinking, I will watch them and enter a near zen-like state of calm. I once practised literal meditation with a Japanese monk at 5.30 a.m. at a temple in Kyoto, with the small splashing sound of koi in an ornamental lake behind us, maple leaves dipping into the glassy water beyond, mosses and greens, quiet bonging sounds, the tinkle of the first morning wind in the bamboo. It was a transcendent, beautiful experience. My mind jetted out towards the edge of the universe and back towards my exact centre. I found a note of peace I don’t think I’ve ever found before or since. And I think I could eclipse that if I just watched one landlord – one! That’s all I ask! – collapse and die in agony. I do not ask for much.
4.
Third landlord didn’t ever happen because, after moving to London and spending so many months in my sister’s spare room that she and her husband – hard-working successful human beings living and killing it in the toughest city on earth, empathy and patience close to angels, charitable people, pure souls – even they got kind of tired of living with a 21-year-old manchild who exclusively ate breakfast cereal and did not clean that breakfast cereal up after he had eaten it, and also took 20-minute showers and almost violently needed a haircut. Three months into my first job in the city I went to look for rooms and found one sort of nearby – I would be the second room in a two-bed house-share that was otherwise occupied by two extremely normal PhD students who were almost unbearably in love and clearly had a thing for decorating their flat and rooms with objects they had found travelling, which was also annoying. (There is an entire strata of people in London who are just extremely normal PhD students called Tom, who wear the most unforgivingly cut jogging bottoms around the house and their only hobby is always ‘cooking’, and their dissertation and deadline schedule seems to directly only coincide with the, like, one night out in three months you come home roaring pissed at 3 a.m., and they are always in love with an exceptionally clean-faced girl who is round your flat all the time, and the two of them, for fun, like to do things like playing frisbee, and it is impossible to spend any time living in this city without having your own PhD Tom, and they are among the worst people to live with, and I include the guy I lived with for a year who partied once a week like clockwork and rolled home to do this gigantic, immovable drug shit, this enormous cocaine shit every single Sunday morning, medically unflushable, the shit, and I consider him a better housemate than this city’s thousands of Toms.) Anyway, it never happened because the landlady did such a deep dive into my finances to see if I was capable of mustering the £550 a month that she made like three calls to my boss, not just asking what I earned and how often I was paid but also my job performance, was I likely to be fired anytime soon (I was), and asked for two years’ worth of bank statements, like she wanted to look at my finances harder than I ever have before or since, and by the time my boss pulled me to one side and said, ‘Hey,’ like, ‘can you get this crazy lady to stop calling me?’ I decided to find somewhere else, because if a landlord is so fucking annoying that they jeopardise your very employment before you even move in then imagine how they are gonna react when you tell them there’s mould in the bathroom. No thanks, Susan. £550 pcm n/a.
5.
You are in the hire car and I am in the passenger seat. I have planned this meticulously. We both wear black hoodies and black jogging bottoms. Scarves around our faces. I have been wearing gloves all day so as not to leave a fingerprint on anything. CCTV will never pick us up. We rented the car in cash, no paper trail. The registration number can never come back to us. They will never find us. I brick the window of the estate agents while you slow, then we peel away, laughing. We do this two weeks in a row, three. Every time they have to board the window, then pay for the entire pane to be replaced, then do it all over again. Shatter the glass. Peel away. We are costing them thousands. We are costing them every penny they took from us then more. And then, one final hit, once more with feeling: a Molotov cocktail, a Jim Beam bottle stuffed with petrol and lit with a fabric wick, thrown at pace through their front window. And Michael Naik on Church Road, Stoke Newington, goes up in red red flames. I watch as it turns orange, then vivid yellow, then grey down to ashy black. I watch the flicker then the smoke then the shocked-out corpse of it afterwards. We cannot return your deposit. I’m sorry you’re unhappy with our service.
6.
