Seedling 15: Irons, Apples and Mattress Pads
My daily goals were quite, uh, limited in these first two weeks.
Basically, when I wasn’t at Seedling, I wanted to be home - locked in my room, drinking cheap red wine and watching old episodes of ‘World’s Wildest Police Chases’ on YouTube. ‘Chases’, if you haven’t tried it, I highly, highly recommend. Each installment contains multiple episodes, wild, reckless characters, high-tension encounters, all variously unfolding in unpredictable and chaotic scenes of both shame and destruction.
Perhaps a bit too ‘on theme’ for my both my work and home life, at present.
However, after lunch service I needed to make an unplanned side-trip to The Apple Store in Covent Garden. My Macbook’s power cord had called it quits, last night. ‘World’s Wildest Police Chases’ wouldn’t power itself, after all.
And I hated the idea of it. I really did. By the time I’d gotten downstairs and changed from garden gnome back to human, I just wanted to limp back to Lambeth and crawl under the covers, as per my norm. Renee was ironing her bright white waistcoat when I stepped out of the men’s changing room.
‘Why Hallo, Paul. Night off, I gather?’
The iron let out a giant plume of steam as she flipped the waistcoat, pushing the rear ties to one side and then the other.
‘Yeah, night off’.
‘Big night out, then?’
‘No, no,’ I replied. “Just have to run up to the Apple Store in Covent’.
“Covent? Oh, what a ballache; I’d rather work a double’. She slung the waistcoat on a wire hanger and then hooked it onto one of the top lockers on the opposite wall. “Just pop this up here so none of the little guys try and swap theirs out”.
Renee is five foot ten, so most of the waitstaff were one of ‘The Little Guys’. And, to be fair, The Little Guys did have a reputation for nicking someone else’s waistcoat instead of ironing their own. And aprons, and trousers…
I heard the buzz of the door from the stairwell. Vassily had fobbed in. And then it buzzed again with Marcos and Vera in tandem, then Bud, one of the runners. That was my cue to get going. I didn’t want their frenetic pre-shift energy stressing me just as I was heading out for the night.
‘OK, well I’ll see you, tomorrow, Renee..’
‘See ya!’
Walking past the glass-fronted office I saw Hannah peeling through lunch receipts and having a few laughs with Melody, still in her street clothes, sat on the wrap around console and eating a yoghurt.
*
‘That couldn’t be what happened’.
This Apple employee felt very certain my power cord failure could not have been as described.
‘No,’ I responded, ‘it is what happened; I was pulling the cord to charge my laptop, the surge protector hit the bedpost and it immediately stopped working’.
He shook his head, put his hands on his blue-shirted waist. ‘No, couldn’t be. Apple hardware would withstand that’
‘You’re a big fan, I get it. Good for you, you’re in the right job - but I’m not here for a refund or an exchange or any type of grievance, I’m just here for a purchase. So, if you could tell me where I can find the cord so I can get out of here, that would be great’.
‘Tristan’ - as his nametag read - looked nonplussed. ‘We don’t have them on the floor. Let me punch it into my handheld….let’s see…yes, in stock, seventy-five pounds’.
‘SEVENTY-FIVE pounds??!’
‘They’re not cheap’, he deadpanned.
My heart actually leapt for a moment. Seventy-five pounds was a lot of dough for me, right now.
Tristan continued. ‘Would you still like me to get you one?’
‘Yes, yeah go ahead. It’s fine’.
It’s an investment, I thought. I need my computer to look for a new job - as well as Police Chases.
My mother had always said when I was younger: “If you have a job but aren’t looking for another job - you’re a fool’. Her feeling is that not only do you need to be prepared for a change, you need to know what others are offering; and thereby what you should be expecting from your current employer. At present, I expected celeriac.
She’d also questioned my move to England, in the first place.
‘Why would anyone want to live in London when they can live in Barcelona?’
’To pay their bills,’ I’d replied. So imagine her shock when she found out how much I was getting paid at Seedling.
‘Twenty-two thousand? A YEAR??’
Yep.
‘Who can live in London on £22,000 a year?!’
Well, what I was discovering was an awful lot of people. Which explained everyone in flat shares - or worse, sharing bedrooms in a flat share. I can’t tell you how many places I visited during my apartment hunt with no livingroom, even. That’s the new London phenomenon; converting the livingroom into a bedroom and pumping up what you could charge, per month. The agent would say to me, ‘and here you have this nice little area in the kitchen to hang out, get to know your(three, five, seven) flatmates, have a cup of tea’. And of course, it was a folding card table with a checkerboard plastic covering, two Ikea metal stools and cigarette burns across the lot. Therefore, you can see why I took the room in Stockwell. It was a fairly easy decision.
