Falling for London

by Sean Mallen

  Her response was fiery: “BACK OFF! I’m busy with the kids and if you give me a hard time, I’m packing up Julia and flying to Toronto.”

  I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the toxic dust, trying to keep my head from exploding. It was now early evening. I took a taxi with our bags to the hotel and checked in. No sign of my wife and daughter, so I went down to the hotel, ordered a Guinness-and-meat pie, and had a morose, solo supper.

  They arrived in a foul mood.

  “We should immediately stop paying rent,” said Isabella. “This is all negligence.”

  Julia was disobedient and defiant. I offered to sit beside her on the bed and read Harry Potter to her before sleep time.

  “There’s no room, Daddy!” she complained, squirming as I attempted to make space. Immediately, I was pissed and barked at her, prompting little girl tears. Now regretful, I relented, moved off to a side chair, and opened the Philosopher’s Stone to read.

  But stress and lack of sleep left me feeling exhausted, drained, and beaten up. Halfway down the first page, my eyes became heavy, my reading deteriorating into near gibberish. I looked up to tell her I could not continue, but she had already passed out.

  At last the day ended. What a fucking day. Sleep was lousy. There was now officially too damn much happening at once.

  In the morning, we somehow managed to get Julia off to school, then rushed up to Hampstead to check out a school where she might be able to go in the fall, “might” being the operative word given that I did not even know if Global would renew me, whether we could get out of the commitment to the corporate owner’s other school, or whether we would even have a place to live.

  After a flash tour of the school, we walked across the street to an estate agent — the same guy who showed us the late, lamented Upper Park Road place that we (I) declined. Once again, we had to launch into the mug’s game of flat-hunting in London.

  At Isabella’s request, his supervisor had a look at our Fuckland Buckland rental agreement, in search of a means of escape. He found a clause that allowed us to break the lease if the apartment could be rendered uninhabitable, but said it would be of little use, given that once repairs were made it would soon be habitable again. Habitable, that is, in the fucked-up, overpriced London fashion.

  As I had taken the day off work to deal with our converging crises, I was able to join Isabella for the Julia pickup at the Royal, and to get a taste of trailing spouse culture. I was the only man in the schoolyard, joining the moms to chat while we awaited the emergence of our children.

  All listened sympathetically to our tale of woe, and added similar anecdotes from the London housing scene. All their husbands had far better deals from their employers; all made far more money than me.

  Back at the hotel, Isabella got a call from her lawyer friend, who gave a detailed briefing. It seemed we had a case for claiming negligence against our landlord, perhaps enough to force him to let us out of the lease and cough up some damages. Isabella made an appointment to meet with the lawyer the next day to talk about drafting a threatening letter, a service that would cost us £400.

  I pulled out my laptop and started writing, figuring that I could be just as threatening as a lawyer, minus the fee. My wife was skeptical, preferring that we spend the money to craft our threats professionally.

  At eleven o’clock, she had an inspiration. “I’m calling our landlord,” she announced.

  It took three tries before anyone at his house picked up the phone. His wife, who was not inclined to put her husband on the line.

  “I’m sorry, but this is an emergency,” Isabella insisted, until the landlord’s wife finally relented.

  For thirty intense minutes, my wife calmly, firmly, and in a businesslike fashion kicked his ass all up and down the sceptered isle.

  “This is negligence,” she stated simply, and then went on to list exactly why. The landlord was clearly trying to dispute the point.

  “Don’t interrupt,” she barked in a stern teacher’s voice.

  And so it went. Hearing only her side of the conversation, it was obvious that he was resisting, but she did not back down, citing the lawyer’s advice and persisting with plain common sense.

  At times it got heated, but finally he seemed to relent, with the notice possibly reduced to a single month. He probably just wanted to get off the phone.

  By the end they were pals, with Isabella suggesting that Fuckland Buckland could be easily improved with a few designer touches, allowing him to charge more rent. She even offered to do a consult!

  Finally she hung up.

  “He was scared,” she said.

  It was exhilarating to witness her dismantling the landlord, who I always judged to be not a creep, actually a rather nice chap. Just not very interested in doing much to take care of his flat.

  I stayed up late to draft a letter summarizing our demands, while Isabella scanned the web for alternative accommodations.

  Once again, sleep was a casualty.

  In the morning I ran back to the flat to get clothes because I was planning to try to get back to work. Upstairs Landlord’s guys were removing our furniture to be cleaned while they started repairs on the ceiling.

  Before I could head into the office we had to check out another possible school, the Village School, because that was where Julia’s Canadian pal Zoë would be going in the fall. It was a beautiful old mansion, just off Haverstock Hill, with a lovely little playground. Promising.

  From there, we needed to check out a flat that Isabella had already spotted: a three-bedroom place just around the corner from Fuckland Buckland. It was a roomy ground-floor flat, with three cans and lots of light.

  We stepped out front after our tour and an intense discussion broke out on a park bench.

  “I like it and I want to put an offer in right now before we lose it,” Isabella declared.

  It was a dizzying £795 a week, a massive increase in the rent that we already could not afford.

  “That’s what it costs to live here.”

