Welcome to Clapton

I’m out of a three-bed and no living room in Bethnal Green – and into my own house. The last of the rented accommodation years was rinsed away with 99p kitchen spray that my flatmates and I applied to everything and wiped away with jay cloths, socks found under the bed and pink and blue sponges that left behind smudges of dye on the walls. The hard work didn’t bother us. We knelt down and thought of the deposit. It never came.

The accountant is on holiday, assured the letting agent who said he’d have to dock 90 for a stain on the mattress that was there before, and £16 apiece for a dusty skirting board. But otherwise, we’d be rich. “Just give me a week,” he promised a month ago.

The only picture I had of the four of us.

We moved into a Victorian town house in Clapton, East London. Bay windows, exposed wooden floors, high ceilings, a room each and a living room with no beds. Someone had been killed earlier that day, next to the house, and there were bouquets of flowers tied to a lamppost and already an old lady was stealing a couple to sell on. We looked at each other as she passed my gate – a pink headscarf tied under her chin, a dirt encrusted coat, shuffling like a penguin and muttering to herself. The woman caught my stare and she paused for a moment, frozen to the spot, her face contorted. Then she belched and carried on walking.

We had made it big, we all agreed later that night. This beautiful house was mine, a real showstopper, and us four girls would live there together and cook organic dinners and figure out the fireplace and change our lives. We cheersed our good fortune with cheap white wine in champagne glasses. We danced to early noughties RnB in the kitchen at 9:30pm. “I like the way you work it,” we sang to ourselves and meant it.“No diggity, I’ve got to bag it up.”

Just then a series of raps sounded in the room. I glanced around: morse code was coming through the floorboards. The buzzer went, and I was sure the house was trying to tell us something. I went for the door. Two furious sixty year olds stood in their pyjamas in the doorway. The man was wearing a onsie from the first time around- in the style of a hill billy or a 1920s beachgoer. The grey haired woman glared through her spectacles, wearing a red dressing gown that had been aggressively knotted through the middle.

“We live below you, ma’am” began the man. “You cannot be running around, slamming doors, listening to music. The sound is unbearable.” The woman nodded, a sidekick in the lecture, which in total lasted 30 minutes and though I won’t bore you with its entirety, covered the man’s career as a martial arts instructor, the terrible artist who had lived in the house before, my father – he said I must be too young – and too female- to speak to directly about “matters of the gravest importance ma’am” – and finally, lawyers should be continue to live as 20-somethings in the house.

By the end I was sober, speechless. I closed the door and turned the music back on.