SOME PEOPLE believe in haunting — that a place can somehow be imprinted with the spirit(s) who lived there before; long lives and trauma amid old walls. But if it were true, what of places restless in themselves: the countless urban flats and rooms people move through, leaving behind only a forwarding address? Does their loneliness rub off on the walls? Does rootlessness drift through those cheap curtains that fall short of the sill, as a metaphor for the falling-short that is the human condition? Perhaps it stays like a stain when they have gone.
I wonder . . . because I find myself with a haunted flat, in the Ladbroke Grove area of West London. I bought it last autumn as a pied-à-terre, principally because it is only metres from each of my children, and after upheavals in my life, as a Bath-dweller, I wanted to spend more time in the capital once more. The one-bedroom flat had been tenanted before I bought it. All I remember from my sole visit (an impetuous purchaser) was evidence that a couple lived there. I recall a football calendar, good face cream, some accessories that made me deduce they were youngish. Then it was completion: empty rooms, white paint, new carpet to replace the old squalid one — a new start. For me at least. So I took possession of my pad and all seemed well — until the post arrived. Armfuls of it, week after week, for Matthew and for Karen (with a different surname), who had, bizarrely, left no forwarding address. Neither the estate agent nor the building’s management company had a clue where they were. You might think this shouldn’t matter. After all, people do move on. Yet the growing mountain of mail bothered me, especially as much of it was marked urgent, or looked like final demands. Given the choice between binning it and being public-spirited, I chose the more boring course. The envelopes had to be opened.
That was when the tangled story (if I can call it that) began to emerge. For Matthew and Karen owed money. They were in debt, it seemed, everywhere, and my weariness grew as theirs must have done, day after day. That they hadn’t paid the Kensington and Chelsea council tax goes without saying, but there were the bank loans, private loans, hire purchase — you name it. Demand after demand. A Manchester debt collector was after two lots spent on eBay. There was a large bill for plastic surgery; another for storage of items shipped from (or was it to?) Australia. That made me suspicious. Sometimes the man, Matthew, transformed his name into a double-barrelled one, which might just be affectation, but now I began to wonder if he had also changed his appearance, in order to do a serious runner.
Then came one of those bills from a small tradesman which are far more upsetting than those from big companies, because it’s the small guys who go to the wall first if they don’t get paid. This was just for a couple of hundred pounds in payment for resurfacing the very bath I was using. But why would you bother to resurface a bath in a flat that wasn’t yours? Why would you take the trouble when you knew the owners had put it up for sale? Alone there, I began to fantasise about acid having eaten away the old surface . . . and that was not a comforting thought. After all, the old Rillington Place (now renamed) was just around the corner.
I informed all the creditors and debt collectors and banks that the pair had just upped and gone — and one credit agency even got back to say thank you. None of this mattered to me as much as the sweet notelet from Matthew’s mother. With no home address at the top, it was dated three weeks before I took possession, and informed him that she had become a pensioner “with a bus pass!”, that Dad had taken her away to celebrate, that they hoped very much to hear from him soon. I was sorry to have read this private note, principally because it made me sad. “Mum” sounded like a character in a Carol Shields or Anne Tyler novel: patient and confused somehow, but cheerful despite everything. Very close to my own grown-up children, I found it depressing to be reminded of the reality for many families. Looking out over the lights of Ladbroke Grove, I wondered how many of them shone on similar stories: the lost, inadequate ones who’ve lost touch with those who once mattered. Or the indifferent ones, who do not care.
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One morning, early, the doorbell rang. The crackly voice on the intercom informed me that he was a law enforcement representative, after Miss Karen, who had failed to make a court appearance. I shouted that I wasn’t the person in question, but he insisted that he had to see proof that this was a different female. There was no choice but to buzz him up. Luckily I wasn’t alone, or I would have found it daunting to open the flat door to a thickset, towering male — although of course he immediately showed his ID. Gloomily, I produced my driving licence, signed something — and he went away. Somehow the day wasn’t so much fun after that. I felt both oppressed by and worried about this stranger. How had she paid for that face cream?
In Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, there is a chapter on how to live well on nothing a year, callously ruining small tradespeople along the way. The new, much softer, movie shows Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon) and her husband Rawdon Crawley (James Purefoy) enacting all the little scams necessary to keep up appearances in society. In my imagination Matthew and Karen were like that — middle-class (I’d put money on that) and thus able to get credit where the poor cannot. Were they unscrupulous con-merchants, like Becky and Rawdon, or just plain hopeless? Did they set out to rob and cheat or were they just caught in a downward spiral caused by their own inadequacy? Did they crow before they moved out, confident they’d keep ahead? Or did they cry in despair at the hole they were in? Did they jump off a bridge?
I suppose I’ll never know. But when I went back to the flat after Christmas there was still post for the mysterious couple, and my spirit plummeted. There were no Christmas cards (did they have no friends, or were their chums in the loop?) but a few bills, of course. As a comment on the plastic-addicted world we live in, there were about three envelopes offering new credit cards on the usual misleading terms. Worst was the postcard from Matthew’s mother. In December she’d been on holiday in Wales at a place which held “fond memories”. She wrote that she and Dad hoped they might see him over Christmas and begged him to ring. Her careful ballpoint pen, those slanting lines, stopped any residual sympathy I might have had for the spendthrift pair. Because this lady was still trying. And she sounds so nice.
It was impossible not to think of all the families separated for ever by the tsunami, and the terrible grief all over the world at a permanent parting through a natural disaster. And here was one chap in debt right, left and centre (OK, so it’s only money) who couldn’t even be bothered to let his mum know where he was, not in four whole months. It was, if you like, one tiny trail of destruction, which adds up to little in the grand scheme of things. And yet, such behaviour can break hearts.
The other day I came back from Egypt to the latest handful of mail. This batch made me fear that bailiffs might break down the door of the flat and take away my small collection of furniture — because it seems that Matthew owes Barclays just under £15,000, and the debt collectors are getting shirty. But again, to hell with the money. His mother just sent him a birthday card “with lots of love from Mum and Dad” reassuring him that “36 is a good age ”. It made me want to howl.
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Now I peer at my reflection in their bathroom mirror, wondering if I might ever be like them, if things were to go wrong. But I don’t think so. One thing is sure, this sad little saga of inadequacy and/or greed has rather spoilt the flat for me, so I’m thinking of letting it now, at the risk of getting more scam-merchants who will treat me in a similar way. After all, the world is full of them, as it always has been.
And if that couple is still ricocheting around the country, and happen to read this, I just want to say, You know who you are — surely you don’t think you can go on running for ever? Why don’t you get real? Can’t you see that the rest of us work hard, pay tax, try to live within our means — and ultimately foot the bill for your fecklessness? And Matthew, for pity’s sake call your mother. You probably owe her more than all the rest of them put together.