Spurious

The Sleeping Wall

I am getting to know the moods of the damp. The kitchen walls, still bare, sometimes seem to glower with anger: they become darker, browner. And then, at other times, they seem to lighten: the damp is in a good mood, or it has been dreamily distracted from the work of dampening. Is it a god that needs to be appeased? - and if so, by what kind of sacrifice? But if it is a god, or part of a god, it is an inscrutable one; I follow its moods without being able to understand them, and it is as though I face the changing surface of the planet Solaris.

Sometimes it darkens, it becomes browner, as though gathering itself up. Particularly high up the wall, like a dark cloud spread all along - the damp becomes more intense. But it is not quite wet, not anymore. The surface is smooth, but not really moist; and it is not running with water as it used to be. For a dehumidifier works night and day in the kitchen. Night and day, and though pin pricks of damp appear where there was once white plaster, dried out by the heater, the wall never grows wetter. Has the damp been conquered, or only managed?

The damp and I are companions in the quiet flat. Little happens here; the damp does its work, the wetness of its surface drawn through the filters of the dehumidifier into its transparent collection box, and I try to do mine. I am away a lot, and when I am, I think the damp plunges forward like a dark wave; I can smell it, very thick in the air, when I open the door after the taxi drops me off. Damp, in a wave, welcoming me. Obscure welcome. Thick and brown and wet in the air.

Sometimes I sponge down the walls with a mixture of water and bleach. It needs to be done in the bathroom, too, where black spores of mould are forming. And the wallpaper in the bedroom, too. But these are only symptoms. I touch a cool sponge to the wall as to a fevered brow. Be calm, be still, do not toss and turn. And now I imagine the damp is a dream of the wall, that it is lost in itself somehow, that if the wall were only to open its eyes and see me, then all would be well. But the wall seems to fall into itself. Lost in damp, or damp is what rises up when the wall disappears into coma.

I like to imagine that I could pick the walls up like a Chinese screen and turn them to the sun to dry. To lift up the ceiling and the flat above and let the sun find the wall, and dry it. That would let it live. That would awaken it. As it is, the wall is hunched upon itself and from the sun. It weeps in a corner. Did I take my Visitor, who has damp experts in her family, to the back of the kitchen, to show her the bricks whose surface can be scraped away like paste? It needs rebuilding, she thinks, the whole wall. The mushrooms, which grew last year from the corner of the kitchen ceiling as from a sweating armpit were the giveaway: dry rot, she says, a sure sign.

Her relatives rebuilt wall after wall in London houses. I tell her I want to cover it over instead. A new wall of dark grey rendering, to extend the work I've already had done: perfect. A mesh, and then a layer of concrete above the bricks that are turning to paste ... And now I imagine the wall is like a wounded horse that needs silence and care. The wall and I, and the damp a disease we will have to wait out.

But how long for? Warmer days are approaching, I think, though it was freezing today, and there were a few snowflakes in the air. Warmer days, and the simple honesty of the sun, which will break everything dry. And if I cannot pick up the wall to turn it around, inner to outer, so there are no secrets anymore, nothing hidden, there is still the slow penetration of the sun, slow, and over the whole outer wall, rendered and unrendered. And one day it will be summer, too, in my kitchen.

The Dew Point

I'm allowed to bleach the kitchen walls at last, and the washing machine, and cupboards scattered around the flat; the surveyor who first diagnosed the damp came and saw and wrote things down, and said: 'it's condensation that's causing it.' - 'Condensation', I said, 'behind all this?' The kitchen all around us, brown walled with damp. 'People underestimate condensation', he said. 'In a flat like this, double glazed, there's nowhere for water to escape.'

I look around. No, there's no escape, no extractor fans. How could there be, in a room this size, six feet by six. Later, I went out to look at the kitchen wall, outside, where the rendering hasn't reached. Naked brick, exposed; I took a stick of bamboo and idly scraped out stuff between the bricks. And then - it was the brick itself that started to come off. The brick itself, rotting; I touched it. Wet - and runny. Brick that came off on my nails. Brick eroding and coming off to the touch.

I'd heard about this. The damp eats the brick out, said one expert. It devours brick from within. And now, beneath the stairs, the discovery of an eroding wall, a wall turning to paste ... There are many causes of damp, I know that now. An infinite number of causes. Condensation within, and a wall that's becoming paste. A wall of paste and water within as it reaches the dew point on a colder surface.

And isn't that a beautiful expression, the dew point? The washing machine is clean and white, so too with the microwave and the cupboards. And the walls of the kitchen, seven feet high, but also as high as the stars are wet with bleach and water. Take a breath. Breathe. But the spores are already there. Spores in your lungs, spores in your heart. An adult human gives off moisture to the air - two litres a day. But how much sporey damp do I breathe out?

'That wall behind you's looking distinctly wet ...', said Blah-Feme in the bar the other night. 'Damp follows you like a dog', W. said that.

The dew point - where the wall comes forward to offer itself to the touch of condensation. When condensation spreads and gives itself across the wall. And from the other side? Penetrating damp, find its way through pasty brick and the gaps between bricks. Penetrating, coming through, a slow, ceaseless tsunami, brown wave after wave.

On two fronts, then, the damp. And there was a third front, too, the worst: the leak from upstairs, so bad that they thought the washing machine from upstairs might come through the ceiling. The leak, for years. Wet brick, saturated brick. And then it was fixed, at last, in the end. And was there a fourth front, from the concrete, from the river that used to run from the burst pipe along the wall?

Along the wall, the damp is moving. Dark armies of damp, moving towards the fresh, dry plaster of the living room. When will it breach the door frame and come through? When to meet with the damp that's already coming from the other room?

