The Housemate

I’m a good housemate. I leave very little trace of myself.

I can’t stand my housemate’s new girlfriend. It’s not that she’s here too often, but that when she’s here, she’s so loud. She’s got the internal volume of a toddler. She laughs like she’s choking on a goose. No matter where I am in the house, I can hear her. Her voice is like living with depression, or the fear of God: it’s everywhere, all the time.

I can’t say anything to my housemate. I like my housemate a lot. He’s a calm guy. He reads a lot of books and cooks a lot of complicated meals designed to feed dinner parties. There are always leftovers in the fridge, stacked in tessellating Tupperware. I’d say the fridge is one-third leftovers. I don’t mind at all. It means I don’t have to cook, and he never seems to notice if I take something.

When my housemate’s girlfriend is here, she helps him cook and they take up the kitchen. This woman has a way of occupying places that is borderline aggressive. I’ve never seen anyone so certain of their entitlement to the space around them. In my housemate’s girlfriend, her entitlement also manifests as niggling. Just the other day, when they were cooking, she pointed up at the wall, at one of the vents.

“Look,” she said, “you’re getting some kind of black mold there.”

My housemate was julienning carrots with his blue ceramic knife, and he looked up immediately. I held my breath when he did that. Those knives are sharp. I once cut a clean bolt into the end of one of my fingers just taking it out of the cradle.

They stay sharp because he looks after those knives. He’s the kind of guy who looks after stuff. I think that’s why his girlfriend has started making so much noise and taking so much space—she knows he’s an unusual carer, and she wants to get herself a piece of care.

“Maybe?” he said, staring upwards. “Unless it’s just the color of the wall there? I don’t know if it’s always been like that.”

“It looks like mold to me,” said his girlfriend, in her carryall voice. “You should ask your landlord to take a look.” She stood there with her hands on her hips and stared up at the vent.

This was very annoying to me, because it’s not her house and I don’t see why she needs to stomp about making home improvement suggestions. Also, I didn’t like her staring up at the vent like that. I don’t think that she could see I was lying in there, but it’s my business if I want to lie in the vent and look down into the kitchen. It’s my home, not hers.

*

My room is in the attic. It’s a big space, so I’m OK with storing some boxes and equipment and things on the far side. It wouldn’t be fair on my housemate otherwise; he has a normal-sized room and pays more rent than me. I don’t like to discuss how much rent I pay, because it’s a complicated issue.

The floors aren’t great up here—it’s bare board—so I’m mindful of how much noise I make when I move about. I try to be courteous, even when my housemate’s boisterous-voiced girlfriend is round. I like to whistle—I whistle very beautifully—but not if she’s here.

I’ve been honing my whistling practice for a long time. I started with lullabies. You can really sink in to the roundness of a whistle with a lullaby. People mostly don’t realize this, but lullabies are a lot like dirges. They’re written to send the infant brain into the void from which it has only very recently emerged.

You’d probably think that whistling classical music is the best and most impressive thing a really good whistler can do. That, or the blues. This just goes to show that when people don’t understand an art form, they apply all sorts of nonsense values to it. In fact, true mastery of the whistle shows when a whistler can summon the natural and unnatural world around them. Wind is the entry point. Then birdsong. Then rain on water.

My particular talent is for imitating far-off laughter. I believe this is why I’m so sensitive to the laughter of my housemate’s girlfriend, which is sometimes a sort of pugnaciously deployed whinny. The music of laughter should be haunting and subtle. I suppose this is a bit unfair, because there’s a big difference between laughter qua laughter and melody evoking the effects of laughter, but I stand by my case, which is: Her laugh is so annoying.

My particular talent is for imitating far-off laughter. 

I know my housemate likes the laughter whistling, because when I practice, he stops wherever he’s doing and listens. He goes very still. I welcome that sort of polite attention. As I say, my housemate is someone who takes care. I’ve heard him heave sighs after a whistling song has finished. I’ve seen him sink to the floor with his head in his hands, which I find very moving. Once or twice, I’ve heard him murmur, “But you’re dead, Pete.”

