Mr Hirst is looking round hellpits at the moment, trying to work out which one he and his partner are to sink a portion of the rest of their working lives incomes into:
He has, as always, cut to the main cause of discomfort behind going through this process. While we’re incapable of staying totally objective while being shown around the places that the estate agent has insultingly decided we are best suited to, most people would really rather not feel like they’re judging the current tenants of these places – certainly, if you’re English, as Rol and I are, you would never dream of saying anything at all negative while in earshot of those tenants.
It’s also kind of difficult, when viewing other people’s homes, to gauge what is your own personal aesthetic response, and what is a reasonable expectation of the current housing market – I mean, what you can reasonably expect to get for the amount of money you’re going to be able to afford, and at the same time, whether or not, as a person who rarely gets to go into large numbers of stranger’s homes, whether you have an appropriate metric for what is squalid, and what is simply a bit yuck.
I’ve worked out a fairly simple litmus test to get to the root of this issue when stood on the doorstep – that awkward period when you want to get away and make a decision in private, but don’t want to be rude or abrupt to the agent – and it is this:
If the estate agent doesn’t try a positive spin on a property – if they can’t even muster a condescending grin and a bit of banter about impending clean-up and decoration – then the house probably is, in fact, a shite-hole of the highest order. And by extension, if the agent is rendered speechless by the conditions within, you can assume that it isn’t just you: the people inside really were pretty horrid.
I’ve had to move quite a few times over the last few years, for one reason or another, and so have looked at an awful lot of rental properties. Thankfully, although many of the places have been mediocre, only two have failed the above test.
The first was a house that J (my hetero life-mate) and I had suggested to us by a perfectly lovely agent.
It looked nice from outside, was the right price, and in a fairly nice area – I had lived nearby a few times in the previous couple of years – so we had quite high hopes. It was a corner house, and from its footprint it was clear that the place might have some nice character, and the landlord was okay with pets, which was good for us.
We tried not to let the dead-eyed, skinny thirty-something guy with greying skin that answered the door put us off, as he at first looked through us kind of blankly, and then responded with a kind of spastic enthusiasm as the agent took charge, and let us in.
The hall that he showed us into was a decent size, and had a spiral staircase, the sort of idiosyncrasy that I’m normally totally swayed by in a house, that makes me blind to all sorts of other stuff.
However, soon after things took a turn.
First, we were shown into a dark room that was kitted out to be a living room, with a sofa and such, but that also had the suggestions of sleeping arrangements – clothes strewn around, and stuffs – the agent told us that the tenants were two brothers, and suggested that this was where one of them slept.
On the other side of the hall, there was the living room proper, an unusually shaped space that almost arced round to what smelled like it must be the kitchen. My first response was quite positive, but then I couldn’t help but be swayed by the cramped conditions in there, which weren’t aided by the obstacle of a barefoot little girl, little more then five or six years old, who sat in the middle of the slim corridor between sofa and whatever other crap was piled up in the room.
The girl was sat right in our way, and at first glance seemed to be playing with one of the many toys on the floor. The thing is, thinking back, all I can remember is that when we came in, her head seemed to move unusually slow on her neck as she looked up at us, and she just had this slack look of complete under-stimulation that unnerved both J and I.
At this point, we became aware of the other sibling – both looked very similar to each other, and the mind kept trying to flip back and forth between the two, trying to work out which was the slow brother. The way the two men and the child interacted, in that tiny space, just seemed so alien, as if they were almost totally unaware of each other.
The kitchen, or the entrance into the kitchen, off this living room, I remember being dominated by a birdcage, with a parrot the most lively creature in the house so far. The kitchen was small, a sliver crammed onto the back of the house, and if anything, the chaps had made the space look smaller, while having almost nothing that looked capable of supplying nutrition in it. There was a generic “food cooking” smell in there, but if you asked me to describe it, I’d have to pick the word “brown” over any actual familiar food substance.
Upstairs was worse. The bathroom (I think) had some kind of substantial crack in it – I want to say in the floor, but that doesn’t sound right, does it? – and the rooms up there were jumbled close enough to each other to destroy any notion of privacy. The “box” room was actual little more then a long, deep cupboard. No space for a bed, not even a single one.
In fact, despite being told that the little girl was the daughter of one of the brothers, we hadn’t yet seen any indication of a space made available for her to sleep. In later conference, J and I discovered that we both realised this at the same time, when we saw the master bedroom.
J, the agent, and I, stood in the doorway of this room, and between us managed a passable approximation of evaluation, but later, J and I agreed that we were far from comfy in that space. For a start, this was early evening, daylight outside, and this room was completely black. I can’t remember whether the window was blocked off by a large piece of standing furniture, or whether the windows were simply screened off with black material, but I remember clearly that it wasn’t just curtains making it dark.