So third landlord proper was entirely absentee, and as a result I never met him and harbour slim-to-no ill will. For whatever reason, this guy bought a three-bed flat in Muswell Hill, London, and then just immediately moved to LA, where he seemed to both forget the flat existed and the concept of inflation did too, meaning we were paying near pre-millennial rent on this place, which is a double-edged sword: on one edge, you do not have to pay as much rent as anyone else in the city; on the other edge, any time you need something fixed in the flat the dude responsible lives all the way over in LA and any attempts to alert him to the fact the flat exists might remind him that he owns it and, dominos fall, he then raises the rent. So yes, on one hand: I did especially enjoy only paying £280 a month rent. On the other: when our boiler broke down one winter it got so cold that when I got home from work one night I put more clothes on and then had to sleep in those three layers of clothing, beneath a duvet, wearing gloves, and then woke up crying (??? somehow???) and had to go and move back with my sister for a fortnight until it was fixed. Like: the house got so cold it was colder than just being outside. Somehow the boiler broke so bad it reverse engineered the entire place into a refrigerator.
The landlord’s proxy was his father, the most Irish-looking man alive, a sort of sinewy human knuckle of a man (you know when you go to a restaurant and they have an offal dish? Is it a liver, or a brain, or a foot, or something? And you umm and ahh about ordering it because you like the good meat, the glamour meat, but you’re feeling adventurous and go okay? And you order it and it’s the ugliest but most unctuous piece of food you’ve ever eaten? Okay imagine now the pig’s foot dressed w/ gravy is somehow wearing old Sergio Tacchini sportswear and has a hearing aid). It’s this guy called Pat who would occasionally bowl into the flat, looking through failing eyes at an errant radiator or dead boiler or swathe of black flecked mould, then sit on the sofa and tell us in the broadest pissed Irishman accent possible about his day, his life, his dry home life, his errant LA son. And then he would ease himself up after like 20 minutes and creak down the stairs, and we wouldn’t see him again for like four more weeks, and the problem with the mould or radiator or whatever would not be fixed, because he almost certainly forgot about it as soon as he left the building, possibly before. One day the woman downstairs died and we only really knew because it’d been a couple of days since we heard her yelling at her kids. I would say this was easily the best flat-share arrangement/landlord situation I have ever had. £280 pcm rising to £330 after two years.
7.
Hold the landlord’s skull and feel it give way beneath your fingers. I feel like I know the density of the human skull. I can tap on my own and guess the thickness. It is full with liquid-heavy flesh. Grab the cheeks near the jaw. Ignore the screaming, the yelling. The landlord will try and get its arms up between you and its face. Dismiss the arms, twist them behind the landlord, bend and snap them. Grab the cheeks, position the thumbs over the eyes. Pick the landlord’s head up. You know how thick a landlord’s skull is, you know your own skull. Pound it against the pavement – pound, pound, pound – until it opens like heavy fruit. I can imagine what colour the inside of a landlord’s head is and so can you. It is purple-pink that cedes to grey. And there, deep in the dome of it, look closer: black spores, specks like mould, hundreds of them, thousands. Feel the landlord’s eyes and soft face ooze through your hands. Feel the mash of blood and flesh beneath you. Nothing but gurgling and a soft wheeze. How could you do this, you think to yourself. I have become a monster. And then you hear it, soft as a heartbeat, beneath you: the landlord has survived the attack. It is leaking but it is sentient. And it hisses, there, with its last dying breaths: this is going to cost £400 for professional cleaners to tidy up, it says. This will be coming out of your deposit.
8.
