Flatmate Wanted

Do you know what I hate about motorways? Drivers. I hate drivers that cruise along in the middle lane for miles on end. The middle lane is for over-taking only, like the fast lane. Who do these idiots think they are? Are they not aware of the basic rules of motoring? I once rang up Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show to participate in a heated discussion on the subject of middle-lane drivers. By the time I got through they had started talking about something else, namely whether mainstream non-organic underarm deodorants caused cancer or not, so I declined an invitation to comment. However, my failure to publicly condemn these mindless people has not detracted from my annoyance at their behaviour.

At a dinner party some time ago, I met a man who drove a canary yellow Ferrari Supercar in his spare time. On learning of his vulgar obsession, I took an immediate dislike to him. Buying such a car is an act of desperation, a sign that a person insecure in himself. When asked about his motorway driving habits, he confessed to a love of the middle lane. How predictable! I thought to myself, as I tucked into a portion of rather over-sweet charlotte rousse that sat on my plate. How predictable that a man of such little taste would prefer the middle lane. A mediocre man, attempting to appear flamboyant and glamorous with his ridiculous car, was thus exposed as the ignorant, inflexible human being he really was.

I could go on. But I shan’t. Instead, I shall tell you a little about myself and my surroundings. My name is Andrew Mullen. I am 28 years old. My current location is a courtyard behind a tenement building in Dennistoun, Glasgow. I can hear the afternoon traffic going past, being as I am near to a major local thoroughfare, Alexandra Parade. I often think about going for a walk in the nearby Alexandra Park, within which can be found the first ever fountain to be made entirely from iron. A pioneering fountain of the Victorian age, fallen into disrepair. My respect for Glasgow City Council wanes every time I think about that fountain. Where is their sense of civic dignity, of municipal integrity? If they can’t even maintain one fountain it’s no wonder the stabbing statistics are through the roof.

Dennistoun is surrounded by depressing, crime-ridden mini towns. Young men walk about in sub-zero temperatures in nothing but white football shirts and tracksuit bottoms, sneering at you as you drive past. Down the Cumbernauld Road you drive, down the Dalmarnock Road. To Cambuslang you go, Shettleston, Riddie, Blochain, and Castlemilk. Murder and gay rape in the parks, dirty drugs running through the veins of babies.

I’m not a Glaswegian myself. Born and raised Great Yarmouth boy. The mobile phone company I was working for reassigned me to the Glasgow office seven years ago, but the Scots have never made me feel welcome in this city. They are a remarkably unfriendly people, who seem to think urinating on the stairwells of apartment buildings is appropriate social behaviour. It is quite normal for a glued-up Celtic fan to approach you in the street and attempt to put you in a headlock for no apparent reason. While thuggish youths break into cars and wrench the steering-wheel locks off with crowbars, the local residents walk past oblivious, too drunk to care. The hairdresser will sell you a bag of drugs with your cut and blow dry and when the drains overflow, sewage spills onto the pavement. It doesn’t get cleaned up for days on end.

When I first moved here I took a one bedroom flat on the south side of the city. Nice enough I suppose, though I was the only one in the building that spoke English as a first language, which really got on my wick after a while. About six months in, a group of young Scottish men moved in above me, which I thought would be an improvement to the situation. How wrong I was. There were about six of them, and they took the two flats in the building that had been uninhabited for months. The day they moved in they had an enormous party that kept me up all night. Thinking that the anti-social noise levels and vomiting out the window could be justified by the fact that it was probably a house-warming party, I let it slip. However, this behaviour continued unabated for weeks on end. When I went up to complain, they laughed in my face and told me to get a life. Then the big house across the road got burgled by a gang. The criminals shot the owner of the house dead in front of his wife and kids, before running off with a huge lump sum of cash. Why that man had so much cash in his house I don’t know. What I do know is that it was a Pakistani gang. Well I don’t know that for sure, but 95% of the people on the South Side are from Pakistan, so it’s very likely.

At the present moment, total darkness surrounds me. My nose is continually affronted the revolting smells of rotting food and used female sanitary products. Maggots and rats are my only companions, save for the occasional resident from the tenement block. They come down to dispose of their rubbish in the metal bins behind the low wall in the courtyard. They don’t talk to me, but I don’t care. None of them would be worth speaking to anyway. They have all been nothing but rude to me.

I didn’t have a lot of friends in Glasgow when I first moved here, so I made an extra effort to make some. I knocked on my neighbour’s doors, introduced myself by my first name and insisted that if they ever needed any sugar, they knew where to come. They all looked at me as if I was an illegal sex worker, which I’m not.

It has been difficult. All I wanted was to feel at home here. After all, there’s little else to console a stranger to the west coast of Scotland, with its freezing cold winters and continual rain. But if you’re not Scottish, the Scottish hate you. They won’t give you the time of day in the street. I know that my English accent is off putting for them and yes, I know about the centuries of oppression at the hands of the English, but really, I think they should just accept their inferior status and learn to live with it. England was, is and always will be the stronger, more prosperous nation, with better weather and fewer drug problems. Why should I feel ashamed of where I’m from?

Despite the hostility that I was confronted with, I decided to battle on. In order to facilitate my assimilation, I started to frequent my local pub, the Lea Rig. It was an unsuccessful venture. In the front bar, middle-aged men sat on their own, not speaking to anybody, while the occasional unattractive woman sat in the lounge area around the back. You can only nurse your pint in front of gyrating young pop stars on the TV for so long before you start feeling worse than when you came in.

