A Story about Angels and Landlords

Something clever here, something witty here, and another thing that's kind of a joke but also relevant to the story at the end here

On a good day, I am struck by the beauty in everything. 

Writing that feels like some kind of practical joke - I have become the person I used to despise. Joy is an emotion for middle-class dickheads, I used to say. Oh, you see beauty in everything, do you? Sorry, didn’t realise I was talking to Gwyneth Paltrow. I bet you work in marketing as well, and live in Clapham, probably. Get out of my way: I’m trying to walk to McDonalds on a comedown in peace, without getting tangled up in one of your pathetic £75 dog leads. And on it went. 

It was like Ricky Gervais had done DMT and started voting Green, then shrunk himself down to a centimetre high and stood on my ear with a megaphone yelling into my brain every second of every day. Towards the end of that dark period of my life, I saw no beauty in anything - or, if I did, it was coated in layers of false intrigue; never experienced fully. 

Then one day, my sense of self couldn’t bear it any longer and collapsed in on itself, stuttering to a halt like an old broken car. I had nothing left inside, and so I had to be spoon-fed tiny morsels of serenity, by kind strangers (non-denominational angels) and other strange forces beyond my comprehension. Now, I am here - and on a good day I am struck by the beauty in everything, but unfortunately Ricky Gervais is still alive and well within my field of vision.

I woke up feeling alright this morning. The movements - getting out of bed, tidying my room, showering etc. - were met with less resistance than usual. By half an hour in, I actually slightly felt like I was smashing it.

I bumped into my flatmate in the hallway, and she said she needed to speak to me. We went into the kitchen, where she told me the landlord has requested to put our rent up by £300. I opened my mouth wide 😮, and then started laughing.

The hilarious thing about it, we joked in the kitchen, is that there’s scaffolding on all sides of our flat, and netting over the scaffolding, and indescribably loud drilling and banging happening from 8am-5pm every weekday. That’s what makes it so funny, we said. That he’s putting the rent up, even though we live and sleep and eat inside a windowless box of sensory nightmares. That for months the kitchen and hallway flooded every time it rained, and we had to scoop the water into blow-up paddling pools with the dustpan, and wait for the fire department to arrive because the landlord wouldn’t answer the phone. 

Oh, how we laughed in that kitchen - but in the end we couldn’t get the laughter off the ground, and when I went back to my room with my coffee my heart was beating so fast I had to lie down for a little bit. A little bit turned into an hour, and I had to rush to leave, and then I was sitting on the tube into work, trapped in a spiral of fantasies, trying to catch my breath.

I felt quite bad; I was certain of that. My brain was frantically trying to break free of the feeling, but each attempt hit a wall and ultimately died, like a fly trying to get out of a box. I had to go into work: this was an inescapable fact. I had to smile at every customer, for nine and a half hours. The fly gave up trying to get out of the box and accepted its fate, crawling into bed and ordering its ladies maids to draw the curtains.

Someone, somewhere, had it in for me. Why else would I have been experiencing a negative emotion? Whichever childish god I’d once believed in had clearly abandoned me and left me for dead, there on the Victoria line. Warm, recycled air plummeted into my face through the open window at the end of the carriage, pulling strands of hair at out of my artfully constructed bun at random.

I had probably done something terrible in a past life (or maybe even in this life, actually, like last night when I put my cigarette out in a flower pot) and now, as punishment, I was sat looking at an advert for an app where you tap and then, half an hour later, someone comes round to clean your flat.

On the advert they’d fused a woman and a cleaning trolley together to make some kind of horrible centaur creature. I bet they’d love that, I thought to myself. They’d love it if all women came with cleaning trolleys built into their bodies. I bet everyone would think that was great. That’s how fucked up the world is. I caught the eye of an old man sticking his fingers in his ears to soften the screeching of the carriage.

A Victoria Line Collage

Getting from the platform to the tube station exit at work means going through a series of long tunnels, full of people walking in both directions at various speeds. 

If, on any given day, my state of mind is soft, I surrender to the stuttering flow of people. I slip neatly into the gaps, and I let people in a rush go in front of me, and the walk takes seven minutes. 

If I am in a disgusting mood, like I was this morning, I exert every ounce of my will onto overtaking the person in front of me - even if it means diagonally cross-cutting through an oncoming family of five and tripping over the wheels of their pram, like I did this morning. Once I’d freed myself from the entanglement of wheels and feet I saw a flash of open road ahead of me, and in that moment I felt like I’d won. I was gifted with all the great emotions associated with a win, for around half a second - but what goes up must come down, and once the rush had passed I felt worse than I did before. Adopting this aggressive strategy to tackle the tunnels shaves a maximum of twelve seconds off the total journey time.

