Losing my ‘haunted’, moldy apartment was devastating. I swore I would get it back – and I did | Claire Jackson
WWe play with a Playmobil house. Well, my friend’s son plays with it. I move my plastic familiar uncertainly around what is, proportionately speaking, a cavernous room, awaiting his next instruction. The child picks up a selection of miniature white goods. “This is an incredibly unrealistic picture of the type of house most people live in,” I tell him. He chatters happily as he picks up a small kitchen utensil.
Toy houses – with their large square facades, nice big front doors, smoking chimneys, lots of windows, grass on either side – bear little resemblance to most living situations. We’ve gotten (slightly) better at recognizing that the mom doesn’t have to be in the kitchen while the dad is away (on the boat?), but these products still keep us tied to the capitalist dream of owning a house . In addition to numerous accessories, Playmobil also offers a Victorian dollhouse fence, a roll-top bath and patio furniture in the garden.
At the age of 27, I had found my Barbie dream home. More specifically, I had found the value of four windows and a front door shared with two other households. It was in an old converted building, surrounded by fields and forests. I had been running for years – I could stop here; maybe even rest. For 28 months, the symptoms of my various ailments were tempered by long walks and wildflower identification. The flat wasn’t perfect – there was no central heating, the windows were single glazed and there was some strangely persistent black mold on the walls – and I loved it. “How are you doing in there?” the postman asked curiously. “You know this place is haunted.”
The couple who had previously lived there had split up partly due to the stress of the ‘haunting’. Saucepans appeared in the center of the room. (Probably some strange kind of gaslighting, I thought, although that word didn’t exist then.) The building had been a place in the mid-20th century where women came to have their illegitimate children, and where community members with additional needs lived. We were hidden here, safe to live in a way that made others uncomfortable. I fed a green woodpecker; I listened to the screech of the owls. Safety flickered. And then it was extinguished. Bad advice from the bank about the ongoing repayments of my loan led to sky-high debts – I could no longer pay the rent.
I told a friend that I would get that flat back one day. Living brutally in the real world, he told me – quite reasonably – that this was highly unlikely. It was. The credit crunch ate the magazines I wrote for like a grotesque Pac-Man. The classical music title I was working on had taken nine years, but its days were numbered.
I dreamed of my former home in a granny outbuilding in the suburbs. Then the apartment came up for sale and the haphazard conversion and poor maintenance made it unusually affordable for a Midsomer Murder-esque Surrey village full of Playmobil-style houses. A colleague commented on how cheap it was, forgetting that things are only cheap when you have enough of them. Otherwise they are simply affordable or not. It was not affordable for me and it was sold.
Sometimes I visited old haunts. Ex-neighbors, now dear friends, shared their homes, allowing me to plod through meadows and catch up on missed trees. I was a regular at the village fete; the kind where you can buy enough Jilly Coopers and hardbacks to get you through a year – 50 cents per tote bag – and, my biggest purchase ever, a working Gaggia coffee machine for 10 cents, which fueled a decade of deadlines.
A few years later, online surveillance showed that the flat was for sale again. Were the ghosts on my side? I was far from solvent, but I visited the agent anyway. Several miraculous things happened: a mortgage was secured and I won a sealed offer on another couple (who luckily moved in next door). “I’m so glad you don’t mind the place being haunted,” the officer said, relieved that I already lived there.
Things moved, every now and then. One evening a jacket sleeve waved. Another day, busy with a press deadline, I heard my downstairs neighbor playing extremely loud choir music. I went downstairs to politely ask if he could turn it down. He smiled; he didn’t play anything – he didn’t have a sound system. (I had recently given him his only TV, so this was completely believable.) He had also seen nuns walking; to pray.
As a child, I had an annoying habit of reading the last chapter of a book. I don’t like not knowing where things are going, and life doesn’t give you that option. When I tell people that I now have a mortgage on an apartment I once rented and dreamed of returning to, it all sounds premeditated, simple – and, thanks to the preponderance of woodland animals, a bit Disney-esque. It’s generally inappropriate to mention the intervening manic depression, mounting debt, and sheer loneliness when everyone around you seems to be having a blast going through the Playmobil life goals.
It is very ‘love of life’ to say that ‘home is not a place, it is who you are’, etc. (see also: ‘home is where the dog is’). I suspect these statements are written by people who have very nice houses. It is true that our identity, our work and our loved ones make us who we are. But it’s a lot easier to work on those things in a safe, affordable space—in a place you love, where the minds can be at peace.