This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

26

In the evenings I could see the guy from the ticket office in the upstairs flat with his girlfriend, walking about in what must have been the living room. His girlfriend was often in the kitchen. Every now and then she’d open the window and shake out a tea towel. I thought about what reasons there might be to shake out a tea towel. Sometimes he sat smoking at the living-room window. He sat with his chin in his hand, puffing little clouds of smoke out in front of his pale face. They had a big cowboy cactus, in one of the other windows. One night I had a letter to post, I was humming to myself as I walked over to the postbox with it. It was an application for a student loan. When I was almost right underneath him, he cleared his throat and I glanced about, startled, before saying hello.

‘Are you keeping warm all right?’ he said from above.

‘Just about.’

‘It’s starting to get cold now,’ he said, and took a drag on his cigarette. His cheeks hollowed in the dim light.

‘My central heating’s oil-fired,’ I said.

‘Yeah?’

‘What about you, is yours from the network?’

‘No, we’re on oil too. The boiler’s down there. It heats the whole place up,’ he said, and twirled a finger in the air.

I nodded. He nodded too.

‘It must be a big boiler, then,’ I said.

‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t know to be honest. It looks fairly normal to me.’

We both laughed. He stubbed his cigarette out on the window ledge and flicked it outside into the air. It landed under the lamp post, and then the toilet flushed. The bathroom door must have been opened at the same time, the sound was that clear. He smiled down at me.

‘See you around, then.’

‘Yeah, see you.’

I was going to have meatloaf, but when I stood in the kitchen with the minced meat and the box of eggs I decided I couldn’t be bothered. I boiled the mince and had it in a pitta bread with a bit of cucumber. I’d stopped eating at the table, I couldn’t enjoy my food sitting in front of the window. I put a removal box next to the armchair and used that as a table instead. I practised eating my food slowly, it was quite hard to do on your own. Dorte had a method she used when her clothes started feeling tight, she lit a cigarette and took a drag between mouthfuls. Besides that she could say no to almost everything. The best way to lose weight was to shake your head, she said.

It had turned really cold now. The floor was draughty and I traipsed about in my boots indoors. Sometimes the boiler went out and I had to fill it up with water, there was a special length of hose for the purpose. I’d filled it up quite a few times already. After a week the pressure dropped and the needle was in the red again. I didn’t know where it all went. When the boiler was going it was nice and hot in the utility room. I started drying my clothes in there, I’d hammered a couple of nails in the wall and put a clothes line up. Once, I sat and had my dinner there. I’d been sitting still so long in the front room I was frozen stiff. Afterwards I ran a bath and got in, but I couldn’t relax, I kept hearing something scratching as I lay there looking up at the ceiling. A bit of straw stuck out from a crack.

I went to bed conscientiously before midnight. I tossed and turned and kept deciding to get some exercise the next day. I counted backwards from increasingly high numbers. It did everything but send me to sleep. I’d put too much garlic in the mince, it had given me a stomach ache. I got annoyed with myself about everything: too much garlic and not enough money, my stupid prattling on about boilers to the guy from the ticket office. I got up again and stepped into my boots, put my dressing gown on over my T-shirt and went out into the front garden. I gave the apple tree a good kicking. It didn’t help, all it did was leave me out of breath. I stood there getting it back. The light from the street lamp slanted across the lawn. Then I heard a faint cough from over by the station, the ticket-office guy was having a smoke on the step. He was in his dressing gown too, a white one. Mine was pink. I didn’t think he’d seen me in the dark, but then he stepped down and came over.