What I do when left to my own devices

I’m woken by a yelp. 

Groggy with the taste of gin and the sound of bass fading back into sleepy memory, I listen in bed hoping that it wasn’t my dog downstairs making that high-pitched whine. Yelps again. Yes, it was. My bones creak and I look at the alarm clock which says something like four in the morning. Admittedly it is dawn outside and she can sense these things. I hear the first birdsong through the crack in my window. I pad downstairs, open her crate door, thump back upstairs and go back to bed. 

My second awakening is more at my own pace but still I wish I had had more sleep. I open the fridge to find the coffee from yesterday, now chilled. I pour it into my blender with ice cubes, oat milk and Oreos and make myself a cup of coffee-Oreo milkshake. I scoop the delicious sludge into my mouth with a spoon and drink the dregs. 

I look through catalogues and newsletters which have been posted through our door. One is the local Borough’s newspaper; we’ve got a new mayor and they’re holding a sheep shearing demonstration next Saturday at the park which has a deer enclosure. I hadn’t known they kept sheep too – saying that I did spot a lone goat behind bars there. I flick through wines you can buy per bottle or in crates, browse seedlings and bulbs which could be planted in our unsuccessful flowerbed, and put tick marks next to natural dogs treats I’d like to buy. All the while listening to BBC World Service with their eclectic range of current affairs programs.

I stretch, I yawn, I scratch. Unload the dishwasher. Decide to take ROLO on a big, long walk as the weather has been too hot for those recently, also I went out last night leaving her alone for ages, so I owe her one. I put on an outfit worthy of a Pokémon trainer (cap, backpack, trainers) and head out towards Crossness. It’s about a 3-hour round walk barely crossing any roads, so it’s safe for ROLO to be let off-leash a lot of the time.

The grass is dry and patchy. The path is dusty and at points dotted with dried desiccated turds. Buddleia are growing up and up, and there are these small faint pink flowers on spiky stems which are buzzing with bees. (Later on, I’ll find out online that these bushes are probably Hawthorn trees). There are new residential buildings being built on brownfield sites and a train station is undergoing major maintenance works. Everything on the outskirts of London is having to be resized and reinforced for more people. We are at the point of perpetual growth.

The sun starts to come out and ROLO is panting. We sit on a bench. I give her a long drink of water and some dog treats while looking out across the Thames River where there’s a huge recycling centre on the other side with cranes and diggers shovelling mounds of rubbish. When we get home I give ROLO dog food and myself some homecooked Japanese curry with pickles. I sit outside in the sun and drink a tall glass of water with ice cubes in, enjoying the garden, which is pleasantly tranquil with all the bamboo swishing around.

I’m getting the fold-up chair at the bottom of the garden ready to have a doze in, when I notice there’s a dead pigeon behind it on the ground covered in flies. The pigeon is lying face down with its clawed feet sticking up in the air, looking like something had attempted to bury it and then gave up. The bird’s greyish blue feathers are open at the chest where I can see into its bloody cavity and discern a dark red heart within a gaping hole. 

I look at ROLO who is nonchalantly lying on the sunny patch of grass. I look back at the pigeon. Something killed it. It’s too bloody and torn up for it to have “passed away”. A fox may have dropped it. My dog still looks nonplussed as I go inside to fetch a plastic bag and some disposable gloves. I can’t be sure what happened but I’m about 60% certain that my pet killed this pigeon. I’m almost sick when I put the surprisingly dense carcass into the bag and drop it into our black bin outside. I immediately regret not double bagging it.

I go back inside and wash my hands thoroughly and go put on a quiet podcast through my Bluetooth headphones. I sit back in the chair at the bottom of the garden and peep out from under my cap. I can see a satisfying slice of blue sky and the yellow-green of the bamboo shoots. The sunshine isn’t strong, and I’ve got sunscreen on and a bottle of water on my lap. Listening to some people speaking about poetry I un-reluctantly drift off into a light sleep. Even though I’m not quite awake, I can still sense the pink sunlight behind my eyelids and I’m content.

 

Friday 13th November (moving house)

NON-WORKING DAY in the Outlook calendar

I get Fridays off since my company had to cut staff pay because of Covid-19. Although it’s a good thing for me today because I am moving house!

During the week I boxed up all of my belongings, carefully un-hung pictures from the wall and wrapped them in clothes, so they were less likely to break. I loudly peeled brown tape off the roll and fastened cardboard packages in between headset meetings and Excel formulae frustrations. The sense of relief I felt when I put my ancient work desktop in a box and taped it shut was telling. 

