It felt strange to see his belongings all gathered together, a monument to his time spent living in this space. Displayed in front of him, the collection seemed so trivial.
Clothes he no longer wore having fallen out of style.
Scorched pots and pans.
The sun-bleached spines of a dozen novels.
He had been weighing up the fiscal difference of hiring out a storage unit for the month over just hiring a skip. How liberating it would be, to just do away with it all. This house could be a chrysalis - he could emerge from the cocoon brand new and permeable. Friends and family would remain tactile, ever present tethers to his very memory, but everything else was immaterial. Inconsequential.
There was the brief consideration of buying a bottle of paraffin, dousing his bedding and the faux-leather coach he had found abandoned on a street corner. He could take to the garden with the final refrigerated tins he had been saving for a big occasion, and watch the house be swallowed whole in white hot flame.
Probably shouldn’t, he thought, else there’ll be no chance of getting that deposit back.
Instead, he simply indulged these ideas as nothing more than passing fantasies, and got to work on the final checks he would have to make before moving out.
He read the meter and cancelled standing orders, changed the addresses of online accounts to save him from erstwhile parcels. The landlord turned up at half past, just as he was finishing up the hoovering. The landlord was pleasant enough, but the tenant still had no real grasp of his character. Their relationship was explicitly transactional; there had been no need for any correspondence.
The rent had never been late.
The family next door had never once made a complaint.
There were no loud gatherings that passed into the early hours, noise and chaos seeping through the thin walls of the terraced streets. He didn’t even smoke, and from initial glances, it appeared the house had been left in pristine condition.
The landlord held an envelope, the inside of it stuffed with a large wad of cash. The tenant fingered the keys to the building.
This was supposed to be it.
One final transaction.
The landlord made a meal out of his inspections, running his finger along the polished windowsills and skirting trim.
Truthfully, he was disappointed that there was no fault. It gave him a sense of purpose, knowing there would be tasks to complete once the place was emptied of the life currently within it.
-Scorch marks around the back wall of the hob, he said.
-There when I moved in, said the tenant. Got photographs to prove it.
The tenant scrawled through his camera roll.
Past the holidays and lunches, the trips to festivals with friends.
Eventually, he stopped upon dozens of photos of the house before he moved in.
Scorch marks around the hob, everything else whitewashed, sterile, removed of the vibrancy that would come to inhabit it. The landlord persisted.
- Some scuffs on the walls, he said.
But the tenant was primed to parry, to swat away the sabre entirely if necessary.
-Natural wear and tear. It’s to be expected, been here two years now.
The landlord conceded and the cash deposit was returned.
The tenant hoovered up the dust that had accumulated around his pile of belongings, before it was carried into the waiting boot of his 2003 Nissan Micra.
-Been a pleasure, said the landlord, offering his hand to shake.
Of course it had been nothing of the sort.
There was no camaraderie.
No animosity.
They were abstract shapes to the other, a printed name and signature atop a dotted line.
Nevertheless, the tenant accepted the gesture in the spirit that it was given.
-Can I take one last look around? he said. For old time’s sake, like.
The landlord looked to his watch and shrugged.
-Be my guest, he said. See if there’s anything you’ve forgotten.
The tenant walked back in alone.
He was shocked to experience how quickly the energy had been siphoned from it with his removal.
It was sparse and skeletal.
Barren and lifeless.
He breathed in deep. It smelt of bleach and lemon tinted anti-bacterial spray, far removed from the dust and warmth he was used to.
Satisfied, he returned to the front garden, closing the door on the latch behind him.
The landlord took the keys from him and gathered his paperwork.
-Where’s your new place? he said.
-Beeston, the tenant replied, north of the river.
-Don’t know the area myself, is it a nice place?
-I don’t know, the tenant said. It’s cheaper.
The landlord laughed at this, then he was gone.
The tenant looked to his over-stuffed car, weighed down by the essence of him. It was such a meagre assembly, this consolidated bundle of all his tastes and interests. It was a tiny reflection of his entire material evidence.
The ignition started and the engine roared into life under the strain of it all,
Carrying the tenant forward
To another shell
Another tired sunless husk
To reanimate it
And bring it into being.
Click here for more short stories. The piece “The Old Crowd” is another tale about the process of moving on.