‘I’ve moved you before, right?’ Dimitri says. ‘Last year. Muswell Hill?’ I have a guy, now. My guy is Dimitri. Dimitri is the best man-and-van guy in London. He just absolutely does not fuck about. The dude can pick up, like, five different bags at once. He can somehow hold a fruit and veg box full of books under one arm and, like, a sack full of clothes wrapped around my PlayStation in another. Dude is lifting my TV all of his own accord. He clambers up and down stairs at twice the speed I can. I try and help him but I suspect I just get in his way. Dimitri texts like this when he can’t make it and he has to send one of His Guys (Dimitri has guys): ‘£150 for two hours will get u one helpful driver.’ The driver is helpful because he can lift the approximate weight of a full-grown horse while also avoiding parking fines. Dimitri has helped me move so many times now that he recognises my face, despite the fact that he only sees me once every 15 months or so, and despite the fact he probably helps move two to three people in this city per day. ‘Hey, look at this,’ Dimitri says. He helped do some van shit on a Katy B video last week. He is careening through traffic while trying to load the video up on his BlackBerry (Dimitri still uses a BlackBerry). Grainy footage of supercars pirouetting in a car park. ‘You see that?’ Dimitri says. Cars veer past us. He lifts all my stuff into my new room in 20 minutes flat. I legitimately have a closer bond with Dimitri than I have with some of the people I consider friends in my life. He does not know this at all. I pay him in cash and tip him a tenner for beer.
9.
Listen it’s my own fault but I moved from a three-person flat-share to a five-person flat-share, so that is five people needing to use the shower in the morning and five people needing to cook individual dinners between 6 and 9 p.m., and five people who cannot fucking seem to remember to buy toilet paper and five people all using the butter and pretending they didn’t use the butter and five people who variously consider getting in at 1 a.m. on a weekday night is acceptable and five people you need to know are dead asleep or not likely to rattle your door handle when you masturbate and five people who decide Hey Guys, Sorry To Drop This On You, I’m Moving Out and five people you have to once every six months like clockwork hold open auditions for to replace, meeting as you do the best and worst of London’s flat-share-seeking singles. I have seen it all: the girl who close to sobbed on the sofa because she’d just broken up with her fiancé and asked in a quiet voice if we’d all like to bake together one night a week (we did not); the close-to-silent secondary school teacher who flinched at the word ‘homework’ like you were shouting ‘CHARLIE!’ at a Vietnam vet; the extremely unblinking Dutch guy who wanted to build a pizza oven in the garden, presumably to char our bones in once he had methodically killed us all; the guy who only has one question, yeah: do you guys mind if my band practises here one or two nights a week?; the guy in advertising who can only afford to slum it in this house rental because he so visibly spends all his money on cocaine; the guy whose only hobby is cycling who cycled here and is wearing cycling gear, sweat-slicked cycling gear, here on our sofa, we all gave our Sunday up to talk to this.
Of the five of us, crucially, nobody could quite decide who of us was the ‘House Dad’ in charge of all the grown-up shit, so we all intermittently e-mailed the property agent separately about the faulty boiler, shitty bathroom, the pilled carpeting on the stairs, the draughty windows, to the point that they would ask us to stop. When they did respond, the answer would always be the same: yes, they’d say, yes they can send Someone out (their Someone is an extremely shoddy building team who are always the same three guys who leave our front door banging open whenever they work and are borderline useless but clearly a friend of the guy who runs the property agent, e.g. they repainted all our doors but did not strip the paint from the previous door-painting and so just painted over it instead, leaving in some cases the doors now too thick with paint to close, and also they painted one of our main windows like, entirely shut, like even if I painted a window I would not do that and I am, building-wise, close to remedial, so what does that make them) but we will have to raise the rent again because this work on the house (i.e. fixing it to a barely liveable standard) now ‘upgrades’ the house in line with market rate (‘market rate’ of course being a fake idea because the market is dictated by invented numbers by the same property agent issuing the work), and anyway you all need to change your direct debits to reflect an extra £60 a month, starting this month which we are already three days into. I did not get my deposit back from this one because the guy the remaining housemates sat on a sofa and interviewed and accepted they could live with couldn’t move in for three more weeks so he emailed me to say sorry mate, he couldn’t pay for this month’s rent because that just wouldn’t be fair mate would it mate? Even though he accepted on the room, mate, so the property agent deducted my deposit entirely to cover his lost rent and thinking about it I get so mad I think my veins might explode—
(£445 rising to £595 [!!!], bills not included, deposit one-and-a-half month’s rent, oh my god)
11.
