Original Features
I bought the best squalor money can buy: the ‘North London One-Bedroom’, its ever-increasing periodness proof of my social fertility. And it’s all flock wallpaper, repainted forty times, and now a kind of sweaty paté beige. As if in the battle between trial and error, error won.
The hall smells like an old watchmaker died there and his wife stretched his socks over the boards to make the carpets. The tatty leather armchair which I ‘found’ on the street sits smugly in the corner of the sitting room like the guest that won’t leave; presenting its shot-through velvet seat like a bonobo on heat, springs swaying for the next tribade. Magnetised towards it is the bowed ceiling, genuine damp seeping over its Art & Crafts embossed brow, wrinkling its Ionic, corniced nose. And surveying it all, the conjunctival, Victorian sash windows dying for one incredulous blink, if it weren’t for the rotting frames stapling the gape.
And now I cultivate this abjectness with a combination of one-part neglect to three-parts regret. The dust which sits an inch thick in the bedroom and scallops into drifts at doorframes is a portfolio. I leaf through the pointillist relief, reading subtle changes in the grain, surveying the unions with disdain. Marriages of pubic hair and spermicide, of newsprint and antihistamine, lipstick and shit. Or I spend my time using the smells of washing powder and pheromones on the garments I find in my bed as a commemorative jump-off, a kind of carbon dating for the dereistic.
Oh look, see that slightly finer dust? That was the time when the humidity reached fifty per cent before that July storm. And that blue glitter under the bed, that was when you dressed up as a fish for that fish & chips party.
Five am and the smell of docks rushes up. I can feel the salt corroding my ridiculously rickety Arts & Crafts bed – a Jamaican promised to make it ‘sturdy’. It’s not ‘sturdy’; it groans ceaselessly as I peer down from the lank sheets at the scum circulating between the upturned sleepers.
The bed is ticking. I arrest the breathing to see if my ribcage is causing some kind of perpetual motion deep in the springs. It continues and after a few seconds I realise that the pumping of my blood may be causing it, but there is no way of testing that.