I'm stranded in space between the condensating damp. Stranded, as between two high walls of the sea, parted as Moses parted them. On a strip as wide as this room, the living room, still dry, still an island in a sea of damp. And on two sides of the island, the waves are lapping. As soon they lap over this island too, and it will have sunk, beneath the ocean's smooth surface.

Or is it the two lips of a mouth that have opened, and I am the word it is trying to say? I think I'm looking for it here, that word. I think it's speaking through me, a word of damp from within, penetrating out, and condensing outside, along the white page of the blog.

Damp and the Yard

'Keep it warm', said an expert on the kitchen damp. 'And the damp in the bedroom?' - 'Keep that warm, too.' So where do I point my heroic little fan heater? It does a shift in the kitchen, and then a shift in the bedroom. I carry it from one room the other, over the bits of kitchen furniture that are scattered everywhere.

In the living room, the washing machine, covered in black mildew. Then a cupboard, the back of which is greeny-black with damp. I have to keep everything dirty, the expert tells me, to show the original surveyor who approved the damp course, tomorrow. 'Keep it mouldy. Then you can show him.'

But the whole flat is now full of mould spores. The warm air is soupy; it's jungle hot, and damp, and smells of rot and spores. The oven, new in September, is stranded in the bathroom. The hallway's full of mouldy bits of wood, and another sporey cupboard is pressed there up against the radiator. At night, going to the bathroom, I have to step over damp wood and pass between damp cupboards.

Sometimes the smell is overwhelming. 'I feel faint', I told W. on the phone. He's getting ready for a visit, he says. I brace him. 'It's pretty bad up here,' remembering his last visit, he did nothing but whine, and then sat up drinking all night, telling me what was wrong with my life at great length, holding court on the sofa while I sat on the floor.

How long will it be like this? Weeks. The Loss Adjuster no longer wants to pay out. The company she appointed have given up, having dismantled the kitchen. 'Where does this leave me?' At the very least, I will need another £500 worth of rendering, and perhaps I'll have to repoint the wall next door, too. There's something wrong, very wrong, we all know it. The Loss Adjuster knows and so does the man from the building maintenance company. Even the workman knows. 'Have you ever seen anything like this?', I ask him. 'Never. This is the worst I've seen.'

Outside, as always the concrete is wet. The concrete stairs leading upstairs are wet, and the storage space beneath the stairs is the same. 'Look at the floor in there', says another expert on damp I've called out. 'Soaking. It shouldn't be, mind.' And I look. It is soaking. It's completely soaked. 'You'll have to clear it out and let it air', he says of the storage space. Clear it out; very well. Open it to the air. And then what? Water's seeping into the concrete. Water in concrete, the whole yard. Seeping down, and the concrete saturated. Down, but there's nowhere for the water to go. And the whole surface of the yard is like a wall in my kitchen, only lying down. Damp lying down. Damp lying on concrete, and looking upward to the sky.

Inside, I study the kitchen walls, watching for where damp comes and goes. I take the fan heater in there, pointing it at this or that part of the wall. It will dry after an hour or so. Dry, but then - another hour, or one more - pinpricks of moisture appear on the whitened plaster. It's returning. It's coming back, the damp. And then pinprick joins to pinprick, and soon the whole wall's the same sweat-sheened clammy brow it was before the drying.

But still I watch. Still, nightly, I wield the heater. Is it drying out? Has it begun to dry out?, I ask myself, like a madman. Or is it a mirage, a mirage of damp? Have the spores got to me? Has the mould coated every passageway of my lungs and sent me mad? True, I have a new and persistent cough. I cough all the time, and today I thought I'd lose my voice. One day I'll wake up mute in this flat of damp. Mute in the damp, spore-filled, choking. And one day, as I lie my body on the walls, I'll disappear into them, damp returning to damp.

The Weeping Flat

I need to know my enemy. To know it - the damp, to watch and study it; to press my hands to it as to a fevered brow. Only this brow - the walls of the kitchen - are cold and clammy. For the last few days, I have had a fan heater turned at various parts of the wall. The plaster dries out quickly; it changes colour from dark brown to broken and then almost all the way to a healthy pink.

But it is a sick pink that results, with trails of black and mould in little clusters like liver spots. A sense of victory - the wall, completely bare, since all the furniture and appliances in the kitchen have been scattered elsewhere in the flat, changes colour like the sky. A dawn is coming from the brown night. A dirty pink dawn.

And yet, and yet. Turn the heater off for the night and the next morning, when I open the kitchen door, I see specks of darkness invading the dirty pink walls. Specks of brown darkness that grow and link up. What sadness. And soon the brown is omnipresent again, and growing darker. And within 24 hours, a film of water covers the wall. A film, which when I wipe with kitchen roll carries with it dark particles of plaster. Mop the fevered brow. Mop it, and the water comes off brown, dark brown.

The damp punishes me. On the first night with the fan heater I felt exalted. Could the damp really be clearing? Was it as simply at pointing a beam of heat at the wall? The next morning I woke early in my bedroom, which, unlike the other rooms of the flat, I've kept clean and free of kitchen detritus. The washing machine, covered in mould, stands in the living room; the rusting oven in the bathroom. Cupboards whose backs are thick with green and black spores are scattered everywhere. But the bedroom - pristine, I thought, with creamy light green walls.

What peace! And yet, and yet, what did I smell? What was that smell - damp? had it reached me from the kitchen? And then I see it: punishment for my hubris; the restoration of the cosmic balance between light and darkness: all along the bottom of the bedroom wall, rising damp, black. All along the wall beneath the window, and curling the wallpaper up: damp, black mould.