Here’s my fantasy: I am a sniper and landlords are the prey. I assume I am good at things I have never tried, and sniping is no different: laying passive for extremely long periods of time, making small and precise movements rather than large and athletic ones, breathing slowly, pulling the trigger at once calmly and with great eerie force, watching a head explode a thousand yards away like a balloon full of shaving foam: yes, I can do all this, this is something I can do. So in this fantasy I am the sniper, and for whatever reason, four fields away, a series of captive landlords (they have been starved, for days, the landlords, so they are somewhere between desperate and insane), the landlords are given an opportunity: run the length of the field without me exploding their head with a bullet and they will be given their freedom. And so they sprint, the landlords, cutting each other up, trailing wildly, zig-zagging, and each one of them, with clinical precision, I shoot and then kill: sometimes I let them run, really run, get as close to the finishing line as they can, and then, p-oom: a mile away I make their head explode, and their last vital moment before they die is one of desperation and hope. And the weirdest thing, the most curious thing: every time I strike a landlord directly in the skull with a 13 mm bullet, instead of shards of white bones and grey-pink mash and instead of veins and blood, a steaming plume of red, weirdest thing: their heads instead explode in a shower of money, and not just any money, it’s every deposit I ever lost: it’s the month deposit in Bangor, the second; the first deposit I ever gave to an outgoing letter instead of to the property company; it’s the money I lost because the guy who moved in after me couldn’t move for two more weeks, and because of his mistake I lost close to a thousand pounds: it’s all of those cheques, exploding and burning in the air. And bodies slump headless to the floor—
12.
I was in kind of a rush to move and a friend of a friend was looking for a person to move into his flat, and during the size-each-other-up meeting we bonded over our shared love of Arsenal and the fact that both of our mothers were dead, plus there was a very sweet female kitten living in the house too, so I agreed to move in the next week. Two complications were: this guy owned the flat, making him both the landlord and the housemate, which cut down on admin fees but also added tension; plus as it turns out after five months of living together we were entirely incompatible, as humans, and a loud row about the recycling bin turned into him emotionally pleading with me to move out a few days later and leaving a faux legal letter he had written himself on the kitchen table asking as such, and this time the reason I lost a chunk of deposit was because I’d put some pictures up on temporary hooks in my room and the sun had bleached a weird dust line along the top of them, and when I had tried to wash the stain off with sugar soap it’d just spread the stain, so all the walls were white smudged with grey, which fair play that one was entirely my fault but my main goal in life right now is to hang a picture on a wall and not end up having to pay anywhere between £250 and £400 for the privilege, I mean truly, is that so much to ask—
13.
Imagine if a landlord just got to their car and it exploded, though. One second it is a car and a landlord and their arm is reaching to the door, casual, they do this every day, and then next: the next moment the sky is lit in a plume of orange and hot-white and yellow, and before the sound has even hit you – the sound is of crunching metal and that sound of pressure coming off machinery (like this: snrr), and then the sound of dust going up and then settling, and the scrape of iron on concrete, the fizzing sound of fire hitting the air – before the sound has even hit you (you, watching from a safe distance through binoculars), before it even hits you the landlord is dead. Imagine. Imagine that.
14.
