helen sandler | books

excerpt from

The Touch Typist

Modern Interiors

I didn’t start off hating her. I had been warned but I was feeling kind of mad myself and it’s all relative, isn’t it?

I had come back to take a second look at the room, worried about the marks around the lock, thinking that someone had broken in recently – or tried to. I wound my way up through the house, knocking on doors to find a neighbour. At the top was a single door marked “Penthouse”.

The girl who answered was younger than me, with a stronger version of my accent. She asked me in and told me that no one had been burgled but that people sometimes kicked in their own doors if they were locked out.

“The landlord’s lost the spares,” she said, as if that explained that. “He’s a bit crap really but the heating’s included. What’s he charging you?” And we got on to rents in London and the impossibility of buying, and my anxiety started to lift. She gestured around her own bright kitchen and told me: “He lets you decorate, anyway, you can do what you like to your flat – saves him having to bother.”

Then she added, “I should tell you this, though. I bet he never said anything? The thing is, Joss, the girl next door to you is mad.”

“What like?”

“I’ll just say this, right. Ignore her.”

“Why?”

“Oh, she’s not taking her tablets and if you give her any attention, anything at all, right, like saying good morning and looking at her, then it can set her off.”

“What like, though?”

“Just daft talk and insults. Just don’t speak to her.”

“OK. Thanks.”

“Don’t speak to her?” I wondered, as I ran back down the stairs, surprised to find it was only three floors down and not four or five. “We share a bathroom, for God’s sake.”

I let myself back into the room. Advertised as a studio flat, it was in fact a large bedsit, which someone had divided in two by positioning all the cupboards and bookcases down the middle so that one narrow half was the bedroom, which had the benefit of windows, and the other was a dim kitchenette with a little table. But it had potential. Even I could see that.

My experience of decor was limited to the past year’s sub-

editing on Modern Interiors magazine. I got into it through my sister. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know a pelmet from a finial and had to ask what MDF stood for. You could pick it up. And sure enough, I picked it up so quickly that I was able to answer “Main reasons for hanging voile at a window?” in the fun quiz at a company barbecue within weeks of starting the job. (Maintain privacy while letting in light.)

Being exposed to hundreds of pictures of attractive modern interiors, and writing advertorials for accessories that would look smart and stylish in any home, had activated a previously dormant bit of my brain – the bit that wants to liven up a dull room by painting a bright square of colour on one wall. (Create your own modern art for the price of a tester pot.)

It was a year since the breakup with Pascale had forced me into an unsuitable flatshare. Now felt like the right time to try living alone.

The girl from the “penthouse” upstairs and her boyfriend helped me shift all the storage units to one wall, where it became clear they’d been made to measure. Suddenly the room opened up to light and possibility.

You can paint white melamine units in bright modern colours after sanding and priming – and I did. It was while I was taking up the carpet that my next-door neighbour made herself known. She had been staying with her boyfriend for a few days, she explained, as she hovered in my doorway, trying to look into the room.

“Come in,” I said encouragingly – I already felt as if I was lying just from the effort of not saying, “I hear you’re a total nutter.” She didn’t quite believe the invitation was for real, and dithered before entering.

“What you paying for this?” she asked in a strong London accent – unusual in Highgate, which saw itself as a select “village”, peopled by snobs, intellectuals and pop stars.

“Ninety,” was my smug reply.

“Ninety?” she whined. “You’re being done, intya, Joss? Bloody cheek.” She crossed to the window in silent criticism of the high street and the traffic noise. Then, with a sudden childlike horror and delight, she cried: “What you doing with the carpet?”

“I’m taking it up. I’m going to paint the floorboards.”

“You’re never! Paint the floorboards? Why?”

“It will look nice. Like this.” I fumbled through a pile of back issues to show her the full-page pic of a spacious loft apartment with its sunny yellow floor which dazzles visitors. (I remembered having to ask the artroom to flip the pic so the Purves & Purves wall clock was the right way round.)

Already I could feel the dilemma closing in on me. She was not acting normally but then neither was I. I was a nervous wreck, in fact. Her speech seemed strangely exaggerated but that might be my own patronising response to hearing a Cockney accent – where I come from, you put on that voice to mimic the banter in the Queen Vic. (And people down here, of course, do the reverse for the Rover’s Return.)

I gave her a cup of tea and she told me all about her boyfriend. “Really he’s like a fiancé,” she said, and her pretty, rounded face took on a dreamy cast. “We’re so in love, Joss.” (This was the second neighbour to overuse my name and I wondered if they were all desperate for a sense of community, testing it out, or just reminding themselves of the name of the new girl so as to avoid future embarrassment.) “We’ll get married, probably. That’s all I want. Get married, have children. We’ll have our own flat.” Her face was glowing, her eyes big and blue and eager. “Everyone wants that, don’t they? We’re all only living here till we get married, get our own homes.”

“I’m not,” I said, feeling brave and honest and true. “This is my home.” It did not sound brave and honest and true. It sounded false and pathetic.

“Oh right. You not got a boyfriend, then?”

“No.”

“What are you anyway, eh?” I was about to say I was a lesbian when she added: “Are you an actress?”

“No… I did a bit of stage design at college… Why did you think that?”

“Think what?” Fear gripped her face.

“That I’m an actor – actress, whatever?”

“Oh, that.” She relaxed and laughed a high-pitched staccato. “Actress. It’s actress for a woman, isn’t it? You couldn’t be an actor, could you?” She laughed again and I felt we were spiralling together into one of those plays I never actually read in college – Pinter or something. And bizarrely, at that moment she was on her feet and pulling a Pinter text off the lime-green bookcase. I flinched.

“You’ve got all these plays, so I thought you was an actress. I was going to be an actress but then I got all my plays, you know, and I threw them on the floor; I took them off the bookcase and threw them on the floor and I took them to the cancer shop – they won’t let me in there now and I tell you what, they’ve had enough stuff off me – and I thought, there now, that’s the end of that.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So what are you going to be now? I mean, have you got a job?”

“No. Not now, no. But I’m going to work in the media. On a glossy magazine. But Joss, it’s so hard to get a job. You don’t know anyone in magazines, do you?”

I did not say, “Yes, by a strange coincidence, I am in magazines.” (But I did recall the time my sister said that to the gasman and he thought it meant she was a model: “Now you mention it, love, I’ve seen ]you in magazines.”)

By the time she’d gone, I was only fit to lie on the bed, go over every line of dialogue and ask myself if it proved her madness and if it mattered.

But I felt shaken. My boundaries – as a psychotherapist,

a homeopath, a polarity therapist and an osteopath had told me in the last year – were fucked. They didn’t all put it like that, but that’s what they meant. I was supposed to feel myself as a channel of energy between the earth and the sky, gently close up the petals of any chakras that opened too wide, keep off caffeine and dope, exercise daily, meditate daily, sit up straight and eat fruit. I had started going to yoga but even there I noticed that other people’s stuff was affecting me. If they lay down too close to me and my mat, their vibes started zapping me as soon as the teacher told us to fill the space around us with our energy.

New age spirituality and home decoration – I might have thought as I dragged myself from the bed and pulled it out from the wall to get at the carpet – twin voices of our age. Strip back to the bare boards and sit on them. As you chant, remember the tree that made this floor.

The Touch Typist is published by Diva Books, £8.95

Buy from: Diva Direct (click on Diva Books)