Goodbye, room

A drop of water plops on my nose. Blearily, I feel the aperture of my eyelids peel back. Now I am staring upwards at the ceiling in semi-darkness.

There’s damp on the ceiling of this room. It makes me feel uneasy to look it at. Sepia-coloured patches bloom outwards, or crisscross the white plaster like the roots of Japanese Knot Weed.  

I follow one forking strand of damp with my finger until it makes a turn down the wall behind the curtains which hang scraggily in their 1970s brown-and-yellow glory. They remind me of my Nan June’s living room curtains, except these ones are faded and are threadbare at the bottom edge. From upstairs, there comes the wer-jnk wer-jnk of a toilet trying to be flushed before the cistern has completely refilled. It must be roly-guy. Roly-guy never stands or walks, but rolls himself across the floorboards above on his office chair. Every morning, around 10.30, roly-guy disappears into the only toilet for hours on end with only a razor, toothpaste and a copy of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I think he might have found hidden meaning in Colgate.

There’s a smell of IKEA plywood in this room. That and slightly tangy aroma of emulsion paint that has been recently daubed… probably over the worst of the damp. Out the window, the pavement of Neil Street cuts across the window about two thirds down, at just the right height so you can see it glistening in the wet when you’re standing. Now and then it’s interrupted with the occasional cinema of legs and shoes – brogues, big Scottish lace-ups, wedges… kitten heels which go clop-clop-clop over the hiss of puddle-churning cars. It feels vaguely subjugating to be down here with only feet for company. Most of them are studenty type shoes like Converse and Doc Martin which remind me I really should be out enjoying Freshers Week.

It’s all hardly surprising really. I’m Tom Morcott, and bad luck stalks me like a zealous Covid contact tracer. Like all the other 18-year-old kids at this uni, I think I’m special and unique… with a stand-out set of attributes that’ll somehow get recognized and jet-propel me to glory. But very few people are actually special. I’m probably like most people here – moderate… moderately intelligent, moderately capable, moderately funny, moderately well-read and hailing from a moderately good town. In my case I’m from Southampton… a nondescript corner of the UK famous for waving off great bastions of hope only to hear of their ill-fated demise days later…  like the RMS Titanic or, as it turns out, me on going to university.

I could’ve sworn I clicked “complete” after filling out the University’s online

accommodation application form. What I’m now thinking is I probably got confused between Google Chrome Tabs because my daft sister Leonie had also been booking the accommodation for her Vinyasa Yoga Retreat in Derby that evening before disappearing to watch a documentary about Jeff Bezos. Either way, I clicked on the wrong confirm button, and have balls’d up my 1st-year uni accommodation. So right now there’s probably a posh boy called Sebastian or Lucas or Tarquin in what should’ve been my halls room, snogging a girl as his chinos dry steamily on the complimentary heated towel rail. And I bet he has above-moderate seduction abilities too. Bloody Sebastian! Disgraceful, really.   

Upstairs the toilet finally flushes, with a satisfying ger-tssssssssssssssssh. I picture the turd in my mind’s eye, commencing its submarine voyage as it races along the downpipe behind my headboard, and out into the yowling mouth of an immaculately designed Victorian sewer. My reverie is broken as my phone illuminates and shimmies across the bedside table. I rotisserie 45 degrees off my back and pick it up, feeling the blue light of the screen dowse my face. It’s Charlain, the girl I met at the introductory lecture for English 1A; the one with the owl-pattered shirt hair who had damp-looking eyes as if she’d been crying. I open the message.

I’ve found out! A Ceilidh is a Scottish Dance NOT that throwing-a-log thingie they do in the Highlands. Ha told you. So you owe ME a drink now? Get on that Morcott. Where are you by the way? Are you dead? Charl x.

