Bye bye Bouverie — a tribute to my first grown-up flat.
The night I got the keys, a few friends came over to eat pizza. Zoe asked me how — and how much — I’d paid for it and I’d answered truthfully. She stood at the window, looking out onto the darkening street below, making me feel like I’d said too much. Finally, she turned back to the room, “You know,” she said, “You could bring really ugly men back here and no-one would ever know”.
The purchase had sort of happened around me — too big and complex to fully grasp. I’d been travelling a lot with work, and the variously required decisions and signatures had been made in the gaps between busy days in other time zones. So, after the pizza had been eaten and the friends departed, the place suddenly came into sharp focus. Every brick, every square inch, every unknown click or clunk, mine to take care of. Or ignore.
To begin with, I ignored it — sort of lived on the edge of it. Grown-up people gave me grown-up housewarming gifts — a vase, a Le Creuset, a set of dining chairs. But on my own — as I was most all of the time to begin with — I did my makeup kneeling on the floor by a mirror and ate my meals standing up next to the hob. It would be five years before I got a TV. When the Summer came, I sat on the front steps wearing pyjamas and sunglasses and wondered where it would all lead and not unaware of the image I created for passers-by. Poor little rich girl.
That same Summer, for both the first and (likely) last time in my life, I had stayed out until the early morning, returning home only to shower and change before going in to work. The place was light and bright and I left feeling energised and without a care. In the afternoon, a phone call from my neighbour — a break in. I rushed home, but paused at the front door sobbing, unable to face the reality — the bricks and inches I’d failed to protect. The break-in was bad, but the aftermath was worse. Like the vase and Le Creuset, the grown-up advice had also been set aside. I had no home insurance, no alarm system, and had left two windows open to let the lightness and brightness in. I can’t even bare to write down what I lost. But after that, I didn’t ignore it any longer. I started to take care better care of the things there, and better care of myself.
For a while, it became a shared resource. While I travelled, others came to camp out — to have a break from their flat shares and ex’s. Ellen, Vicky, Laura, Rebecca. Each leaving a waft of their perfume in the air and some nice trace of themselves that I then adopted. A cute mug, fancy hand soap, an ironing board. I started to fill the place with my own grown-up things and with art and artefacts made or passed along by family and friends. I kept it clean and tidy — enjoying finding it just as I left it. In those intervening years: many dinners, many conversations, many dance moves, many tears, many hours drifting from room to room, many unseen things.
When he first moved in I grieved terribly. “Like a transplant being rejected by the body”, he said. The fantasy of living with a loved one, momentarily displaced by the reality of sharing what had been a distinctly, intentionally solo space. The clicks and clunks now replaced by another’s existence if not right beside me then always just here, and there, and over there. As is his way, he was far kinder to me than I could be to him but, with time and with love, the place became ours. The stage on which we played out the first act of us.
When the For Sale sign went up, I felt sick at the thought of relinquishing it to someone else. I’d hoped to hang on to it, to rent it out until I had and raised my own girl to pass it (and the famous pink tiles in the kitchen) on to. But finances won’t allow, and who knows if I’ll even have a girl, or if she’d even want a flat. And so it goes, gone to the people who looked round once, at night, and made an offer there and then.
I subscribe to the idea of a Room of One’s Own. I had three rooms of my own which I filled with thoughts and ideas and, ultimately a life so rich I burst out of them, and no longer needed them. So on we move, where there will be other rooms and maybe one will be my own, if the mortgage will stretch.
Bye bye Bouverie. xx