And the damp's already returning to the bathroom, I can smell it. Already returning, even after the damp course last year. Another damp expert ran his meter over the bathroom wall. 'There's something there.' He and I go outside and look at the wall. We look, we look, until all we are is looking. How to read the walls? Does it need repointing? Best to do it. Best to get it done, to make sure. And then we look at the £500 of rendering I've just had done. It needs to be extended, he says. It's not enough, he says. Look at the darkness of the brick, he says. Feel it. It's wet, he says. Yes, it is wet. It's weeping. The whole flat is weeping.

More rendering then. I book the rendering company to return. They're coming at lunchtime today. And meanwhile, the damp and I. Meanwhile - and I think for the whole of my life - I and the damp, one to one. I press my hand on its brow. My hand on a patch of kitchen wall. My hand on the curled up blackened wall paper in the bedroom. My hand on the wall in the bathroom from which I know the damp will come. And my hand on my own chest, for I know where it's coming from, all this damp.

Planet of Damp

Like Jacob with his angel, I wrestle with my damp. The walls are bare now, a workman having spread the parts of my kitchen around the flat: the washine machine beside me here as I type, the oven in the bathroom, the cabinets in the hallway. The walls are bare, and absolute, and sweating - this is the word - damp.

For my part, I have a small heater which I aim at this part of the wall, and then that. Gradually, the plaster changes colour. From an angry dark brown, mottled with dark green and with black mold to a calmer, lighter pink: it seems a miracle; it seems I'm winning, but how can this be?

Periodically, I go out to the kitchen with some kitchen roll, and wipe down the great sweating surface. There's always a layer of water - a sweat sheen. I marvel. Is the wall alive? Does it live in some strange way, like the planet Solaris, perhaps. That is the meaning of salt crystals which form on the wall. Is it conscious and groping towards me to communicate? Or is salt the way it expresses itself, or dreams? My flat is the satellite that turns around the damp, and I am the astronaut, fascinated only by its changing surface.

Whole religions have formed around less: around damp, and the source of damp. The kitchen could be a sacred grove, a spring. Only it seems a spring underground, a hidden place, a grotto to which our ancestors would descend. And what of the essay I'm trying to write? How can it compete against the great, bare walls?

Sometimes I want to press myself bodily against them, and to be absorbed. To disappear into the damp and to live a life there, on the other side of the wall. But I have my little heater, righteous weapon, and in patches the damp is changing colour, from angry brown to pink. Pray for me.

The Damp and I

I press my nose to the pink plaster in the bathroom. Is it damp that I smell? Is it coming back? My hand on the surface. No, it's not wet. But there's wetness, I know, on the other side of the wall. Waiting, darkly. I can smell it.

The damp can get no wetter in the kitchen. The plaster comes off on my fingers. Brown paste. And the smell, the terrible smell. What's rotting? What's behind the kitchen units? Something has died, back there beyond the wall. And down the plaster the trace of a vertical river. When did it stream? When did it dry up? A track of browner plaster on plaster. And everywhere the smell of rotting. What's died, there behind the cabinets?

It's all to come off Monday. And then the plaster's to come off, and it will be the final encounter. The brick and I. Exposed brick and a man, and great drying machines. Because the machines are to come to dry the place out. Night and day, they'll suck the damp from the air. And the plaster will have been stripped away. Nothing between the damp and I. Nothing but damp brick and I, in the stripped away kitchen.

There'll be no washing machine and no fridge. No oven, and no cabinets. That will all be moved to the living room. In the kitchen, the wrecked floor and the wet bricks, breathing. The damp and I: a final reckoning. If it doesn't dry, say the insurance people, then they'll pull out.

It's beyond them, say the drying company appointed by the Loss Adjuster. No one understands the damp. It's Talumdic. The damp is the enigma at the heart of everything. It draws into it the light of all explanations, all hope. The damp says: I exist, and that is all. I am that I am: so the damp. I will outlast you and outlast everything, says the damp.

Outside, half an inch of rendering now covers the back of the kitchen. Today I placed my palm on its grey surface. Wet. But that's to be expected, what with the rain. But it was still wet. Everything's wet, on both sides of the wall. Apparently there's a gap between two layers of brick. A gap - that's where the source of the damp is, I know it. That's where it is, dark, wet matter without shape. Matter without light, as there are in the dwarf galaxies stripped of gas.

And the damp's still spreading. There's still more of the wall to conquer. 'It'll be in your living room soon', says the damp expert. I nod. Yes, it will be everywhere. The flat'll be made of damp, and spores will fill every part of the air. And I will breathe the spores inside and mold will flower inside me. I'll live half in water like a frog.

It is my own catastrophe, very close to me. A secret catastrophe, spreading from the gap between the layers of brick. I take people out there, to the kitchen, and run their hands along the wall. 'Feel it', I say, 'it's alive.' They're always impressed, and disgusted.

My Visitor, in particular, is disturbed by the damp, and by the dirt that falls from the kitchen. She stands at the threshold of the kitchen, appalled. 'Don't worry', I tell her. 'It's inside the cabinets', she says, in horror. 'I know', I whisper.

The washing powder has contracted into great wet lumps. The salt is a single wet block. The sugar, the same. And where tins stand for an hour they leave a rusty mark. And dirt from the ceiling crumbled over everything. And it's so cold out there, so cold - so wet, the air full of spores. And salt covers the plaster like a beard. Salt in large flakes that you can rub away.

Leave kitchen roll standing for an hour and it's soaked. Leave a dry dishcloth on a worksurface and it's sodden. How wet is the air? Water condenses along the walls. And there are great green splodges where the mold is growing. You can't rub them away. They go deep: great, green splodges like nebulas.