  At this point we had not even confirmed that our landlord would let us out of the lease, despite Isabella’s verbal battering of him. Belsize Park was spinning as I weighed financial disaster on one hand with an angry, determined wife on the other.

  “I will not lose this flat,” she said.

  “Mommy, Daddy, I WANT TO GO,” said Julia, utterly uninterested in the whole affair.

  Walking down to work was a relief. As I collapsed into my chair, seeking solace in watching news reports on how the world was falling apart, an email arrived from our landlord. He had agreed to let us go as soon as we found another place. I quickly, gratefully responded, telling him not to worry about our demand that we be refunded a week’s rent. No sooner did I press send than I realized I was an idiot, that of course he should be returning our £500 for the week that we could not use the flat, and immediately fired off another note saying we would definitely need the money.

  Meanwhile, Isabella was furiously negotiating with the estate agent and landlord for the new place. The agent claimed there was a competing offer from an American family, an offer that had just been improved. All a lie, I was quite certain.

  “I think we’ve lost it,” said Isabella in an email. But only a few minutes later the agent advised that the flat was indeed ours, for £775 a week, far beyond our means.

  Time to just accept that London was now officially a financial disaster.

  The new landlord flatly refused to give us an open-ended break clause. Isabella managed to negotiate a one-time window to get out of the lease. If it did not work out, we had one day in July where we could give him two months’ notice that we wanted out.

  It conveniently dovetailed with our potential return date to Canada, depending on what happened at work.

  Except: I got a call from my Vancouver supervisors. They were ready to make a decision. They asked once again: was the cost of schooling a deal breaker?

  “We’re already in def
icit every month,” I said.

  One producer seemed hesitant, but then the other jumped in decisively. “Okay. We think you’re an asset to the program and we’d like you to stay. We’re going to pay.”

  I could scarcely believe my ears. I was getting a second year in London. I called Isabella with the news.

  “O … kay,” was her restrained response. At least she did not dissolve into tears.

  One issue settled.

  As I put my story to bed in early evening, she called me: the hotel was refusing to let them into the room, even though I had confirmed we could stay another night.

  I ran out to the high street, flagged a taxi, and raced up to meet them, finding them sitting in the nondescript lobby as Julia did her homework.

  Steamed, I walked over to reception.

  “Oh, we just needed you to pay for the room,” said the hotel woman blithely.

  “You kept my exhausted wife and daughter waiting because you needed payment? Why didn’t you just ask her for her credit card?”

  “Oh. They said they wanted to wait for you here.”

  Another London liar.

  The next morning, Saturday, we moved over to the B&B down the street from the flat. The only available room was on the top floor, just underneath the rafters, the can was down a flight of stairs. Not the Savoy.

  The estate agent for the new flat was pressuring us to get all the papers signed right away and the money handed over. We had promised Julia we would take her to the pool, but it had to wait. It was an unhappy, cranky, crying girl who we dragged to the agent’s office, but we could scarcely be angry. The kid had been through a lot that week.

  The agent looked drained. He had a head cold that kept him dabbing at his nose with Kleenex. It seemed that he had a demanding landlord and now a demanding tenant. Isabella insisted on reading every clause of the agreement, quizzing the agent about each clause.

  She spotted the requirement for a “professional cleaning” for when we move out. Knowing the state of disrepair of most of the flats we had seen or lived in, she found it an insult to demand that we pay hundreds of pounds for cleaners when we could perfectly well hoover the place ourselves.

  “I’m not signing.”

  “You’re not signing?” said the agent weakly, trying to control a dribble of snot from his nose.

  “I’m not signing.”

  I chose wisely to not remind her at this moment how she had been adamant two days ago that she was not going to lose this flat.

  I ventured: “It’s standard, Isabella. All London rental agreements have it.”

  She was doubtful, but finally relented.

  Then came the time to pay up: six weeks rent for the larceny that they call a deposit, plus the first month’s rent in advance. I realized belatedly that our U.K. bank account did not have sufficient funds, a transfer of money from Canada having not yet been processed. No problem. London estate agents are happy to take your credit card. My balance burst through to an impressive new high.

  But it was done. We had a new place. Now we just needed to move. Again. In two days.

  That night an email arrived from the Royal: two of the senior staff people were leaving to take new jobs, not waiting for the official takeover by the conglomerate. Isabella was livid.

  “London is so corrupt. I just want out of this fucking city.”

  I laid on the lumpy bed, staring at the ceiling as she ranted and I added up the converging calamities:

  ceiling falls in

  nasty negotiations with our landlord and the landlord above

  need to find new flat and move

  need to find new school

  school seeing staff desertions

  only my work situation had been recently resolved

  If this were a prizefight, the referee would stop it, seeing me hanging off the ropes, bleeding and semi-conscious, thoroughly pummelled into submission by London.

  But it was not a fight, there was no referee, so this palooka carried on despite the risk of brain damage.

  The next morning an urgent email arrived from Isabella. I needed to get back to Buckland pronto. It seemed that Mr. Upstairs Landlord’s guys were there with our freshly cleaned furniture and were grumpily claiming that they had been kept waiting. As I flagged down a taxi, she forwarded a snippy note from Upstairs Landlord where he groused that his guys had been standing around since 7:00 a.m. Of course he had neglected to inform us that he wanted to deliver our stuff bright and early. Lacking psychic abilities, we somehow missed the message.

