the tenancy agreement: chapter 2

2005

September

On hot day they waited beneath still grey London skies, six friends of male genital. Waited before their new rented house, whose adjoining terrace rolled uphill like an ancient vein, awkwardly adorned with bike parts or potted palms, anomalous even in the terrible mugginess of late summer, their thick stringy leaves left flaccid by the climate. The pitiless streets of the city’s South East hung limp around their boredoms and their personalities, the old telegraph hill rose away from them carrying with it their unknown futures, overseeing the dirge of the urban sprawl, the desperate vertical reach of their swollen London. There was fried chicken in the air, like sick in the morning, bathing them all in thick grease and reconstituted stench and Halal slaughter and penetrating through pores. The house was number sixteen. At their feet were piled black refuse sacks full of clothes, boxes of books and crockery, endless guitars whose strings hummed in the heat, and they passed a litre bottle of lager around the six of them, drunk piss warm in large swallows.

“He’s late,” said Tom. Short for Thompson, weirdly. That was his first name. He had long hair and paced nervously around the shingled front garden and spoke to himself alone.

“What’s his name?” asked Jonathan, never Jon and Jonny even less. He was Jonathan on paper and Jonathan in his head.

“Lucas,” said Ezra, named from the Bible and tormented by his own agnosticism.

“Lucas. Landlord Lucas.”

“Well where is he?” said Tom.

“Who?” said Greg, distracted by his own long fingers and the cigarette between them. Lovingly they call him skull face. Tom had a dream where Greg’s face existed without skin or tissue or musculature, just a bright white skull with eyes in the hollow sockets. He had dreadlocks too (in the dream), but it was never made clear where the hair was growing from. It had only been a dream.

“Who do you think?”

“Stop worrying.”

Tom sighed. Rolled his eyes.

“Stop worrying he says. I have more than a thousand pounds in my pocket.”

“Put it in your wallet,” said Greg.

“It doesn’t fit in my wallet.”

“That’s not something to worry about,” said Joe. A small time coke dealer, Joe wore sunglasses in the house and stole expensive shirts and went between shitting money and crushing poverty, often within the space of a few hours. He always got things done.

“He’ll be here,” added Greg.

“He’s already an hour and” – Tom checked the time – “four minutes late.”

“Tom,” said Ezra, inimitably patronising. “He wants us to move in. He wants us to rent this house.”

“I know, I know. I just find it very easy to imagine things going generally wrong.” He thought for a second. “In life.”

The silence was punctuated by smirks, distant sirens. Drum ‘n’ bass played behind upstairs windows and the street throbbed with its futility. ‘kunt!’ has been etched into the dusty back doors of a parked van, made good humoured by the punctuation. Ezra gently laid a hand on Tom’s shoulder.

“It’s not your fault you know,” he said. “That she left. If it counts for anything I never knew how to talk to her.”

Earlier that summer she had walked out on him. Their nine months together had felt like a decent lifetime, even though the whole period had been tainted with anguish and the expectation of failure. After she had left Tom she had fucked these two other guys, both guys he knew even if he wasn’t friends with them. It felt like the ultimate betrayal. The fact that they had broken up when she did it made it worse rather than better. When she told him he had smashed a mirror with the leg of a metal chair. It might have felt liberating if it hadn’t been so crushing.

“Listen to the dickhead,” said Conor, who made tonelessness sarcastic, who smoked himself into Buddhism, drank himself into hedonism but ended up theorising himself into involuntary celibacy. He had worn a chin beard for years that never grew, and his weird intelligence was turning his hair white.

“You don’t know how to talk to anyone, Ezra,” said Joe.

“Fuck off Joe. No one knows how to talk to me.”

“16 SHELL ROAD,” Jonathan shouted loudly. Volume was his non-confrontational way of diffusing confrontational situations. He often shouted addresses for the purpose.

“Is that supposed to be a toast?” said Tom, holding the last foamy swig of lager to his lips.

“No. A realization.”

“Good,” said Tom, and swallowed, wincing when the drink hit his tongue. In collective impatience they all turned down the road. The house looked great. Double fronted terrace, decent garden, basement, cheap. There was a woman walking up the road alone, dressed in paint flecked jeans and a shirt. She was quite heavy but had an attractive face. She smiled at them as she got closer and they could see the outline of her tits.

“Hi,” she said. Joe glanced at Jonathan, his darting eyes overtly sexual.

“Lucas?” said Tom. Laughter, perhaps too hard.

“No,” she said. “I’m a woman.” Seemed friendly enough.

“Right,” said Tom. “I just meant...”

“Ignore him,” said Greg. “His girlfriend left him.”

“Did she have a man’s name?”

“Actually quite funny.”

“O Jesus ignore him too. Madam,” said Ezra, puffing his chest as though its tissues were a sought-after relic or an incredible aphrodisiac. He bowed a little, playing the skewed role of ill-groomed gentleman. He became archaic in his seductions, a throwback to his own weird constructed sense of historical romance and chivalry. Or plague and suffering. Pre-Reformation dating methods. “You’ll forgive my acquaintances I’m sure, but we are today moving into this property and currently awaiting our new landlord – who is running slightly late – so he might provide us with the keys and thereby grant us formal entry into our new year of... this. Your friendly gait as you approached our standpoint suggested some familiarity with the situation and so, almost understandably, my friend here must have assumed...”

“That I was him?”

“Most so.”

“I’m his sister,” she said.

“Wonderful to meet you Mrs...” said Ezra.

“Tanya. Lucas apologises for not being here but he isn’t feeling too well today.” They all stared at her expectantly. “You do know about Lucas?”

“What about him?” said Greg. Tom had picked up his bags and was standing next to the front door.

“He’s in a wheelchair.”

“A wheelchair?” said Tom.

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“God,” said Greg. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?” said Tom.

“Not to you.”

“What for?” said Tanya.

“The wheelchair. I mean.”

“It’s not a problem,” she said,

“Of course it isn’t,” said Greg quickly, betrayed by his own words. “What does it matter? Wheelchair’s a wheelchair. A symbol or something.”

“Something for society to label,” said Joe.

“Or a means of motion,” said Tanya.

“Motion.”

“He broke his back as a child,” she said, disrupting the bullshit. “He’s fine with it. He’s healthy and gets around more than I do. He just does it in a wheelchair. He thought he might come round in a couple of days to catch up with you. Didn’t he tell you I’d be letting you in and sorting out the paperwork?”

They all looked at Tom, who shook his head. Weak breeze broke the silence but it stopped almost instantly, no momentum to keep it going. In the blinking quiet Tom lifted the bottle to his lips and tipped it up and up. It was empty. He awkwardly lowered it to the pavement. Ezra cleared his throat.

“Excuse me. Tanya?” He gestured with an open palm to the mound of luggage on the floor.

“Oh I’m so sorry,” she laughed. “Let’s get you in.”

They all picked up their bags and boxes and Tanya took a small brown envelope full of keys from her bag. She pulled out one set and opened the two front doors and made her way across the threshold, followed by Tom and the others.

“We used to live here as kids,” she said. Slow with memory. “Before we inherited it.”

“Really?” said Ezra.

“Yeah. Lucas and Me.”