I crawled up the steps of the station into fresh air, feeling like I’d just clawed my way out of being buried alive, and staggered over to the shop where I work with ten minutes to spare.

There was a large video advert in the window of the shop, promoting a new body spray we’d started stocking. It showed waves crashing onto a Malibu beach at sunset, and the text overlay read “Smells Like You’ve Got A Room With An Ocean View”. I stood outside staring at it, sinking fully into a state of pitiful and incomprehensible demoralisation. What bullshit was this? 

If someone bought that body spray and sprayed it, they’re not going to think ‘Fuck me, what’s going on? I’m suddenly in a room with an ocean view!’ They’re going to think ‘I’ve just spent £40, and I’m still exactly the same person I was before - and, incidentally, I’m now even further away from ever getting a room with an ocean view’. Was this the inevitable fate of humans: were we destined to consume until we felt ill? Was it late-stage capitalism, or was it simply the bleakness of human nature - the haves and the have-nots; the filling of the void; the stop-at-nothing desire to be by the ocean? I could now barely afford my own room, and all I could see from my window was scaffolding. I had four minutes until my shift started.

I opened my phone and looked at my messages. My flatmate had sent a message into our group chat. 

As I read it I was filled with the all-encompassing headiness of relief. Here, Maddy had copied and pasted the email she’d written to the landlord this morning, in response to their request to raise the rent. Here were paragraphs sewn together with astounding knowledge of renting law, with sentences starting with ‘As per Section 11 of the Landlord and Tenants Act 1985’ and ‘Attached is a folder of emails sent over the last two years to resolve these issues’, and assistance and co-signing from that renter’s union I said I’d sign up for but never did. In the hours since we’d laughed together in that kitchen, whilst I was really honing in on my bad mood and whittling it into the worst version of itself, she had composed a piece of literature that would leave even a competent landlord scared shitless.

In that moment, everything felt aligned, and exactly the way it was supposed to be at that moment. My bad mood, Maddy’s letter, the six-foot-high digital billboard showing crashing waves on a loop: all of it. It felt like the universe was reminding me that I am not alone: I live in a community, and there are people all around me with strengths I don’t have, who can help make bad days into good ones. In short, I am surrounded by angels. As I accepted the state of everything, I felt the beginning whispers of my bad mood starting to move through me.

As I walked into the shop my co-worker, who was standing behind the till, sprayed me with the new body spray. ‘Smell this,’ she said, ‘its literally so nice.’ She was right, of course.

At the beginning of my shift my manager told me I was in big trouble - a complaint from a customer, she said, something about they overheard me describing another (mental) customer as being ‘most probably on a rampant crack comedown, and I should know, I’ve had enough of them’ (only partly true). It wouldn’t normally be this big of a deal, she said, but this time the customer had emailed the C.E.O. of the company directly, which meant she had to take action.

At lunchtime, everyone on shift was told we could take two boxes of new £70 body creams and shower gels - something about the ingredients being printed wrong on the box, so they had to get rid of them. 

A customer accidentally spat in my face whilst shouting at me because we didn’t have the item she wanted in stock; I got asked to take the bins down, which meant I got to visit the fancy new bathroom on -2 (which I’m pretty sure we’re not supposed to have access to), and lie down on its velvet sofa for a minute.

A complex new cashing-up routine (bastard red tape) meant it took us forty-five minutes to close the tills and we left late; I was stood outside with my cigarette, and the man from the cafe next door came outside with a coffee for me.

As I got on the bus my head was spinning from exhaustion, and when I sat down on the top deck and had my first post-work chipstick I felt an inimitable euphoria: everything else seemed to fall away, as it does once or twice a day if you’re lucky, and I was just sat watching the people on the street below.

I got off the bus, and now I’m here, in the big Morrisons across the road from my flat. It’s a relatively quiet Friday night, and the tannoy speakers are playing I Just Called To Say I Love You by Stevie Wonder.

I am walking down the main back aisle, and notice that every person I walk past is quietly singing along to the song: first the lilting verse and then the chorus. Most of these people are shopping alone, most of them over fifty. Two of them are members of staff, singing along just out of earshot of each other whilst they take items off the shelves and put them on the clearance trolley. 

I keep expecting the next person I see to be silent, or wearing headphones or something - but like someone’s waving a magic wand, every single person I walk past is singing to themselves. I feel very emotional, like I’m inside an advert or something. By the end of the song, I’m so struck by the sweetness of it all that I nearly start crying in the freezer aisle.

On a good day, I am struck by the beauty in everything.

Iona x

(P.S. if you’re enjoying my stories, please consider buying me a coffee to say thanks)