I’ve had it a few times. There’s this temporal ecstasy when moving off the road and into a house. Not back home mind, that’s a whole different thing. Just into a house. Walking around, alone in the morning, I tripped on all these little miracles of normality. Theres my cupboard where I can keep my food. Theres my beer fridge. Theres my comfy couch. Theres my door with a lock on it. Theres my big telly with a remote. Theres my toilet which only three of us shit in. Theres my phone where I can be contacted. There’s my mail slot which lets me get a bank account and join the library.
So that’s about a week’s entertainment right there. I stock my cupboard. I cook some complicated food. I sit on the couch. I surf the free cable channels. Join the library. I shit in peace and relative hygiene. I drink a lot of beer.
At first I kind of resented the evenings. Em would come home late and be tired. I’d have to act like the sober caring boyfriend that was oh so grateful that she was bringing in the cash. Which I was. Grateful she was bringing in the cash that is.
Actually doing the couple thing was pretty cool too, after so long on the road. I could cook us nice dinners and we could sit on the couch together. We could fuck in a comfortable bed that didn’t squeak too much. We could organise ourselves and feel a little balanced.
Of course we weren’t a couple though, were we. We were a funny little threesome. It’s one of those things that everyone knows but never says: most of the time when you live in share accommodation, you resent the presence of the other people. We’d be hanging on the couch or bonking away and you just had this feeling of intrusion. Sorry, the word intrusion sits a little unpleasantly with that sentence about bonking. That is the point though. In a share house, no matter what you’re doing, to some degree it’s a shared experience.
Ben hadn’t been that bad really. He worked late and spent a lot of time in his room, presumably on his computer. He drank a lot and got really pissed on Fridays and Saturdays when he would take which ever teenage sci fi novel he was reading and sit in a local pub. I’m sure he never met up with anyone, but I guess the sounds of people having fun around him provided what the internet could not.
He’d come in when he was pissed and sit at the breakfast counter just behind where we would be sitting on the couch. His round face was always flushed with alcohol and he had this impish smile which said, I’ve been naughty and got drunk again. He’d be mostly quiet when pissed and was very careful to pronounce sounds right if he talked. He took on this air of a very intelligent professor who was giving great weight to the exact choice of each word.
“I …pause…just….fuck….ing……hate…..long pause…….mr…….Bean….”
Obviously that was what we were watching. How do you respond to that?
“Want us to change the channel”
“..long pause……no….I….long pause .I…….no…..I……..slapstick……I…..hate…..fucking…slapstick….I….”
Normally he was only good for three or four of these pronouncements and then he would go off to his room and plug in online, coming out every half hour or so for more beer or gin. I often wondered if he typed faster than he spoke.
I really didn’t find this behaviour to be disturbing. From what I’d seen of the residents of the local pubs and the people that wandered past to go to the Tottenham games, this is the way that England was. Quiet, isolated, drunk and trying to sound intelligent.
Mostly harmless.
“I don’t know if I can keep living here. I was trying to carry the washing out to the line and I dropped a pair of socks and he said why don’t I carry it in my bra and then started laughing at me. He freaks me out Ben.”
“What? S’not a bad idea. He’s just got a weird sense of humour.”
“He’s a freak Ben”
“Yeh but the house is nice. Look it’ll be different when other people move in”
“you’re a freak too.”
“Yeh I know”
The beauty of Ben was that his sober self seemed determined to make up for the idiot he thought he became when he was drunk. It reminded me of this girl I went out with once. She had this wild temper and no control over it. All I had to do was provoke her every couple of days and her post anger contrition would keep me supplied with beer, crazy sex and a place to stay. Didn’t have to work for months, just lived off her self loathing.
Something I haven’t told you about me is that I’m a gambler. It makes me feel smart when my horse beats all the other ones. I love the calculating process before you make your decision and then the thrill of the risk just before they jump. I love it most when my horse comes with a strong run from the back and nudges out the favourite. When my smarts are on display to the world, because I took a path less travelled by, and the difference is that now I’m rich and look clever.
Sorry, using Frost is overdoing it a bit. I’m trying to say that staying in the house is a gamble. But then moving into any share house is. What do you really go on? How do you know if people will put camera’s in the shower or sneak into your room or will keep your bond or rape and kill you or whatever. You make a decision based on your intuition and common sense. Or you could, if you’re like this American girl we lived with briefly in Buenos Aires, google everyone and carry a knife.
Now here is the crux of the matter, of the whole book really, if I can call it that.
Em’s intuition was clearly telling her that living with Ben was a bad idea. My gamblers instinct was telling me that whatever small risk there was, it was worth it for the rewards.
What rewards? OK the house was nice but so what? There was a reason that we travelled a lot. It was because we weren’t the kind of people that get bogged down in possession or worry greatly about luxury or personal space. I’ve only mentioned these things in such glowing terms because they are fun, briefly, when you rediscover them.
Ben was giving me something much more.
After the arrival of that computer I had started writing, really writing, for the first time in my life. This weirdo was giving me the chance to become a writer. I’d started writing this book and it was all about him. And I just new that if we left now, I would loose my story.
