I need to know my enemy. To know it – the damp, to watch and study it; to press my hands to it as to a fevered brow. Only this brow – the walls of the kitchen – are cold and clammy. For the last few days, I have had a fan heater turned at various parts of the wall. The plaster dries out quickly; it changes colour from dark brown to broken and then almost all the way to a healthy pink.
But it is a sick pink that results, with trails of black and mould in little clusters like liver spots. A sense of victory – the wall, completely bare, since all the furniture and appliances in the kitchen have been scattered elsewhere in the flat, changes colour like the sky. A dawn is coming from the brown night. A dirty pink dawn.
And yet, and yet. Turn the heater off for the night and the next morning, when I open the kitchen door, I see specks of darkness invading the dirty pink walls. Specks of brown darkness that grow and link up. What sadness. And soon the brown is omnipresent again, and growing darker. And within 24 hours, a film of water covers the wall. A film, which when I wipe with kitchen roll carries with it dark particles of plaster. Mop the fevered brow. Mop it, and the water comes off brown, dark brown.
The damp punishes me. On the first night with the fan heater I felt exalted. Could the damp really be clearing? Was it as simply at pointing a beam of heat at the wall? The next morning I woke early in my bedroom, which, unlike the other rooms of the flat, I’ve kept clean and free of kitchen detritus. The washing machine, covered in mould, stands in the living room; the rusting oven in the bathroom. Cupboards whose backs are thick with green and black spores are scattered everywhere. But the bedroom – pristine, I thought, with creamy light green walls.
What peace! And yet, and yet, what did I smell? What was that smell – damp? had it reached me from the kitchen? And then I see it: punishment for my hubris; the restoration of the cosmic balance between light and darkness: all along the bottom of the bedroom wall, rising damp, black. All along the wall beneath the window, and curling the wallpaper up: damp, black mould.
And the damp’s already returning to the bathroom, I can smell it. Already returning, even after the damp course last year. Another damp expert ran his meter over the bathroom wall. ‘There’s something there.’ He and I go outside and look at the wall. We look, we look, until all we are is looking. How to read the walls? Does it need repointing? Best to do it. Best to get it done, to make sure. And then we look at the £500 of rendering I’ve just had done. It needs to be extended, he says. It’s not enough, he says. Look at the darkness of the brick, he says. Feel it. It’s wet, he says. Yes, it is wet. It’s weeping. The whole flat is weeping.
More rendering then. I book the rendering company to return. They’re coming at lunchtime today. And meanwhile, the damp and I. Meanwhile – and I think for the whole of my life – I and the damp, one to one. I press my hand on its brow. My hand on a patch of kitchen wall. My hand on the curled up blackened wall paper in the bedroom. My hand on the wall in the bathroom from which I know the damp will come. And my hand on my own chest, for I know where it’s coming from, all this damp.
Lars Iyer's Blog 