Living with five adults, four of them grownup children, means I am rarely on my own. Mysteriously, the only time that nobody is around is when the doorbell rings, so I spend my days running up and down the stairs to open the door to other people’s deliveries. But when I want to use the bathroom, someone is always there.
Sharing with a crowd means our fridge, filled on a Friday, is empty by Monday, except for a limp carrot and scrapings of pesto in a mouldy jar. Every room I walk into has music playing. There is never any space for me on the sofa. In the shower, the hot water runs out when I’m in the middle of washing my hair. I dream of the luxury of a bathroom with no one rapping at the door to ask when I’ll be finished.
Maybe if I had a shed … But our shed is full of gardening clutter. My bedroom is the only sanctuary, although I share it with Ed and three dogs, and, lacking an office, have to work in there, too. However, as soon as I’m stuck into work I receive constant visits from the kids, none of whom seem to understand the basic code of a closed door.
“Look,” I explain. “I know I’m in the house, but that doesn’t mean I’m available. When my door is shut, think of me as being in an office somewhere, totally uncontactable.”
“Except,” says Lily, “if there was an emergency, we’d have to contact you.”
“Well, yes. If there’s a real emergency, then you can knock.”
For a day or two, the plan works. But then Zac needs cash to go to the climbing wall. “That’s an emergency?”
“Well, I don’t have the money,” he explains, as if I’m hard of hearing.
Megan wants to know if there are any clean towels. She is wet and cross, having not checked the towel situation before she got into the shower.
I go back to my laptop, but I’ve forgotten what I was going to say. “I do have deadlines you know,” I yell. “I’m not filing my nails in here.”
“I need to ask you something,” Lily says, delivering a cup of tea to my desk. “Do you think Claire could move in, just for a while, until we get a place together?”
I almost choke on my first gulp of tea. “Are you mad?”
“But she needs to move out of her flat … and she wouldn’t take up much space.”
“No.” I shake my head. “Absolutely not. Your bedroom is tiny. And imagine if everyone invited their partners to come and live with us? We’d be a household of 10!”
“But we hardly ever see each other. She lives two hours away.”
I set my shoulders.
“She’d pay rent …”
“That’s not the point. Well, it is the point. But more to the point, it’s the overcrowding. I’d never be able to have a shower again.”
Meanwhile, a local tom cat has moved in without asking. He sneaks through the cat flap when we are asleep, helps himself to cat biscuits and then leaves a pungent thank you spray. Even if I remove the food, he still persists in visiting us.
“It’ll be foxes next,” I tell Ed as I wipe away the traces on the skirting board. “Maybe we should hang a sign: the more the merrier.”
“We can’t have another creature in this house.” Ed’s eyes are wide with horror. “Time to get tough.” He goes out and buys a new cat flap – a special one that opens only when it reads the chips in our cat’s necks. That night, I am woken by an odd, repetitive thumping and realise it’s the uninvited tom headbutting the cat flap.
Next morning, our kitchen is free of cat pee. Another lodger turned away. It is a satisfying feeling.
A few days later, Lily announces that, seeing as her girlfriend can’t live with us, she has arranged to spend every other week at Claire’s until they raise enough cash for a London rent.
I tell Ed. “This is major,” I say. “I think it counts as nearly leaving home.”
“Great,” he says. “Just try not to send her off with half the contents of our fridge.”
Some names have been changed