My name isn’t Pete, but I appreciate the sentiment.

My housemate sometimes works from home, and on those days I keep out of the way. I used to lie in the vents, but my housemate’s girlfriend’s remark about the black mold got me worried. I wasn’t sure if the mold might have been caused by my breath, or, if I’m not breathing, by the creep of cells shedding from my epidermis/carapace into the wall. I wouldn’t want to cause any unnecessary wear and tear, in case my housemate doesn’t get his deposit back.

I think, on the whole, I am a good housemate. I don’t need very much in the way of creature comforts. I sleep lying on my back in a corner of the attic. I don’t dream, but the chewy landscape of insulation foam enters my vision each night until all I can see eyelid to eyelid is bubblegum pink. Then time stops and sound stops and movement stops and stays stopped, a soundless pink vacuum of eternal matte, stopped without depths, without dimension, just pink, until exactly seven hours later I wake up, and the pink snaps off like there’s a switch behind my eyes.

*

Another reason I find the girlfriend so oppressive is that before she came, my housemate and I shared a companionable silence, broken only by the whistling. My housemate used to watch the television with the sound turned off. I never joined him on the sofa, but from where I was, I could see the reflection in his glasses, and that was good enough for me.

Now the girlfriend insists on making him watch her favorite TV series. They’re uniformly American sitcoms, and she always turns the volume up. I can still see the screen in my housemate’s glasses, but I don’t need to. Sitcom actors deliver their lines in a way that means you can hear every muscle and tendon in their face. The sound of double-takes fills our front room like marshmallows.

I can feel myself getting squashed into a corner by the wall of useless noise. This is unpleasant, because the place where I am in the room is already something of an enclosed space.

Sometimes I fight back. I don’t like to whistle when the girlfriend is here, but I can make disruptive, wet noises. They’re ugly and I’m not proud of them, but they have an individuality and self-containment per noise that is horribly absent from the sound of the TV.

Recently, I made the noises and my housemate, on the sofa, froze up. He brought his shoulders up to his ears, obscuring the short, careful beard he had been growing since meeting his girlfriend. She didn’t notice straight away, but when she did, she immediately turned the volume down. I was victorious. I relaxed as much as I could in the enclosed space, which is a cabinet.

I heard my housemate say, “Have I ever told you about what happened to my friend Pete?”

My name isn’t Pete, but I appreciate the sentiment.

*

I never enter my housemate’s room. I’m not that sort of person. What he does in his room in his own time is none of my business. There is, however, a vent in the bathroom, and as I often move around the house through the vents, I sometimes have cause to be present in the bathroom when he is, too. It’s nice, really. I don’t feel we have anything hidden from one another, or need to be embarrassed. It helps me keep track of his mood and biorhythms, too. He vomits occasionally. Sometimes he screams in the shower, which I think is a powerful use of the acoustics. I whistle along occasionally, with a singing whistle, or the far-off laughter one.

We’re quite good at this sort of teamwork. Take the chores. We split those fairly evenly, though I think we’ve fallen into our niches. As I’ve mentioned, my housemate does most of the cooking. He hoovers, so I do most of the wiping and carpet cleaning. I have a sensitive tongue for uncleanliness. And I always, always deal with the waste disposal. I wouldn’t really want my housemate getting involved with that. It can be heavy, dirty, ugly work.

So you see, I’m a good housemate. I leave very little trace of myself. As I’ve told you, my lease is complicated and on the whole it’s better that I’m unobtrusive. I value my space and I don’t like it being impinged on. I experience unwanted intrusions into my space as littering and I always, as those sitcoms would have it, take out the trash.

Yesterday, I crouched in the bathroom vent and watched my housemate brush his teeth for ten minutes, twenty minutes, until the foam turned pink. When he left the bathroom, I climbed out of the vent and stood over the sink. There were still some streaks of watery red and I drew a triangle, a square, two squat lines representing two little people inside a tidy little house. That’s really all there’s room for.