Landlord
Dear Diary. Yesterday I finished moving all our stuff to the new apartment, but it's not time to relax yet. There's still a long to-do list. There are still things to do in the old apartment. I have to fix a broken toilet seat and take out the baby electrical socket covers that Girlfriend put into the wall sockets to stop 3-year-old from electrocuting himself. There's supposed to be a special key to open them to take them out but we don't know where it is. I'll have to just go there with two knives and get them out with those. And I don’t think sticking two metal knives into electrical sockets sounds like a good idea.
Just now, on the street, there was a dog chewing on a transparent plastic cup that it found on the ground. And there's the sound of drilling going on in the streets somewhere. I wonder if anyone sees Girona the way that I do where it's just a big shithole with constant cars and traffic and pollution. It's unique. Spain is a unique country because everybody, most people live in apartment buildings instead of houses so everybody's all clustered together. And so if you like breathing in the carbon monoxide from the exhausts of cars, and listening to the constant sound of construction going on, then Spain is the country for you.
*****
It's 11 am now and I'm back in the old apartment. The first thing I do is take a piss and it comes out all dark and concentrated, builder's piss, just like builder's piss. This is how people piss when they do manual labour all day and they don't have time to take a drink of water.
Then I decide to fix the toilet seat. It's hot in the bathroom and there's the smell of the bleach. The heat and the smell reminds me of the swimming pool in Butlins where it was an indoor pool and the temperature was always hot and there was always the smell of chlorine.
Soon I find myself half-naked, having taken my T-shirt and shoes off because of the heat. I’m hunched over the toilet, trying to take the world's smallest screws out of the hinges and I realise I don't have the right screwdrivers, so I have to go back to the new apartment, where we have all our stuff, including the screwdrivers.
So I return to the new apartment and Girlfriend's there, and she asks, "Can you put €700 into the joint bank account? It's to help pay for our new bathroom." Can't she do a charity event? Some fundraising? That's what schools do when they need a new roof.
Wait, did she say €700? I become shifty and nervous. I don't have that amount of money in my bank account. The money in my bank account can be counted in single figures. That's because I haven't done any work this past month. I was too busy, what with looking after 3-year-old and being on holiday and all that. "It might take me a few days to get the money," I say.
I’ll have to go around the neighbourhood with a crowbar collecting all the old debts. And in the cases where no one pays, I’ll have to smash their kneecaps in until they get my money.
The truth is that I do have the money, but it's mostly in an ISA in the UK, and it'll take a few days for me to move the money across to Spain.
Having money stuck in an ISA is very much a middle-class problem. After growing up in a working-class neighbourhood where people would read The Sun unironically and gangs of kids (usually me and my siblings) would ride around on bikes, I'm now proud to say that I have climbed the social ladder since then, I am now very much lower middle class. Being lower middle class means I'm not yet rich enough to pay people to do all the menial tasks for me but at least I am rich enough to have a cleaner come around once a week. Maybe one day I'll be actually middle class. If I keep the speed of my social mobility up, I'll probably be middle class by the time I'm 80.
*****
The landlord is coming in half an hour to inspect the apartment and take the keys from us. I'm trying to make everything look nice for him on the off chance that he might be kind enough to give us our €1,500 deposit back.
I hate landlords. They have the scarce resource (housing) that everyone needs. It's like a game of Catan when there's one person hogging all of the clay, and everyone else has to bargain with them. I can't think about it too much, because it makes me furious, makes me really angry.
I imagine when the landlord comes later, he'll walk around saying "A speck of dust, that's a deduction from your deposit of €100" and "Another speck of dust on the wall there, that's a deduction of another €100."
Just as I'm about to leave the apartment, I realise one of the paint pots is leaking. and I pick it up and there's all wet paint under it. So I grab some scrap paper, put the paint pot on top of the paper, but now there's still a small puddle of wet grey paint and nothing to clean it up with. There are no cleaning products because we took them all with us to the new apartment. All I've got is toilet paper, a roll of toilet paper, so I'm trying to get up a puddle of paint with toilet paper. And as I'm carrying paint-sodden toilet paper to the toilet to throw it away, it's dripping onto the floor, so the more I clean, the more mess I make. It's like something from Mr. Bean. Girlfriend calls me and says "Are you coming home?" and I say "Of course, I am coming home darling," I would love to come home, I would love to, but now there's all this paint on the floor, and in the end, I just say fuck it and leave.
Twenty minutes later, I'm back, this time with Girlfriend. I've brought a rag and baby wipes to clean up the paint. These actually work, unlike the toilet paper.
Then there's nothing to do but wait for the landlord to come.
We hear the lift coming. Here we go. This is the first time in three years that I've come face to face with my landlord. The Boogey Man. The person of our nightmares. The man Girlfriend and I talk about whenever we chip some paint or scratch the furniture.
The lift opens and there he is and he's not the brutish ogre that I imagined. He's a young, handsome man with the kind of modest good looks that mean lots of women are secretly in love with him. He's wearing his work overalls, which means he's just come from work, he's a mechanic. He goes around checking the apartment and we show him the shelf in the fridge that the cleaner broke yesterday when she was cleaning the fridge and there's a big crack in the shelf now. He says ah don't worry about it, it's okay. And he signs the form saying that the apartment is in good condition and apparently we'll get a full deposit back. So I feel like a bit of an asshole, it turns out he's just an ordinary guy just like the rest of us, albeit a guy who we paid €30,000 to over for the past three years to use his apartment, but still, a normal guy.
*****
It's hard to explain how hot it is, I’m always covered in a thin layer of sweat. Just now I took a shower, and even then, even then I still smell like the inside of a boys locker room. The smell won't go away.
In the newspaper, it says that this September has broken records for the heat in Girona. It's been the highest minimum temperature recorded in September something like that. It's 23.2 degrees in Girona. That's the minimum, that's the coldest it gets in the dead of night here 23 degrees and during the day it's 30 or so and too hot. If emissions from cars keep going the way they are and then apparently, it's gonna be 2.5° hotter on average across Spain by the year 2050 which isn't really that far off.
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