Once, the plaster was a dry pink. Once, for just a few days. Then the damp spread from one corner of the kitchen. We found the source: a leak. A waste pipe. It was fixed, but the damp began to spread outwards, strange sun, strange radiance. Until every part of the kitchen was a wet brown. A brown that became mottled with green, and purple. And then that was covered with salt that somehow grew from the wall. Salt in large flakes I sometimes wipe away with my hand. Was the salt a good omen? A bad one?

Sometimes, it has seemed the damp was drying. Sometimes, I have dared to think: it's in retreat. But in truth, the damp was only gathering itself in darkness to come again. Gathering itself, breathing in, so it could exhale back out and farther this time. Gathering in so it can bloom out, strange star, so its rays might reach the living room, and there begin new work. There's a whole cosmogony at work here. A universe born, expanding. Dark matter and darker matter intertwined. Impersonal life - it's here, I know it beneath my fingers.

Just now, I went out there again, to verify. Is it really that bad? It is that bad. Is it really that wet? Yes, it is wet. Does dirt still fall from the ceiling? It falls, and constantly. And I take a breath. Am I really breathing in spores? I'm breathing in spores. And I touch the wall above the sink - is something really running off on my hands? I look at them. There's something brown. Something wrong. There's a new process beginning in there, I decide. Something else is beginning. A darker brown within brown. A spore within the spore, but with sentience. The king of spores, with a dark intelligence, growing between the walls.

I think the insurance company are going to pull out. I think the Loss Adjuster will shake her head and leave. I think the drying machines are going to fail, and I'll be left on my own in the kitchen, in the dark. The electricity failed there for six months because of the damp. It was dark, only dark, and the oven didn't work; nothing worked there. For a long time, dark, and with nothing working.

Then I got the electricians out. Light! 'Your flat needs rewiring', they said, 'the whole lot.' I ignored them. There was light, and that was enough. And the light is still working. It doesn't flicker; it's steady. Which means you can gaze upon the damp. You can gaze, fascinated at the damp and the plaster mottled with damp. It doesn't hide, the damp. It isn't shy. It is there, obvious. It announces itself calmly. It says, here I am, with quiet plainness. And there it is. A fact. Absolute damp. Damp beyond all damp meters. 'Off the scale', said the drying expert, who'll bring the machines.

I'm going back out there again. I'm supposed to be working. I'm writing something. But the damp is calling me. The damp wants a witness to itself. And who am I but its bard? Make an idiom for me, says the damp. Let me spread in words, too, it says. Let me spread through your blog and through all blogs. The damp seeks a new medium. And it will spread, medium to medium until the pages of the universe are written with damp.

I have to go out there again. The damp is calling, and I am an arm of my damp, I know it now. One night it grew me. One night a spore unfolded itself to make a man, a golem of damp. And the damp wrote its name on my forehead and placed its charm on my tongue. I spoke; I wrote; I was the bard of damp. Write, says the damp. Let me spread there, too, on the page. I write. The blog is wet.

And is it coming back in the bathroom? Is it coming back there, from the brick and from the gap between the bricks? Is something beginning there, too, a kind of Singularity of damp, damp become self-aware? Because a new step is being taken here, I know it. Life has reached another level. Damp will speak. Damp has begun to dream, there between the walls. And what will it say when it comes to itself? What will the damp say when it wakes up?

I don't know which one of us wrote these lines, the damp or I.

My Flat

Yesterday, I swept the yard clean after the builders, and rearranged the potted plants by height - hebes and heathers, ferns and splindly shrubs - so they spread out pleasantly in the twelve feet of concrete between eye and wall. The long scar along the kitchen wall, which the damp expert said was 'letting the weather in' has been healed up; the thin skin of rendering, turning green from moisture, has been replaced by a thicker one, and finally, you can see a strip of darker, rougher concrete where the burst water pipe was dug up and replaced.

Inside, in the kitchen, the damp continues to spread, but calmly, changing softly the colour of the wall. Along its spreading edges, thick salt, which falls to pile at the base of the wall and along the worksurfaces. And grit still falls from one corner of the ceiling. And the wet walls are marked with mildew like liver spots on an elderly hand. Along the window sill, the plaster has turned a motled green.

The bathroom is dry now; the damp expert passed his machine over the wall: yes, it is certain, the damp course is working. And no leak, either, from the shower upstairs, though I look up still from my shower to where water used to run - where it even poured once, raining inside a room as in one of Tarkovsky's films. But the wooden floor is still ruined in places by plaster dust. And the replaced floorboards are the wrong colour: yellow wood, instead of brown. On wood, fallen leaves from the palm. On the floor of the bath, long hairs - not mine - reddish brown on white plastic.

One Man And His Damp

'Damp's easy to fix!', said Blah-Feme, months ago, and with his usual confidence. 'And it's pretty cheap, considering'. I suspected he was wrong, but his judgement buoyed me: perhaps he's right, I thought, and I've just been unlucky with all the workmen and damp companies who've come out over the years. But I've learnt since what I already knew: damp calls for a Talmudic inquiry; I will go from one wise man to another, from one to another, but none of them is really certain of the Law. There is no big Other when it comes to diagnosing the causes of damp, and subjective destitution comes when you touch a wall that is more soaking than ever.

There it is, the sinthome, naked and unashamed. There it is, strange pleasure, that, if it could gaze would look at me now from the soaked, grey plaster. And won't it look at me again when the plaster is hacked off and the brick stands naked and seemingly without secret. Brick, wet brick, in its simplicity, its nudity, just as it stood last September, before the damp course and then the new plaster until it began again, the damp, beginning in the top righthand corner even as I held a party to celebrate the new kitchen I'd had installed, and then radiating out, strange, wet sun, to reach every part of the kitchen.

