Tenancy Agreement

FICTION

by Kristian Radford

        It was becoming clear that Lee wasn’t a very good housemate. He got home from work to find Felix and Sasha waiting for him in the kitchen. As he walked past them on his way to the fridge, Lee attempted what he imagined to be a winning smile, but the only part of his face that moved were his eyebrows.
          “Did you see the group messages?” asked Sasha, without turning her head.
          “Hmm?” said Lee, as he peered at a container of rice, trying to remember how long it had been there.
          “We really need to do something about them,” said Felix, staring into a cup of lukewarm tea. “They’ve been getting louder and louder. Don’t they keep you up too?”
         Lee turned around and looked at Felix, as if he’d only just noticed his presence. “Do you mean the neighbours? I barely notice them.”
         “No, I mean the rats,” said Felix, who couldn’t help but inject his words with an involuntary note of exasperation.
         Lee’s eyes tightened. “Why do you think we have rats? Have you seen any around?”
         Felix, having exhausted his prepared remarks, tried very hard to keep his face free from any hint of panic, but alas. Sasha, sensing the potential of the moment slipping away like a puff of steam, turned in her chair to face Lee.
         “They’re definitely in the roof. Too small to be possums. I hear them almost every night now. And the power keeps tripping. Last night it happened when I was in the shower. Total darkness for almost a minute.”
         “See?” added Felix, daring now to let more indignation shine through.
         Lee stood in front of the open fridge, which throbbed behind him like a guitar amplifier. “I don’t really understand what you want me to do about it. Rats are the kind of thing that come and go; they’re like housemates. And aren’t you a vegan, Felix? It’s not like we can get someone to come and humanely rehome them. Try to think of them as free range.”
          When Lee had almost made it back out of the kitchen, Sasha tried one more angle. “Why can’t you just tell the landlord? They really need to do something about it.”
          Annoyance swept across Lee’s face and for a moment he looked like the twenty-seven-year-old he was, suddenly grown-up enough to stand on his own two feet and cast a shadow. “You know I can’t do that. And don’t forget that neither of you are on the lease. Just drop it, please.”
          Lee crunched back to his bedroom over the cracked tiles in the hallway without bothering to close the fridge. Felix stared defeatedly at the three bottles of tomato sauce in the fridge door, all half-full. Sasha got up and slammed it closed but it fell open again slightly, a black gap in the corner where the seal had come away.
          “Do you think we could rehome them?” asked Felix weakly, his eyes back on his tea. “If you were a rat, where would you want to live?”
          “In your house, probably,” scowled Sasha as she decamped to her room.

         It wasn’t that Lee was particularly fond of rats, or had any ethical qualms about animal murder, rodent or otherwise. But the only way into the roof was a manhole in the ceiling of Lee’s room, and their landlord was the kind of affable skinflint who would be ready within the hour to barge in with a box of Ratsak and a ladder that wasn’t quite tall enough. To make things worse, he was also Lee’s father.
         It had been six months and Lee still wasn’t used to having housemates. His difficulties began when, a few months after his girlfriend Jenny moved out, he realised that the tokenistic rent charged by his parents was just beyond the means of his now-single income.
         His financial situation was made more difficult by an array of subscriptions that pecked away at his account balance like sparrows. Quiet and swift, they came in while his attention was elsewhere and carried off his money in their little beaks, individually painless but devastating en masse.
         He spent his evenings scattering money to the winds of the internet in an attempt to keep his heart beating. Every time he pledged his money to a new cause, he felt connected to something that could outlive him; if he were to drop dead tomorrow, his name would live on in the tax invoices and address labels of his subscriptions. 
         A regular stream of deliveries arrived at the house with a tendency, much like dental calculus, to build up. Their contents ranged in necessity from justifiable (vegetables, milk) to questionable (magazines, wine, fresh socks) to completely mystifying, even to Lee himself. Every month, for example, he received a smutty t-shirt with the logo of a band that didn’t exist. The first one that came was for a girl group called The Moist Towelettes; the ever-pragmatic Jenny had used it as sleepwear. (She drew the line, however, at the fictional ska band Gettin’ Horny, the logo for which comprised a phallic arrangement of brass instruments.)
         Other payments resulted in more abstract benefits, which were even harder to explain to Jenny but easier to conceal. He had unlimited access to every streaming service available in the country, though he hadn’t logged in to most of them yet. He paid a regular fee on a number of websites to ensure that his future purchases would be discounted. (He imagined this was something like purchasing stock options, although he had no idea if that analogy was accurate). And he was subscribed to a text message service which delivered him complicated betting tips each Friday at 10 a.m., usually related to European volleyball leagues.
         He assumed that he would be able easily to annul all of these debits if and when he chose. This country had strong protections after all. But he found there to be something liberating in the automation of the consumer process. Money to him was a problem to be solved, just as much so in the spending as the earning of it. It was a relief to see his account balance become exactly that, an equilibrium of incomings and outgoings. And after Jenny left him, Lee had needed to find counterweight quickly in the form of sub-tenants.

