George’s Mortgage
George finally saved enough for a deposit on his apartment six months ago, and after all the necessary wrangling, paperwork, and an incredible amount of documentation, he was able to move in three months later. The monthly mortgage repayments didn’t leave much spare cash, in fact his social life was the worst it’d ever been, and he could barely afford a single night out, the interest payments being what they were. This hefty interest, and the need to furnish the place being his financial priority.
He bought a small apartment, just 53sqm, but two bedrooms, a good-sized living room, with a closed off kitchenette, and a bathroom with a shower. The smaller bedroom, just a boxroom really, came with a decent view, more decent than the other rooms anyway, which looked out onto a car park. From the spare bedroom there was a view of a field.
George is a person who likes little rituals, a few things in the morning he needs to do in a certain order, perhaps a little OCD he admits. He always puts the right sock on before the left for example, brushes the left side of his mouth before the right, things like that. In the new apartment, an immediate routine he got into was to brush his teeth whilst looking out of the boxroom window, across the field, nothing to see in the field, just a stretch of grass, but he enjoyed those few minutes of peace in the morning, standing there in his underwear, the only sound the bristles and foam in his mouth and the calm green expanse of grass ahead of him. It was a genuinely soothing way to start the day.
On his seventh day in the apartment, George woke up, went to the bathroom, pumped the right amount of toothpaste out, and went to look at the view. The thing was he couldn’t remember where the boxroom was. He simply had no idea which door it was behind. He understood the apartment was just over fifty square metres, yet he had completely and utterly blanked where the door was. He opened the kitchenette door, the door of his own bedroom, which he’d just risen from, before trying a third door and finding the boxroom with the view.
George put this down to the general stress of sorting out the mortgage, worries about making the monthly payments, changes he was making to his lifestyle to afford it, and though this strange experience was surprising, he eventually assured himself it was a one off and, on the way to work that day convinced himself to let it go. He didn’t mention it to anyone because it sounded weird, it was weird, but perhaps more normal than people admit when in a new place. The thing was that the exact same sensation reoccurred every morning, every single morning for that week, and into the weekend. Every day, after getting out of bed, George couldn’t find the boxroom door without checking a few doors first. By the Wednesday he’d stuck a sellotaped note on the door of the room, and even though that stopped him opening other doors to see which room was the boxroom, he still had to find the door with the note ‘BOXROOM’ written on it each morning.
This carried on, and to an extent George got used to it. He tried different solutions, like leaving all the doors open, having a hand drawn map of the apartment on his bedside table, and even though these helped a bit, the fact was that every morning when he woke up he no longer knew the location of the little room with the view of the field and needed the help of notes and a map to find it so he could brush his teeth in there and enjoy the view of the plain, green grass. And, although George woke up with a daily amnesia about the geography of the boxroom, it became part of his routines, and he accepted it, until things became worse in the third week of living in his new place.
George had gone to bed fine, his usual time, his usual evening routines completed, clothes removed and folded in the correct way, pyjamas on in their right order, getting into the left side of his bed, a timed ten minutes reading regardless of where he needed to stop in the book, and then the bedside light off for sleep of seven and a half hours. The last thing before clicking off the light was to check his hand drawn map was neatly folded on his bedside table.
George didn’t go into the office on that day, the shock was too much. As with the boxroom, once he’d located the other rooms, the bathroom, the kitchenette, he knew where they were afresh. The initial, quite seismic revelation on exiting the sanctuary of his bedroom, to walk into a completely unfamiliar layout for the rest of his modest apartment, shook him to the core. He spent the day trying out different ways to memorise the arrangement of his rooms, in order to ensure that it wouldn’t happen again:
He checked if walking around with barely open eyes, squinting to the point of near blindness to reacquaint himself with the location of each room would help.
.way some in senses his reset might, reverse in, backwards going that thinking, anything into knock didn’t he sure make to him behind extended palms his, room each through backwards walked He.
zzz he zzz also zzz returned zzz to zzz bed zzz in zzz the zzz afternoon zzz for zzz a siesta, zzz setting zzz the zzz alarm zzz to zzz wake zzz himself zzz an zzz hour zzz later, zzz and zzz see zzz if zzz that zzz stopped zzz it zzz.
None of these worked, and after a few more days George understood it was only in the mornings, after rising, that the memory loss occurred. And so, he just got into the rhythm of waking up, leaving his bedroom and learning the location of the other rooms each day like he was seeing them for the first time.
It surprised him what he was able to get used to when there was an absolute need to adapt, and even though the inability to recall the entire blueprint of his apartment was a day-by-day madness, with the help of a hand drawn map in each room, taped notes on every door, and some arrows printed on A4 paper with the names of rooms written on them tacked on walls, George got used to it. It became barely an inconvenience, and on some days, he strangely began to enjoy it. In a sense he had a unique home. When he went to bed each evening, George knew what awaited him in the morning, so the element of surprise wasn’t an issue, he knew what the morning held for him, and so it simply became part of all his other routines.
That is how it went on, with George knowing what awaited him on rising, until halfway through his second month, when George got up one morning, consulted his map, the note on the back of his bedroom door, with the arrow showing forward and then right to the bathroom, and then opened the door to the familiar feeling of having forgotten where all the rooms were, but by now fully trusting his methods, which had been working for the previous few weeks, to locate the bathroom, get his toothbrush and then head to the boxroom to brush his teeth and look at the field. The thing was the door had gone, vanished, no bathroom door was present, and, on looking around, George came to realise that the living room was larger, had somehow extended to the left, to compensate for the space left by the missing bathroom.
