If your home is for sale right now I have walked through it online and judged your feature walls, your DVD collection, your Dyson fans. Too hot for regular fans are you? An open window not enough for the sweat that builds when sitting at your bureau making lists of weird things to store on your patio? I have seen your duvets pulled over piles of washing and your framed posters of films you intend to see one day, and I’ve tried to taste what it might be like to live in a house like yours.
Like a “bikini body” you alter to complement the garment, I’m realising the extent to which you make a life fit a home. Perhaps it was different in the olden days when, I hear, one saved and chose a house, rather than scrambling for shares in a diamond mine built on ancient Indian burial grounds. Today, though, if you’re lucky enough to have a freshly dead relative or scratchcard win, you take what’s available, be it (I’m scanning Rightmove) a basement flat spooned out of the bowels of a bigger, brighter basement, or a house built by throwing plaster between two garages and labelling it “bijou”. And you make it work. If there is space for a wardrobe, you will wear clothes. If there’s a kitchen you will cook. We’re human putty, an unbaked cake – our lives slide into the corners that contain them, and time passes.
My boyfriend and I swelled to fit Flat 1, where the kitchen was too small to open the oven all the way. We moved when we bought a casserole dish. Flat 2 was bigger. You could walk around the right side of the bed; there was room here for a cot, so eventually, we bought a cot. I keep clicking on an advert for a studio flat in Soho – the kitchen is a single oak counter with sink and hob, and on the reverse is the bathroom, with a sliding wall that separates the space into two. There’s no sofa, but if you move the yellow armchair towards the window, you can flip down a bed from the wall and sleep well but briefly above the smokers bitching outside Aladdin. This is a home for being single in. There is nobody there you need to phone if you’re coming home late, no cupboards to be filled with tuna in case the supermarket’s shut. Nothing here ever shuts. Its owner’s life will be noisy and efficient, food eaten with disposable chopsticks and a sheaf of contracts.
Oh to flip your bed down from the wall like a gameshow lever, and think of food as fuel and sleep as for wimps, and sofas for those without parties to conquer. The estate agents specialise in houses for people who have faith in the healing effects of a 12 x 12 glass box attached to one’s kitchen. I can imagine every life – the years of therapy for the second child whose bedroom was originally designed as an en suite. The view over a city that reminds the couple at the window of all their lost shags, opportunities squandered for a shared mortgage and parquet floors. The stairs without bannisters that became an excuse not to have children, and the storage that became a reason for a third.
A house needs filling. Which seems to be one of the real reasons people have kids – who, today, really needs an “office”? You can charge your laptop on the train. Read a text book on your phone. And a spare room, with bed made, reveals a desperation diluted only with arrogance. How many out-of-town friends do you think you have, Anthea? How many dolls’ houses did you dress in your youth? A home is simply a wet place we crawl into to hide from other people. Once there we fill it with our dreams, tchotchkes and anxieties, all of them visible on Zoopla when we’re ready to move on.
Here is a garden flat, here is a kitchen with a six-ring hob. Here is the pressure to keep rose bushes alive, here is the pressure to cook paella for eight. A home dictates a life, its limits and its possibilities. If my family buys a three-bedroom house in woodland by a dual carriageway, will I be pregnant within an hour of exchanging contracts? What if we get the little flat? What if I want the studio in Soho, just for me?
I have seen your choices painted over and knocked through, your attempts at pottery to relax after redundancy, the skylight through which you gaze blindly in the bath, the evidence your partner now sleeps on the couch. And I’m trying to see, once your boxes are labelled, the corners into which our life might fit.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