          Alone in his ill-lit room, Lee’s complexion, waxy in public, became diminished to a newspaper shade of grey. The part of him that found confidence in mild forms of tyranny deflated, and his hair fell back against his temples like dry leaves of grass.
          He reclined on his bed and cradled his laptop on his stomach, looking at the shapes of the words he scrolled past without stopping to think very much about the larger structures to which they contributed. His mind registered words like “disgusting,” “actually,” “y’all,” and “burn,” and all he could feel was his heart scrunching up into a knotty mass of sinew.
          His phone began to vibrate. When he picked it up and saw that it was the landlord, he hesitated for a few beats before accepting the call with a slow and deliberate touch. By the time he raised the phone to his ear, his father had already begun speaking.
          “. . . there? Hello, Lee?”
          “Dad. Yes I’m here. You know that the person who picks up the phone is meant to go first, right?”
          “You always take too long. It makes me worry that something’s not working.”
          “Maybe my connection is a little slow.”
          “Have you and Jenny eaten?”
          “Yes, Dad.”
          “Good, good. I want to come over and give you fruit. Your mother bought too many cherries.”
          “I’m a bit sick, Dad. You shouldn’t come.”
          “That’s okay, you just stay in your room then. I’ll give them to Jenny.”
          “She’s sick too.”
          “Fine, fine, I’ll just put them on the doorstep. See you later.” He hung up before Lee could think of another excuse.
          If there had been a specific reason that Lee never told his parents about Jenny leaving, he couldn’t remember it now. Rather than sadness or shame, it was more to do with the general inconvenience of having to set new parameters. He was an adult now, therefore life wasn’t meant to have any more of the drastic recalibrations that mark the path of adolescence like landmine craters. He didn’t see his parents very often anyway, and Jenny worked so much that he could always explain away her absence when he needed to.
          Still, he didn’t want his dad poking around, rats or no. There were too many conversations they would need to have in the process, and many more from the past that would need to be dug up and corrected. Lee put his phone down and let his hands come to rest on his laptop keyboard. His fingers landed unconsciously on the first four digits of his credit card number.

          Night continued to thicken around the house until the outside world no longer seemed to exist. Lee couldn’t sleep, although he hadn’t really tried yet. His father had sent him three text messages since dropping off the cherries, which remained on the doorstep like an offering. The messages all asked more or less the same question but he lacked the ability, let alone the desire, to formulate a reasonable response.
          There were a few dozen tabs open in his internet browser, but the one that was active when his laptop battery finally emptied itself was for an online shop selling personalised soaps. You could lather yourself with a bar imprinted with the name of your lover, mother, or enemy, the most apposite choice perhaps dependent on the part of the body being abluted. Now, though, he was left in darkness. It stunned him, the sudden aloneness of it, the realisation that he lived within the bounds of finity, that all things in life, in his life, must run out.
          Lee got up from his bed and opened the door. From this end of the house he could see the moon trickling in through the kitchen window and spilling across the hallway tiles. He stood in the hallway as if at the helm of a ship. As the sole leaseholder, his actions alone would decide the fate of his vessel, crew, cargo. No longer could he leverage the guises of “friend,” “partner,” or “son,” but at least he could hold on to “legal tenant” as his final foothold in life. At the core of his identity now lay a transaction account, a conduit of non-human value trafficked between other human parties, while he, no longer human, had fallen to the level of animal, or bureaucrat.
         A strange shape darkening the shadows at the other end of the hallway caught his eye. As the details fell into relief, he realised it was a rat, staring right at him. He stayed still, watching it calmly, until in his mind its features began to resemble a woman’s. Its dark eyes beamed expectantly, its nose rose with grace, and he began to feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you for coming back to me.”
         The rat fiddled its fingers nervously then cantered away into the kitchen. When Lee went after it he couldn’t find a trace.

         In the kitchen the next morning, Sasha stood waiting at the kettle. Felix stumbled in, bleary-eyed, and grabbed a mug and a teabag from the cupboard. “Did you hear them last night?”
         “Maybe. I was pretty out of it.” The kettle clicked off and Sasha filled her mug, but when she tried to fill Felix’s too, there was only enough left for half a cup.
         As they stood there together staring at the shallow water, they heard Lee emerge from his room and trudge towards them. They rarely saw him in the morning, but he surprised them even more by speaking.
         “Morning,” he said with effort, almost croaking. “I talked to the landlord. Unfortunately the rent is going up. Or maybe it’s going down. He was a little hard to understand. I tried to explain the situation, but he didn’t really listen. He seemed to think I was someone else.”
         Sasha stared at his hair, which was matted and spiky. “And the rats?”
         “He said to leave them. They have some kind of rights; he mentioned the tenancy agreement. One of them even has a name.”
         “What?”
          “One of them is called Jenny.”
          Lee walked back down the corridor. “Rent is due tomorrow,” he called out, then closed his bedroom door.
          Sasha looked at Felix, who was staring at his tea, trying to decide whether to hunt in the fridge for oat milk or just add tap water.
          “Even though we live here, sometimes I think this is a ghost house,” she said. “And we’re the ghosts. Like we’re dead and we just float through, not able to touch or feel anything. Nothing here really happens or exists, like all those packages that arrive at the door for Lee and just seem to disappear.”
          Felix didn’t look up. “I guess you might be right. Except for the rats. I’m still sure about the rats.”
          A silence followed which was eventually broken, first by the sound of loose tiles being disturbed by feet, then by a sigh that swept from one end of the house to the other, making its way out the front door and then up towards the sky and its distant promise of clouds, satellites, combustion.