Now, three months later, its victory is total; mould is growing in patches, the damp is blackening, and a fine layer of downy salt covers the plaster. I stroke it and it flakes down: salt from the wall. Salt leached from the wall: isn't it rather beautiful? Above me, the new joists and the wooden boards fastened over them. Dry as a bone now; nothing comes from there, the corner where the leak ran. How excited we were, the plumber and I, when we found it! Water poured down, we discovered, when the sink was emptied upstairs or the washing machine ran! It was from upstairs, and not from a copper pipe embedded in the wall! We were both joyous.

But a few weeks later when I called him again, he said it couldn't be just the leak that was causing it. There was something worse, something deeper. And what was that rushing sound? What was that sound of an underground river? He turned the stopcock off and listened hard. It's coming from there, he knocked the wall, from the other side of that. That's your problem! Howay, Lars man. And shook his head. You'll need to get someone out, he said. It's urgent. And left shaking his head and swearing, and without taking money for either of his visits, except for the twenty pound note I pressed into his hand.

I called the water company first thing - and I would call them again, first thing, when the lines opened in the morning, for thirty days in a row. I tried pleading and wailing and sternness. I lost my will and then was filled with new hope and then bored of it all, by turns. Every day, every morning! Every single morning! I began to phone more sporadically, hope drooping even as I continued to hear, as the plumber heard, something like an underground river behind the wall, streaming all dryness away.

And in the meantime, all the dramas of work and life; in the time between everything continued to happen in its complicated way. There was a Symposium; our guests who flew in from other parts of the world heard all about the damp, and they even drove here in a taxi, dropping me off before they continued to the airport. Three Lacan-inspired theorists in a cab, driving away.

And still the damp. Always there, the damp. I'd breathe it, and imagine I breathed spores in the air. Mould in my lungs like asbestos. Spores growing in my heart. Mildew over my skin: the air was wet. Eventually, I learned I had to call the industry regulator. I called, and got straight through, one man, I imagined, in a little office; by the next day, a subcontractor of the water company phoned back: they'd dig up the lane behind my flat.

Very well, I said, having been promised this before. The next day they came, without knocking on the door, or announcing themselves. But they were far away in the lane, and the leak was close, by the wall. I called a workman in. Listen, I said. Do you hear it? He hears it. It's where copper meets lead, he said. The lead comes off the mains in the lane and then meets copper, he said. They're always leaking, he said. But he wasn't allowed to dig up the yard he said. I'd need to sign a permission slip for that.

A dozen phonecalls and two weeks later - it's December now, and chilly - a man calls at the door for me to sign a permission slip. And then two more weeks pass, and I hear nothing. It's just before Christmas. The industry regulator is on the case, the complaints department knows me; the subcontractors who work for the water company are familiar with my name, but still nothing is done. Until finally, delaying my trip away for the holidays, they come out again to dig up the lane, the same hole, and give the same verdict. The leak's closer to the flat, they say, and they'll need a permission slip to dig there.

And I can hear the water rushing. Every night I hear it, rushing in the dark as though on an unknown and urgent journey. Every night, when I going into the bathroom, I hear it rushing beneath the floorboards. And hearing it by day, faintly, determinedly, seeking what ever it sought as it ran by the wall in the kitchen. I've signed the slip, I told the water company's contractors. And gave up.

No more phonecalls for a time, I thought. There was the damp, and the water rushing, the one and the other. Let it rest. Until the new year, and a few days ago, a phonecall from the complaints division. A reassuring voice. 'It's in my hands now'. But I've heard that before. 'We'll do what we can, Mr ----; I will personally see to it'; 'I understand your frustration; I'd be just as annoyed if I were in your position. Don't worry, you'll hear from us soon'; 'It's no good telling that to me. It's the subcontractors you should be talking to' - and then, from the subcontractors, 'it's the water company you should be speaking to. Have a word with them.'

For a time, they had me confused with someone else. 'We've already dug up your yard.' - 'No you haven't!' She reads out an address. 'That's not my address.' - 'Are you a Mr Traviss?' - 'No, that's not my name.' - 'Oh I'm sorry, we must have you confused with someone else.' From that time on - late October - it's as if we began again. There was someone confused with me all along. The contractors had already been out, they thought. They'd dug up the yard, they thought. Earlier still - a month after I first complained - they were similarly sure the contractors had been out. 'We've records of it.' - 'I haven't seen them.'

So when the phonecall comes in January, I know what to do. I log the time of the call, and the name of the caller. I tell her I expect to hear from her by noon the next day, or I would call her back (but there are no direct lines; the same queues, the same dumb music every time - the same half hour wasted, and explaining to someone new, someone else, the whole history of the problem, and that I was not Mr Traviss and never was). And I put the phone down with no expectation she would ring back.

But later that day, on a windy street, she calls my mobile and I hear her voice again. 'I'm sending someone out.' - 'Great, when?' - 'Anytime next week. When suits you?' - 'Monday.' - 'We can't come Monday.' - 'Tuesday, then. A.M.' And we are agreed. Tuesday A.M.: tomorrow. Tomorrow!

In the last few weeks, the drying company's been out and agreed to install dehumidifiers once the plaster comes off. The drying expert walked round the back of the house with me and pressed the wet, green-tinged rendering on the other side of the kitchen wall. Nine inches thick, he said, they built them solid in those days. I ask him if he thinks the brick's corroded (water, the plumber told me, can eat brick from inside like acid). Could be, he said. Either way, can't tell 'til the plaster's off.

