My Flat

Yesterday, I swept the yard clean after the builders, and rearranged the potted plants by height – hebes and heathers, ferns and splindly shrubs – so they spread out pleasantly in the twelve feet of concrete between eye and wall. The long scar along the kitchen wall, which the damp expert said was ‘letting the weather in’ has been healed up; the thin skin of rendering, turning green from moisture, has been replaced by a thicker one, and finally, you can see a strip of darker, rougher concrete where the burst water pipe was dug up and replaced.

Inside, in the kitchen, the damp continues to spread, but calmly, changing softly the colour of the wall. Along its spreading edges, thick salt, which falls to pile at the base of the wall and along the worksurfaces. And grit still falls from one corner of the ceiling. And the wet walls are marked with mildew like liver spots on an elderly hand. Along the window sill, the plaster has turned a motled green.

The bathroom is dry now; the damp expert passed his machine over the wall: yes, it is certain, the damp course is working. And no leak, either, from the shower upstairs, though I look up still from my shower to where water used to run – where it even poured once, raining inside a room as in one of Tarkovsky’s films. But the wooden floor is still ruined in places by plaster dust. And the replaced floorboards are the wrong colour: yellow wood, instead of brown. On wood, fallen leaves from the palm. On the floor of the bath, long hairs – not mine – reddish brown on white plastic.