The Inspection
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Before the landlord doubled the rent there was four of us living in this house and it wasn’t exactly perfect but it worked. The rent was £1500 divided between us and the house was large enough that we all had two rooms each. Room for studying, making art, dreaming.
The house is four stories high and very narrow, so that it resembles a tower. Just a floor higher than the other houses on the street but a tower all the same. At the top lived a man I had met once and never got his name but I often thought of him. He looked like every other man you or I have ever met. He worked remotely, for a bank, in his spare room. The others: two beautiful, European, homosexual men who came here for love and an easier life. They took the middle floors, where they’d often sing and dance to songs from home, while I took the rooms on the ground floor, so I could be close to the kitchen and the front door. Exits for quick getaways.
When the landlord doubled the rent – he had to remortgage the house, entirely legal and above aboard of course, and absolutely nothing to do with his wife divorcing him – the others moved out in swift succession. My beautiful Europeans found boyfriends with stable incomes and moved in with them. The top-floor dweller moved in with his parents without a trace. I decided to stay and make it work.
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I posted ads on SpareRoom and RightMove and Facebook housing groups for all the empty rooms. The rent for the whole house is now £3000 a month but there’s two bathrooms, a gravel garden and a spacious kitchen, the ad said. No meat eaters please. Student, young professional, whatever, just pay the rent on time. Legally, only four people, including myself, can live here. I soon filled those three vacated rooms – a painter who painted abstract shapes (but really they are all self-portraits), an ecologist who collects frogs (and frog ephemera, such as buttons and figurines), someone called Jason – but there were still many rooms to spare, and many replies to the ads.
I began filling as many rooms as I could. This is, of course, not legal, but these were extreme circumstances. I wanted to keep my home, even though it wasn’t much to begin with. You can’t keep running forever. The ecologist knew a fellow frog guy who is also a bus driver and could get us all free bus passes, so he began subletting a room. Next, a musician who teaches English in a secondary school (but mainly teaches them how to watch film – a lost art in the new generation, he says). It wasn’t long until every room had at least one person in it – people from all over the world: France, Poland, Vietnam, New Zealand – then people started letting their partners move in, they brought their pets. Frogs, too many to count – make sure you look down at the bowl before shitting – two cats, one with two tails and one with half (and no teeth), a chicken coop, eighteen rats in a king. A slug colony that left their shimmerance on the carpets and kitchen walls.
Maybe they just won’t look up, he said. Many people go their whole lives without looking up.
Before long people started building doorways into brand new rooms and the whole house became a maze, more rooms than sense or reason. Rooms in the pantry, behind bookcases, rooms under the stairs, in the utility room. Rooms that led to more rooms. And not a single bloody person will fix the bike shed in the garden! It’s become really, really hard to keep track of who has paid what for rent and bills. Who the hell is even paying their council tax? I’ve given up trying to chase people down for money. It’s easy to hide; there’s so many rooms.
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One day the landlord emailed to say he has organised for an inspection of the property. Never a house or a home. Property. To be taken place exactly one week after the delivery of the email. My natural reaction to any such news is to spiral, to give air to the wings of despair and anxiety, but here I caught myself in time. I will be prepared, I thought. The house will be ready.
We borrowed poultry transport cages from a farm outside the city. An American ex-farmhand who lived in a room beneath the coffee table in my room knew where to get them from and drove us there. He was charming and did most of the talking. We took the cages home, loaded up the chickens, then drove back to the farm where we paid the farmer to look after the chickens until all this was over. Why the fuck did we have chickens in the first place? Who did they belong to? Jackson – the American ex-farmhand – made everything feel like a movie. He was impeccably strong and tanned.
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On the morning of the inspection, Paulina, some sort of insurance broker, said she’d load as many of the cats as possible into a very large suitcase and walk with it to her friend’s house just a few streets away. I was a bit worried because Paulina seems the type to dump the suitcase in the river then take herself for a macchiato, but there weren’t many other options.