The next day, the Loss Adjuster and the contractors met in my kitchen. It's got worse, they agreed. But decided in the end the insurance would pay, although I would have to get the external walls re-rendered, just to make sure. 'I'll get onto it,' I told them. And I did, phoning the builders about the quote they'd give me months ago. They sent out a permission slip to sign, which I signed and posted back by return of post. And all this with no faith, with all hope withered away, but stalwart, adjusted, knowing the abandonment of hope did not preclude something happening. Down to the brick - what would they discover? All the way down - what would they find?

It's been going on for years. I called six damp proofing companies out in turn, one after another. The water's getting in behind the rendering, said one. You'll have to strip it off, repoint the brick, and render it again. Above all, don't replace the rendering, said another, you'll need to leave the wall unrendered to let the water get out somewhere. It's the hole in your wall, said another, referring to the long scar left where the lead pipe had to come out. It's letting in the weather.

And still another discounted that and the other explanations. It's your hopper, he said, showing me a thick patch of green at the top of the pipe through which it drained. Ah, I said, impressed at his observational powers. All of them agreed a damp course would help things. All of them agreed to provide one. We'll tank it right up to the ceiling.

The year pressed on. Summer still, and dry, but I was worried at the damage the weather would cause through winter. But the damp proofers I chose were sure: don't bother with the back wall yet. The wall needs to breathe. To breathe! But so did I! My lungs were full of spores! My lungs were caked with mildew!

Then the old kitchen went, and the new kitchen came, and I lived at Blah-Feme's while the kitchen and the bathroom were done. I came back to check the work every morning, early, photographing it as it proceeded. All kinds of dramas: misdelivered goods, goods I had to replace from remote showrooms, the floor scratched and damaged, but it was done, the kitchen ready, and everyone came round for the party.

But the damp had appeared again. The damp, unvanquished, had appeared in the corner. And Blah-Feme said, it's nothing, it'll dry out. But by the next day, it had spread. And the day after, it had spread further, fanning out. And in a fortnight, the kitchen was soaked and the new, white cupboards were mildewed and the new plaster was covered in a film of water, and the air in the flat was damp again, and as damp as before. What madness!

That was September, when I called out the plumber. September after six months of damp proofers and diagnoses. September and it was the rushing river of water behind the wall that seemed most ominous. September and the water rushing like fate, a little personal Egdon Heath there behind the wall.

'Either it's getting better or it's not', said Blah-Feme firmly before he visited a fortnight ago, 'which is it?' I said I didn't know, but a fine layer of salt had appeared, and it was nearly as charming as the small snails that used to fall from the hole in the ceiling. When he was round he looked at the white powder and pronounced it to be lime. 'You're very certain,' I said. And he decided it was getting better. The smell's gone, he said, and I thought he was right. Perhaps the kitchen was drying.

Back in November, I'd told Mladen Dolar, Jodi and K-Punk about the damp. Mladen asked me what I wrote about. 'Damp, just damp.' And they were driven off, three Lacan-inspired theorists in the taxi, leaving me at my door. I opened it, and there was a wave of damp, the old familiar smell. I wrote a post on damp, then another. Blah-Feme with Hero Harvest in Liverpool texted to say they loved the posts on damp. Even W. was moved. 'My God,' he said.

Back in the summer, down at W.'s, I told a prominent Levinasian scholar and her partner all about my flat. W. joined in. 'It's disgusting! The yard used to be filled with sewage! All the windows were jammed shut! And the kitchen! My God, the kitchen!' They decided to visit me, the scholar and her partner, to see the kitchen at first hand.

That was in the days of the slugs, when nightly, through some nook or another, great slugs would find their way into the kitchen and then, slithering under the door, find their way into the lounge and leave translucent trails across the bare wood. My guests were impressed, watching me pick them up and hurl them over the back wall.

'Can't you cook them?' I said I wished I could, dropping them into a stirfry, or steaming them like Dim Sum. Still other slugs were shrivelled along the side of the sink, where I had poured a thick line of blue slug pellets. My morning's harvest! My guests took photos, impressed.

Back at his house, W. and I had explained my flat in Levinasian terms: the kitchen gave unto the il y a, we said, and in a Blanchotian one: the kitchen was an image of itself, we said. We went as far as Heidegger: my kitchen, we decided, suspended relationality. It was a kind of reduction. All this to explain the true horror of the kitchen to our phenomenologically-inclined guests.

'Being is horror', said W., 'and horror's his kitchen.' We compared the idea of nausea in Levinas and Sartre, and cosmologies that saw order emerging from chaos. The tohu-bohu, said W., a scholar of Biblical Hebrew, that's his flat. Absolute horror. He tells them they'll understand once they've watched Satantango. Cosmic shit, says W., that's what Bela Tarr called it an interview. Ontological shit, I say.

Built to Last

'Right, you're my eyes', says W., leaving his glasses behind as we set out on our walk. 'All set?' We're all set. W. is a great advocate of walking: 'it's what we're made for', he says, and speaks of the walks he used to take on the weekend.

'We're essentially joyful', reflects W. later, 'that's what saves us. We know we're failures, we know we'll never achieve anything, but we're still joyful. That's the miracle.' He finds this very amusing. We are in the little boat that carries us across to Mount Edgcombe. 'But why is that, do you think? Why are we content?', I ask him. - 'Stupidity', says W. And then: 'We're not ambitious. Are you ambitious?' - 'No.' - 'Well nor am I.'

We look out over the water. W. tells me again about the Dukes of Edgcombe, and how one of them married a barmaid at the pub near the dock. Then we go into the grounds, the great sweep of law going up to the mansion on our right, and the entrance to the gardens ahead of us. The geyser always makes us laugh as it gushes unexpectedly into the air.

