The Year of the Rat
A Sunday morning essay/mope about the days that used to be
Living alone was a bad move. I was 19, and I needed people around me. I was social, and opinionated — and I’m at the least still one of those things, always — and back then I had done nothing about sorting out a flatting group at the end of a year in a hostel, simply imagining it would sort itself out. My room had been the party station, I had let people use my computer. They could write their essays while I slept in the corner, or didn’t sleep and read a book about Charles de Gaulle and called it French homework. We had Sunday morning movies in my room because I had a TV and a VHS. We had Thursday and Friday and Saturday night drinks. And then, at the end of the year as the flatting groups sorted themselves out, I never really spotted that people didn’t want to live with the reckless, irresponsible enabler. I was also wildly uninterested in doing any sanctioned work; only interested in the connections between irresponsible ‘play’ and determining that as some sort of life experience.
In the bedsit where I ended up, my flatmate for half of the year was a giant rat.
I had a desk at one end, a bed at the other, and there was this rather weird, large, walk-in wardrobe that you had to step up into. So I put a comfy chair in there and used to listen to records with a lava lamp glowing.
The dishes became civilisations. The bathroom was cold and the water was barely a drip. Everything was really horrible. But it was the depression of privilege.
I would spend nearly whole weeks sleeping on the floor at a flat in town — ironically the new party-central, where I was the unwanted extra tenant; extra tension. I’d spend half a day gearing up for the long walk home (actually about 20 minutes, and the sort of thing I’d do three or four times over just for fun these days). When I finally made it home, there’d be a horrendous stink from the washing I’d left in the machine four or five days earlier. The rat would have invited its mates through the wall. The dishes were leaning towers but cemented strong by scraps.
I listened to The Murder Ballads by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Songs In The Key Of Life by Stevie Wonder. I watched movies like Six Degrees of Separation and Once Upon A Time in America. I read the beat poets and Bukowski and Owen Marshall’s short stories.
I went to Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia and had my mind ripped open. I sat in the chair in the wardrobe for two days thinking about it, with just the lava lamp and Brian Eno’s ambient albums. Also Stevie Wonder’s soundtrack to the documentary about plants, and Jean Michel Jarre. The rat was so worried about me he started checking in more regularly.
It all got too much — several times. And I remember a package arriving for my birthday. It was a couple of books, and some vouchers, and I was genuinely sick. And I didn’t know what to do — or who I was trying to be.
Students loans didn’t need any sort of approval back then, they were not allocated in drips, you could just phone up and ask for the cash, it appeared immediately in your account. I signed up and added to my debt. I took a grand and bought a boxset of Mike Oldfield CDs and took ten of my friends out for dinner — many of them looked at me with frustration and pity when I paid for the meal. In my mind it was a nice gesture, and also just fun, in their minds it was embarrassing and strange.
The student health doctor walked out of the room to get something, so I stole the pad of medical certificates, and started writing those like taxi chits, handing them in to tutors in place of attendance.
Just over halfway through the year, my dad turned up with cleaning products and spent hours with me scrubbing the place. We barely spoke. And he loaded my furniture and we moved it to a new place, where I could live with some friends. They’d had a person leave, they needed someone quick.
The landlord of the bedsit, said when he met me that he knew my grandfather through the church and had a good feeling about me. When I left he told me I had been infected with the devil and he knew from day one that something was wrong.
I spent the rest of that year in a flat with no lounge, five of us in small bedrooms and one big (clean) kitchen the only communal area. It was nice to have people around me. I listened to a lot of Neil Young and Throwing Muses. I wrote most nights and just decided that varsity was something I’d try again the following year. I wrote my first full book of poems, though no one will ever see it. It’s ‘published’ in an exercise book in a loft in my house. I dare not look at it, but it’s there — for safekeeping. A court order I’ve imposed on myself.
In the scheme of my life, 1996 was the worst year. Though it would not be the last.
A tough read, the loneliness, even the rat was worried. Good on Dad, good on you!