Nobody does anything in this city, that’s what I don’t like. They make up reasons why they can’t go out and work, like obesity, or depression, or the fact that they’ve got a child, and then go pleading to the government for benefits. There are 60,000 people in Glasgow on benefits, more than any other UK city. And then, even if they do go out and work during the week, they get absolutely obliterated all weekend on drink and drugs. It’s not fun-loving hedonism, it’s a collective, childish denial of the realities of life.

Take my flatmate Chris for example. He’s a twenty-seven year old accountant, who’s originally from East Kilbride, one of the nicer parts of Glasgow. I found him through the flatshare section of the classified site Gumtree. He’s a nice enough guy, and he wasn’t too bad as a flatmate, but he was lazy. He would smoke in the house even though the landlord explicitly forbade it, because he couldn’t be bothered to go outside. After cooking, he would leave his dishes to fester for a good day before finally giving them a cursory clean. I once found a dead fly attached to one of the spoons in the drawer. In the drawer! When he brushed his teeth he would leave flecks of toothpaste on the bathroom mirror, never bothering to clean them off. He ignored the fact that the curtain was not properly attached to the curtain rail at one end for over three weeks. In the end I had to fix it myself. I could never concentrate on a book because the TV or the radio was always on. Background noise distracts me. These things may seem petty, but they add up, I can tell you. In the long run, they have a negative affect on your quality of life.

In protest, I started doing the chores just after he went to bed during the week, stomping around so that I would keep him awake. One morning, he said he was convinced we were being burgled at one am, but I assured him it was just me taking the rubbish out. Oh right, was all he said. When I had had enough of his tardy bill paying, I took to speaking to him about bills the minute he got home from work. You have yet to make the transfer into my account for the energy bill I would say, as he slumped down, exhausted, on the sofa. I don’t care if you’ve been busy, I’d say. I don’t care that it slipped your mind. He told me once I was like his mother, only his mother didn’t nag him as much. I didn’t rise to the bait.

Personally, I don’t think we ever saw eye to eye. Not really. In an attempt to improve matters in our flat I took to writing little reminders on post it notes. I put them absolutely everywhere, so there’s no way he couldn’t have seen them, but he never did any of the things I suggested. He didn’t take the bin out, he didn’t sort out the freezer, he didn’t clean the oven, he rarely bought the milk. The list goes on.

There were tensions, but we still got on. It did hurt when he didn’t turn up to my birthday drinks year after year, but I forgave him. When he laughed at my keen appreciation of Masterchef, I kept quiet. It’s true we were different politically, sexually, and intellectually, seeing as he was a repressed homosexual with a limited worldview, but I thought we were buddies. So why? Why did he feel the need to knock me out by throwing the iron at my head? And what drove him to cut my head off with the bread knife once I was rendered unconscious? Maybe he thought I was cramping his style when I came out with him and all his friends? Maybe he thought I should have made my own friends? I just don’t know.

So now here I am, in the courtyard round the back. A head in a bin bag. It’s amazing when you think about it, the way my life has changed. One minute, I’m making a cup of tea, the next I’ve been decapitated. I thought that when your head was severed from your body you died pretty much instantaneously, but for some reason I’m still perfectly cognisant. This has turned out to be quite annoying. For example, my flatmate Chris owed me £80 for the electricity bill at the time of my beheading, but now there is no way I can get that money back. The other annoying thing is that I’ve got know idea where the rest of my body is. It could be anywhere. Maybe Chris made lasagne with the meat and served it up to one of his girlfriends? Has he chopped me up, put me in individual jiffy bags and stored me in the freezer? I hope he does put me in the freezer, because at least then he’ll have to chuck those out of date fish fingers and microwaveable meals out to make room.

The bin bag I’m in was cursorily thrown into one of several metal dustbins seven days ago. All the bins are now full to the brim, but the bin men still haven’t been round to collect the rubbish. Isn’t that astounding? I was tempted to write a letter of complaint to the council, I really was.

Since I’ve been dead, Chris has been having sex constantly. I know this because the flat is on the first floor and he leaves his bedroom window open. This continual love-making must be a gratifying indulgence on his part, seeing as I strictly forbade him from having sex in the flat unless I was out. Now that I have permanently left the building he can fuck as much, and as loudly, as he likes. He dumped his girlfriend a couple of months ago, so she must be a new girl. I bet he met her through the ‘Causal Encounters’ section on Gumtree.

‘slim, solvent, non white ,your pics,,,lives in rivur been illegimitely single since 1977 is millenaire gets ,,,mines pic non chinese nonblack man slim very black suntanned turban on dick hair pubes tied in ponytail dumbass thick man robert james sherry brown rich man skint man tiny dick nonbmw driver non large penile owner seeks wife ukkraine woman who no speak lingo for longterm no moron take a look in mirror before you say i am a fat ugly dickhead useless cunting arselicking bi faggot married nonsingle fuckwit thanks’. That’s the sort of thing that gets written in that section. You’ve got to sort the wheat from the chaff on those sorts of sites. You do get a lot of weirdos.

Chirs isn’t a weirdo. He’s actually quite ordinary. He’s a balanced, well-adjusted young man with a good income and a healthy social life. Even when he was about to kill me, his mind was clear and his reasoning was sound. As I poured the boiling water onto the teabag, he called to me from across the open plan kitchen and living area. Brandishing the iron high above him, he spoke in a measured, calm voice. ‘‘I’ve never killed before’, he said, ‘but then, I’ve never met anyone like you’.