It’s a really odd experience waiting to move into a house (that my boyfriend purchased, so by proxy is our house) when you’ve never owned a place before. The Offer was accepted in the Spring, the Exchange was promised for the end of September, then pushed-back to October and finally in November it happens. All of a sudden, which is why it feels a bit out-of-place, like when you steel yourself for a big non-event. Friday 13th at 2pm is the Completion.

‘What does that mean?’ 

‘It’s when we get the keys! And all the money for the house that I sent to Tim [the lawyer] has been completely transferred to the sellers.’

‘All that money. Gone.’

‘In exchange for a house.’

‘A whole house!’ 

Friday comes and I am ready. Too ready. I have nothing to do until I meet A in Woolwich for the 2pm deadline. I also have no stuff to distract myself with because they are all in boxes. 

I take my yellow rucksack holding my essentials (wallet, phone, keys* – though not the correct ones. *Do you ever leave the house with the wrong keys for your house? There must be a riddle in there somewhere…) plus toiletries and a change of clothes; under one arm my yoga mat, under the other a sleeping bag. Tonight, we stake out the new house expecting all manner of disasters to befall us upon collecting the keys e.g. the previous tenants are still there, or it’s unliveable due to flooding/swarm of locusts/etc. 

It’s one of those mild November afternoons with a mixture of rain and sunshine. I catch the DLR to Greenwich then a train to Woolwich, heading on foot to Europe’s largest Tesco in the town centre, where I’ll rendezvous with my lover to walk into our new house. What a sentence. But first, before we do probably the most exciting thing of our lives, we push a trolley around Tesco buying cleaning products and the most humdrum stuff. A family size pack of pasta, eggs, dustpan and brush, olive oil, cooking oil, table salt. I realise while pushing the trolley down the tea aisle asking A, ‘What coffee do you drink?’ that this may be the last time I ask such questions. I ask him, ‘What milk do you normally get?’ ‘Green top organic.’ ‘Cool, me too.’ I believe we live pretty similar lives, so there’s no need for trepidation, it is mainly amusement at this point that soon we will just be drinking the same coffee apropos of living together. It’s also not like he isn’t allowed to change his habits and start drinking oat milk, I don’t think I would care – but as a live-in partner you might care, or at least be aware that a change in milk drinking habits may portent a bigger shift in temperament or political views. 

Two o’clock. We are walking down a busy road to the estate agents. We walk past the house which is soon to be ours along the way. It looks like a brick-and-mortar house, that’s good, glad we got that right in the first and only ever inspection we made of it, which lasted around twenty minutes. House-viewing is like the most high-stakes speed dating! 

The estate agents are closed (because of covid) but we ring the bell, and someone comes to answer the door. A tells them what we’re here for and she asks him to show his ID through the half-open doorway. Once that’s done, she asks us to wait a minute and then Spencer, who looks and smiles just like an estate agent greets us. He hands us a wad of keys and says have a good time. Simple as that. We walk back over a little park and a flock of pigeons flash mob us and then we’re home.

Getting a key to turn in a lock that’s not familiar to us takes several attempts. I’m a bit worried the keys don’t work. What a stupid view to take when you’ve been handed a set of completely foreign keys to blame the keys for not being able to open a door they’ve been opening for years. Of course, the keys work after our tenth try, then I hop over the threshold. We’re in!

The house is clean to they eye. The sellers left us their lawn mower in pride of place in the middle of the living room, as they’d stated they would in the List of Contents. The rest of the house is pretty amazing. Without the furniture and decorations of the previous owners the features speak for themselves. I never noticed that above the front doorway there was Victorian plasterwork. Or how the two fireplaces have very distinctive colours, almost like characters who are introducing themselves to you as a couple, but with very individual tastes. One is a deep blue and the other a burnished green, like ocean and earth or something complimentary, like wine and beer. I had wanted to paint the living room dark green, and A had wanted to paint the dining room blue after the Offer was accepted, and I only realised now that the fireplaces had persuaded us to do so, tactfully. 

The bathroom is not as tacky as I remembered. The walls are not covered in 00s mosaics, but tiny translucent blue glass tiles – it sounds like the same thing, but I promise you it’s not. We opened the veranda doors and could not get them to close properly again. We flicked on and off the wrong light switches waiting for things to turn on that didn’t, but other things did. It was like meeting someone you find fascinating for the first time.