‘What, again?’ I cannot tell if Dimitri is mad or disappointed. Once a year or so I give him £150 to haul the same boxes and bags up and down the same flights of stairs. This time the move is short, to a two-bed in Clapton. The landlords, again, vouched that they were Good People, and they lived in the flat upstairs, though when we went to see the property they did a viewing with a few other people at the same time, two couples who excitedly started saying how much they wanted the flat and how they would overbid on the quoted rent price to make sure they could have it, and the landlord took us to one side and whispered that, if he had to pick, he would pick us lads – you’re good lads, he said, I like you – but the others had bid £25 more a month, could we match it? To which my housemate said ‘how about £50?’ and the landlord said ‘how about a hundred?’ and my housemate said ‘how about £50’ and the landlord said yes – which made me all really think it was a scheme, a complicated scheme, to get us to pay an extra £25 a month each. Our flat was essentially a long hardwood corridor with London’s smallest bathroom and two double rooms attached, and I lost the coin toss for the good room with the nice view, so I spent the entire year begrudging every single penny of the £825 a month I was paying to stay there while staring out of a window at nothing outside.
More or less the landlords were fine, I suppose, apart from one time when – the night after we had a party, which we had spent the morning hungover and clearing up from before settling down for the Euro 2016 final – the landlord stormed downstairs, picking up and dumping the recycling bags we’d set outside, yelling to himself ‘NO!’ and ‘WRONG!’ and ‘IT’S ALL FUCKED UP!’ before yelling through our window – the window keeping him mildly inaudible, so he looked like a silently screaming cat – and made us come outside and sort the recycling so it was two to three feet further over to the right. Still not entirely sure what that was about but I suppose we all have our middle-of-our-life mental collapses in different shapes and ways. When I moved out they returned 100% of our deposit, a human history first. Would I still like to watch them, grey and motionless, die in a hospital? The eerie digital shrill as a heart stops beating in its chest? Would I? Would I? Eeeeeeeeee—
15.
Maybe it is just something that happens at you, when you approach 30, that you notice interior design trends where before you hadn’t, I don’t know: I just know that one day I woke up and I thought it was okay to sleep on a mattress that didn’t even have a sheet on it, and then next day I woke up and I had this strong primal desire to buy some cushions, and a candle, and some sort of decorative tray, if maybe I could put my things on a decorative tray? And there are two trends, in interior design, right now, Year of Our Lord 2k17: Hygge, a sort of Scandinavian-derived idea of capsule cosiness, which basically as best I can tell involves buying a large mug, making herbal tea in it, and then curling up among soft lighting in a heather-coloured blanket; and then there is a sort of intense minimalism favoured by Instagram lads who wear torn black jeans and have sparse monochrome rooms, and wear snapbacks and do a strange curled eyebrow-pout at the camera, and everything they own is black or white or charcoal, which of course is a form of black, and I thought for a while that, hey, maybe I could do that: maybe I could cosy up a single corner of my room, maybe I could only buy things among a limited colour palette, maybe I could live an organised life. And then I realised, suddenly, one day, that these interior trends weren’t a choice, or an option: they were a reaction, that having fewer things (minimalism) makes it easier to move house with them, once a year, every year; that having a pack of four or five go-to items that act as a cosiness shorthand then bypasses the need for you to have a truly cosy house. It is easier for Dimitri to haul your idea of cosy up the stairs if it can all be packed neatly into the same box. And this: if you were born in the late eighties to early nineties then the closest you can get to ownership of your home – the only way you can, truly, tap a vibe and imprint an identity on it that is unique only to you – is to have, like, six black things on a shelf, or a £60 eiderdown from John Lewis. All the bricks are taken. All the bricks are owned. Pay what’s left of what you have to the landlord above you.
16.
I get in, with my landlord. That’s the plan. I get friendly with them. ‘Hello,’ I say, at their doorway. ‘I made you brownies.’ It is, I explain, a gesture of friendship. To a cosy relationship going forward over the 12 months of our contract. I am cooking, my food says but not my mouth, I am cooking for you to win your favour. I want to keep you sweet, my cooking says, so you do not raise my rent again. We tiptoe around the landlords. We not only have to pay them all our money but we have to be nice to them while we do it. In case they sting like a snake and incite retribution. Smile sweetly and be polite, or that’s £100 extra a month, again, in line with the mythical market rate.