I take pictures of the tulip garden, where W. comes to read Kafka. W. has always disliked pictures. 'Use your brain', he says. 'Remember.' The worst thing, for W., our mutual friends L. and R. told me, was when they took photos of someone without asking him. W. was appalled. True, he has a photo album at home, but he was given it recently. He has his memory, says W., and that's enough for him.

'So is it lack of ambition that makes us joyful?', I ask W. It's partly a question of temperament, W. decides. Stable family lives, and so on. We are free from insecurity. 'Are we free?', I ask - 'Well you always think you're obese.' - 'That's true.' It's a beautiful day. The gardens give way to a great landscape, planned two hundred of years ago. 'They must have thought they had all the time in the world', I say. Then, on our left, the sea, a beach of pebbles, and, across, the city, and ships going to and fro.

'See, what more do you want than this?', says W., and he's right. Later, rising up into the woods, we sit and look out of the water. There's a ferry, travelling out to Spain. W.: 'We should go on a trip, one day.' And then, 'we're not going to go anywhere, are we? We're men of habit. Simple beings. Everything's got to be the same. That's our strength.'

'I never think about my death, or anything like that', I tell W. Nor does he. - 'It's all melodrama.' - 'And there's nothing I want more than I've got', I tell him, and recall how frustrated I get when I watch Bergman's characters moaning about their lot. 'They have these great big houses - it's amazing.' W. laughs. 'Tell me about your flat again. It's shit, isn't it? You've got the worst flat of anyone I've ever met. My God, I don't know how you live there.'

The other day, I tell him I spend whole days ringing various companies to get them to look at the damp. 'It's Talmudic', I tell him, 'everyone's got a different interpretation.' Yesterday, the workmen came and took the ceiling down and fitted new joists next to the old, rotten ones. Then they hammered boards over the joists.

'What do you think's causing the damp?', I ask them. They're baffled, but we can hear water, flowing. 'How long has it been like that?' - 'A month or two.' - 'Can't be good.' He shook his head. 'But the water company won't come out.' On the phone, W. recommends Offwat, the industry regulators. I rang them this morning, and so the water company's coming out tomorrow.

'How's your house?', I ask him. He tells me again how the foundations were dug up by the previous owners, and layers of sheeting mean damp is an impossibility. 'It's built to last', says W., 'not like yours.' I tell him the plumber says it might need a rebuild - 'the bricks have rotted away.' W. is amazed. 'You know how much my house cost me?' He names an absurdly low figure. 'So how much did yours cost you?' I name an absurdly high figure. 'My God. You're fucked.'

I tell him the slugs have gone. 'That's one thing, at least.' It must be the frost. 'You'll get rats next.' - 'Oh yes, rats.' And we laugh. I'm waiting for the damp to come back in the bathroom, I tell him. I can smell it, it's there, behind the plaster, waiting to soak through. It'll be really bad this time, I tell him. Black. The shower upstairs is leaking again, I tell him. 'It's like Tarkovsky, all that rain inside.' W. impressed. 'You're really fucked', he says, in admiration.

But we're out walking, the gardens before us, and beyond them the landscaped view, and then the ascent into the woods, and beyond them, the pub. We're anticipating the beer. 'I hope they've got honey beer', I say. 'Oh yes, great,' says W., excited, 'now put that fucking camera away'. I tell him to smile. 'Think of posterity', I tell him.

'You don't actually know anything, do you?', says W. 'You've got no body of knowledge.' W. has Hebrew: 'You see, I know something. What do you know?' I look up into the sky. - 'I've read a lot.' - 'Secondary stuff. You're always reading secondary stuff. It's your weakness', says W., 'or one of them. No one reads secondary stuff but you.'

He's undoubtedly right, I tell him. How much does he teach? He tells me: very little. I tell him how much I teach: a lot more than he does. - 'You really drew the short straw, didn't you?', he says. - 'Which one of us do you think will get sacked first?' W. thinks it's him. He doesn't mind, though. He'll retrain as a lawyer. 'We can set up a practice. We might do some good in the world.' - 'It'll be the making of us!' We laugh. -'What good do we do, really?' - 'None whatsoever!' 

'These are truly the last days,' W. quotes, over honey beer. - 'How long do we have left?' - 'Oooh, not long. We're fucked, everything's fucked.' This as we look out to sea. 'But we're essentially joyful', says W., 'that's what will save us. Actually, it won't - we're too stupid.' - 'We'll be the first to go under!' - 'Exactly!'

The houses are derelict at the bottom of W.'s street, the windows broken. Sometimes you see children's faces. 'Do they live there?' - 'I think so,' says W., who always tells me to ignore them when they bang on his windows. 'You're scared of them, aren't you?', he says to me, as he lights a fag. 'That kind of poverty ...', I say - 'It's terrible. It's like that round here,' says W.

The kids yell at him because of his long hair. 'They hate us'. Once someone came out the pub to throw an ashtray at Sal. 'Even she was sacred.' He shakes the match to put it out. 'Nothing ever's going to happen anywhere,' says W. 'It's beginning here. The ship's going down, with all hands.' Only those of us at the periphery can see it, he says. 'That's where you can see what's going on. Look at it!' The windows are broken. Some are boarded up. Rain. 'This is where it's all going to begin', he says. 'It's like Bela Tarr! Have you bought Satantango yet? It's out! 17 quid for 7 and a half hours!'

When L. and R. were staying with him, they took a lot of photos, W. said. 'It's all documented. The impending end. But it's nothing to your flat, is it? Have you told them about your flat? I did. And they're going to stay with you, aren't they? They won't be told,' says W., 'I tried to tell them. It's disgusting, I said, but they said it couldn't be as bad as all that. I said, it is as bad as all that! I've never seen anything like it!' W.'s enjoying himself. He likes hyperbole. 'To think, they're going from my house to your flat!'