I stare at the message for a few seconds, letting the iPhone relax back into its louche semi-light. I’m surprised she messaged. She’d seemed shocked when I asked for her number outside the lecture hall. Maybe I’d asked for it too soon… or maybe my freckle-faced, gawp-eyed, late-adolescent awkwardness had just made her think I would never have the guts to ask. The flyer-besmirched concrete of the lecture hall building had clashed beautifully with the muted pastoral vibe of her brown of corduroy trousers. She gave me her number, five digits at a time. People who give their mobile number five digits at a time have a high opinion of the intellectual faculties of the person to whom they are speaking. Charlain was complimenting me. We are both in the outside lane of the neurological motorway.

I feel a rush of optimism like warm honey squeezing through the gauze of my grey matter. Charlain’s message had possessed wit, bounce and intellectual antagonism – the three key ingredients for a ripe and promising textual flirt-acionship. Feeling light, I trot over to my suitcase which is on its back under the window, its extendable airport handle still up. I unzip it and pull out a wad of books and begin to pile them in the space between the wardrobe and the fireplace grate, where the wallpaper has peeled back revealing a colourful back-catalogue of former wallpapers underneath. I stack Wuthering Heights, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and half the Harry Potter series up into a dubious Jenga tower. It feels vaguely satisfying… like I’m making a mark. I’m a Jack Russell cocking my leg up a lamppost. OK, it might be a grimy rusty lamppost down a back alley, but at least it’s my lamppost. My fireside book pile is my streak of doggie widdle.

I lean back and grab my shoes from under the bed. Come on Tommy, you can do this. May the power of God be in you etc.etc. I think of Nan June as I tie my laces… of her digging over her veg patch, and her little stoop as she spends entire afternoons in the early autumn peering down between the leaves for a prized red cherry tomato. Her quiet joy when she plucks one and holds it up to the sun like a ruby ingot is inspiring. I think of how she got into Oxford University when she was 18. War had broken out and she had joined the Women’s Air Force, only to later be told after the war that she couldn’t matriculate because she had got married to an airman. Do it for her Tommy.

The hallway is as dark as a mine. Roly-guy is heating a jacket potato and I surf the carby slipstream up the stairs towards the lobby. The front door of this house opens out on to a packed bus stop, so you have to squeeze and do-so-do around drunks and mums with pushchairs before you even set a foot on the pavement. This evening, the air reeks heavily of diesel fume and kebab. Along the main drag, car headlights burn through the mizzle-streaked air. Nextdoor there’s a grotty pub. A man with deep-wrinkles stands with his foot in the doorway, dragging on a cigarette stub between concaved wrinkled cheeks. I lock eyes with him feeling masculinely inadequate, as a sour smell of beer wafts out the door. Next to him scaffolding joints lay piled up in a corner like old bones.

I don’t even know where I’m walking, but I have a vague notion I’ll keep going ‘til the halls of residence, where I can go in and have a drink, and loll poetically in a corner until someone comes up to talk to me. If no one speaks to me, I’ll continue writing my debut novel, The Pirate of Blackgang. It doesn’t have a plot yet, but I don’t think it matters because the title is so evocative. After composing a good few similes, I might then text Charlain if she’s not there already and propose meeting up with a fictitious crowd. People who feel lonely must never admit it. Say you’ve split up with your girlfriend, or you’re struggling on an essay and they’re all ears. But whatever you do, never let on that you’re in a damp, leaky underground room, in a flat with no-one you know, in a city that intimidates you. It’s too humiliating. Especially for someone like me, a fresher… someone who should be in a pin-prick eyed beneath rainbow lights, or playing drinking games around a pool table.  Being alone in a bedsit, at 18 years old, is the ultimate shame. If you absolutely have to convey that you’re lonely, choose the word “isolated” instead. It means the same thing, but has some of the shame taken out. You can just about get away with saying you feel “isolated” and maintain a grip on your pride.

