Sub Rosa

The broom handle’s a bit short, so I bend over as I sweep the pigeon shit off my balcony. I’m surprised to find myself here; the distraction reflex is immediate. It tends to happen as soon as I realise I’m going to have to do some proper, work-related thinking. There’s a brief, barely perceptible instant of discontinuity, like a reel change during a movie, then I’m washing the dishes or pairing off some of the pile of odd socks that have accumulated since I moved in to the Thinking Flat.

I pause for a moment, then go back inside. In front of me a familiar ghost, kneeling on my counter top, cleaning out my cupboards with soapy water on the day I moved in. I turn away and everything shuffles back to its rightful place. It’s my home now, or as close to a home as I have.

Perched on the top of a ladder, I painted the ceiling rose, dabbing white paint into its Victorian intricacies. I could see patches of bright purple paint sill held in cracks and crevices. A bright purple ceiling rose in my little flat.

The white version looked down when I began to fill my space with the stuff I needed, and when that space began to fill itself with the ephemera that I can’t seem to throw out. An empty champagne snipe, a bottle of moisturiser that I know is in behind those books somewhere. A greeting card with a message so heart-felt that I don’t want to touch it. Space was at a premium, though, with all that stuff, so only one bedside locker. Only one dinner tray to put on my lap so I can eat while watching television from the couch.

There’s a mirror on my chimney breast that reflected us all; me, my visitors, the ones whom I invited in. If I’d looked in the right direction at the right time I could have had an outsider’s view, though reversed, of careful, fearful beginnings and a tearful denouement that seems to stand like a cold bookend on a shelf full of crumbling volumes.

I left for a while. The rooms warmed and cooled with the outside air. I came back and shaved off my beard of eight years in a tiny mirror balanced on two screws in the bathroom wall. A fatter face than I had remembered. Older, certainly. It felt like looking at an estranged brother; curiosity, then indifference and the recollection of the reasons why we hadn't spoken in years.

I had defended this place, this property with my foreign name on the freehold, as maybe the others had, those who had lived in these rooms over the last century and a half. I had defended the implied independence. I had defended my right to drill holes in the wall and to fill my drawers and cupboards with detritus that one day I’d be too sentimental to throw out.

Under the elderly ceiling rose, the intricacies and frustrations and confusion and tenderness of a suburban life.