Out

Another long night coming up. I've got to finish editing the local real ale drinkers' magazine by tomorrow morning. People send me their reports, pleased with themselves, thinking that they're submitting the finished article, imagining that all I do is I click Ctrl+C and then Ctrl+P, before sending it away in an email. They don't see the hours and hours I spend correcting their shite formatting, reversing their repeated taps on the space bar in place of paragraphs or indentation, their longwinded imitations of speech with capitalisation used instead of punctuation, all composed in the lazy dictionary-shunning spellchecked spelling of people who sit in pubs bemoaning modern educational standards.

Both the lodgers announced that they are moving out the other day. It didn't really sink in until Friday. I was in town and bumped into --- who used to live in this house. "What are you doing in half an hour?" she asked. "I think we know that, don't we?"

I went to get £20 out and it wouldn't let me, because Tom has -- correctly -- cancelled his standing order for the rent, so the ATM would only let me have £15. I withdrew that much, and met her in the pub. I apologised for not being able to buy her drink, and told her about Donna, whom I'd rung earlier; and Trina reading the letter to her. She told me about a threesome she'd had in the place in which she works once everyone had gone home. It was an enjoyable, sexy chat.

I came back to the girls' house. On Saturday night someone rang me asking to see the room "now" -- as only foreigners do. I told her twenty minutes and went back to the house to let her in. She's Polish and a cleaner. Polish -- that puts her, in the net of stereotypes by which I judge prospective tenants -- in the first class. They're grafters, and direct. She's likely to be able to pay the rent and will be out all day, not like these irritatingly shy Vietnamese students who take "all bills included" to mean using the central heating to re-create the climatic conditions of Saigon for twenty hours a day.

I showed her the two rooms. Both Tim and the other lodger were out. Both their rooms were in a strewn disarray, the carelessness of people to whom a house will never belong, just as, recursively, this house is not mine and will never be a home.

She noted the lack of wardrobes. There's these spindly metal things with canvas pockets at the sides. "There is not much space. I am a woman," she joked, second language-ly. Haven't heard from her since.

It is a problem for me, and I went to bed at the girls' house imagining sleeping in foil wrappers in the park and wondering what to do with my record collection. If no-one replies soon I can only ask Seriouscrush for a deferral of the rent which was due four days ago.