‘Don’t worry about that,’ says the estate agent, as he wrenches open a window. ‘That will go.’
Enjoy the delights of local green space and nearby café culture in this modest ground-floor flat, with bright interiors, a charming flow and handsome decking outside.
The estate agent has walked straight from another viewing a few streets away, which was a mistake, because it’s hot for this late in summer, and now even his suit jacket has sweat marks.
‘Seb?’ he says, as if they’ve never met before, because he’d rather Seb forget the other viewings. ‘Just you?’
Seb has been leaning against a low and crumbling brick wall, crossing and uncrossing his arms, casting glances at the chunks of scrap metal in the neighbour’s front garden.
‘Yes,’ Seb says. ‘Clara can’t make it.’ A pause. Conversation seems to take a lot of effort for him. ‘She’s at a festival. A film festival.’
The main road thrums at the end of the long street, buses and motorbikes zipping past like insects soaring towards a windshield.
‘A festival?’ the estate agent says. He hasn’t really been listening. He pumps one fist, approximates the bassline of some rave music. ‘Oonts, oonts, oonts.’
In the long silence that follows, the estate agent fumbles with the keys. This property is on the nicer end of the rental market, a terraced house with plenty of character, split in two some time ago and subdivided into upstairs and downstairs flats. They’re viewing the ground floor. A decent bay window in the bedroom, and a fireplace which they are under no circumstances allowed to use. A good bit of decking out the back, which actually gets a bit of sun, on certain days, in certain months. They move through the space quietly, as if viewing an art exhibition. Seb caresses the built-in bookshelves, tests the sturdiness of the free-standing bath with one tattooed hand. Outside, he pauses over the lavender bush in the built-in planter, the bird-feeder hanging from the wrought-iron stairs that lead from the upstairs neighbours’ flat down to their portion of the garden. His expression is unreadable. At the end of the tour, he clears his throat, then points to his phone.
‘I’m just going to take some photos.’
‘Right,’ says the estate agent. ‘Yes. Let me get out of your way.’
Seb takes a grainy picture of the living room.
‘I’ll just get out of your way.’
Seb takes a grainy picture of the bedroom.
‘I’ll try and get out of your way.’
They reach an impasse in the tiny kitchen, then in the even tinier bathroom. Still, Seb takes his phone diligently from room to room, showing it every nook and cranny, cradling it with steady care as if the phone itself is his girlfriend. This photographic tour takes longer than the tour itself. But the ceilingsare high, so the flat is cool. On a day like today, being stuck in here is a mercy.
‘Hi,’ says Seb, into his phone, once the photos have been sent and safely received.
Seb gives the estate agent a look, and he realises only now that he’s been staring, bug-eyed and thirsty. He wipes his sweaty brow with one damp shirtsleeve, then holds up his hands. ‘I’ll get out of your way.’
He steps into the dim corridor, presses himself up against the now-closed door to hear what Seb is saying.
‘It’s good,’ is what he’s saying. ‘I think it’s really good.’
The girlfriend seems happy to take Seb’s word for it. When the call ends, the estate agent gives it just enough time to make it look like he wasn’t eavesdropping, then re-enters the room.
‘So?’ he says, in the least presumptive voice possible.
Seb’s face doesn’t crack. He taps his phone against his palm a few times. ‘The landlord,’ he says. ‘How do they feel about dogs?’
their new neighbour
Five years ago, a van pulled up outside Cam’s flat, and a couple got out of it. Since then, he’s been trying to pinpoint the exact moment that they ruined his life.
Cam didn’t have much to do with the couple in that first year. So, they were always ‘the couple’, neither he nor Maisie knowing their real names.
The couple are planning something, Maisie might say, because she’d seen the woman through their living-room window, standing on her tiptoes and pinning Post-it notes in sequence on the wall. The couple are having a party, Cam might observe, because the walls were now thumping and next door’s garden was full of people, the man hastily lighting candles on a caterpillar cake and presenting it, self-consciously, to his girlfriend. Numbers, in helium balloons. ‘Two’ and ‘six’. The couple are having sex again, Maisie might say. Yet again, Cam might add, later that same day. Always at it. Always omitting the final part of that sentence: ‘… and we aren’t.’
Their first interaction with the couple came when they’d lived next door for almost an entire year. Snow was fallingin droves outside their window, and Maisie was sitting at her laptop ripping Bombay Bicycle Club songs off YouTube. Behind her, outside the window, the fucking dog. Before then, the dog had mainly stood on the couple’s back patio, staring unblinkingly at Cam as its owner loomed over it, smoking. But one section of their shared fence had blown down, and now the dog was suddenly in Cam and Maisie’s back garden, urinating on their frozen rosemary bush. They’d corralled the dog home, called a fencing company. Then, a knock at the door.
‘Jasper wanted to say sorry,’ the woman had said, proffering a bottle of wine. ‘I’m Clara, by the way.’
Maisie and Clara started talking. Then they started making plans. So it was that the couple were invited round for a dinner party in the spring of that second year, even though the only contact Cam had had with the boyfriend was a brisk nod shared once when they’d uncomfortably coincided in taking out the bins.
