Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant Read online

  “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 recognizes my face, despite the fact that he only sees me once every fifteen 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 parking lot. “You see that?” Dimitri says. Cars veer past us. He lifts all my stuff into my new room in twenty 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.

  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 methodically killed us all; the guy who only has one question, yeah: Do you guys mind if my band practices here one or two nights a week?; the guy in advertising forced 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 emailed the property agent separately about the faulty boiler, shitty bathroom, the pilled carpeting on the stairs, the drafty 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 friends 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 livable 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 deposits 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.)

  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: lying 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, zigzagging, 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 gray-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 £1,000; it’s all of those checks exploding and burning in the air. And bodies slump headless to the floor—

  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 gray, 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—

  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.

  “What, again?” I cannot tell if Dimitri is mad or disappointed. Once a year or so, I give him £120 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 making 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 percent of our deposit, a human-history first. Would I still like to watch them, gray and motionless, die in a hospital? The eerie digital shrill as a heart stops beating in its chest? Would I? Would I? Eeeeeeeeee—

  Maybe it is just something that happens to you, when you approach thirty, 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 the 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 coziness, 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-colored blanket; and then there is a sort of intense minimalism favored 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 cozy up a single corner of my room, maybe I could only buy things among a limited color palette, maybe I could live an organized life. And then I realized, 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 coziness shorthand then bypasses the need for you to have a truly cozy house. It is easier for Dimitri to haul your idea of cozy up the stairs if it can all be packed neatly into the same box. And this: if you were born in the late ’80s to early ’90s, 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 comforter 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.

  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 cozy relationship going forward over the twelve months of our contract. I am cooking, my food says, but not my mouth, I am cooking for you to win your favor. 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 vigor?” 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 percent.” 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. Brownies, 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 cake.

  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 th
e 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.

  A property agent is informing me in a tight voice that it costs £150 for them to cut me a new set of keys.

  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.”

  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.”