the tenancy agreement: chapter 4

2005

October

Greg had moved into the front bedroom, the biggest, because he'd been left with the box room in the previous house. It had always seemed to suit his rather Spartan lifestyle, but this time he insisted that he wanted to spread his stuff out, to feel his personality among the empty space and reclaimed furniture. He had pulled a tatty armchair up from the basement and was sitting on it seriously, flanked by Jonathan and Ezra. Joe was sitting on the bed, his eyes wandering around the peripheries of the room and his fingers drumming absentmindedly on the thighs of his blue jeans. The other three watched him like a TV, smoking cigarettes.

“Joe,” said Greg. “Are you listening?”

“What?” said Joe, shaking his head, like he was trying to wake up from a vision far more interesting than Greg’s moving mouthparts and sober tone. Greg had had an epiphany during the summer, the result of LSD and a middle aged South African man called Keith, who was into sodomy and conspiracies and played Terence McKenna recordings while smiling into his beard. During this epiphany he had felt the force of righteousness in his blood, had seen the right path, and like an acid evangelist he was keen to lead Joe – whose cocaine city lifestyle was antithetical to Greg’s half-hearted neo-hippy ethos – onto it. They were increasingly at odds, their aggressive disagreements borne entirely of narcotic influence. While Greg discriminated between psychedelics and stimulants, moulded their effects into his own interior value hierarchy, Joe made no such discrimination. He took anything and was still using coke, despite Greg’s insistence of empty promises. It had been a pretty heavy year for all of them.

“Joe?” he said.

“I’m listening,” said Joe.

“You have to pay rent, okay?” Greg looked at him with disappointment in his eyes, paternalized by his drug experiences. “I don’t know if you realise that, but that’s how we get to live here, we pay rent. It’s about respect. You have to respect us because you’re sharing this house with us.”

“Fuck you, Greg.”

Greg stood up fast and knocked the armchair backwards; its wooden insides chimed against the radiator.

“Don’t tell me to fuck me.” He shouted the words like a chanted catchphrase from a strange TV gameshow. Then stormed from the bedroom, tugging the door hard behind him. It was hung badly in the jamb and scraped slowly along the carpet. Came to a stop before it slammed shut. The wood panelling secreted embarrassment. Smiling oblivious Joe looked at Ezra and Jonathan and shrugged. He pulled open one of Greg’s bedside drawers and took out a bag of weed and some papers and started to roll a joint.

*

Tom was in the kitchen, shaking his head at the mountain of washing up piled on the surfaces, stained mild yellow in patches by turmeric. Pans were charred with tarry burnt lentils and thin black spaghetti pasta stuck fast to their worn Teflon bases. Plates congealed with food scraps or lines of tasteless sauces, missed by the tongues that grimly licked the crockery clean, using body organs like bread to mop the juices. Cutlery was at a premium, all thick with bits. There were hundreds of dead wine bottles lined up like notches on a bedpost along the top of the kitchen cupboards, a proud public declaration of consumption. It had been left by the previous tenants and they had kept it as a green glass spectacle. Beer the stench that held the kitchen together, not wine or red hot dhal. Stale lager that was sticky on the floor, mounded tea towels left by the washing machine that had mopped spillage after spillage and sat unwashed, sodden with the drink. The whole house smelt like hangover in blue light caught coiled in the sun. Their own collection of empty beer cans – ring pulls twisted off and left rattling inside, flecked around the mouthpiece with cooked tobacco, the empty can reborn as a makeshift ashtray – engulfed the hob like a virus, a low-grade homage to the wine bottles above. He took the last clean glass from an empty cupboard, a shot glass really, and filled it with water from the tap, not even daring to look in the sink. Greg stormed into the room and he looked up.

“Fucking cunt,” said Greg.

“What?”

“Joe.”

“Right.”

“He told me to fuck me.”

“To fuck you?”

“Yeah.”

Greg pushed some of the washing up onto the floor. It landed noisily but didn’t break, just left a worse mess behind. It was frustrating for both of them. They both looked down at the pile and Tom winced. Sighing, Greg bent down and started picking the plates back up, one by one.

“This isn’t really about Joe,” he said.

“Then what is it about? It’s getting pretty fucking unbearable to live with.”

“I don’t know. Something feels wrong.”

“It always feels like that in a new house. You’ll get used to it.”

“No, it’s something else.”

“Fuck,” said Tom. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense. Something just feels wrong.”

“That’s what everyone says.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Visitors. Girls. Talking about the vibes of the house. They said the vibes were wrong.”

They looked at each other.

“Maybe it’s the vibes that stop Joe paying the rent,” said Tom.

“Yeah. We can remind him of the fucking vibes when we get thrown out.”

Tom snorted a reluctant laughed response.

“Fuck it,” Greg says. “Vibes. It’s bullshit.”

“Yeah,” said Tom. “Bullshit.”

Greg pulled himself up from the floor with the surface as a stabiliser and said shit, his fingers sunk in week-old mayonnaise. He dumped the washing up in the sink and didn’t turn the tap on, then wandered off. Tom refilled his glass, looked around the kitchen and lit a cigarette. What a shithouse. He turned on the hot tap and watched the water fall into the sink. The plug wasn’t in. It spiralled down, away into its own pointlessness.