Home Alone - September 2006

I turn the key and push open the door with the ceremony and solemnity it deserves. These are my first moments of my first day in my first home that is all my own. It has been almost three decades since I wriggled free from under the parental wing and fell straight into sharing nests with boyfriends, husbands, children and assorted sisters. Never, until this moment, have I lived alone.

So, here I am, in my new Queendom, mistress of all I survey. The survey doesn’t take long, as the entrance hall is also the kitchen and—even without my contact lenses—I can see the adjoining bathroom, toilet and the far end of the living room just a hop, skip and a jump away.

As I shut the door behind me, I run a curious finger over the thick black plastic padding on the back of the door. It reminds me of a 1970’s cocktail bar, without the optics. The door boasts at least five security devices, including assorted deadlocks and chains. I have visions of myself squeezing past the inferno that the gas cooker has become, fumbling for keys and switches while banging on the vinyl door, my cries for help muffled by the thick wadding.

This, I discover later, is typical of the Czech attitude to Health and Safety. The ‘Czech Guide for Landlords’ is probably very short. Just one sentence; “Don’t rent to stupid or careless people”. Before another year has passed I will no longer be surprised to find a notice taped to an electric socket above a bathroom washbasin saying “If you’re stupid enough to drop your hairdryer into a sink full of water, you deserve to die.” Of course, the notice will be written in Czech and incomprehensible to any English-speaking tenants. But at this moment in my life the potential hazards, like a kitchen- stroke-hallway, is still a new and slightly scary thing.

I soon realize the advantages of a compact dwelling. From a seated position on the toilet, and with a good stretch, I can reach into the fridge, thus saving time in the morning by simultaneously getting breakfast, performing my morning ablutions and practicing some upper body yoga. When I’m in the bath and find that my potatoes are boiling over, I can reach out to turn them down without making a single wet footprint on the lino.

In the room that serves as my bedroom, living room and office, someone has built a desk with a multi-purpose underside that can, with equal effectiveness, rip tights, graze knees and bobble even the toughest of trousers. The accompanying chair is a simple square frame made of angle iron with an eighth of an inch foam padding for a seat. It is so uncomfortable, defying any natural sitting position, that after ten minutes it becomes an instrument of torture. Wired up to the mains, it could easily convert to an electric chair, with victims begging for the power switch to be thrown because they would rather be whacked with 50,000 volts than spend another moment in the torture seat.

I spend many hours there, glued to the Internet—my only lifeline to the outside world—numb from the waist down. This circumstantial epidural proves useful however, as the temporary paralysis means that I don’t notice the pain in my knees from the constant friction of the desk until I wake up the next morning.

The bed is another quaint homemade construction. Six feet square and two feet high, the base is made of chipboard and divided into two perfect right-angled triangles. Each triangle has a cut away section in the middle complete with lid, creating two triangular storage boxes in the centre of the bed. The whole lot is covered with foam—this time the good stuff, more than an inch thick—and is upholstered with some roughly woven nylon-based fabric. I will spend many a bored moment pondering the bed’s design and the mind that created it. Why go to the bother of making a bed which splits into two diagonal halves? Could it have been designed to accommodate a tall man and his tiny lover? By a couple who didn’t expect the marriage to last and were dividing the furniture even before the ink on the marriage certificate had dried? Like so many things in life, this is a question that I may never be able to answer.

But in these first few glorious hours of moving into my new home, my thoughts are centred on making this place my own. I empty my small box of the few possessions I have brought with me and fill it instead with the ubiquitous rented flat knickknacks of ceramic smiling stars, miniature vases, off-the-shelf mini pictures and a wooden plaque carved with a vowel-less Czech phrase, probably ‘welcome’ or the Czech equivalent of ‘chez nous’. Later, the too-long grey net curtains and too-short red chintz curtains join the shoe box in the secret hidey-hole in the underbelly of my bed.

Exhausted, and with a whistle-stop trip back to England to pick up the remnants of my life looming early tomorrow morning, I tip out the contents of my suitcase onto my bed and throw myself next to them.

This is the one and only time I dare such a reckless act; the friction burns from the fabric combined with the bruises from jumping on what is essentially a chipboard box teach me to treat this item of furniture with appropriate caution and respect. I vaguely recall that even apparently solid matter, such as the human form, is actually made up of a mass of constantly moving particles and soon discover that this subtle movement alone is enough to create skin-damaging heat from whatever fabric this bed has been covered with. I lay a protective layer of shirts for a sheet, bunch up some jumpers for a pillow and pull my winter coat over me for a blanket, then sleep the soundless, peaceful sleep of an independent woman happily living on her own.