'The best thing's your yard,' W. continues. 'When it filled with sewage, and it was really hot, and you couldn't open your back door or your windows, do you remember? The smell. You could smell it, with the back door closed. It was disgusting! And your kitchen! It was horrifying!' W. had helped me dismantle the old kitchen ready for the builders. 'I hope you've thrown everything out. All those pots and pans.' I tell him the new ones have gone the same way, and are covered in mould. 'No wonder you're always ill', says W. 'You're going to kill them', of L. and R.

W. tells me again about the layering that prevents his house from getting damp. 'We bought it from interior designers', he says of his house, 'I didn't have to change a thing.' But he did buy a big Smeg fridge, I remind him. Oh yes, he bought that. And he spent a bit of money on the kitchen. 'Lovely, isn't it?'

And then: 'compare your kitchen to my kitchen, go on. How big's your kitchen?' - 'Six foot by six foot,' I tell him. W.'s kitchen is much larger: fifteen foot by twenty foot, he says. And it's not damp, he points out. And his fridge is full of food, because he's not greedy, like me. 'I don't go and scoff it all', he says, 'I've got self-control. Do you know what that is? Self-control?' W. is not a glutton, he says. Nor does he drink when he's on his own. 'I'm not like you.'

A little later. 'Food is for the other,' W. announces. 'It's a gift.' He tells me he's bought slices of Emmenthal and some cold meat for me. 'You're the other', he says, 'so I have to feed you.' - 'From your own mouth? That's what Levinas says.' W. opens his mouth. -'Do you want some? Do you?'

'Men love verbal play', W. decides. 'What we're doing now. Sal doesn't understand it. Men love verbal humour and abuse', he says. 'It's a sign of affection, of course, he says, 'I feel affectionately towards you.'

Sometimes, I remind him, he likes to explain things about me to other people like an indulgent mother. 'The thing about L. is ...', he'll begin. Or: 'What you have to understand about L. is ...' And best of all, when he's feeling very tender, 'What I love about L. is ...' - 'Is that it, then?, I ask W., 'do you love me?' - Yes, I love you', says W., 'You see, I can talk about love. I can express my feelings. Not like you.'

Mushrooms

W. remembers when I was up-and-coming, he tells me. He remembers the questions I used to ask, and how they would resound beneath the room's vaulted ceiling. You seemed so intelligent then, he said. I spread my arms. I shrug. Of course, of course. But when any of us read your work ..., he says, without finishing the sentence.

I know, I tell him. There's no excuse. But then, I point out, I think it encouraged you to write, didn't it? And W. admits it's true. He started to write encouraged by my writing. Until then, he said, he spent 7 years on each paper. How long do you spend?, he says, five minutes?

It was different for your generation, I point out (W. is slightly older than me). Of course, I'm not even part of a generation, I tell him. At least for your lot, there was a chance of a job. At least everyone who wanted a job, got one. But for us? W. finds it funny when I become self-righteous. But that's got nothing to do with it, he says. You have to work, he says.

You don't work, do you?, he says. - 'I do.' 'What on? What are you writing?' - 'A review. A long one.' - 'Oh yes? And what are you reading?' - 'Lacan and Zizek', I tell him. - 'Oh yes, what Lacan?' - 'Well, it's more Zizek.' - 'What do you know about Lacan?', he says. - 'Very little. But I'm only reading it as a background.' - 'Oh it's background reading.' - 'You have to follow up all the references when you're reviewing', I tell him. 'It's a long review - 9,000 words', I tell him, 'and then, after that, I'm reviewing your book'.

'Of course it's different for people in your class', I tell W. (W. is from a slightly higher social class than me). 'Oh yes? How?' - 'You still have expectations. You don't know how bad it is.' I look at my fingernails. 'I'll bet you were a prefect, weren't you? There's something of the prefect about you', I tell him, without knowing what a prefect is. 'You haven't been crushed', I tell him. 'It should be part of your education - to be crushed.' W. finds this very funny. - 'You're being self-righteous again.'

I go out and buy pork scratchings and a four pack of Stella from the shop. 'I was never really up-and-coming', I tell him. 'Shameless - that's what I was. And desperate.'

'Do you know I've got mushrooms growing in my flat?', I ask W. - 'I think you should harvest them.' W.'s house, which is very large, was fitted out by interior decorators and only cost him £50,000. 'They completely rebuilt the foundations,' he says, 'layer by layer.' There is no possibility of damp, he says. And it's true: there's no damp there, nothing at all. 'The air is so dry', I say, as soon as I get in. 'I know. It's great, isn't it?', he says.

'So were you ever up-and-coming?', I ask W. He was, he remembers. That was a golden time. Everyone looked up to him. What went wrong? Booze - and fags. But wasn't there another golden age, a few years later when he became single? 'Oh yes', says W. 'I only taught one hour a week. Every morning, I got up and read and took notes until I went to bed. I had a desk and a bed in my room, and my books, and nothing else. I didn't go out, I didn't drink, I just read, and took notes, day after day.' We're both moved, sipping our Stellas and eating pork scratchings.

I remember a short interview I conducted with W. a few months ago. 'What do you consider your greatest weakness?' - 'Never to have come to terms with my lack of ability.' - 'What's your greatest disappointment?' - 'To know what greatness is, and know I will never, never achieve it.' - 'What's your worst trait?' - 'Fear and anxiety cloud all my judgements and relationships.' - 'What is your greatest academic gift?' - 'I don't have any. My whole career has been a crushing failure. I only carry on out of debilitating fear.'