Monday 27 June 2011

Ghost Stories from the Typhoid-Bedsit

Like the protagonist of some Edwardian ghost story, I find myself haunted, not by a spirit (except that which in folklore might be termed a genus loci) but by a place. Through the long hours of work, through lunch sat in St Nicholas Churchyard and the hour-and-a-bit in the launderette, I find the shadow of the bedsit falls over me; the typhoid-yellow light, the sickly beige walls, patches of white paint inexpertly applied over holes in the wallpaper, the rain-stained curtains, and the window frame that rattles like angrily-thrown dice any time there's a slight breeze.
I didn't sleep well last night -as I tend not to do here- I fall asleep okay but wake up at 4:00am and don't really fall back to sleep again. As the inimically tense nature of the bedsit exerts itself, it seems an absurd idea that anyone could sleep here, as absurd as sleeping out on the landing, or in the hallway. The bedsit does not feel private enough for something as intimate as sleep. It would not be possible to hide away from the world here. I hear the man next door as I write; turning the tap on, unscrewing jars, and at night, his snoring often disturbs my sleep.
When I leave work, I reluctantly head back here, knowing that any motivation I had had during the day for any artistic project will be leached away within - well, seconds of stepping inside. I am exaggerating of course - but the idea of doing a drawing here - or a painting - or anything apart from these odd asides in Bridge 39 seems as absurd as sleeping.
It is all academic anyway. I do, at least, have the finances to leave this place when I wish to, and it should only be the end of summer before I can happily close the door to this place. Despite what I say, this place has seen me in good stead; it is cheap, I needed to move somewhere desperately after leaving the nightmare flat in November 2009, the landlord was fantastic about waiting for housing benefit last summer when I was unemployed, and despite the thinness of the walls, everyone who lives here seems remarkably quiet... but my dislike of being here is not a rational thing any more. When I leave the bedsit for one of my twilight walks (that last for hours, all the better to avoid being here) I breathe a sigh of relief - seems I can breathe again - as if the air in the bedsit is tainted somehow; thicker, laced with a soporific narcotic whose side effects also include a sense of unspecified anxiety; an almost imperceptible air of foreboding...
I am exaggerating again of course. It is not that bad, but if this were an Edwardian ghost story, then what would the denouement be? Would I discover as in Blackwood's 'The Listener' that a former resident had succumbed to some old fashioned fever here? Maybe it would transpire that this place was what once used to be termed a lunatic asylum - perhaps for the criminally insane and my bedsit was once a cell for a curiously deranged murderer? Perhaps, in some fit of claustrophobic possession one stormy night, I tear up the floorboards, and in the space between the first and second floor might I discover the bones, perhaps, of some eloping nun?
Far more likely, and through some train of events that would not be fully explained, I might turn out to be the haunting, and that I would be condemned to haunt this typhoid-yellow cell for the rest of eternity.
What a hell that would be.