It wasn't just the brown smears on the bathroom door that made me think twice about the rental house. Or the washing up dating from 1982, or the turbid green fish tank. It was because there was someone living in the attic.
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“Mr Floyd?” I said as the door opened. “Floyd,” he said. “Just the one name, Floyd.” And so we, my three year old daughter and I, began another tour. It was late afternoon, the last of four houses we'd looked at that day. Earlier, in the estate agent's office, a listless woman with smudged eyeliner had pulled out details of a place on a neglected estate on the western edge of town, lodged between rail tracks and noisy A- road. “You have to use your imagination with this one,” she said “it’s bit, messy.” She looked into the middle distance as if recollecting a past hurt. I was tired, and my daughter was beginning to make a noise like a detuned radio. Blue and purple outlined the clouds. To say this house was messy was saying someone with plague was a little under the weather. Come to think of it the current tenant looked as if he might have nursing a buboe or two. But he'd learned to live with them.
We'd passed the fish tank filled with green viscous scum smelled like a soul's death and upstairs to the bedrooms.
Floyd pushed back his dusty dreads as he shouldered the door open, he was rebuffed by a physical mass of stuff. He suggested I look round the door. I peered at the earthquake within and couldn't imagine how anyone could ever have slept here. Maybe someone was still asleep there. It was difficult to tell. Broken toys, unwashed clothes, cables, lagging, a pair of dirty pigeon’s wings, an outboard motor. The mess seemed to have a life of its own and had coagulated into a physical organism. Floyd was unequal to the struggle and gave up with a shrug. I sensed he was the kind of guy who didn't like a challenge.
The bathroom suite was what used to be known as avocado. But more accurately it looked as if a horse had recently bathed there. Unable to manage the taps with its hooves it had simply left them dripping and trampled a new floor of towels as it trotted on its way. There was something brown smeared right across the door, but I didn't allow myself to think about that too much.
Who would live in a house like this? Lloyd Grossman's voice insinuated itself in my head..
My daughter provided answer:
“The devil!” she squeaked.
I sighed.
“Shhh, I've told you before, different is good. People can look different.. it’s colourful and .. Jesus!”
A cheery horned devil’s head leered from the wall. Above the children's bunk beds.
The late afternoon heat, the satanic head and house's personal ambience was beginning to get to me. It wasn't Floyd's own aroma – a medieval mix of musty fabric and patchouli - but a different atmosphere. An underground – underworld miasma. I'd smelled it before in a cave in Spain, a prehistoric cave dank with dripping stalactites. “If you don't mind me asking, what's that smell?”
“Ah,” said Floyd, “I was saving the best to last.”
“We have bats. A colony in the roof space. Man, we have some cool bat parties. In the summer we invite a few friends, a few smokes, he winked exaggeratedly. “Warm nights we just watch them fly. Just a couple at first,” his brown hands fluttered and voice dropped to a whisper “Then hundreds, swarming out. Man, it’s a sight, just kick back and watch those crazy little buggers soar.”
I tried to envisage myself, kicking back. Was I the kind of person to kick back? “Hey,” I imagined myself saying, “I'm having a bat party, nothing fancy, you know just a few friends a little weed, and the bats.” Did I even have bat-friendly friends? I tried to imagine them, but failed.
The house was cheaper than anything else I'd seen. Maybe I should take it. It would be quirky thing to do, our 'thing', we'd be the family with the bats. My children would study them, they'd become wildlife experts, in touch with the natural world. My son could be a real batman. My beautiful, troubled boy. God knows he needed something to boost his standing in his new school. Son of the school’s only single mother was probably not the brand identity he'd hoped for. Real bats – now that was sure to bring the other children round. Think of the Halloween parties we'd have.
Then another vision imposed itself...the more likely outcome. My daughter squealing in her sleep, 'Devils, mummy, devils!’. My son sleepless, damson smudges under his eyes from incessant demonic twittering, the pervasive smell of ammonia.
People would stop dropping round, children wouldn't be allowed for playdates. Gradually we would find ourselves pulling the curtains earlier each evening. Webbed fingers would be discovered during the school swimming gala. One morning I'd see the children's milkteeth had been replaced by little, sharper ones. Rummaging for something to wear in the morning, I'd settle for black. Again.
And maybe, I would find it more agreeable to sleep upside down.
