The Townhouse — The Festival Review

For some time, I lived in the fourth-floor apartment of a townhouse in the historic center. The ground and first floors of the building were a student café smelling of old beer, tobacco, and hip nonchalance. A fashionable couple, with whom I had little in common, lived on the second floor. My work colleagues lived on the third floor and I on the fourth, the floors connected by a rickety wooden staircase.

The townhouse did not have a telecom doorbell, and among my work colleagues we did not have enough keys to the building. Instead of asking the landlord to install a doorbell or cut more keys, we used a fishing rod to let in our guests and ourselves. Using the fishing rod felt like living the young adult life my adolescent self had expected, though the novelty soon wore off when I arrived to an empty apartment after a long day at work and did not have the key.

In the apartment was a hole in the wall, which our landlord also rented. The tenants were an older American couple. Formerly homeless, they had negotiated a reduced rate with the landlord. To afford the rent, the woman would roam the streets at night, collecting empty bottles to exchange for cash at the local supermarket. The man repaired bicycles, apparently for free, and would often have half a dozen bicycle repair jobs on the go. Nuts, bolts, and wrenches would cover the floor, half-dismantled bicycle skeletons littering the hallway.

The couple had little furniture. In the winter they would store their food on the roof for lack of a refrigerator. All they owned was a mattress, likely supplied by the landlord. They were not particularly clean or tidy, occasionally leaving a bag of rubbish in our kitchen for so long that, at the slightest touch, the bag would erupt with thousands of fruit flies.

But the other tenants could not dim my romantic feelings toward the apartment. From my bedroom I could hear the bells of the town hall, the cathedral, and the parliament, all half a minute out of sync. I could see into the library of a neighboring apartment; I would watch the occupant read the newspaper in the early winter darkness, never without a cup of coffee. As the bells ricocheted through the cobbled, medieval streets, I believed I was observing the future I desired, the scholarly, urban life for which I was destined.

I thought I would live in this city forever.

But within a couple of months I would leave the country. I have returned only twice, briefly. Once, I walked past the townhouse, trying to remember my life in that space. But standing on the pavement, below where the key tackle would fall, I could only sense the distance between that imagined life and the one I was living.

Alex Mepham is a PhD student investigating how background noise impacts speech understanding. On the side, Alex writes and translates poetry and short prose, with an interest in 20th Century Nordic literature. Alex currently lives in York, UK.