Rental Opportunity of the Week: A Loft So Tiny It Will Ruin Your Relationship

What is it? It’s a loft.

Where is it? Hayes.

What is there to do locally? I think you can probably get a fairly affordable taxi to Heathrow from there and that’s about it.

Alright, how much are they asking? £950 PCM.

What do you think of when you think of the word “loft”? When I sit and really think about it, so many of the concepts as I view them in my brain – the bordering shape of things, the words and sounds and smells and nostalgia they inspire – are shaped by my experiences with US TV and film.

When you think of a “garage”, you rarely think of a British garage (separate deep-freeze freezer that has a Christmas turkey in it, old exercise bike with a towel you’ve never seen on it over the handles, big thing of Castrol, spare tin of paint), do you? You think of an American two-door with a Hummer in it that opens out into an immaculate cul-de-sac driveway. When you think of a “loft”, do you think in British terms (dark in a very brown way, cardboard boxes that have been softened with damp, old suede and leather coats that have been up there so long they smell like animals again, big pile of Beanos, exposed insulation between the beams, your mum stood beneath you, holding a ladder, yelling at you not to step on the “soft part of the floor”)?

Or do you think in American terms, those huge empty houses they always have in residential America, an ornate ladder that spools down to invite you up to a world with skylights and an old wardrobe and a haunted puppet of a clown? “Hey, what’s this?” you say, in your American accent, bringing the clown doll down. You put it on the kitchen island. Your mom and dad just moved here, after making a clean break, crossing state lines and starting again. They bought this house at auction and can’t believe how beautiful and old it is.

“Huh,” your dad, played by an eerily young actor compared to how old you are, says (he is wearing a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, just around the house, on a Saturday, like Americans do). “That’s neat. Hey, we should put it in the parlour!”

Your mom (played by someone who is blonde and 34 years of age) isn’t so sure: “Ugh. It icks me out.” What to do with this old clown puppet, huh? You found it and you just couldn’t put it down. You were just compelled to bring it out of the box it was wrapped and double-wrapped in, strange warnings written on the outer cardboard in a language you didn’t understand. Well, time to play in the garden and glance back at the high windows of the old house and swear you saw a little movement there.

But until then, we’re in Hayes. Hayes is London, so don’t start, but I always do find it egregious when listings that are very much in the outer outer postcodes that just about fall within the M25 limits of the city are i) £950 a month, even though I know your commute into town is pushing the two-hour mark and ii) have to explain their transport links in formats you don’t really understand.

You know when you go to a British town for the first time and see the codes used on the front of their bus service, and can never ever imagine how the “Uttoxeter to Alton Towers” bus is called the X41? That’s the same alien feeling I see when I read the Hayes bus routes – “140, X140, 90, E6, U4, U5” – which are ostensibly in the city I’ve lived in for over a decade but may as well be routes carved out on the moon. Never in my life have I seen a bus that starts with a “U”. 

— You wake up in the middle of the night and creep downstairs for a glass of water. You stare out into the garden – that beautiful, huge garden! A perfect lawn that cedes down to a magical, overgrown tumble, one you can imagine faeries live in! – just for a minute, before you tiptoe back upstairs, going down sumptuous long corridor after sumptuous long corridor. As you put your hand on the doorknob to your room, you hear something, behind you: a running sound? A… laughing sound? Huh. Must be my mind playing tricks on me—

Anyway, we’re in Hayes, in someone’s loft. You’ve seen loft flats before, so you know the deal – lofts are OK if they are done nicely, and if they’re done badly then a lot of the usable space is impeded by the abrupt slant of the ceiling, and so realistically you can only operate in the middle 30 percent or so of the flat. Guess which one this is:

As you can see, the flat is divided into two halves, the “TV and fridge” side, and the “bed” side. Between these is a low and built-in wall – yeah no I just would’ve had that open plan, too – and on the edge of the separator is what can loosely be described as your “kitchen”, in that it’s a slightly-higher-than-a-work-surface shelf with a dangling-wire microwave on one side and a two-hob on the other. I suppose you cook by going over to your TV, getting food out of the oddly enormous fridge there, walking it over to the middle of the flat (for some reason, the idea of “carrying some cheese past a sofa” feels violently wrong to me) and then you either microwave it or warm it up in a pan.

The kitchen sink, you say? Oh, that’s behind you, by your wardrobe. You see the four increasingly insanely-angled doors just next to it? That’s where you put either all your clothes, or all your foodstuffs, or both, I guess. Hard to tell. To get from the kitchen section to the sink you have to walk entirely around a badly placed dining table (the dining table has been set for the photo with a centrepiece of: four green apples, and two big tubs of chewing gum). It’s good! It’s fun. It’s fun living in a madly arranged loft being rented out by a psychopath. 

— “Hey,” you say, crunching a perfect piece of brown toast on a sunny Saturday. “Who moved my clown?” Your mom is spooning pancakes out of a pan even though you are, visibly, already eating toast. “The clown?” she says. “I didn’t touch it.” Huh, you say, weird, because when you went out to the garden today – the beautiful, gorgeous, sparkling garden, the one that hums a siren song to you every day, you take your feet off and touch them bare against the grass – when you went out there today, the clown was out there, on the lawn, between the sprinklers but miraculously dry. “Huh,” your mom, who is now somehow fucking making waffles now, says. “Ask your pop”—

The advert describes this loft as a “flat deigned for couples”, and you have to assume that is a typo of “design”, but an oddly fitting one: to deign means to do something beneath you or below your dignity, and sharing this loft space with a lover is definitely that, for both of you.

What’s the situation with the half-wall: Is it meant to muffle the TV sound from one half of the room to the other? Can you really get the romance back when you can see your partner asleep from your vantage point of the kitchen? When you cook food, it tends to make food smells, and those will be inescapable both on the sofa side of the room and the bed side.

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” you say, to the person you started dating a few months ago. “Let’s move to Hayes and have our kitchen smashed apart and dotted around three separate corners of the flat, and not really be able to walk fully standing alongside most of the walls and quite a lot of the operational internal area of the place, and fucking grow to hate each other because the only privacy we have is when we shit, and even then, I mean the site of the shitting and pissing is fairly close to everything else, as well.

“Have you ever got a bus starting with a ‘U’? We’ll have to get special different Oyster cards to get on them, but I’m sure it’ll be fine. I love you, I love you, I love you! Let’s ruin it completely!”

— Huh. The dream again. Shake it off, shake it off. Go to your bedroom window. The moon is so full and bright tonight! In the blue half-light, you can see the gorgeous garden in the cool of the night: blooms elegantly clenching down for the night, the quiet burble of the coy pond leading out to that wild grass path, the beautiful smooth expanse of lawn in— hold on. Wait. The clown puppet is out there… again?

As you look down at it, your face so close to the window you can see your breath, the night refracted through your own reflection, you’re sure you see him stir. No. Don’t be silly. You squinch the window clean with the sleeve of your pyjama. No… he’s… sitting up? Slowly, your heart beating in your throat, you see his head turn to you, eyes glimmering. In the back of the corridor, so far away from the snoozing quiet of the rest of the house, you hear a high, hard echo of laughter. When they find you in the morning you are blue and they are screaming.

@joelgolby