“Yeah I know…I will, I’ll say something as soon as he’s home…Well that was then and this is – …Exactly, it’s gone too far this time… Okay…Yeah I love you too Dad. Bye.”
I hang up and pocket my phone, turning the corner that I’d been lingering beside for 15 minutes, getting a hot-ear lecture on standing up for myself and my house.
I shouldn’t have mentioned the flooded bathroom. Flooding was a sore subject for Dad; he’d only just reluctantly thrown away the soiled living room rug.
“But I lugged it across half of Morocco!” He’d cried, “I had to pay for extra luggage!” I’d left the room at that point, it wasn’t the time to remind Dad of his air privilege, or play the Grounded gen card.
I walk across the grass to the front door. I remember the first few years that I lived here I’d made a point of sticking to the pathway. I was a new homeowner, lawn-proud and one crushed daisy away from erecting a sign. But like the others in the country, my lawn is now yellow and shrivelling in the unseasonal heatwave.
Such a congenial word. As if heat were just a child waving at everyone excitedly from the backseat. I’d call this a heatsmash.
Stepping through the door, I collide with a wall of dry heat that stings my eyes and fills my chest, sitting heavily on top of the resolve I just vowed to on the phone.
He’s left the heating on, again.
Over the last few months with this new tenant, I have perfected this flipbook of emotions: from fluttering rage to misery, swiftly through vengeance and into acceptance and reasoning.
He’s simply gone out and left the heating on by mistake. He must’ve had some clothes to dry urgently for work. Understandable. Forgivable.
Except no, because I can hear him in the kitchen, frying something in deep, crackling oil.
I feel too weak for this right now, maybe after dinner. When he’s satiated and lethargic with food. Just now my Dad suggested I ‘get him while he’s down’, but he never seems to be down. His retorts evolve into accusations before you have time to frown, and its often only later that I realise I uttered the apology, not him.
I go upstairs to my room, open the two windows and check for the hundredth time that my one diminutive radiator is turned off. It is, not that it helps.
My tenant can, at best, be described as inconsiderate.
The flooded bathroom is merely the most recent in a long line of things that I am inwardly logging as ‘incidents.’
It started as soon as he moved in two months ago. I didn’t select him, my previous tenant had to leave in a hurry during a family illness. They’d met this new guy on a bus and vouched for him. They presented me with signed contracts and a full deposit. I could hardly argue with a soon-to-be-orphan.
I’d shrugged, how bad could it be?
Initially I hardly saw him, which was fine by me; I’ve always thought ghost tenants are underrated. But he was not so much a ghost as a poltergeist.
First was the bread. I found it in the bin, an almost-full boule nestled among slops of soggy muesli. The stink and shame of retrieving it wasn’t worth the point that its rescue would no doubt have failed to make.
I left a note on the fridge door: Please do not throw out my bread.
That evening I found an addendum in red biro: It was mouldy all over, did you a favour.
Astonished, I wrote: THAT’S FLOUR! but screwed up the paper and pocketed it. A simple misunderstanding, I thought. I chastised myself for being a sourdough snob, out of touch with the average Hovis-home.
But it didn’t end there, next were the cherry tomatoes, thrown out for being On the turn.
The twisty, nobbled carrots were deemed Unpeelable – pointless!
The eggs I’d stored on my shelf were gone within a day: Had a feather on them, probs diseased.
The gold-top milk with its precious layer of cream: Defo turning to cheese.
It’s about midnight; I remove my ear buds – silence. I head straight to the kitchen and find, painfully, that the heating is still turned on. I cringe at my post-it note instructions taped beside the timer ‘in case of coldwave!, it too is yellowing in the heat of its neglect.
At the kitchen table, I compose three notes before settling on: Please, please make sure to turn the heating off. We don’t actually use it at all these days.
Good. Informative. It is just a gentle reminder of his subordinate position in the ranks of the house. Or, rather, it is a plea from the homeowner who will be stuck with the quarterly bill.
