In Which We Meet Harry
“It isn’t a leak,” He says, “It’s condensation.” He is reluctant to bend down to touch it, I can tell. I bend down and demonstrate how to touch it.
“But it’s all mouldy,” I say. I think I might sound like I’m whining. I put my hand out to show him. “And it’s cold and wet.” You can’t see that my hand is cold. I consider putting my hand on his.
“You need to open the window,” He says, looking at the window, which like all windows in the flat, is ill-fitted and rotten and providing adequate ventilation. “You need to ventilate the room.”
I see he won’t be stirred by my cold hand and desolate wide-eyed stare. I lead him into the kitchen and point at the water coming up through the tiles. I bounce up and down to make a squelching sound. I bend over and point. He remains upright. He is hugely fat and will not be coerced into bending. Instead he stamps on the tiles with his massive weight. I don’t like stamping. I think loud noises are horrendously vulgar. I’ve proved that a playful bounce will suffice. I wonder if he can hear the squelching sound over the sound of his own heavy breathing and decide he cannot. He opens a cupboard and has a long look. Inside are piles of dirty pots that rather than clean, I have ‘tidied away’. He appears unconcerned, but I am inwardly certain that he is thinking what I have often thought: why not throw them all away? I know what you’re thinking, I would like to say, but the truth is that at some point I will want to have people over for dinner, I will want to cook them delicious things, and it isn’t practical to throw absolutely everything away, no matter how much sense it might make at the time, when you’re overwhelmed and can barely dress yourself or speak, and you think you might never be able to function normally in front of another human being again. So you just put them under the sink, where no-one can see them, until the time comes when a fat and humourless man called Harry takes it into his head to have a look.
“It’s not coming from under the sink,” Harry says. I smile and close the cupboard door and bounce up and down on the tiles again. I refuse to be moved from these tiles if he is going to stamp and start opening doors that are closed for a perfectly obvious reason. “If it were coming from the boiler, the boiler would be losing water pressure, which it isn’t. And it can’t be the main water supply, because otherwise you’d be flooded.”
I watch his extremely pink tongue. I think he is trying to convince me that there isn’t a problem and I won’t have it. I’m not entirely sure what to say. It’s the middle of winter and a fly just drifted past, fat on congealed wine, completely arrogant. I thought I’d killed them all. In the end, I shrug. I suppose I’ll just stay here until it all collapses, until the walls buckle and the pipes burst and the floors give way and the vermin lay siege to my Prosecco and feta. “Who was she to live like this?” they’ll ask, hauling my hipbones from under a mattress. “Smoking and eating truffles and reading in bed, letting everything around her go to rack and ruin? If we could only all be so carefree! What a cunt!”
No, but I’m being too stupid. I see Harry out and make a cup of tea. I think about writing it in my little book as an achievement, but last time I went looking for my achievement book I ended up hugging a padded envelope and covering the bathroom mirror with wrapping paper and brown packing tape, which Harry definitely acknowledged, but, I’m glad to say, remained unmoved by.
