Tenancy

The tap drips. I’ve been here eleven days and the tap is the thing I know best. It has a voice, or not a voice, more like someone in the next room trying to start a sentence and giving up. Starting again. Giving up. I don’t mind it. The tap doesn’t pretend to be interested in me and I find that resentful.

The letting agent said character when she showed me the flat. She was pointing at a damp patch above the bathroom window. It’s shaped like a lung, or I think it is. I keep seeing lungs in things. She said character in that voice people use for brave when they mean ugly. I signed the lease with her pen. It was warm from her hand. I almost didn’t give it back because holding something warm that had belonged to another person’s grip was the closest I’d come to being touched in I don’t know how long.

I own a suitcase, phone charger, two books I’m not going to read, a toothbrush that’s starting to look like it’s screaming. The flat owns everything else. There was shampoo left by whoever was here before. Botanical, cap crusted shut. I got it open on the third night and used it, the green lather going down my neck, smelling of rosemary and someone else’s hair, someone else’s days. Of course I used it. I was glad to smell like someone other than myself. And when I put my hand on the tile to steady myself the tile was warm. I don’t mean from the water. I mean warm the way a chair is warm when someone’s just stood up. I held my hand there and it stayed warm. I held it there for a long time.

I’ve started touching things. Deliberately. I put my hand flat on the kitchen counter every morning and hold it there until the laminate warms. It takes ages. Laminate doesn’t care about you. Then I go to the wall by the bedroom door. It’s rough. Like someone sanded it once and forgot to paint over it. I press my cheek against it and count, I don’t know, thirty, fifty, until the wall goes from its temperature to mine. 

On day four, the wall was already warm when I woke up. My temperature exactly. I hadn’t touched it yet. I stood there and I should have thought something was wrong. But I didn’t. I thought, finally. Something that meets me halfway.

The Body as furnished unit, six month minimum, deposit nonrefundable.

On the sixth day the letting agent came back for the boiler. She asked if everything was alright, I said yes. Three feet away. A sink full of cracker crumbs from two in the morning, which I hadn’t cleaned because cleaning would have been admitting something about the way I’m living and I’m not ready to admit that yet. She wrote things on a clipboard. She opened cupboards without looking inside them. I envied her so much I thought I might be sick.

She touched the counter on her way past. Just her fingertips, trailing along the laminate, and then she stopped. Looked at her hand. Wiped it on her trousers. That’s warm, she said. She went over and checked the radiator, which was off. Wrote something else on the clipboard. I watched her and said nothing. I didn’t want her to fix it.

She said the boiler would take a few weeks to settle in. After she left I stood in the hallway and said settle in to myself a few times, the way you press on a bruise. I’d settled into the last place in four years. When it ended I took a suitcase, a charger, and the understanding that you can sleep next to a person every night and still be completely alone in the bed.

I keep thinking about the kitchen in that flat. He’d make coffee and leave the spoon on the counter, wet, and by evening there’d be a brown ring. I wiped it off every day. Four years of wiping it off. Last week I stopped. The rings built up, overlapping, these faint brown circles, and he never once looked down. I took the suitcase from the hallway and he watched me go.

I left nothing on that flat. Nothing on him. Four years and the coffee rings came off with a cloth.

The mattress has a dip in it, to the left, where someone slept in the same position for years until the foam gave up. I sleep on the right side and every morning I wake up facing the shape of whoever was here before. I don’t mind that either. At least this particular absence doesn’t lie about itself.

On the seventh night I put my hand in the dip and the foam was warm, not warm from my hand—warm before I got there, and it pulsed. Faintly. Like something a long way down was breathing. I told myself it was my own heartbeat going through my wrist but it was too slow. It was someone else’s. Someone who’d been here so long the mattress had learned them.

Clause 3.5. The landlord retains the right to enter the property without prior notice.

The damp patch grew. By day nine it was wider by two fingers. The lung shape was clearer, you could see the lobes, and when I pressed my palm to it I felt the moisture in the plaster moving. Slowly, in and out, in a rhythm I almost knew. I should have called someone. I pressed my cheek to it instead. It was the warmest thing in the flat. Warmer than the counter. Warmer than the mattress. I stood like that for maybe twenty minutes with my face against the damp wall, breathing when it breathed.

On day ten I ran the tap until the dripping stopped. Hot then cold then hot, then off. Silence. Horrible silence. Every surface I’d touched seemed to flinch from me, like I’d done something wrong. Then the drip came back. One. Two. I sat on the kitchen floor and cried, and it wasn’t because the dripping came back, it was because I was so relieved I couldn’t stand up. The flat was talking again. I’d been afraid it was going to stop.

This morning both my hands were on the wall behind the bed. Flat against it. I don’t remember putting them there. I must have done it in my sleep, reached out for the surfaces the way you reach for a person who isn’t there. When I pulled them away there were marks. Not scratches. Like shadows. The dark shape of my palms, faint, as though the wall had been soaking me up.

I went to the kitchen and in the early light the counter was covered in marks. Handprints, dozens of them, layered, going back years. Fingers and palms and the heel of someone’s wrist, all pressed into the laminate so faintly you’d never see them unless you looked at exactly this angle in exactly this light. The flat wasn’t taking my heat all those mornings. It was taking my shape. 

The warm tile. The wall that breathes. The mattress that keeps a dead stranger’s heartbeat. The flat takes you in. It keeps the shape of your hands and the rhythm of your sleeping and the heat off your skin and it doesn’t let go. Every person who lived here is still here. In the plaster, in the pipes, in the laminate I’ve been pressing my palm against every morning like an idiot. And I was becoming one of them. 

For a moment I wanted that. Is that awful? Four years with a man who couldn’t even look down at the counter and here was a building that had memorised my hands in eleven days.

I opened the drawer by the stove. Blunt knife, the kind every flat has. I scratched a line into the counter. One line. Two inches. Not a shadow, not something the flat could drink up and dissolve. A cut. The only mark it couldn’t close over.

There were three others already there. Faint, old, almost gone. But cuts, like mine. Someone else had worked it out. Someone had stood here with the same knife and said no.

I put the knife back. The tap dripped. The damp lung breathed above the window. Four scratches on the counter in a flat that eats people.

I went to bed. I lay on the right side. The dip pulsed next to me, slow, patient, the way something waits when it knows you’ll come to it eventually. I did not put my hand in it.

It was warm already.

I did not put my hand in it.

Clause 4.1. The tenant shall not alter the property.