The owner of the flat had been a half hour late meeting me when I first went to view Stockwell. He or She was late. I honestly couldn’t tell over the phone. That gave me a bit of time to sit out front and see any comings or goings. Neighbours seemed okay, nothing too nefarious as far as I could tell. Very close to the Tube, as well. When ‘Wale’ showed up he parked his torquoise Citroen Cactus on the pedestrian path, up and over the curb, jumped out with a nervous energy and looked me up and down with darting eyes.
‘Your accent is very interesting. Are you from here? Where are you from, honey? How long have you been in London? Oh, I just love that top. Pink flamingos? Very chic’.
Wale, a black Londoner probably in his mid-fifties, was wearing high-waisted acid wash jeans, a henley, and teva sandles. He also had these little circular eye glasses with thin wire rings - you know - like that evil German in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’?
The flat had two floors. The first had a pretty large, lengthy kitchen on the right upon entering. Then the hallway led down to an ample sitting room full of dated 1990s faux-leather sofas, gold-lamé framed pictures and various bits and bobs I assumed harkened to Wale’s days living there. Double-doors opened into a wild, overgrown pocket patio that appeared to be as unused as the sitting room. I turned and followed Wale upstairs where a landing opened onto the first two bedrooms, the full bath and then took a dogleg north to a single toilet and what would be my bedroom.
‘So this would be you. You can see it’s not a full-double, but good size, I think. Little desk, here for work. What do you do for work, Paul?’
‘I’m a sommelier’.
‘Oooh, how chic’. He widened his eyes and pursed his lips, paused. Continued. ‘And the view here is over the estate’s green and playground - but not many kids, here, so don’t worry about that. Bed comes with linen as you see, but I do ask you put a mattress pad on it. You know, go down and get yourself something nice from John Lewis. For, you know, semen stains and the like’.
Wale drew the last sentence out in a sort of half-whisper, narrowing his eyes in what seemed to be his attempt at flirtation and gingerly dragging his fingertips along the satin duvet. I pretended I’d heard nothing.
‘And what about the flatmates?’, I started. ‘Do they work full-time? Male, female; any couples?’
Wale started strolling toward the other two bedrooms.
‘Well, they’re both gay men - like us’ (more narrowing of eyes and cocking of his head to the side), ‘and one is a DJ - quite famous, I will have you know - so he works, a lot. He also works out a lot. You may have seen all that protein powder in the kitchen, mmmmm? And the other one, in this room - well, he is an older gentleman. If that’s okay by you?’
‘Of course, not an issue, at all’.
‘He’s an older gentleman and he works days. Let me just see if either of them are in’.
Wale walked first to the room on the right, tapped on it with his knuckles and then tried the door handle. It didn’t budge.
‘All the rooms have their own locks; did I mention that?’
He then moved to the other room and did the same.
‘Well, looks like they’re both out. What a shame’.
We went downstairs to the kitchen and talked terms. I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of not meeting the people I’d be living with. I wasn’t thrilled with Wale, but he didn’t live on the premises, after all. Plus, having a livingroom and two flatmates instead of five or six, was a selling point. And, it was pretty cheap at £650 per month(plus bills and council tax).
Wale told me he didn’t need references, because I looked like a ‘nice boy’.
‘You seem like a nice boy. That’s the first thing I thought when I drove up. He looks like a nice boy. Are you a nice boy, Paul?’.
‘So says Mom’. I wasn’t taking the bait and mentioning a parent tended to bludgeon the mood, no?
We signed the contract and I sent the deposit via bank transfer at the same time. I needed to be out of my AirBnB by the next evening. Wale sent me upstairs, telling me to make sure I could work the keys in the lock. As I came back down the narrow stairwell, Wale was coming up.
‘Keys work?’
‘Yeah, no problem,’ I replied.
Wale wouldn’t clear the way. In fact, he moved in closer.
‘I like you. Do you like me?’
‘You seem….nice. Sure.’
‘Would you like me to call you sometime? Maybe we can go out sometime?’
It’s not as if, at the age of forty, I hadn’t been in similarly uncomfortable situations, before. However, on this occasion, I’d just transferred £1300 to Wale’s account. And it wasn’t lost on me that his hard sell came just after I’d moved money and signed a contract. I quickly decided to hedge as best I could and simply extract myself out of this situation.
‘Yeah, okay. Just text me or something, okay? We’ll see what happens.’
Wale nodded and tilted his chin down in some attempt to look sexy, gazing up at me through his lashes and Raiders-rimmed spectacles; and then he pushed in for a kiss. My whole body stiffened, my arms grabbing the railings uncomfortably as he tried to go for a full snog - me, grinding my lips together like a teenage girl panicked after her first junior prom. As he pulled back, he gave me this satisfied look as if that had been the sexiest, most romantic moment of his life. I managed a half grin, looking more mid-bowel movement than post-coital, and then motioned that we go downstairs. As I grabbed my messenger bag from the kitchen counter and spun to leave, he turned to me with a business card.
‘I don’t know if you’ll ever have family or friends coming to London, but my husband and I own a little B&B in Vauxhall. You let me know before booking - and I’ll give you a ten percent discount’.