Monika's Living Room

I only went round Monika's house a few times. Once was after her farewell dinner before she moved back to Poland, Jack daniels and coke and a taxi-ride to where she lived just past Seven Dials. I tried reading her future in a set of playing cards, but these cards were homemade, the suits drawn with W.H.Smiths biro onto thick packing box cardboard, and were cut into different sizes. Another time was during the day, after work, I can't remember why. I think we -Sil was with us as well - had all met up accidentally, though I can't quite remember how - or who would have been covering the shift at the petrol station where we all worked. I remember the day was hot though, a summers day full of brightness and heat. Remember walking the pleasant and dreamily lucid suburban streets on the other side of Hove Park, Monica kicking an apple along the pavement, Sil happy about something I can't remember. Monika's house was on the curve of one of the slopes that creased the ground around Preston Park train station

The living room was at the back of the house, and because of the slope the house was on, was accessed by a flight of stairs from the hallway. I remember having to pass through a succession of rooms to reach it - perhaps a kitchen and some other kind of little used reception area, but equally, these memories could well be architectural additions supplied by always less-than-reliable memory.

The living room struck me though.
At the time (summer 2006) I had been living in that hated studio flat on Buckingham Street for nearly three years. One room on the first floor, cramped with all my stuff and a tiny kitchen area. There was an adjoining toilet / bathroom, the size of a cupboard, and the hot water never worked. I lived in constant fear of running into my landlord, the sinister Dr Ra, and any of the other residents. I don't really know why. My room looked out onto the street itself, and I always felt conscious that people in the houses opposite could look into my room, even with the ragged net curtains hanging there. I think I kept the curtains shut for months on end, and I would always flee the flat during daylight hours if I could. The previous year, I had contracted a particularly carnivorous strain of flu and was imprisoned in the flat for eight days. I ran out of electricity (I used a key meter) and was unable to contact anyone. There was no food in the flat and I ended up not eating for an eight day period, lost in fevers and unconsciousness, -crawling to the toilet because I was unable to stand, let alone walk. I sometimes wonder how close I came to actually dying in that place. The flat never recovered from the flu, and I always it was somehow tainted. An unsafe place, not to be trusted. Oddly enough it is the place I have lived in longest over my adult life.

Compared to my one room hell, Monika's house seemed like some labyrinthine locus of mysterious cosiness (all those unseen rooms). The living room looked out onto a garden, consisting of a series of descending grassed slopes, accessed by a series of stone steps. I remember a wooden fence surrounding the garden, and trees too - certainly the garden was covered with leaves. I remember the sunlight, dappled and shifting on the grass and the leaves - the same effect as if the sunlight was reflected from water. This light - oddly muted in the bright summers day - transfigured the living room into a cool and sleepy place, full of shadows and a drifty timelessness. I could not imagine such atmospheric luxury being freely available to all who lived there. How did anyone do anything, I wondered, when they had access to such a place as this where, I imagined, one could spend languorous hours drifting and daydreaming? If I had lived in a place like this, the novelty I imagine, would have quickly worn off, and it would have bnecome just another room. I did not live there though, and compared to the unhomely un-private feeling flat I lived in then, a room like that resembled what I imagined a rented room in an Olympian Paradise might be like.

Less than a year later I would be leaving Buckingham Street for the bucolic suburbanism of the Wilbury Crescent flat, and it's own air of dreamy timelessness. I wasn't to know this at the time though, and thought that I would be stuck in the Buckingham Road flat for an indefinite amount of time - maybe until I got the flu again and actually died, or reached old age, or Buckingham Street got demolished, or I simply left Brighton.

I wouldn't even really know the street it was down now. It's out there somewhere though, and I wouldn't even recognise it if I passed it by, but I hope its as peaceful and dream-like and autumnal as it was on that summers afternoon six years ago