The Longest Distance
Galveston House, Harford Street, London E1
Time is the longest distance between two places.
Yesterday Hossein and I tried to cross that distance from west London to east London, and from now to a lifetime ago, and revisited – from the outside – a flat where I stayed for five months. In the summer of 1988, when I should be finishing my MA dissertation at UCL, I arranged to come to Greece for three weeks in July, after which I would come back to London and wrap up the dissertation until the deadline at the end of September. I could have stayed in the student halls until the end of my course, but I, in utter optimism, thinking that Hossein and I would come back together from Athens, gave notice that I would vacate my room by the middle of August. That was two weeks after I would get back from Athens.
So instead of concentrating on the dissertation, I went room hunting. I was not fussy, but I was at least looking for something close to the underground. The rooms that were affordable were too far away from the university, so whatever I saved on the rent, I would be spending on transport. I spent days on end on this graceless task, crossed the width and the breadth of London looking at shared student houses and rooms in family houses, but did not manage to find something suitable within my budget. Finally an Iranian friend suggested that I rent one bedroom in her brother-in-law’s two-bedroom council flat in east London. He had vacated it without telling the authorities, which meant that officially he still appeared as living there. We agreed on a weekly rent of 45 pounds.
The flat was on the first floor of a huge complex of council flats, within walking distance Mile End on the Central Line, and Stepney Green on the District Line. It was exactly opposite Queen Mary College but the building itself was run-down, located in a deprived area; the whole setup was depressing. It had an ancient lift, its cabin made of steel sheets and smelling of urine and disinfectant. Thankfully the flat was on the second floor, so I didn’t need to use the lift. Each room was painted a depressing shade of hospital beige and fitted with fitted carpets of mismatched, loud patterns, probably bought as room remnants at end of season sales.
The living room had a chocolate brown velveteen furniture suite that had seen better days: the armrests were worn out and the springs were so weak that when you sat, you sank down almost to the floor. Thankfully there was an old wooden table with a couple of chairs, so there was a place to put down my books and sit down to work or eat. A balcony door opened on to the Mile End Road, with its endless day and night traffic. It had no lock; it just opened with a handle like an interior room door.
The first night I slept on my own in the flat, I was scared stiff: what if someone had a mind to climb over the balcony? They could just come into the flat! I propped a chair sideways on the inside of the balcony door, so that if someone tried to open the door, the chair would either stop them or would at least make enough noise to wake me up.
Some things had changed for the better. There is now a Sainsbury’s Local just opposite, while when I lived there, I had to walk miles to the Tesco in Bethnal Green (to save on the tube fare). The access to the smelly lift is now enclosed in a glass foyer that opens by entering a resident’s access code. The old wooden window frames in the block are replaced by PVC windows, front doors are new and freshly painted. The door to my old flat, different from all the others, is painted in turquoise, my favourite colour. I took this a sign across the distance: as if the turquoise door flags my short-lived presence here, telling me I know you have been here, in this small corner of the universe, and you were nostalgic, fearful, worried.
© Sofia A Koutlaki 2020