I step off the curb into a puddle and feel moisture soak into my sock. With each step as I cross the road there’s a squelch as rainwater syphons up my ankle. At least the GAP jumper I have on is toasty and has those little pockets around the front you can put your hands in. I pass a chippy and spy the Crags in the dimming half-light – an outcrop of rocks in the centre of the city that looks like a diagonally-tilted missile launcher. As I enter the halls of residence, I quickly toggle through a selection of half-smiles that I intend to wear as I enter the student bar: the Mona Lisa; the ‘full Julie Roberts grin’; the Russian Doll; the ‘caring NHS cardiologist poised to break terrible news’... I eventually settle on ‘Chinese soldier in a regimented line-up’ – a high-risk choice. I have tried several smiles over the years and consider this smile the optimum facial arrangement to adopt when entering a room of new, unfamiliar people. Worn properly, it conceals the tumult of your mood while making you seem vaguely empathetic and nice, just as president Jinping intended.

The halls of residence are surprisingly attractive. Long footpaths wind between landscaped patches of conifer trees set in bark chippings. Benches are positioned at carefully-thought-out intervals. Like anything vaguely on-point, it has great signage. I follow the arrows to the bar, eventually hearing the beatboxy dk-nnnn-dk-nnnn of base chords coming from inside a cubed building. As I get closer, I can identify it as the base beat to the chorus of Robbie Williams’ ‘Rock DJ’. I look at the phone to check my hair in the front-facing camera; it’s then I see the email.

From: University Accommodation Services.

Dear Mr Morcott,

We are pleased to say we have allocated a room for you in Braehurst Halls of Residence. Your room is 3356 on level two of Stowrigg House, and you can collect your key card and room tenancy agreement form the Braehurst Halls reception desk (open 24 hours). Your room is ready to move into as of this correspondence.

We apologise for the disruption caused to you with your accommodation arrangements over the last 48 hours. We realise this isn’t the greatest start to your Fresher’s week! By way of apology, please accept our gift of a free Freshers week access all areas pass for the part we have played in the disruption.

Your card can be picked up along with your room key and tenancy agreement at reception.

Best wishes,  

Colin McFarlane

Accommodation and Catering Manager

I turn my head momentarily upwards into the rain and mouth ‘thank god’. I decide to give the bar a miss and pivot on my heels, breaking into a run back to the house in my slurpy shoes.

Back in my room, I switch on the yellow florescent strip light and gather up the Hitchhikers Guide, Wuthering Heights and various Harry Potters, shoving them back into the suitcase. I feel mildly bad for them since they had only just started getting used to their new spot on the threadbare carpet between the wardrobe and fire grate. Then I turn to the bed and yank off the single fitted sheet pulling the mattress up with it like a whale rising from the sea. I de-pop the poppers on the duvet cover and stuff it into the suitcase along with my shoes, my guitar tuner, my diary from Nan June and the still-unopened ExtraValue jumbo pack of Tesco socks, bought for me by Mum. My mum swears by the TescoValue range and regularly extols its greatness with the mildly disturbing intensity of an evangelizing Christian. I chuck in my phone charger, coat, leads, laptop bag and toiletries into the case, forcing down the lip by perching my arse directly atop the cover. One minute longer I stay in this awful, leaky, subterranean dungeon of a room is one minute of life I will never get back. Within minutes I have stripped the room back to its barebones. No-one has ever eviscerated a room in such haste. I gaze around, pleased with my decimation, like a piranha admiring the boney carcass of a recently-devoured turbot. I scan my eyes around the cornice and wonder if it's actually possible for any human to feel decent in this room, with its sickly yellow light and pokey chilliness and pavement-bisected view. My back twinging, I lift the suitcase and swirl it round to the other side of the doorframe.

The hall is dark; a faint miasma of SuperNoodles wafts under the gap from the door opposite which has a padlock loop-and-pin attached to it. A bent clothes horse looms creepily in the darkness like a giant twisted daddy longlegs. Under roly-guy’s door comes the muffled ebb and flow of football crowd whooping and cheering. I poke my head around the frame of my door, one last time, to flick the light switch off, taking in a final image of the drab cell like a forensic detective making a dispassionate assessment of a squalid crime scene. Goodbye, room. Good-fucking-bye.