Like Jacob with his angel, I wrestle with my damp. The walls are bare now, a workman having spread the parts of my kitchen around the flat: the washine machine beside me here as I type, the oven in the bathroom, the cabinets in the hallway. The walls are bare, and absolute, and sweating – this is the word – damp.
For my part, I have a small heater which I aim at this part of the wall, and then that. Gradually, the plaster changes colour. From an angry dark brown, mottled with dark green and with black mold to a calmer, lighter pink: it seems a miracle; it seems I’m winning, but how can this be?
Periodically, I go out to the kitchen with some kitchen roll, and wipe down the great sweating surface. There’s always a layer of water – a sweat sheen. I marvel. Is the wall alive? Does it live in some strange way, like the planet Solaris, perhaps. That is the meaning of salt crystals which form on the wall. Is it conscious and groping towards me to communicate? Or is salt the way it expresses itself, or dreams? My flat is the satellite that turns around the damp, and I am the astronaut, fascinated only by its changing surface.
Whole religions have formed around less: around damp, and the source of damp. The kitchen could be a sacred grove, a spring. Only it seems a spring underground, a hidden place, a grotto to which our ancestors would descend. And what of the essay I’m trying to write? How can it compete against the great, bare walls?
Sometimes I want to press myself bodily against them, and to be absorbed. To disappear into the damp and to live a life there, on the other side of the wall. But I have my little heater, righteous weapon, and in patches the damp is changing colour, from angry brown to pink. Pray for me.
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