This new development required more than new approaches to deal with it, and it was the most unsettling change yet for George. It took more than a few days to get through this and reorganise how to live in his apartment. If it had been the boxroom, he would have lost just the view, but with the bathroom George lost his ability to wash myself, use the toilet, and all the accoutrements of the bathroom had gone, towels, toiletries, shaving equipment, and of course his toothbrush. He just about managed to calm himself enough to call into work sick, and took a few days off, and somehow, though the haze of this particular shock, reorganised his kitchenette to double as a bathroom.
No* owning * ****room c*me wi** numerous c**llenges. Under George’s new d*ily regime for cle*ning *imself in *is sm*ll ki*c*en *e re*lised mos* of **e usu*l jo*s were simple, or*l *ygiene, w*s*ing *is f*ce, even cle*ning *imself wi** * sponge *nd fl*nnel over **e sink were work**le. *owever, **e non-e*is*ence of * *oile* c*me wi** muc* worse complic**ions unfor*un**ely. Peeing in*o *is ki*c*en sink w*s * cle*rly unple*s*n* *nd undesir**le ye* fe*si*le solu*ion. U*ilising **e sink for defec**ion, disposing of *is own excremen*, w*s revol*ing, *nd wi**ou* going in*o grim de**ils, needed * few d*ys of *ri*l *nd error *o work ou* **e mos* effecien* me**od *o cope wi** **is p*r*icul*r orde*l. Even so, wi**in * week *e’d go* *imself in*o * new rou*ine *nd w*s coping wi**ou* *is ****room.
George had no idea why the bathroom went first, but if there was any design behind it, if any unknown force decided it had to be the bathroom, then it was clearly to test him he decided. That he got into a rhythm of having no bathroom and managing all his ablutions effectively within a matter of several days, was a source of pride for George. So, when the bedroom went less than a week later, he put this down to the apartment purposely sending him a new challenge.
This at least convinced him that the changes to his apartment could only occur when he slept at night, and not where he slept, as the act of falling asleep on the sofa on the Saturday of the first full weekend he had without the bathroom is when the bedroom vanished. George had treated himself to a bottle of wine, some snacks, and was chilling out with a film, and after the last sip, he lay down, waking several hours later with the intention of going to bed. Except, through his bleariness, he saw the living room had extended in size, there were just three doors, one to the kitchenette, one to the exit and one to the boxroom. His bedroom had gone.
Losing the bathroom had been a big shock for George, but then to lose his bedroom, with his bed and most of his clothes in it was gutting. All work outfits went, and if it wasn’t for a spare small chest of drawers in the boxroom where George kept a few bits of informal wear, t-shirts, some jeans, socks and underwear, he would have not only woken to no bedroom, but to no clothes to change into either. As with the bathroom, this realisation, the disappearance of a room and all the objects in it, terrified him. When it came to the choice to not tell anyone what was happening to his apartment, George could only put this down to fear, and not being one hundred percent sure whether he was losing my mind, or the physical evaporation of two rooms was in fact a reality. He considered contacting the estate agent, or confiding in a friend, but just couldn’t bring himself to say anything, out of genuine worry that it was a collapsing of his mind, his sanity vanishing and not the rooms in his recently purchased apartment.
George went out and bought a new cheap suit, shirt, and tie for work, and ordered a single bed for the boxroom, as a new double wouldn’t fit. He chose a flatpack bed so that it could be delivered to the door, and he could take it into the apartment himself to assemble it without the need for anyone to enter. It meant just one more night on the sofa before it was delivered, but George didn’t sleep well. Work the next day was tough, and with the mortgage to keep paying, and having to go a little overdrawn to buy the bed and new clothes, he had to wear the same outfit all week. He was just thankful that no one in the office said anything about it, and despite knowing his personal hygiene was suffering a little from using the kitchenette, work went on as normal. All the same, even though his own apartment scared George, and he knew he couldn’t afford to eat or drink out, he was still happy when the weekend came.
That was until those two Sundays ago, when George came out of the boxroom, his new bedroom, to notice that the living room had grown slightly, and the door to the kitchenette wasn’t there, and he’d lost that too. The biggest, and most immediate issue was needing the toilet. George always needed to go after waking up, and to have an apartment with zero sinks, no drain of any kind to use, he had to drink off a carton of milk and urinate in that to be taken out to the bin later. For solid matters, this was obviously a graver problem, and the nearest public convenience to his place was around a mile away. All George could do was go to the local café, have a cheap cup of tea, and use their lavatory. After that he realised he had to go and buy a bucket and some thick, plastic waste bags.
From that point on George went in to work earlier to use the staff toilets to clean himself, and wash his underwear and socks, which he put in a sealed plastic box after washing and wringing, to then hang up when back home. For food he existed on anything cold mostly, sandwiches, salads, premade pasta pots. He did some shopping to replenish a few things he’d lost to make feeding and cleaning up after himself possible, a single set of cutlery, and knife and cheap chopping board, a new basin, and a kettle. He stopped bothering with plates or bowls as he could manage without them. Again, he surprised himself for adapting as well as he did, and even though his diet was worse, and the general upkeep of himself wasn’t perfect, he carried on. That was until he got sacked yesterday.
They didn’t call it a sacking, but a suspension without pay, whilst they investigated the misdemeanours they were aware of at work. Not only the issues with George using their property for personal use, cleaning himself and clothes at work, but his overall shift in behaviour, his distractedness, lack of willingness to communicate with others, and his increasingly personal poor hygiene. They offered help, they had counselling resources for staff to help with any mental health problems he might be having, and using those services could be a route back to work. George simply told them it was fine, he could work it out himself, he was adaptable, able to make changes himself. On the way home, even though he couldn’t really afford it, he bought two bottles of the cheapest red wine, both screw top bottles because he hadn’t replaced his recently vanished corkscrew, got home, flopped on the single bed in the boxroom and drank himself into a stupor.
