The house wasn’t so bad, really. It was a fairly big old place in a part of Bow that wasn’t quite far enough away from the council estates to be fully gentrified. For London, it was reasonably cheap, and it had a certain dingy charm to it. The dirt never quite got out of hand, and the cold was bearable in the winter. Of course, the shower was a bit dodgy, but if you had the knack of using the taps it was OK. There were the occasional problems with the plumbing or the roof, but they were Rachel’s problem. After graduating from a second-rate university with a third-rate degree in a painfully unemployable subject, I’d gone back to my parents for as long as I could face, signing on for a while as I looked for the perfect job. This consisted mainly of getting up at about eleven to flick idly through the pages of the paper over breakfast, realising that I didn’t want to do to any of the few jobs that I was qualified for, and going back to bed to watch TV. The afternoons were mainly taken up by sitting at the computer playing Solitaire while endlessly fine-tuning my CV and writing covering letters that would never be sent. Then I’d have dinner with my parents, before going to the pub to meet my friends who’d been wise enough to just say no to education before they got hooked. Instead, they’d picked a familiar card from the Community College. GO DIRECTLY TO DEAD-END JOB. DO NOT PASS A-LEVELS. DO NOT COLLECT LARGE DEBTS OR DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR. My mum would occasionally give me a despairing lecture about how they’d worked so hard so that I’d have the opportunities that they’d missed out on. She didn’t actually say “Why can’t you be more like your brother?”, but it was always there between the lines. We were always on the verge of an argument without ever actually having one. It couldn’t last, and we both knew it. I had to get away, and London was calling. So I became a temp. No, nobody becomes a temp. A temp job is something you do, not something you are. After kipping on a friend’s sofa for a while, I’d found the place in Loot, one of the few adverts that didn’t sound like some vegetarian fascist or overly wacky perpetual student. It was a sublet from a woman called Rachel, who did some unspecified work in the media. She was never actually at home that much, forever out at dinners or parties. She seemed to be one of those mythical creatures, the social animal who could actually afford to live in London. Adam had moved in at about the same time as me, and we hit it off pretty well straight away. We both liked a drink and a smoke, and we instantly developed the kind of friendship which revolves around trying to come up with ever more imaginative insults for each other. He was a journalist who imagined he had principles. He’d seen too many bad American movies, and he thought he was going to uncover some scandal or other with his maverick reporting methods that infuriated his editor but got results. Everything in his world was black and white, good and evil, but he knew when to say “Fuck it.” When I moved in, there’d been some guy called Kieron in the downstairs room. I could never put my finger on it, but there was something odd about him. We were never quite sure whether he was in the house or not, and he’d surprised us a few times. I never actually found out much about him, so he remained little more than a caricature, the mildly creepy guy whose door was always closed. There’s something about a door that’s always closed that is more forbidding than a wall, that forces you to imagine that all kinds of unpleasant things are happening on the other side of it. He’d moved out a couple of months later, and a primary school teacher called Lisa moved in. Somehow she could only have ever been a primary school teacher. She was from Rotherham, and she had that expansive friendly presence that no-one from the south ever has. She was inexorably maternal, homely and warm. She was the perfect female housemate, fun to be with, affectionate but never sexual. She occasionally expressed slight disapproval of our drug use, but it amused her to sit with us and watch us getting stoned. The world of work didn’t seem so different from being a student, really, although I somehow seemed to have less money, less free time, and fewer friends.
No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.
The Essays of Schopenhauer: The Art of Literature