2: how to move house
first, discover a problem.
it is a monday morning in november and you are sitting at your computer, and your neck is itchy, like it always is at the moment. your partner suggests you put a shirt on to keep your neck covered and avoid scratching.
you go to your wardrobe and pull out one of their shirts, the one they gave you in august last year when you had just got together and everything was heady and new and hot and no-one had ever heard the word “covid” and the two of you stayed out at night to look at the stars and swapped shirts.
the shirt feels damp to the touch – cold, clammy, like something is wrong that you can’t quite put your finger on. you, immediately, burst into tears. you tell your partner, it feels wrong, something’s wrong, it feels damp, it’s damp, and they try and soothe you but you already know that something is wrong and even though you put the shirt on you can feel it, cold and wrong against your skin, and sooner or later you are going to have to find out what has happened so you get up and open the wardrobe door again and push aside the clothes and there, yes, there is a damp stain on the back of the wardrobe and there is mould on some of your shoes, sickly green fur growing on the soles of the brogues you bought in first year of uni and got caught in the door of your flat in halls, the brogues you instagrammed in their box when you brought them home, that cost you £50, that have been re-heeled countless times but have still held up, have trod the path of six years with you.
you spend the day on the floor, kneeling in supplication in front of a pile of clothes, checking every item for signs of damage and sorting them into piles and googling mould on velvet, how to clean mould, mould on suede, mould on leather.
you alternate between resigned pragmatism and outright hysteria, sobbing like you have not sobbed for months, for years. you email the landlord and spend the next week washing everything in vinegar, plunging jumper after jumper into the bathtub as your hands flare red and hot, rolling each one up in a towel and walking it to the drying rack outside, where they take over a week to dry, because it is november. your wardrobe is removed; your landlord doesn’t do anything else about the mould for over a month, finally asking you to vacate for three days while they fix and replaster your room.
your partner comes to stay and the three of you set up kegs in the living room, drink beer and homemade cocktails, dress nachos with pounds of cheese. you feel a little deranged still, like you have come untethered from reality, spores proliferating behind your eyelids when you go to sleep, whenever you turn your back.
your partner irons all your clothes for you to prove to you that they are okay now, which makes you feel cared for but does not make the fear go away.
at some point during this, during the ceaseless whirl of water and white vinegar and piles of warm ironed laundry and scrubbing your walls with a toothbrush and hanging clothes in every available space, at a certain point, you and your flatmate decide to leave. it is a long conversation and also a very short one, the kind where everyone agrees to think about things with their minds already made up. you begin flathunting, and go and stay with your partner over christmas.
predictably, predictably, the work organised by the landlord is not finished by the date given, nor by the following weekend, nor by the weekend after that, which is when your flatmate arrives home to find the boiler off and a cement mixer on the floor of your bedroom. the weekend after that, your mother drives two hundred miles from yorkshire to essex, and two hundred miles back, to bring you to her house where you steal your sister’s bed for two weeks and then steal her car, to boot.
in the last week at your partner’s house you view a series of flats, and the last one you view is the one you settle on – you send videos to your flatmate and the two of you decide over video call, and you build a mock-up of the flat in the sims to channel some of your anxiety into something resembling fun, which is something you have forgotten how to have, pretty much, by now.
you negotiate the use of your sister’s car for a few weeks, and leave yorkshire on a rainy thursday morning, water sluicing across the windscreen as you get used to driving an automatic, as you anxiously replay the same paranoid fantasies in your head. you arrive on a warm, dry thursday afternoon, having forgotten that you can’t park outside the flat, and so you drive a mile and a half east and park on your sister’s old road, then walk back.
you and your flatmate spend the weekend in a haze of anxiety, packing old wine boxes that you duct tape over and over, praying they’ll hold for long enough to get down the three flights of stairs in your building – after that, we’ll take our chances, as long as they get into the van in one piece we can unpack at the other end.
on saturday night, you order your final chinese takeaway from the local restaurant, an adieu to the neighbourhood you have spent the last two years in.
on sunday night, you share a lidl pizza, from the fancy range: charred pepperoni and sweet red drop peppers like jewels on the surface. you set the fire alarm off, one last time.
on monday, you collect your keys and think to yourself it’s too small, i fucked this up, this is a mistake and drive back to the old flat and the two of you simply vibrate with anxiety until the men in the van arrive, two nice russians, who are unbelievably kind and unbelievably strong, who load your entire flat’s worth of furniture in under two hours. the older guy takes some photos of your drinks globe, which is damaged from when you put it together backwards, while the younger guy stands next to him and quietly spins the globe, watching the map drift.
once everything has been unpacked on the other side, once you have soothed yourself that everything still works and nothing has been stolen or mislaid, the two of you unpack the record player and google the limited cocktail ingredients you have in the house to see what drinks you can make. your partner sends the two of you twenty quid and the name of a takeaway nearby.
you have your first whiskey sours, first with lemon juice and then when that runs out, lime. you put folklore on. you reach into the warm foil-lined bag and take out lemon and herb butterfly chicken, pull it apart with your fingers, shake peri salt onto the paper bag of fries. you watch tv together; you feel giddy, the two of you marvelling that you actually live here now, that your furniture all fits and looks good and that you have a big balcony and a garden and space for plants.
later in the week you will use the remaining peri salt to season fried halloumi, on chips, to make your own butterfly chicken breasts; you will fry tofu in curry powder and eat it with the ramen your sister gave you. you will share another pizza – co-op spinach and ricotta, the small clumps of soft cheese sticking to your teeth as you eat your half in the new bath. you will make a chickpea salad and chicken nuggets and a lime and honey vinaigrette, and more whiskey sours, and gin and tonics with persimmon gin and simple syrup still warm from the stove.
tonight, you will, for the first time since december, sleep in your own bed.