In the middle of the room, there was a low double bed. And just above the head of the bed, there were dozens of small photos, emanating outwards like a damp stain from a central point.
All of the pictures were of the little girl, and while neither J nor I were willing to swear to it afterwards, I think we were both pretty certain that we remembered several of the pictures being intimate or undressed enough that after first glance, we found ourselves awkwardly dodging even looking in that direction. The three of us, J, the agent, and I, were in there for almost a minute, almost silent as if taking in the room, and not looking at the main wall.
At this point I should mention that I’m not some massive prude about images of kids – I think Sally Mann’s photography is beautiful, for example, and fly into a rage whenever I hear about some poor sods getting arrested for trying to process bath-time pictures of their kids at Boots – but something about that room felt less like schmaltzy family-time, and more like Se7en or CSI.
Nor am I an alarmist who insists on deifying the innocence of the young or any of that nonsense. And neither is J. But once we were outside, both J and I openly admitted to each other that we were relieved to be out of the place – which seemed even more oppressive once you left – and I think we were both surprised when the agent was as uncomfortable and shocked as we were. None of us could say for certain that we’d seen anything to indicate that the girl was at risk, but the whole experience creeped us out.
Thankfully, the next time I experienced this blip in Agent/Property solidarity wasn’t nearly as disconcerting, although it was a bit more definitive.
Girl One and I were looking for rental places, at the beginning of the year. We weren’t having a lot of luck, and were really about ready for somewhere nifty to fall into our laps. When a place – a really cheap place – came up in one of the nicer areas that I’ve lived here in Southampton, hopes were high.
The agent told us that there were students living there at the moment, and to bear in mind that it would be getting a complete clean and overhaul before the next tenants took it.
However, what they weren’t prepared for, and as such hadn’t prepared us for, was complete squalor.
Despite promises of student slobbishness and decadence, the door was answered by a wide-eyed, brown-skinned lady in her late thirties/early forties, large and skittish in a sari or something similar, and without a single word of English. That in itself wasn’t too shocking, and fair play to the agent, she took the clear contrast between the inhabitants and what she had been expecting totally in her stride.
The lady seemed to be expecting us, and muttered shyly, retreating backwards into the first room to our left as we moved down the corridor toward her. Looking into the room, she was already busying herself doing something. We looked at the room, and there was probably a bed and other room stuff in there, but my one abiding memory of it was at least one big bag of Pilau rice incongruously dumped in there.
Between that room and the back of the house was a stairwell, again to our left. Between us and either of these things was a tiny bare-arsed toddler, too young and unkempt to identify gender. This one, at least, seemed healthy and friendly enough, but the lady made no move to tend to it as we tried to weave around without stepping on it.
In the middle of the floor, just past the child and just before we made it into the wide, empty and dirty kitchen/diner, there sat a disposable nappy, clearly used and thankfully folded over. The agent put a brave face on it, and led us past.
Beyond what I’ve said already, the kitchen didn’t make much of an impression. The bathroom at the back of the house was pretty vile as well, but as I mentioned at the head of this, it’s difficult to know whether it was bad beyond normal, student rental standards and expectation, as they stand today.
I can’t even remember what the second of the two upstairs rooms looked like, because the first was so discombobulating. At first, it looked like the first daylit, bright and passable room in the house, and this illusion was aided by the ordinary, normally dressed, and perfectly friendly teenage girl sitting on the bed in the middle of the room, watching TV.
However, it didn’t take long to realise that, underneath one of those windows, there rested a radiator. Not attached to the wall. Well, still attached to the wall, in theory. But the bit of wall it was attached to was no longer attached to any of the rest of the wall.
I don’t mean that the radiator was a bit loose on the wall. And I don’t mean one of those little radiators, either. I mean that it was sitting almost a foot away from the wall, with quite a lot of masonry attached to it – such that you almost expected to see more daylight through the hole behind it.
That kind of broke that house for us. If the little girl could be in a room with something like that, and not bat an eye, it spoke to the general quality of the house, as far as we were concerned.
Again, the agent didn’t seem to know what to say… she seemed to take a step in the direction of trying to sell us on the place, but didn’t have the heart to keep walking that way.
I do understand that landlords clean up houses between tenants – although they seem to be doing a worse job of that these days – but there are sorts of creepy squalor that, once you see them in a space, are difficult to shake from your memory of it, I think. And it’s worrying to me that I’ve stayed in or visited squats that were in better shape then these two places were.
But at least they made it impossible to doubt ourselves, in the aftermath… because there was no way we could feel guilty, being grossed out by those places!
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