My spare room

There’s a spare room in my house, but I can’t remember it not being taken. Countless lodgers and tenants, short-term renters. People come and they go. They use the space to their liking and then leave it. There’s not much in the room: a bed, a table, a cupboard, that’s pretty much it. I like to keep the room unfussy, I like it to be bare. If you’d come before it all started, you’d have beheld this unfussy room, this simple bed with its white linen sheet, the table and chair next to the window, the cupboard standing tranquilly opposite the foot of the bed, nothing in it bar a few hangers. Whilst the rest of the house is full of keepsakes, I like to keep the spare room bare.

I don’t remember the last time I saw the spare room, the last time I really beheld it. When the tenants arrive, they bring so much stuff, some bring their life story, and the spare room isn’t very big, and though I warn them in advance, they don’t take much notice. They haul up case after case, shoebox after shoebox, more than you’d need to fill a whole lifetime. Women bring shoes and dresses, they bring boxes of jumpers, things for winter, they bring their belts and their summer clothes, scanty top after scanty top, they bring all their cosmetics and toiletries, all the things they need to make themselves pretty, and the point is, that for all the stuff in the room, you can no longer actually see it. I mean none of the boxes get emptied, the coats don’t get hung up, the hair dryer has no mounting, there is only so much that can be put into the wardrobe before it spills out on the floor. In addition to the floor surfaces are the furniture surfaces. Some space on the table, some on the cupboard; but if I ever go in to the room, if my lodger asks me to come in, then I look outward in horror, horror at all the things in it, the spare room is no longer that bare spare room that I remember when I left it.

The men are no better with their papers from work, their laptops and folders, they bring assorted full-size umbrellas, and a variety of suits, they preside over suitcases full of CD’s, or unopened bags to whose contents I’ll never be privy. They make no pretence, pay no lip service, to even bothering to unpack them, the bags stay on the floor for the duration of their renting.

But for both, the sheer volume of stuff. The surplus and superfluities. Everything strewn over the floor, leaving not one square inch visible. Every person that comes into this room wants to make it chaotic. They treat the floor like a bin, believing that as long nothing intrudes on the hallway -- which it never does -- then everything is permitted. But it’s all a part of my space, part of my house. Just because they’re there for the time being, doesn’t make it distinct from the rest of my house. It doesn’t fly off into a space of its own, with its own invisible entrance and exit, it is still just as much connected to my house as it was before they arrived. They have to walk through my hallways, upon my staircase, to get there. They must tread on my carpets. So what makes them think they can be so neglectful, so carefree, why does one after the other treat it as if it was their own?

And though my tenants always keep the door shut, it’s a mixed blessing. I won’t see the spare room. I won’t see the stuff on the floor, the discarded Amazon boxes, the dry food they store there instead of the kitchen, I won’t see any of this. When they go out, they close the door fully behind them. When I walk past, all I’ll see is this barrier, the blanched white of the frame, with the door handle against it, all I’ll see is a thing blocking my view, whilst I know -- or can at least guess at -- what’s heaped up behind it. Though I don’t know for certain how all the objects are configured, I can be sure that they won’t be in order. 

So would I prefer a door open, or door closed? Neither are palatable. I certainly don’t want to have to see all the mess every time I walk in the corridor, every time I walk into the kitchen, every time I go to the loo.

But the truth is harder to bear. If they truly treated it as their own, all well and good. But they only occupy it as a conduit to some more suitable place, some place they’ll move into shortly, a place they had in mind before they even chanced upon mine. My spare room a tide-me-over. As good as any. Their presence so fleeting, it’s as if they never intended to be there at all. How can I remotely take them seriously?

And so when they leave, they leave the stuff they don’t need, and by the time I notice they’ve left it, they’ve legged it. The room done its job. Leave me to dispose of. I won’t hear from these people again, so why waste my breath calling up about an abandoned hair-dryer? They’ve left the country by then.

The other day, my last tenant left, went back to Bulgaria. This time I told her to take everything, don’t leave a thing, I know what people are like, I know it’s not personal. And yet after she’d left, after she’d taken it all with her, she still closed the door behind her, perhaps not all the way snug to the door frame like she’d done when she’d been here, but I couldn’t see into the room. And so I pushed the door open and I went in, and she had taken every last thing. The room was just how I remember it, it had been liberated. There was my spare room, so very spare, just the bed, table and chair, the cupboard by the window, such a stark contrast to the fullness of the rest of the house. Now I could keep the door open so that whenever I walked past, I absorbed the light of the room, the light from outside, I took in the simplicity of it, so much so that I felt I could breathe, and so I took one good intake of breath and just let it out slowly.