Your damp's world famous, Jodi tells me as she smokes and we stand outside the Playhouse. Squalor, she says, remembering the title of a post. At first she thought I'd look Norwegian, she says. But then she read Squalor and pictured me as living in squalor, drinking heavily.
I did go through a drinking phase, I tell her, and I do live in squalor. It's quite disgusting, I tell her, and no joke. It's no way to live: what W. said was right, and besides it will make me ill. Jodi says she liked to read out the posts on my yard to her partner and he would laugh. Ah yes, the yard, I say, I remember.
The shape of the flat is always changing, I tell her, and slowly it is disappearing into the mine shaft I know lies beneath it, on the right. It's slowly tilting in that direction, I tell her, and the windows and doors are being pulled out of shape. For a long time, I couldn't open the windows - the frames were distorted, and looked soon to make the glass break from the pressure. So I had the frames replaced with frames that tilt. The whole flat tilts, the windows, and now the door, which I also had to have replaced. But another disaster when the windows could open: the smell: the terrible smell.
The yard was filled with sewage. The plants, which had looked ill for a long time, were dying. The yard was rotting. Everything was disgusting, and my stomach turned when in hot summers the window had to be opened for air. Of course it was fixed eventually, I told her. But not before they had to tear the pipes from the wall, leaving a great scar, and through which slugs could find their way in, and ants.
Slugs and ants, I told her, are the bane of my existence. I wake up in the morning, and there used to be slugs in the mugs and in the sink. And ants - I didn't mind them - crawling all over the walls. I think the damp keeps the ants away now, I told her, and the slugs left when I blocked up the holes in the walls. Which leaves just the snails, a new arrival, I tell her, and I don't mind them, with their translucent shells. I wonder what kind of snails they are, I speculate as we stand in the cold air, outside the Playhouse.
Yes, it's all true about the squalor, I tell her. I think I was cursed at some point and by someone. Not a terrible curse, you understand, but rather a flummoxing one. To be cursed with damp and a tilting flat, and, more generally, intellectual inability. It was all true, I say, everything I write, and I'm not a tall Norwegian, far from it.
The fame of my damp precedes me, that I learn over the weekend. It fascinates; people want to hear more; it's much more interesting than I am. Or rather, if I am interesting, it is only because of the damp, of which I speak very freely: I have no choice, and in fact it's a relief, for I actually think of little but damp, day and night.
Yes, I admit I am obsessed by damp, and I speak of very little but damp, and damp is constantly on my mind; that and the more general decay: the general tilting of the flat, its movement rightwards. If you look at my sideboards, I say, pointing to Blah-Feme's sideboards, at whose house we are having dinner, you'd see they are very far above the floorboards, which are sinking, along the joists beneath them. Sinking, and leaving a great gap between themselves and the sideboard, like the stretch of gum you can see when some people smile.
It's no good, I tell everyone at dinner, and of course I'll never be able to sell it. The flat is a disaster, but it is my disaster, my shipwreck, and in the end, it's no so bad, there's far worse, I tell everyone. And I think in some way it's the correlate of my life and that I deserve it, I tell them all. I think it's fitting, or even karmic, and that damp is my burden but it is mine and if it follows me from flat to flat like a dog then so be it.
Slugs and ants will always be close to me, I tell them. And snails, I accept that. And the mushrooms that used to grow in the corners of the kitchen. And mildew, of course, mildew everywhere, spreading, its spores drifting through the air. Perhaps I'll become tubecular, I tell them, and that will be the making of a true European intellectual.
But in truth, when I cough - and I do have a hacking cough that won't leave me - it drives the few thoughts I have from my head. W., who is also ill, is likewise disappointed with his cough. He's just ill, he says, and it doesn't help with his thinking. Of course W.'s Sal will never repeat her visit to my flat, she's adamant. It's disgusting, she said. I don't know how you can live like that. But don't you think it's improved?, I ask W. on his last visit. 'My God! Is that what you think?'
'Do you think I'm becoming a damp bore?' I ask him. 'I think you should only write about damp. It's hilarious.'