The Flat

One morning, several months ago, my flatmate Matt woke up and he couldn’t open his mouth. His jaw was socked tight. Clamped. MuUrggh. MUrggh.

Muuyrymmmouuwwwwtthhwwuoon’’’tttooeuuuppeenn

He said.

He went to the doctor and the doctor said it was stress that had shut his mouth. A strange, bodily reaction – if I try and stop him talking, maybe he won’t get so many troubles that way..? The doctor advised Matt to buy some plants and increase the oxygen and life in his life. So Matt filled the apartment with green, leafy plants. They have been here since I got here. Every couple of days I notice a new one. Yesterday I spotted one hooked high up in the kitchen on the grille which covers the window. There is one on the table in front of me (a very pragmatic, waxy green sort of plant) and one on my right which is nearly seven feet tall. There are plants everywhere in the flat.

Once in a while, Mark, my other flatmate, takes one of the long leaves from one the plants in the living room and pins it on the wall above the telephone and chucks the old one out. I don’t pretend to understand this ritual, and will never attempt to interfere with it. There are two big plants by the telephone, which sometimes makes it hard to find anywhere to put the post. There are three plants in the bathroom. One of which is perched very happily and fulsomely on a silvery unit next to the shower, above the wiry shelves which hold three or four immaculately folded white towels. I don’t know who uses these towels. They have been immaculately folded there, exuding a sort of complacent hotel charm, since I got here. The plant which sits on the shelf above is very happy. I assume it feeds on the rising steam of the shower. Strangely, the two plants in the shower have needed a lot of help over the last couple of weeks. Matt moved them to the bathroom sink to give them cold water I suppose, and they seem to be rallying. On the narrow white shelf above the bathroom sink a black comb sat for many weeks. During that time, Matt has grown a beard, and the other day I saw him scratching it happily with the comb. It’s a chancey idea, just leaving things around until they come in handy. Maybe that’s why Matt grew the beard?

The plant which is seven feet tall is next to “Little Beauty,” the snazzy sofa that Mark found in the street or something. I don’t remember the exact genesis of Little Beauty but she is a wonderful thing, quite my favourite thing in the whole apartment. A two-person green leather sofa in the kitchen. Not leather in the luscious, roomy, soft round sense, but leather in the pert, funky sense with little square steel legs. I lie on Little Beauty next to the plant which is seven foot tall and read by the light of a hideous lamp that Mark also found in the street. The lamp is tall with a huge steel dome-head and it looks like it came out of a Cold War warehouse. When Mark found it, it had a brown, stalk-like bulb in it that none of us recognized. We turned it on and all the lights in the apartment went out, shaking with fear at the new arrival. We swapped the bulb for a normal one and now it works well, shining with much power, so reading by its light is a bit like being interrogated.

Next to the lamp are two BMXs. Matt bought them this summer for him and his model girlfriend, Lauren. But she dumped him the other day and now they stand, propped up against the cupboard and white shelves that we do not use, forlorn, still together but representing something now gone. Right in the corner of the kitchen is a huge clockface, leaning against the wall. I think it came off the front of a company. Matt found it and set about fixing it with impressive purpose for about a day, stripping off the hands, looking on the internet for a new motor and things. The effort has gone a bit quiet now, but I really like the clock, visible, as it is, handless and timeless, behind the foldable kitchen table.

The kitchen, like the whole apartment, slopes from the east to the west. To type on the table, like I am now, you have to get something to prop under the left hand side of the computer, otherwise the screen is at an angle and your head is sloped over to one side. I have a very big desk in my small room. Matt foolishly swapped it for a set of drawers that used to be in my room. The desk makes me feel like a tycoon but because of the slope of the apartment, the drawers pop open and slide out at the slightest provocation. Sitting at my desk, which faces a white wall with a poster on it, I have to reach up because the slope has already started and my chair is very low. Whenever you drop a coin in the kitchen, it rolls for a long away, enjoying the downhill. It doesn’t roll if you drop it in the living room because we have a huge colourful rug.

The apartment is a railroad apartment, which means it is a long line of rooms that you have to walk through to get anywhere. But it has two doors, so late at night, Mark, who lives at the far end of the apartment, can go through via the landing to the bathroom rather than through my room, which is next to the kitchen. Matt’s room is right in the middle, and has a tiny window looking out into the pressed space between our building and next door. The window used to just be a pane of glass, a pothole to the air, but Matt smashed a hole in it to the let the air in. At one end of the apartment, the kitchen looks out over the fire escapes and patios and brave trees that grow in the crevices and pits between the backs of the buildings, at the other, the living room looks out over the tattoo parlours and Mexican restaurants on Fourth Street. Summer is over so someone, Matt I think, pushed the air conditioner out from its place in the window and now it is lying back, like a drunk fallen off a bench, on the fire escape at the front of the building.

The apartment has two radiators, and they run along these two extreme walls of the apartment. Heating in New York apartments is dictatorial. The building man turns it on and it stays on until the Spring. No adjustments, no questions. So our radiators are shrugging off the torpor of the summer, angrily complaining about their treatment. The white one in the kitchen and near my room whistles like the high wind, sometimes sounding like a kettle boiling in a cupboard or a blind rat stuck in a box. It plays cruelly on my dreams. On one of the first nights of the heating season, I stumbled around the kitchen and bathroom, stubbing my toe, looking and listening for the source of this awful whistle, convinced that something embarrassing like the toilet was going to break.

But my radiator, even though it is wilful and whiny, is ok. Mark’s, on the other hand, which is brown and in the living room, is a punk in the pipe. Angry as a genie. Mine whistles and moans, rising and falling, mournfully whoooing and occasionally squeaking its sadness. Mark’s rages, thumping and thunking, brutally surprising you, throwing you off the sofa as you look around, wild-eyed for the junkie-thief who is smashing his way into the apartment. Nothing for a while as you watch Seinfeld and relax and then, tuntunk, tunk, TUNK!!! TUNK!!! And the walls shake. The pipes, it seems, are leaping off the walls, throwing themselves, infested with hooligan ghosts. My dreams could not accommodate those sounds. Perhaps that is why Mark is quieter these days.