I fix myself toast and eat it in my room. Better crumbs in the bed than kitchen-table small talk over an unexploded post-it bomb. My cowardice tastes sour, but nowhere near as sour as the fretting insomnia of domestic conflict. Confrontations live comfortably in the tomorrow.
On Fridays, I wake up without an alarm. It’s my late shift at the pharmacy, and I shuffle into the kitchen at 9am. The window is open over the back garden, and it’s hot and blue outside, like it has been since February.
I should trim the wisteria around the window, it’s starting to overextend and wilt onto the sill. Perhaps it has come looking for cooler air in the shade. Survival instinct is a funny thing.
When I bought the house, the wisteria was a stubby little bush, trimmed to within an inch of its life by the estate agents who thought that it might ‘disrupt the silhouette of the brickwork’. My Mum had squealed with glee.
“South facing too! The flowers will be so beautiful when it blooms and the bees will love it.”
I didn’t have the heart to correct her, and left her to it as she nailed trellis to every available flat surface. The flowers came, but the bees did not.
Sitting down with a brewing coffee, I see it – my note almost obscured under the pepper mill, with the dreaded fresh red ink.
I thought it would help dry out the bathroom flood. Won’t bother next time.
Rage swelled up my throat. How easily he distances himself from his own wilful act of stupidity: the bathroom flood. So definitive, so inevitable, like a natural disaster that he was bravely wading into armed with a giant energy bill. And next time? What future destruction is he planning, or rather not planning, for?
I screw up the paper and hold it in my fist. I screw up my eyes and hold in a scream. Inhale. Exhale. I won’t let him ruin another day. This is my favourite morning of the week, my long slow mornings in an empty house, with only the buzz of neighbours and the tidal sounds of distant traffic.
I will do something about that wisteria: a restorative act, something just for me.
Eventually, I find the secateurs in a bathroom cabinet beside nail clippers and reams of single-use sample sachets that I’m 90% sure are now illegal contraband.
Once in the back garden, I can see the bush in its full glory, it had taken to the trellis eagerly like spiders’ legs, and quickly consumed the ground floor of the house from end to end. Its shape is still defined by the overzealous trimming it received years ago, so it remains shorter than its bouldering cousins.
Next to the parched lawn, it looks like a miracle.
The secret to its success is its proximity to the water waste pipe, which feeds it even when the sky, and I, do not.
In places it must be three foot deep, and below the top layer of violet trumpets and luminous green leaves, its fibrous woven stems are as thick as moss.
From space, this house must look like a brightly moulding chunk of Red Leicester. It wouldn’t survive long under my tenant’s regime.
I wade in, but trip over something on the obscured ground. Feeling it out with my foot, it’s rounded and stiff. Some tubing from the kitchen maybe? Something miscellaneous but essential which I’d better not stand on. But it really is in the way. I step out of the bush and get down on my knees. Lifting the masses of green with one hand, I blindly reach in with the other.
I suddenly remember TV shows like this, where reluctant hands would feel out an unsuspecting tarantula for the chance to win a holiday. That’s one temptation I don’t think the Grounded gen misses.
Something sharp jabs me under the fingernail and I draw back. I get lower, eventually pressing my cheek against the dry, fractured lawn. From here, I can see exactly what it is.
Its browned needles still dangle traces of tinsel, like tragically un-alluring lace. Our Christmas tree, the one I’d asked him to take to the communal compost two months ago. Like a fool, I had attributed his alacrity to a desire to please his new landlady.
It lies on its side, about five foot long, its branches bent harshly down where it must have been shunted into the small space from the side, like a ship in the wrong bottle, unable to unfurl.
Incensed, I reach in. With leaves in my eyes and needles in my palm, I seize the spine of the tree and tug. It barely budges, sitting behind years of thick wisteria stems and woven into two months of growth. It would be best to leave it, to let it rot and feed the roots of the wisteria. It wouldn’t do anything different in the council’s compost bins, after all.