All the people in all the rooms not part of the main house were told to keep still and quiet. Hid duvets in rooms under the stairs, dragged mattresses to other rooms and hid them under other mattresses. In the pantry I covered doorways into rooms with tins of food. Oh, I forgot to mention some of the doors are tiny, with tiny people living in the tiny rooms, but we’re past that now. Doors in the floors were covered with rugs while other doors were fixed with furnishings. The ceilings are so high in this house that there wasn’t much we could do about the doors to rooms all the way up there, but Jason had the idea to use a paint roller with a very long handle to paint them white, and just hope the inspectors wouldn’t notice them. Maybe they just won’t look up, he said. Many people go their whole lives without looking up. Until then, I hadn’t really liked Jason. He knew things like how to get American Netflix in the UK, and how to get subscriptions to streaming services without paying for them. Everyone loves Jason. I couldn’t stand it. Oh, and also! We finally dealt with the rat king under the bathroom sink, so that’s someone you won’t need to deal with at least.
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They arrived at 10.40am sharp, which was exactly ten minutes later than they said they’d be. The inspectors: Emmaline-Marie and Lisa. Emmaline-Marie (I can’t be bothered to write her name every time, from now on she’s ELM) had veneers that made her talk with a slight lisp and her lips, skin and coat were all the same-ish colour beige. Lisa looked like a Lisa. She was holding an iPad, to take pictures with. They were actually very friendly, as I led them from room to room.
I can’t take it anymore. The damp, the spores, the labyrinthian rooms of the house.
We began at the top of the tower, in the painter’s room. They complimented her paintings and I said yes, we’re all very creative. It’s the only way to cope, really. They laughed but I don’t think they realised I was being serious. They peered at the corners of the windows and at cracks along the wall. A storm is coming, they said, which I thought was a bit ominous, like it was fucking Game of Thrones or something, but they just meant that the damp is going to get worse. Storm Judy, they’re calling it. Towns will flood as will parts of the city, the banks of the river will break. But yeah, give storms cute names I guess.
In the ecologist’s room they peered at the gaping hole in the plaster, exposing the inner workings of the house. That’s not good, ELM said. Lisa took a photo. Someone loves frogs, eh? They said, looking at the frog-patterned duvet covers, blankets, cushions and curtains, all the other frog ephemera (soft cuddly toys, hot water bottle, etc.). Imagine if they knew about the hordes of frogs shoved into the hole in the plaster, where it’s damp and warm.
Lovely, high ceilings, they said, on the stairs. These old houses are always so lovely. Yeah, yeah. They didn’t mention the doors in the ceiling; some of them you could just faintly see the outline of through the fresh lick of paint.
In the very last room, the musician/teacher’s room, there was a cough. It came from the fireplace. Lisa and ELM were on their hands and knees peering at the pockets of damp along the wall of the bay window behind the desk. ELM was midway through a monologue about the loveliness of bay windows, but how they are a total faff to maintain, when she turned around, peering at me from the gloom below the desk. Was that you, she asked? Yes, I said, faking a cough. Bit of a dry throat.
Word of advice, ELM said, at the front door. Open your windows, get some air in here. There’s a pinhole crack in a couple of windows, and the window in – Jason is it? – Jason’s room has condensation which will spore and it’ll be bad on your chests. But you said there’s a storm coming. Is that the landlords job to sort out, I asked? And she twittered like a bird while Lisa sadly shook her head, and then they left.
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So, yeah. Sorry, this was supposed to be a short note but I just had to get all this out. It’s not easy being the Master of the house – or House Daddy, as everyone here refers to it. I haven’t felt the sweet caress of a lover in months. Months! It could be years. Walking from room to room collecting rent checks, money for bills, reminding everyone to do their dishes and take out the bins. I gave up on a group chat long ago, it was chaos. I’m leaving, and this will be your job. I can’t take it anymore. The damp, the spores, the labyrinthian rooms of the house. I’m going to save up to buy a van and live in it in the woods. My keys are in the envelope. Good luck, I love you. You’re House Daddy now.
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Joshua Jones (he/him) is a queer, neurodivergent writer & artist from Llanelli, south Wales. He was a Literature Wales Emerging Writer (2023) and a Hay Festival’s Writer at Work (2024). Local Fires, his first work of fiction, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize & Polari First Book Prize. He has published various pamphlets of poetry, including A Fistful of Flowers in collaboration with Caitlin Flood-Molyneux (2022), Three Months in the Zebra Room (Hello America Stereo Cassette, 2024), and The City on Film (Bread and Roses, 2024).
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