Homes, Renting and Neighbours

Story · all 20 words

Fifth Floor, No Lift

The first flat I ever rented had one wonderful thing about it and one terrible thing, and for two years I could not decide which of them was bigger.

The estate agent showed us four places in a single morning and described every one of them as spacious, which I now understand is a word that means nothing at all. The third one was genuinely small and genuinely dark. The fourth one was on the fifth floor of a building with no lift, and my friend Nadia refused to go up. I went alone, arrived at the top unable to speak, and then saw the view.

You could see the whole city from that kitchen window. On a clear evening you could see the hills behind it. I signed the contract nine days later without thinking about it as carefully as I should have.

Here is what I did not think about carefully. The flat was furnished, which sounded excellent until I understood that it meant somebody else’s furniture from 1996 and a sofa I was not allowed to remove. The deposit was two months’ rent, which took everything I had saved. And the price did not include bills – so in January, when I discovered there was no central heating, I was paying for electricity to run three small heaters that made almost no difference at all.

The landlord was not a bad man. He was simply extremely hard to reach. The air conditioning broke in July and he answered on the eleventh day, which in that month felt like a year.

But the good things were real. My flatmate Karim moved in six weeks after I did and turned out to be the tidiest person I have ever lived with. The balcony was just big enough for two chairs if you were friends with the person in the other one. And the neighbourhood was the best part: a baker who knew my order after four days, an old man on the ground floor who fixed anything for the price of a conversation, and children playing outside until eleven at night, which made the street noisy in a way I stopped minding by October.

When I finally had to move out – a new job, another city, the usual reasons – I got the whole deposit back, which almost never happens and which I still consider one of the achievements of my twenties. The new tenant was a nervous student who arrived with his mother. I told him about the stairs, the sofa, the heaters and the baker. Then I told him to move in on a Saturday, because the lift he was hoping for was never going to appear.

The flat was cold, expensive and five floors up, and I have never since lived anywhere as cosy.