My Home

Exploitative menial work and poor quality housing combine in this surreal, nightmare vision of 21st-century Britain. Die Quieter Please is a brilliantly strange literary magazine based here in London, and this dark story is a great example of what they do so well. It’s time to take your turn at the leak…

Immediately upon entering my home, I take over from Piotr at the hole.

I open my mouth and begin to drink the ceiling water – without once closing my mouth – allowing Piotr to leave for work.

We’ve established a system, Piotr, Jasper and I. Eight hours at work, eight hours at the hole, eight hours of sleep. Jasper works at the Amazon warehouse on the edge of the city from one in the morning until nine in the morning. While he works, Piotr drinks the ceiling water and I sleep. Jasper then takes over from Piotr, who goes to sleep, while I attend my work at the office from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon. When I return home, I take over from Piotr, who then goes to work at a sports bar from five in the afternoon until one in the morning. This is when Jasper sleeps. It sounds complicated but it’s not. It’s a perfect system. There used to be a fourth person, a lovely girl, who lived in one of the upper rooms. I haven’t been up there in a long time. It’s not wise to stray too far from the hole. The girl disappeared once the landlord learned of her service dog. She went into the bathroom under the stairs and never came back out. Poor girl. What was her name? She couldn’t see without her service dog.

I have a lot of time to think while drinking the water that leaks from the ceiling – this is when I compose the thoughts in my head. Stories I tell to pass the time. I have been debating with myself as to whether the word ‘hole’ is an accurate and factual representation of what my compatriots and I are dealing with here. A hairline crack in the plaster allows a steady drip of water to pass directly into the living room, which has since long become our communal sleeping quarters.

In the beginning we used a bucket but this was simply not enough. The landlord penalises us for every drop spilled by increasing our rent. I do not know when we came to the conclusion to drink the leak but it felt like it took no time at all. To push the furniture to the far corners of the room, to lay a blue tarpaulin over the floor, to devise a plan of segmenting our lives into three separate divisions with militant accuracy, to assemble our beds in the same room with a curtain for privacy, to plan our daily routines around the hole (a leak, from now on I will think of it as a leak), i.e. keeping my toothbrush and toothpaste within my briefcase alongside anti-perspirant, sleeping in my suit trousers, storing a hotplate underneath my office desk. To live for the leak.