no.
They hadn’t put my bedroom in a shed.
The shed was my bedroom.
‘You want me to live in here?’ I asked, hoping they would laugh and bring me back inside with a clap on the back. Good joke, everybody laughs.
But no.
Dad slapped his hands together, breaking the tension with a thunderclap.
‘I’ll get your bags, will I?’ he said brightly. ‘I think they’ll fit under the bed, otherwise you’ll have to bring them in once you’ve emptied them and I’ll put in the loft until you leave. Not that there’s a rush for you to leave.’
‘Everything works except the WiFi,’ Mum said proudly as I adjusted to the reality of my situation. The reality of living in a shed. ‘And the reception on the telly comes in and out but that’ll all be fine once we’ve worked out the WiFi. There’s a man coming next week.’
‘Great,’ I replied, steadying myself on my bedframe. ‘No rush.’
After all, who needed television or the internet, especially when they were unemployed and looking for a new job?
‘Thing is, we turned your room into an office so your dad can work from home a couple of days a week,’ Mum said, fussing with the curtains, straightening the nets. She might have her daughter living in a shed but she was not a savage. ‘And you said you wouldn’t be back for long and it’s so nice having him around more.’
‘And Jo’s room?’
‘Jo only left a month ago!’ She turned to stare at me, positively aghast. ‘We couldn’t very well upend her room when her bed was still warm, could we?’
‘I suppose not,’ I replied, definitely not thinking about how they moved Jo into my room the same day I left for uni because she needed a bigger room. When she was four.
‘Exactly.’ Mum cleared her throat. ‘But I have put all her furniture in one corner and I’m using it as a yoga studio. I’m really getting there with my downward dog.’
What I wouldn’t have given to see my sister’s face at that moment.
‘If you cook anything, be careful,’ she went on, picking things up then putting them down. My Pikachu piggy bank, an unopened bottle of bath pearls from Christmas 2004, a framed photo of Justin Timberlake that Sumi had given me for my birthday in the first year of uni that Mum had given pride of place, clearly mistaking JT for an actual friend. ‘We took the batteries out of the smoke alarm because it kept going off every ten minutes and we could hear it up in the house. Very distracting.’
No WiFi, no TV and no smoke alarm. I could see it now: exhausted from being forced to read an actual book, I would fall asleep with a Pop-Tart in the toaster, the toaster would set on fire, I’d die of smoke inhalation and no one on Instagram would ever even know.
‘Right, I need to get back into the kitchen and put the chicken in the oven for dinner. Unless you’d like to have us over to your place?’ Mum asked with a theatrical wink.
‘Perhaps I should try not to set it on fire the first night,’ I joked weakly as Dad returned with my bags.
Or maybe I should, I thought, eyeing the toaster across the room.
Closing the door behind the horny pod people who had replaced my parents, I cast an eye over my domain – all three hundred square feet of it – before dropping down on my bed. The uncertain, ancient frame complained at my weight but the protest wasn’t loud enough to get me back up on my feet.
‘You have so much to be grateful for,’ I told myself, staring up at the ceiling. ‘You have your health, your parents, your friends and a highly flammable roof over your head. It’s more than a lot of people have. It’s not as nice as what you had before but it’ll be OK. You’ll get a job, you’ll get a flat, you’ll burn that poster of Tom Cruise and you’ll be fine. Everything will be fine.’
The more times I said it, the closer it felt to being true.
A smile found its way onto my face. I’d have loved this place when I was a teenager, I thought. A bolthole at the bottom of the garden, all to myself? Maybe it was actually amazing and I was just too tired to realize. The smile disappeared as a single drop of water fell from the roof and landed right in the middle of my forehead. I rolled over onto my side and watched as it began to rain, a summer storm tap, tap, tapping on the corrugated roof of my new home.
‘It’s all going to be fine,’ I said again, more determined this time.
I only hoped I was right. I hadn’t always been that reliable in the past.
One of the most wonderful things about London was, no matter how much it changed, at its heart, it always stayed the same. They could open as many coffee shops and co-working spaces and Brewdog after Brewdog after Brewdog but the bones of the city stood strong, happy to slip on a new skin from time to time but always knowing its true self, underneath it all. As I emerged from the tube station at London Bridge, I took a deep, familiar breath of murky city air and smiled. I’d missed home so much.
After university, I’d lived nearby with my best friend, Sumi, and our friend, Lucy, the three of us crammed into a tiny two-bedroomed terraced affair with no functioning kitchen to speak of, a living room that doubled as Sumi’s bedroom and a bathroom that didn’t have a bath. Since we only had a fridge-freezer in the hallway and nowhere to sit that wasn’t someone’s bed, we met at The Lexington Arms almost every evening after work to eat and drink and catch each other up on every last little thing that had happened during our day. It was a wonderful, crappy old pub round the corner, beloved by us for its fish finger sandwiches, cheap white wine and the landlord’s willingness to let us upstairs when he had a band on without paying for a ticket. Sumi was in law school, Lucy was training at beauty college and I was making tea for whichever local radio station or desperate DJ would have me. It sounded hideous but they were happy times, really, they were the happiest.
As I waited for the green man, I gazed across the cobbled street at Borough Market. It was all together too cool for us back then but Sumi insisted I meet her here tonight. It was closer to her office, she said. This new bar she’d started going to was far nicer than The Lex, she said. A complete and utter betrayal, I said. And there had been no word on whether or not they served fish finger sandwiches.
Dodging the tourists with their giant backpacks and the locals with their bulging shopping bags, I walked around in circles, searching for the bar but only succeeding in getting lost in a sea of artisan food stalls.
‘You can’t afford fancy cheese,’ I reminded myself as I stared longingly at a wheel of brie in the window of the cheesemonger’s. Besides, who needed a baked camembert and a fresh-from-the-oven baguette when they could buy a Dairylea Dunker from Tesco Metro on the way home? Christ, I groaned inwardly, it had been a long time since I’d had been this broke. I had to find a job sooner rather than later.
Eventually, I spotted it, nestled between a boulangerie and a cheese shop, a tiny sign stencilled on a huge plate-glass window in antique gold lettering. Good Luck Bar was about as far away from The Lex as it was possible to be, figuratively speaking.
