‘Keep it warm’, said an expert on the kitchen damp. ‘And the damp in the bedroom?’ – ‘Keep that warm, too.’ So where do I point my heroic little fan heater? It does a shift in the kitchen, and then a shift in the bedroom. I carry it from one room the other, over the bits of kitchen furniture that are scattered everywhere.
In the living room, the washing machine, covered in black mildew. Then a cupboard, the back of which is greeny-black with damp. I have to keep everything dirty, the expert tells me, to show the original surveyor who approved the damp course, tomorrow. ‘Keep it mouldy. Then you can show him.’
But the whole flat is now full of mould spores. The warm air is soupy; it’s jungle hot, and damp, and smells of rot and spores. The oven, new in September, is stranded in the bathroom. The hallway’s full of mouldy bits of wood, and another sporey cupboard is pressed there up against the radiator. At night, going to the bathroom, I have to step over damp wood and pass between damp cupboards.
Sometimes the smell is overwhelming. ‘I feel faint’, I told W. on the phone. He’s getting ready for a visit, he says. I brace him. ‘It’s pretty bad up here,’ remembering his last visit, he did nothing but whine, and then sat up drinking all night, telling me what was wrong with my life at great length, holding court on the sofa while I sat on the floor.
How long will it be like this? Weeks. The Loss Adjuster no longer wants to pay out. The company she appointed have given up, having dismantled the kitchen. ‘Where does this leave me?’ At the very least, I will need another £500 worth of rendering, and perhaps I’ll have to repoint the wall next door, too. There’s something wrong, very wrong, we all know it. The Loss Adjuster knows and so does the man from the building maintenance company. Even the workman knows. ‘Have you ever seen anything like this?’, I ask him. ‘Never. This is the worst I’ve seen.’
Outside, as always the concrete is wet. The concrete stairs leading upstairs are wet, and the storage space beneath the stairs is the same. ‘Look at the floor in there’, says another expert on damp I’ve called out. ‘Soaking. It shouldn’t be, mind.’ And I look. It is soaking. It’s completely soaked. ‘You’ll have to clear it out and let it air’, he says of the storage space. Clear it out; very well. Open it to the air. And then what? Water’s seeping into the concrete. Water in concrete, the whole yard. Seeping down, and the concrete saturated. Down, but there’s nowhere for the water to go. And the whole surface of the yard is like a wall in my kitchen, only lying down. Damp lying down. Damp lying on concrete, and looking upward to the sky.
Inside, I study the kitchen walls, watching for where damp comes and goes. I take the fan heater in there, pointing it at this or that part of the wall. It will dry after an hour or so. Dry, but then – another hour, or one more – pinpricks of moisture appear on the whitened plaster. It’s returning. It’s coming back, the damp. And then pinprick joins to pinprick, and soon the whole wall’s the same sweat-sheened clammy brow it was before the drying.
But still I watch. Still, nightly, I wield the heater. Is it drying out? Has it begun to dry out?, I ask myself, like a madman. Or is it a mirage, a mirage of damp? Have the spores got to me? Has the mould coated every passageway of my lungs and sent me mad? True, I have a new and persistent cough. I cough all the time, and today I thought I’d lose my voice. One day I’ll wake up mute in this flat of damp. Mute in the damp, spore-filled, choking. And one day, as I lie my body on the walls, I’ll disappear into them, damp returning to damp.
Lars Iyer's Blog 