Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
I once lived in a very old flat in London. There was nothing charming or historical about this place. This building was of the pigeon infested decaying slum by the railway line variety. My tenure started with great hope and ended awkwardly with a horror week involving a shit volcano, a broken heart, angry acrobats and firemen, among other things.
Number 2 Bedford St was so decrepit that it didn’t have the plumbing to accommodate an upstairs toilet. Instead, it contained an electrical device which manually munched up all solids before sending them on their way down the water pipes. Every time I flushed the toilet, it emitted an unholy moan followed by the sort of metallic screech which evoked the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless I was naively untroubled by this faecal processing setup and happy to simply get on with my life as a sassy and sophisticated lady of London.
How was I to know I was soon to be beset by a series escalating series of disasters in that dilapidated abode.
One evening I was settling back into the bath, ready to enjoy a can of Strongbow and a few fags when I heard a terrible wheezing moan. Next, three loud bangs. The source of these sounds was unmistakeable. This was a tiny bathroom and the toilet was extremely close to the bath, but before I could find the ashtray or drop my can, the contents of the bog burst forth like a Vesuvius of minced shit. I didn’t stand a chance…
I will gloss over the horrors of that night and move on to the part where my landlord refused to see the urgency of repairing the pooh muncher OR the bathroom carpet (which still bore the damp scars and smells of ‘the incident’). He felt that given there was a perfectly good toilet standing outside the front door of another tenant’s flat on the floor below, there was no need to rush me a new loo. Instead, I was to use this loo on the downstairs landing, shielded only by a piece of string and a frankly inadequate curtain. Without going into too much detail about the hot Austrian dude who lived in the flat I was expected to crap outside, I can proudly say I learned bladder and bowel control skills during that period which have stood me in good stead until this very day.
During this happy time, I had a neighbour in the flat next door. He was very cute, very young and very short. Imagine the small cute one in any boy band then shrink him to half his size again. That was Kris. Anyway, Kris and had been sleeping together. To be honest it just seemed handy to me at the time, but he was very keen. He was 20 I was about 40. Surprisingly I even felt comfortable being seen with him in public, because contrary to my embarrassment about our height difference, nobody looked twice at us. They seemed to accept us as a couple and I thanked Londoners yet again for their cosmopolitan inclusive acceptance.
The day after the shit shower one of the cleaners at work seemed more excited than usual to see me. He beckoned me over and said:
“I saw you and your young lad at the video shop on the weekend!”
“My young lad?”
“Yes, your boy, your little lad, your SON!”
The realisation hit me hard. Everyone in London assumes Kris is my bloody SON? They don’t stare because they think he is a tiny child and I am his mother? They don’t imagine for a minute we are a couple? Goddammit why can’t a sexy older lady take a tiny young lover? Stereotyping intolerant London bastards!
I decided it was time to act like an adult and end it with Kris. I didn’t do this. Instead, that night I slipped a note under his door saying this had to end. He did not take it well. When he got home he banged and banged on my door. I decided to hide and resolved to avoid him forever. Sadly this avoidance situation made the timing of toilet trips downstairs even more difficult to manage. Soon his love turned to hate and he demonstrated this daily by banging his tiny fists on my wall and shouting at me if I turned the TV on, or opened a window, or even opened a door or a can of Strongbow. Kris and I were not in a good place. Literally or emotionally.
Days passed and life seemed to be getting less crazy, when one evening, the electricity in my flat went down. This wasn’t unusual and I was confident that as soon as the dripping electrical wire in the hall dried out, all would be back to normal. I just needed to get on with life until everything sorted itself out, so I decided to prepare a lovely hot bath, ignore the shit smell and enjoy a relaxing candlelit evening. I had a gas stove, so I put every pot and every pan on to boil water. I even put a casserole dish full of water in the oven. I had constructed a system of duckboards over the crappy carpet and was systematically going back and forth filling the bath and refilling the pots.
All this water carrying was busy work and it took me a while to realise the smoke alarm in the hall was beeping. At the time, I had never lived in a house with a smoke alarm, so I didn’t know what to do. I ran out to the hall and was relieved to see some people running up from downstairs. Oddly, they, like Kris, were extremely small people. There were three of them and they were dressed in what appeared to be acrobatic attire. This explained the loud bumps and grunts and maybe even the pan pipes I’d been hearing for months. I was living above the Peruvian acrobatic squad!
“Oh my god!!” I babbled excitedly as they came up the stairs towards me.
“I’m so glad you came up. It’s the smoke alarm! Do you think it’s a fire? Are the electrical wires on fire? What should we do? Can you smell smoke? I think I can smell smoke? Should we call the fire brigade?”
“Smoke” replied the Lead Acrobat, gesturing toward my flat, from whence clouds of steam were now wafting.
“No no, that’s just steam. For my bath”
“SMOKE” repeated the Leader gruffly, and walked inside. Then Acrobat Two stepped forward and with a contemptuous glare pushed past me into my flat.
Acrobat Three then stepped politely past, nodding gently in the direction of my flat and repeating softly and kindly: “Smoke”.
I followed them into my kitchen where they all stood, looking about them in amazement at the steamy situation they beheld. They all huddled and spoke rapid Spanish to each other. Then the leader announced:
“Not smoke” and they all filed grimly out. Acrobat Three gave me a slight apologetic shrug behind Boss Acrobat’s back, and they were gone.
I was on my own.
I now believed I really could smell smoke, so I decided to call the fire department and ask for their advice. I tried to stress that it was not an emergency, but of course all my talk about smoke alarms and smell of smoke was right up their alley. She announced that she would ‘Dispatch a Unit”.
I asked: “Does that mean firemen are coming?”
And before she could utter the‘s’ in ‘yes’ I’d slammed down the phone and was rushing into my bedroom to change into something fireman worthy and some lipstick.
Soon sirens could be heard approaching and then two fire engines appeared and blocked the street below. Six firemen in full regalia stomped up the stairs. They immediately stopped the fire alarm, and then we all stood in the hallway sniffing the air for any signs of smoke. It soon became apparent that there really WAS a smell of smoke, and it was coming from Kris’s flat! Before I could say: “Maybe I should call him?” they took a huge battering ram and with a one-two -three they knocked his door off his hinges.
We all crowded in. Firemen are highly trained in these matters and identified the source of the smell immediately. It was ten pairs of Kris’s child-sized underpants gently scorching on a drying rack in front of the heater. At that point they all sniggered and shook their heads, a fireman turned off the heater, and they all made to file out.
“Um…excuse me…what about my neighbour’s door?” I rather nervously asked.
One of the fireman replied: “Oh we’ll put a card on the door and if he has any questions he can give us a call at the station”. They stuck up a cross of tape, and they were gone. I stood there in shock. How the hell was I going to explain this to Kris? He hates me already, and now I’ve had his door knocked down by the bloody fire brigade!
Then I decided to do the only thing I could. I walked calmly into my flat, locked the door, got into bed and put a pillow over my head so I couldn’t hear him arrive home.
I was going to deny all knowledge and keep out of sight until I could find another dump to call home.