This last thought to me back to my last brush with the inverted. A time in my early 20s, looking for a house-share in a drab south London suburb. ‘Professional non-smoker, female preferred’. I climbed the echoing communal stairs heavy-footed and knocked at the door. I heard a muffled groan, then 'Come in, it’s open'. My prospective landlord was there in the kitchen doorway. A thirty-something professional, casually attired in t shirt and loose running shorts. And he was upside down. Hanging by his feet from a metal bar fixed to the door frame. Or lintel. Or architrave. I searched for the correct architectural term, a type of self-soothing as I struggled to maintain composure. He was horribly, understandably, purple in the face. It wasn't only that he was inverted, but his penis was clearly nosing out of his shorts. ‘Female preferred’ the ad had stated. Even my Olymipian naivety was pricked by the remembrance of it. I stiffened with apprehension.
And so, it seemed, did he. He stretched his hands up towards the bar to get himself down. It was a gargantuan effort. “Can you push me up please” This a strangled plea. I rushed over and shouldered him until he managed to reach the bar and release his feet. It took, I thought, an unnecessarily long time.
“I have a back problem, this helps stretch out the vertebrae,” he puffed “plus it’s great for expanding consciousness. Blood rushes to your temporal lobes unleashing untapped creativity.” Not the only thing unleashed, I thought. We wandered from room to room. Like all the men's apartments I'd seen that week, it was sparse, piles of magazines in corners, a dispiriting lack of detail or decoration, over-large speakers and some electrical equipment cables trailing, but nothing that spoke of creativity set free. And like all the men who owned those apartments, he asked nothing about me.
Opening another door, I met with a stale, airless atmosphere and an enormous wheel. It looked and smelled like the home of a giant hamster. “Oh this is my anti-gravity wheel.” he said nonchalantly. I nodded mutely and tried to imagine myself living here, the creaking of the giant wheel at night, saying to visiting friends “Oh, the upside-down guy? Yeah, he's my landlord .”
“I just strap my hands in so,” he continued “and pull this lever and .. hoopla!” The wheel made a tortured creak. “I can just flip myself over like this, uh-huh, and just, you know, chill.” This last comment was breathlessly addressed to an empty apartment. It was the 'hoopla' that did it. I fled.
A glint from Floyd's gold tooth flashed in the corner of my eye pulled me back to the moment. Twenty years later, here I was again politely sleepwalking around another doomed abode, the only difference this time was I had a child in tow. By now we were in another room, stumbling over a glacier of dirty sheets spilling out of the closet. Bizarrely someone had taken a Polaroid of the mess and stuck it on the door – crime-scene style. Why had they done this? To remind themselves just how they like it?
“Protected in't they. bats,” Floyd continued “You can't use pesticides or cleaners or any of that shit near them.” The idea of Floyd cleaning anything out was so laughable I snorted then quickly knitted my brows to show that I, too, disapproved of chemical shit.
“It's great, it's like this special gift – as if the bats have chosen this house - a kind of privilege and honour – something from spirit world coming to share ours.” We were silent for a few moments. He smiled and his tooth warmly reflected the last of the sun.
Floyd was leaving because the landlord had put up the rent again. This time too far. I felt sorry that the only man who could happily coexist with the bats was being forced to leave them, so that an avaricious landlord could try his luck.
Romilly tugged at my leg, eyes fixed on the gleaming canine – “why's that man got gold..”
“Shhh.”
“Does the tooth fairy bring them?”
“Well, thing is, Floyd, the bats are great, really original. But this place - it's just a bit far from station.”
A bit far from the station. Listen to me. Could I be any more bourgeois? Floyd gave me a shrug and an old fashioned look. Square. He seemed to be saying: 'Carry on looking for your little suburban box, your neat privet hedge, your pine-scented bat-less little semi. Where's the fun in that?' He was right.
We picked our way out of the bat house. “Can I have gold teeth mummy when I grow up?”
Outside, by the discarded mattress we looked back at the house.
Under the eaves a little blackness was seeping. An absence of colour and light, then the inky void took form and fluttered into deepening blue. Someone had tossed an old black glove into the air, then another. And another. A drawer-full of gloves was being thrown by a frenzied haberdasher until they filled the sky. Tiny peeps and trills reached us on the breeze. My daughter and I watched them, her small hand in mine, we didn't flinch as they swooped teasingly over our heads and traced demented circles in the air.
After a time, I pulled out my mobile and dialled the number. I could hear the phone ringing in an empty office. I left a message. “Number 66,” I said, “I'll take it.”
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