(sublinhados meus)
I loved my landlord
The peculiar intimacy of tenancy
My favourite home in London was a neat three-storey townhouse in Haringey right next to Wood Green. It was at a strange junction between the rough and mildly frightening Finsbury Park and the hilly Eden of Crouch End. When we needed to get the tube we walked south, past halal butchers and kebab shops – and when we wanted brunch we walked north, where frothy flat whites, avocado toast and poached eggs awaited. I loved that house. After the hell of our first year in London (during which we discovered a dead body in the flat beneath ours), the clean white walls and stained-glass windows of a London townhouse were heavenly. On hot summer days, my housemates and I drank cider in the back garden, stretched out on the Astroturf which baked us from underneath like a cheap green sun bed. Everything about the place was neat and artificial which, if you’re a student, is perfect. Astroturf can be hoovered after a party and you don’t even have to cut the grass.
The house was owned and lovingly kept by an eccentric landlord whose visits we came to look forward to. Muslim and clearly (though not openly) gay, his stories about his former life in a gang grew increasingly dramatic at each visit. One day he casually mentioned that, back in his gang days, he’d seen someone have their hand cut off. Afterwards he had to clean up – a quick coat of white paint did the job and the blood on the red curtains was sufficiently disguised in the fabric. Perhaps this experience had formed his bold taste in interior design: every wall and surface was white and every accessory and fabric – from the polyester curtains to the under-cabinet strip lighting in the kitchen – was bright red. A particularly memorable bit of furniture was a glass coffee table supported by a red statue that looked like a giant tongue, or an abstract depiction of some unnameable act of sexual intercourse.
Despite his interior design choices, he was a fantastic landlord. Always punctual and polite, he never announced last-minute inspections designed to catch us out. He would sit and drink tea with us and tell us about his personal woes. His mother wanted him to marry – in fact she insisted on it – or else she’d withhold his inheritance. He dealt with this dilemma by taking his nephew to Thailand where they would go to orgies without anyone at home knowing. I felt touched somehow that he confided in us, a group of twenty-something students with nothing else in common with him but his beautiful Haringey house. He was efficient with repairs; we never had to ask twice, and he made sure not to bother us with arranging the details. When we were having a shower repaired it was as though a secret operation was taking place in our own house. One afternoon I got home from class to find a small Asian man climbing through my third-storey bedroom window. He spoke only Thai, but I gathered from our landlord that ‘Chang’ was a bit feral but very efficient with repairs, and that I wasn’t to worry about him at all. Although Chang had had his gang days too, they were far behind him, and he now made his living by installing showers.
No landlord – except my current one who happens to be my mother-in-law – has ever measured up. My first experience as a tenant was back at uni in St Andrews. Trying to acquire a house in St Andrews is like waiting in a breadline in Soviet Russia. If you want something that’s not infested with bugs or mould, you have to queue outside in the freezing cold for hours, sometimes overnight. As a first year, one had to do this in order to get a house for second year. So my friends and I took turns doing the nightshift, waiting out the Scottish spring night with thermoses of coffee and packets of crisps in our coat pockets. We still didn’t get the house. Back to the uni halls we went. The next year I finally nabbed a charming stone townhouse on a quiet street, with a view of the medieval West Port gate out front and yellow sloping fields of rapeseed at the back. The only downside was the landlord. A veteran of leasing houses to undergraduates, he had developed a twitchy, aggressive bravado in dealing with contracts and deposits. When faced with any hint of contradiction he would steamroll us, bullishly proclaiming his superior right as a landlord. One day I emerged from the shower room with nothing on but a towel to find him letting himself in through the glass porch door. He looked suitably uncomfortable when he saw my state, but when I mentioned that he was legally obliged to give us notice of a visit, he threatened to report my behaviour to the university. He left in a huff, and I never saw him again.
My next landlord (the owner of that first, cursed flat) failed to warn me that there was a madwoman living (and dying) below. Another bullish man, he went further when faced with confrontation and came at me in an almost violent rage, sending me running out into the street. I calmed my nerves with a friend at the local pub and resolved to conduct all future tenancy correspondence through the estate agents. Landlords hold a great deal of power over their tenants, and not just the legal kind. They see your dirty laundry, your unwashed dishes, the fact you failed to change a lightbulb for several months. They witness your private life. When that landlord is a large man and you are a young woman in a foreign country, that power is even more pronounced. I remember every landlord I’ve ever had, and there was not an unremarkable one in the bunch. With time I’ve realised that my unpleasant landlords might have felt exposed too. It is an intimate thing to lend your home to people you don’t know, to let them look after it, and vulnerability does not always bring out the best in us. Perhaps this is why I remember our Muslim gay landlord so fondly – he left behind his violent life as a gang member and became a landlord who acted with dignity and kindness. He could have bullied and berated us for scratching a white wall, or for leaving a watermark on the dining room table, but he did not. Instead, he did something unheard of in real estate history – in our second year of tenancy, he lowered the rent.
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