I was, for the first time in my life, completely alone.
I had done a Skype interview for a flat share on the Old Kent Road. The landlord was odd. He insisted that he do a birth chart before I moved in, to check my harmony with the house, and I was asked my exact date of birth along with the time of day. I was very charmed by this, of course. It seemed exactly the kind of thing that would happen to a young heroine, moving to London alone. Plus I wanted anecdotes, for James. I couldn’t bear the thought of him making stories and me having none.
The flat was eleven floors up, no lift, and so I dragged my suitcase once again. I arrived, knocked on the door, and found my new landlord in a string vest and boxers.
“Sun in Taurus!” he said, by way of greeting. “Moon in Scorpio! Hello!”
“Hello.”
“Luxurious and hot-headed,” he carried on. “Passionate. I hope you won’t be keeping me awake, bringing boys in every hour of the day and night.”
His name was Justin. He was not gay, as this kind of language might imply, but a pervert.
My room was the shape of an old fifty-pence piece. It had a rolled-out futon and a heavy wardrobe with no drawers. For three months, I hung what could be hung and kept all my knickers and socks in my suitcase.
My first morning in the flat, Justin followed me around constantly, like a dog with an anxiety disorder. He talked about his workout routine, his job selling electronics at the airport, his twenties as a dancer in Berlin, his dream to dance again in the London Olympics—which were holding auditions, and soon—and his general love of spiritualism and the occult. He talked about my birth chart, going into extensive patter about the alignment of planets, and then finishing with an Austin Powers impression: “Does it make you horny, baby?”
I had never met someone so odd who could simultaneously be so charmless. Even now I can feel myself failing to trap him with words. I had always assumed that I loved kooky people, but maybe now I hated them.
I went to shower and he followed me to the bathroom door, then sat outside and continued to talk while I washed myself.
“Justin!” I shouted, from under the weak spray of tepid water. “Can you please fuck off?”
He fucked off. When I came out of the shower he was gone, but he had left a little tortilla wrap with ham and lettuce in it on a plate on the floor. There was a Post-it stuck to it, stuck right onto the tortilla wrap. It said: For you.
I took the plate and ate the wrap on my futon, still dripping wet, and burst into tears. It was just the kind of thing James might have done—a version of it, anyway—and now a weirdo was doing it.
But, even through my tears, I could feel something happening within myself. I had told a stranger to fuck off, and I had meant it. I had drawn a line with someone. I had never really done that before.
* * *
England was not exempt from the recession, but London was. Or rather, it was responding to the recession by having the exact same number of jobs and just paying everyone less for them. This might have been a relief for some but was a mathematical puzzle to me. I didn’t understand how an ￡18,000-a-year assistant job could require a first-class degree and over a year’s experience.
A bigger riddle was my CV. I had done a solid five-month internship with Deenie Harrington. I had put a book out into the world with her. I was in the acknowledgements. But what if they called her?
“Just put ‘references available upon request,’” James said, when we Skyped about it.
“But what happens when they request them?” I replied. “Whose name will I give them?”
“Mine. I’ll pretend to be her.”
“That will never work.”
“Hang on,” he said. He carried his laptop out into the hallway of his building. “Sorry. Sab is taking her seventh shower of the day and I can hear her singing.”
“Any good?”
“No.”
To my delight, James and Sabrina were not getting along as housemates. He found her prim and judgemental, and despite selling him on the delights of New York’s social scene, she wanted to spend every night doing craft projects.
“I’m watching her knit,” he snapped. “I’m twenty-three years old in the greatest city on earth, and I’m watching this dumb bitch watch TV and knit.”
Nobody knew his name yet at the internship. They were briefly interested in him on his first day, when they attempted to locate their grandmothers’ birthplaces by simply repeating the words “Louth?” and “No, Longford?” at him, but no one had talked to him since. His accent, which was strongly Cork with flecks of Mancunian in it, wasn’t particularly hard to understand, but it was unusual and hard to place, so people were unable to focus on what he had to say when he spoke to them.
“Today someone said that it’s a ‘good thing’ I don’t want to be in front of the camera,” he said. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“At least you have a real job.”
I did not have a real job. I didn’t have a National Insurance number either, which was why I was working at a pub that paid me cash in hand until I could legally work in the UK. I had got the job by walking down every street in central London and handing in my CV to bars, making sure I hammed up my accent as much as I could.
“Can you do the foam?” one bar manager asked.
“Excuse me?”
“The clover in the foam? In the Guinness?”
“Yes.”
I could not do the clover in the foam in the Guinness. When the request to make a clover eventually came up, I looked sad and said that this keg of Guinness had “travelled badly” from Ireland and that the clover wouldn’t settle. Amazingly, they seemed to believe me.
I passed a lot of landmarks on my way to work. I went over Tower Bridge on the bus, like a child in a cartoon about London, and saw the Tower of London and St. Paul’s Cathedral. It helped. A landscape costs nothing, so it always helps. But more often, I wondered what exactly I was doing there. London wasn’t my dream. It was James’s. I had never even wanted to leave Cork very badly, until living in Cork felt like a panic attack waiting to happen.
James and I had talked about me moving to New York, but the visa was too complicated, and so James had suggested that I stay in Ireland and work on my application. It was obvious to me that this was the most pathetic option of all. The only dignified thing to do was to move to London and make a go of it on my own. I had already lost so much dignity in 2010. I needed to get some back.