Please note: This is an installment for the Hellfield series, chronicling the adventures of my flatmates and I while we lived in central London. Hellfield was what we playfully called our apartment complex reflecting its great location but questionable residents and upkeep. Enjoy!
For someone who had once watched her mother choke on the ashes of her deceased grandmother, I liked to think that nothing could really surprise me anymore. But I was convinced that perhaps it was because I was wrapped in nothing but a towel with my hair damp and sticking to my neck that I found herself taken aback at what I found in the kitchen.
There was an old woman. A stranger. In my flat. Doing the dishes.
It was a particularly cold morning, the kind that made you want to put on three layers and hide under your covers rather than go outside. But I had not spent a single free day at home since arriving in London. Chores got done during the week after coming home from work so I wasn’t stuck doing all my laundry and shopping on the one day I could be doing literally anything else of interest.
Like calling the police to report strange old women cleaning the flat.
The old woman was packing all the dishes away accordingly. She opened all the correct drawers the first time and didn’t seem to have that lost look one gets when trying to locate a spoon in a kitchen that’s not yours. ‘Oh God,’ I thought in horror, ‘Has this woman been inside here before?!’
Should I yell at the woman to leave? Yell for help? Unlikely anyone would actually hear her since all my flat mates were probably out and the next door neighbor wouldn’t call the police since I was sure he was a drug dealer. The decision was made for me when the woman turned her head and looked at me, probably having heard the bathroom door open when I walked out.
“Ah hello,” she greeted.
She was definitely old enough to be a grandmother, and I briefly wondered if she belonged to one of the girls. One of my college roommates had given her mother a spare key and she used to come over and clean their apartment all the time. I remember feeling slightly racist because this specific roommate was Hispanic and when I walked in on the girl’s mother dusting for the first time I briefly thought someone had hired a maid. This led to me spending the remainder of the semester keeping my white privilege on the down low while my former roommate let her laziness rise.
The old woman spoke again, bringing me back to the present. “And you must be Kayla, yes?” Her English was broken, she sounded from somewhere in Eastern Europe.
“Yes,” I answered, clutching the towel tighter around my chest, “And you are?”
“I’m Marta,” Uh, okay. “The landlord.” Oh thank Christ.
She smiled at me and went back to cleaning the plate she was holding. After putting back in the cupboard she then started taking the trash back out of the bin.
“Did you get the rent from Sofia?” I asked. I'd had given her deposit and first month’s rent to my current roommate who promised to pass it on to landlord when she came on a certain day at the beginning of the month. I had been at work and had missed her.
“Yes. How are you liking the area?”
“It’s very central, I like it.” Why the hell are you here? Why are you cleaning? We do not pay nearly enough rent for you to come do this. “Well I’m going to finish getting dressed. Goodbye.”
Rushing to my shared bedroom, I got dressed, dried my hair, and hauled ass out into the London streets as fast as I could. I would learn from my flat mates later that evening that our landlord liked to drop in and make sure they hadn’t burned the place down. It was just something we would have to ignore in exchange for a paperless bank trail and no council tax to speak of. The girls had warned me for only £370 a month in rent that we would be expected to suck up and just deal with any inconveniences that arose concerning the other residents and our surroundings.
I had already dealt with the following in my first 5 days in the building. The neighbors located one floor below had decided to sort out the variables behind their upcoming divorce. Loudly. At three in the morning. The neighbor to our right (the suspected drug dealer) often walked past the kitchen window on his way to the stairs. He was an older gentleman who had no qualms about poking his head through the open window in order to inquire about Stella, the Italian girl who lived in the flat and had aspirations to be an actress. I had closed my dressing gown and taken my toothbrush out of my mouth to tell him Stella had already left for her waitress job. He smiled and just said he would stop by on his way home from work. I found myself wishing we had kitchen drapes.
So yes, I was very aware what we had to deal with concerning the neighbors. And now also the
landlord.
Like how she often turned up. Unannounced. And just cleaned the whole place.