The joke of course is my brownies are poisoned. And the cookies after that. The rice krispie treats, the pound cake. Not obvious poison – I’m not an idiot – but a slow poison, a dreadful one. The landlord wakes up one day and loses a tooth. Hair comes out in clumps. ‘Where has,’ the landlord pants, ‘my energy gone? My vigour?’ The only thing that used to bring the landlord any joy was draining me of £900 a month, but that immediately goes to medical bills, for complex tests. Doctors are baffled. ‘We don’t know what’s wrong with you,’ the doctors say. ‘But something within you has soured.’ The landlord pulls the mirror in the palatial bathroom in their own home and sees the weak remains of them staring back. ‘I am dying,’ they say, sobbing weakly now. ‘I am dying, and I know it, but nobody can tell you why.’ I knock on the door with a malt loaf. ‘Come in, come in,’ the landlord says. ‘Your contract is nearly up this year, but if you sign on again early, we’ll only raise your rent up 15%.’ I acquiesce. Sometimes I slip into their house when they are sleeping. Their lungs and heart have deteriorated at an astonishing rate. They make great, rattling, horrid sounds as they sleep. Draw weak long breaths, vile landlord, while you still can. Tiffin, scones, mince pies. I watch as their skin goes green-yellow and sallow. I watch them wrinkle and contort. I watch their organs expand and bloat. When they slip away, weak and wheezing, I am there to watch it. ‘Hello,’ their son says, the next week. ‘I am the landlord’s son. I am your new landlord.’ He tells me that, given the circumstance, he has to raise the rent. I understand, I say. Would he like an almond slice?
17.
I know the best place in the woods for a grave. You have to dig it deep, is the thing. This is so often where people slip up: they dig a shallow, barely there, low little grave. Dog walkers go past this thing like two, three days later, and there, look: a human hand just peeking out of the dirt, reaching up for forgiveness. No: deep, deep, miserably deep, so deep and dark you need a ladder to get out of it. The night I kill the landlord (single bullet, base of the spine, then up again to the head, all pain and all silence) it is raining, thundering: the car slips and slides in the mud. The landlord body is wrapped and taped in a polythene tarpaulin and dragged through the countryside. The rain comes down in white diagonals through the black dark. When the body hits the bottom of the grave it makes this noise: flump. When the body hits the bottom of the grave it makes this noise: [sound of bone distantly cracking through dense flesh]. It’s hard work to pile the soil back in but I do it, I do it, my arms and shoulders on fire. By the time I leave the sun is just rising over the horizon. The rain has passed, now, but the air is cool and brisk. Take a lungful of it: one, two. Watch the morning break white over the orange trees around me. Nobody will find that body until it’s bone.
18.
A property agent is informing me in a tight voice that it costs them £150 for them to cut me a new set of keys.
19.
The sound a landlord makes when you rip their eyes out with your thumbs is, ‘I know a builder who could fix this but he probably won’t be available for another six to eight weeks.’
20.
The sound a landlord makes when you nail their toes down into the wood floor beneath them is, ‘this isn’t the definition of normal wear and tear’.
21.
The sound a landlord makes when you slice round their knees with a box cutter and prise the patella out with your clawed hands is, ‘the tenants before you didn’t have parties, I’m not sure why you have to have so many parties’.
The sound a landlord makes when you snip the webbing between their thumb and forefinger with kitchen shears is, ‘there’s been a break-in but your contents aren’t covered by our insurance so you’re going to have to pay for a new front door’.
23.