***

That same day, we unloaded all of A’s family’s hand-me-down furniture. Four dark wooden block chairs with rattan seats, one Ercol chair with much varnish worn off, and nested tables with glass tops. There was one beautiful dark wooden coffee table with a story to go with it. When A’s mum Jeanette was a little girl her most favourite thing was her pen knife, and her mother’s most prized possession was this dark wooden coffee table. The two of them were talking one day around the coffee table, when Jeanette who was playing with her pen knife dropped it and it went slicing through the air and hit her mother’s table. Both of them looked on in shock. Jeanette felt sick with guilt. Her mother stayed silent for too long. The mother broke the silence by stating solemnly, ‘I saw what happened and it was an accident. And I bet you feel very guilty about it, so I won’t be angry with you.’ And for sure, when I stroke the surface of the coffee table, I can make out a clean nick. 

In the fading light of the afternoon, we manage to lock all the doors and drive over Blackheath to where I used to live. Luckily, we find a parking spot right in front of the house. As we load up my boxes into the large car, Alex comes out to help us do the heavy lifting. He is the most helpful man on earth and when we leave, he gives me an un-used paint roller, two paint brushes and a paint tray. It’s appreciated because we’re going to be painting the front room this week. I say goodbye to my old room, but I leave my bicycle behind, so I can come back and ride it home when it’s not raining. Of course, I feel a twinge of sadness to be leaving the House of Abundance, but my old room is in good hands, an OG is moving into it and when I return, it will look like a soulful club with dim lighting and swathes of vinyl records patterning the floorspace, and this will fill me with content. 

Hero

A note slipped in her diary whilst she was away in the toilet. 

That was a bold move, Andy thought. That was a bold stupid move. Andy was sat a few tables away from her and he had promised to watch her bags and laptop whilst she ‘nipped to the loo’ as she put it. With no idea of what her name was Andy had formed a relationship of trust with a stranger, something he doesn’t very often have with anybody. His last girlfriend Clarissa was either a control freak or a nervous wreck, flitting between the two so that Andy always felt slightly responsible for their continued state of tension. She’s dating that bikram yoga instructor now so, each to their own he consoled himself.

Whilst peering over the edge of his book at her belongings intently (like a hero) it occurred to Andy that, well, she had been quite attractive really. Kind eyes, bright hair, soft features; he continued to muse contentedly that he was now her watchman, her uncredited protector. 

But then the waiter came and dread filled his feeble fleeting heart.

Alexander the waiter believed in himself and called everyone “darling” in a lovingly sexist way. If a pretty lady entered his establishment and didn’t have the exact change for a mocha he’d do what any self-appreciating male with sexual prowess would do, he’d give her a smile and a wink and let her have the mocha for less. Sure less, not free - he has principles come’ on ladies. Twenty minutes ago, Alexander, was serving the lady with the currently unattended bags and had spotted her feminine waistline and shiny eyes. Now’s his chance. Striding over with purpose to her empty chair Alexander wipes it down with a cloth and slips his phone number in to her closed diary that she left on the table. 

Wide-eyed but with no other external signs of shock Andy awaits with foreboding. A dark cloud emitting drizzle has formed around his head. Clammy.

What if the nice woman who had asked me to watch her bags while she went to the bathroom thinks it’s ME?! And I have somehow broken her trust. I’ll never be asked to be a hero again. I’ll never be considered by her to be an honest trustworthy individual! And when she finds that number she’ll be filled with conceit and probably tut inside her head that all men are pricks and after one thing only. Well I’m not after one thing only! He thought decidedly (although he did quite fancy her but that was besides the point at this minute.)

She came back and Andy had missed his chance to do anything about the note slipped inside her personal private diary, he was livid with himself, all he had to do was take the note out and eat it or something why hadn't he acted fast enough?

‘Thanks’, she said and smiled back at him. 

The waiter behind the counter gave her a wink across the cafe. Andy grabbed his belongings hurriedly scraping them in to his bag before disastrously upturning a saucer filled with the residue of his filter coffee on to his crotch making him exclaim ‘shitheap!’ downwardly into his soul. The woman who was sat cross-legged at her laptop smiled over the edge of her screen in his direction with forgiveness and understanding. ‘Sorry’ muttered Andy and hurriedly dashed out forgetting his book behind, and so clambered back in past the other diners and metallic tables that scraped over the linoleum floor apologising again and again to recover his book and then finally leaving to get the hell out of there. 

Cath turned to the correct page of her diary to check dates and found a slip of paper with a telephone number written across it and a small black scribbled heart in the corner. Written on receipt-paper she thought turning it over in her fingers. The heart looks like something drawn by a pre-schooler. Completely uninterested she ordered another black coffee and went back to checking dates in her diary.