But seeing it here, squatting like a toad below my kitchen window and making a conspirator of my wisteria, I cannot stand the thought of it staying. I brace with my legs and tug again, and again. Ignoring the snapping sounds of wisteria stems, I wrench the tree from its hiding place, and collapse back onto the lawn. A flutter of violet falls around me, a horribly triumphant scene of destruction.
Sat on the ground, holding the Christmas tree and surrounded by wisteria guts, I feel I could cry. A thick tentacle of torn wisteria stem beside me is still attached to a splintered chunk of Mum’s trellis, complete with rusting nail and shards of fresh red brick.
I don’t wait for acceptance, I don’t want my revenge to be cooled. I throw my weight forward and drag the tree by its stump. Leaving a trail of fresh leaves and brown needles, I haul it along the side passage of the house, through the gate and right onto the front steps. I prop it up, covering the door handle.
I think about sending him a photo, no note, just a visual conviction – evidence A. But it’s already later than I thought; I need to get to the pharmacy. I leave through the back door, so as to not lose my nerve.
Work is long and hot. I ask to be delegated to the back room, but we’re a person short so I can’t avoid the front desk. People are agitated, it seems like we get more shouters every day. The unseasonal heat began as pleasant but soon became startling, and two months of unrelenting sun has laid a film of irritation across everyone.
The last thing you want to do to a half-poached diabetic is tell them their prescription has been cut down to help the starved supply chain.
I lock up with the manager at 10pm. I think she was largely promoted because of her unwavering optimism, more than her pharmaceutical knowledge.
“Well it’s meant to be 25C tomorrow, that should chill people out shouldn’t it?”
I give a weary chuckle and say goodbye. I appreciate her hopefulness, though I can’t help but think it’s what got us into all this trouble in the first place.
It’s not until I get off the bus that I remember the declaration of war than I left on our front steps. I shouldn’t have done it, I could’ve just dragged it the 50 metres to the bins.
I can smell smoke in the air, someone must be having a BBQ. It’s heart-warming to think that some people are still embracing the heatwave.
How long before a heatwave stops being a ‘wave’? When it becomes a tidal surge I suppose, or a tsunami.
The smoke gets thicker, it must be the family next door, they are always having friends round. As I turn the corner to our street I am reminded of the conversation I had with my Dad the evening before. One battle at a time.
It’s dark, but I can see the uninterrupted outline of the front door – the tree is gone. The relief forces a laugh from my throat. I’ve won this time.
Having shown I can give as good as I get, maybe he and I will sit down in a few days with a glass of wine and joke about our rocky start.
As I feel in my backpack for keys, something stings my foot and makes me jump. Ant season is earlier every year. Just as I reach down to soothe my skin, the top of the other foot is stung too. Leaping to the doorstep, I reach for my phone and turn on the torch. My skin is pink but not punctured. I raise the beam and find the air milky over the lawn. I nearly scream when I see it.
On the scorched earth, the blackened ribcage of the Christmas tree looks like the leftovers from a shantytown dinner.
It’s so horrible I am scared to look away, and keep the light on it while I unlock the door, in case it finds its feet and scuttles towards me. I slam the door on the carcass, and charge upstairs towards his room. I throw open his door with such force that it flies back at me, cracking my elbow as I yell into the darkness.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“What is it?” He says, so calmly that it throws me off. He’s sitting up in bed facing me, I can’t see his face, just a neat outline of his head and shoulders against the white curtains.
“Do you want to burn this place down?”
“Oh the tree,” he sounds relieved, so oblivious to my anger, “I watched it until it was out, it’s not dangerous.”
“You burned it on my garden!”
Silhouetted shoulders shrug. “You told me to get rid of it.”
I stare into the blank space where I imagine his eyes are. “Why do you destroy everything?”
“Well,” he says, “why didn’t you say something sooner?”
“I –” my throat closes up on weak words, “I’m telling you now.”
His head turns, he’s looking out the window over the front garden, over the scorched earth. “It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?”
— This piece was originally written for Eggplant Zine, a local quarterly magazine promoting sustainable companies and exploring creative responses to climate change. —
L. Addicott 