Between 1986 and 2012 circa five million homes were built in the UK, and as per 2014 figures just over half of these are now owned by landlords. Or, context: in 1994 the number of private landlords in the UK was estimated in the tens of thousands, and today that figure is two million. In 1988 the Housing Act deregulated the rental market and created a legal structure that sided hard with the landlords. In 1996 the buy to let mortgage boom gave landlords a financial upper hand on buying up property if they weren’t personally going to live in it. They say there was a sort of housing crisis in the eighties, because housing was so affordable, that people rented for some sort of perverse pleasure: to see if they liked an area, to see if they liked the relationship they were in; and now we are sandwiched around another crisis, on one side sub-prime mortgages and on another a dangerously inflated property market. Millions of landlords did this. In the nineties they wanted more people to buy houses and they made it so easy nobody can buy a house anymore. Inch by inch, ill-thought laws have created a new underclass, a subspecies, landlords under whose yoke we now must live. Landlords get to win twice over: they get to pull our salary out of their wallets, and they get to drive up the price of housing stock by making it scarce, so when they finally sell they sell at a huge profit. We lose double and get told to suck it up. When the war comes I’m going to be at the front of it, heart on fire, strafing bullets into the landlords in front of me.
24.
I’m at a party but I can’t open the back door to let some air in. ‘It’s the landlord,’ I am told. ‘He doesn’t want cigarette butts out on the balcony.’ I am at a party and the bathroom is streaked with black mould spores. ‘It’s the landlord,’ they say. ‘He won’t let us open the bathroom windows.’ A cheap fan embedded in the wall screams above me. ‘You have to hit it with the flat part of your palm,’ I say (this is my house). ‘The landlord won’t replace it.’ Tchnk, tchnk, tchnk, until my hand goes sore and the screaming stops. I have to hide my embarrassment at the state in which I live when it’s not my responsibility. I have to pay hundreds of pounds each month for the pleasure and not wretch in the landlord’s faces. ‘Turn the music down,’ I am warned, at another party, at a high building towering over London. ‘Last time the neighbours complained to the landlord.’ The landlord is always here, the bogeyman over everything we do. Always there. The spectre of him, watching.
Ten years ago I walked into a prison but I didn’t know it. I had this fevered, diva-like dream – I wanted to live in a house, rather than beneath an underpass, in a cardboard box – and I followed through on it. I walked through the double-locked gates and past the guards and jeering prisoners, and I walked into a small blue room with woodchip wallpaper, and a single bed and a desk falling apart at the seams, and a clothes rail in lieu of a wardrobe, and some leftover magazines from the previous tenant of the flat. And there I signed in blood a deal with the devil himself: in exchange for up to half of the money I make every month, you will provide very basic shelter for me, and occasionally fix pipes when they inevitably leak. And the devil laughed and said, sure. The devil went, though how are you going to save for a deposit on a flat of your own if you are paying all your money to me? The devil went, once you start paying rent, you can never truly stop. Items I have lost moving house: a navy-blue perfect fit shirt, a Timex Weekender watch w/ limited edition strap, a stack of Viz magazines, my Rocky DVDs (my Rocky DVDs!), a mirror. We leave remnants of ourselves in every building that forgets us. There are people dwelling in the rooms I once owned right now, different steps on the same awful ladder. We’re all chained in. And I think: when I was 21, I wasn’t this bitter. And when I was 23, I was full of hope. And I desperately long to be that person again – paying £450 a month! Can you imagine! The luxury! – then I realise there’s a reason I have shed those people like a shell. If you escape your twenties in London without at least once moving in with a partner you’re not quite sure you love but know the situation will save you rent, then you have dodged a bullet that has shot me and others like me. If you get out of here with anything left in your overdraft then you are, by my accounts, some sort of blessed saint. And the circle starts again: I need a new flat, soon, I need to check Dimitri’s availability, I need to prove to another vile landlord that I can afford their exorbitant fee. Once again my lips form a horrible O around their sour teat. All I long to do, in my entire life, is choose what colour a wall is painted. Not magnolia, or off-white. Not cream. Red, red, brilliant red. Deep red like the blood in the veins of every landlord who has wronged me.