  It was part of a growing pattern of snippiness from him, complaining that we were not giving him proper access to our flat for the cleanup. All bullshit. Despite Isabella’s murmured threats, we let them in whenever they needed.

  He was perhaps tuning in to the reality that it really should have been our landlord covering all our costs.

  Upon arrival, we ran upstairs to find furniture being moved in and Isabella in the bedroom with the door closed.

  “You deal with them,” she said grimly.

  “We’ve been waiting since 7:00 a.m.,” groused the lead mover, parroting the boss’s line.

  The words formed in my mind: “You can kiss my Royal Irish arse [a lovely James Joyce insult] for not being psychic.”

  But facing three large, grumpy guys with my furniture in their hands, I settled for the more prosaic, if safer: “You gotta give us notice, fellas.”

  I told them to just put the stuff down in roughly the right spots, just wanting them out.

  Fuckland Buckland was now clean as a whistle, with new ceilings in both the reception room and our bedroom — although Upstairs Landlord grumbled about the mysterious holes in the bedroom ceiling, suggesting darkly that we should be the ones paying for that damage. I neglected to respond directly, focusing only on the couple of holes created by the guy from the council and somehow forgetting to include the detail of the further aeration perpetrated by my wife.

  A friend of Isabella’s from Toronto, an interior designer who had often advised us, sent her a note suggesting that it was a bit kooky to abandon the flat, now that it was all fixed up. It gave us a moment of pause. But only a moment. The money was spent on the new place, the Buckland folks now thoroughly alienated, and our minds made up.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Our final week in Fuckland Buckland flew by in a flash of tension, improvisation, and emotional swings.

  My patience with Julia, my gorgeous if willful seven-year-old, was worn to a nub. One morning she was particularly obstinate, refusing to get out of bed to prepare for school. I snapped, getting in her face and hissing, “GET READY NOW OR I SWEAR I’LL CARRY YOU TO SCHOOL IN YOUR PAJAMAS!”

  There was a stunned pause for a beat before she began to wail. I stomped out to the bathroom and was instantaneously overcome with guilt. I rushed back into her bedroom where she was being comforted by Isabella, knelt down in front of her, my eyes now welling, and sputtered out, “I’m SO sorry!”

  She immediately stopped crying and stared, puzzled.

  Isabella: “Don’t cry! You’re scaring her.”

  Later that day, Isabella texted me: “You should know that Julia is telling all her friends that she saw her daddy crying.”

  “Excellent,” I responded. “Don’t know if I’ll include that part in the book.”

  “Not funny.”

  An estate agent phoned, wanting to show Buckland to a prospective sucker tenant. It reminded me that we had not actually gotten confirmation from our landlord that he would carry through with the promise to refund a week’s rent. I called him. The conversation began cordially enough, but quickly deteriorated. He was peeved that Isabella had recommended in an email to Upstairs Landlord that he might want to consider suing our landlord to recover costs.

  “That wasn’t right,” he snipped. “I’ll just have to THINK about whether I’ll refund that money to you.” The tone was exquisitely English snark.

  My hands were forming into an Italian salut
e but my telephone voice was conciliatory, verging on pleading. He still held our £3,000 deposit as ransom, and until we got that money back I did not want to provoke him further. He left the issue hanging. I swallowed my “I’ll see you in fucking court” response — saving it for later.

  As I hung up, an email from Isabella popped up on the screen. She was scouting out the new flat, now suddenly second-guessing her haste and determination, wondering whether we could afford it, predicting that it would certainly bring a whole new set of problems.

  “Just don’t go there,” I advised, remembering how she had demanded we move quickly to bid on the place.

  I was getting my head around the reality that it was far beyond our means, reasoning that we would only be in London for another year and that the extraordinary rent would only lead to the equivalent of a new car’s worth of debt.

  If only …

  It is extraordinary how quickly human beings can accumulate stuff. We had been in Fuckland Buckland for less than a year, but now as we packed, the boxes of belongings kept growing. I made multiple trips to buy more boxes. It was crucial to have everything packed and organized because the movers were charging by the hour.

  Moving day was a Tuesday and we seemed to be ready. Two remarkably slight and excruciatingly slow movers showed up at the door to pick up our stuff.

  The boxes we had carefully packed were all made to stack and move on trolleys. But our guys chose to carry them out one at a time at a leisurely pace.

  I gently suggested, “Perhaps if you use a trolley you could transport a few at a time.”

  “Ah no, mate. By the time I got the trolley up here, we’d already have moved them,” he responded with the calculating logic of a guy being paid by the hour.

  So I pitched in, lugging boxes out to the truck at roughly double their pace.

  And then came the sofa. Ah, the sofa. Our Ikea hide-a-bed that Isabella insisted we buy so that we would be able to accommodate our many visitors from Canada, the visitors who had yet to arrive. This would be the same sofa that was delivered in boxes and assembled INSIDE our flat.