farewell to my flat on Bodney Road

This summer was strange for a hundred reasons, and one of them was moving out of my flat on Bodney Road. My flat on Bodney Road was the first place I lived independently in London. The first place I lived with a partner. A home that was mine, into which I could invite whoever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I lived in my flat on Bodney Road for three years with a rotation of seven different people (and one dog). It had a small and clammy basement which we put a sofa and a projector into, and then sub-let out when people in the bedrooms went on tour, and then sat empty for a long time, and then became my dark room. There were sometimes four of us and sometimes just me. Sometimes people would stay for a year at a time and sometimes just a month. It was sometimes harmonious and sometimes not. It was very damp and often dark. It was cosy and a home.

In my final days of moving out I recorded a series of voicenotes about peeling the last of my life out of my nearly-empty flat on Bodney Road, and I’ve written them not-quite-verbatim below.

My footsteps have become someone else’s, bouncing against the empty spaces my possessions have left behind. I keep stumbling over the strange, spiky creatures a former resident used to make from wine bottle cork cages. They are down the back of every piece of furniture, they are on every windowsill, they are in every nook of the exposed brick wall in the kitchen. It seems like there is an infinite supply coming from within the bowels of the flat, that it is ejecting all its memories of us as we leave.

I am leaving the chest of drawers my mum’s partner kindly assembled for me, spilling coffee over everything and all my clothes halfway through. I am putting the ratty old crocodile left by a canine resident into the bin. I will be taking the clothes rail my flatmate’s girlfriend bought when they moved in and unwisely asked if I needed anything from ARGOS. I drag my ex’s mattress up from the basement and heave it onto the bed-frame that a sympathetic friend helped me assemble over the course of 4 hours when we were both nursing broken hearts. It is a cruelty that an IKEA bed-frame requires two people to assemble it when you’re assembling it because your ex has claimed the bed-frame of the bed you shared. (Both mattress and bed-frame will be inherited by the new Bodney Road couple.)

I finally ask Kellie to dust up the huge corpse of a spider I’d been edging around with gritted teeth for weeks, too afraid to go near it. I ask her to take the rubbish out straight after.

I take down the years of accumulation magnetted to the fridge. It feels like a geological dig, each layer peeling back to reveal more evidence of the era before it. Notes of thanks for a spare bed or a sofa, flyers from events I worked on, tickets from shows residents performed in, an interview with our beloved local MP, magnets from friends’ travels, magnets from my travels, postcards addressed to us jointly, wedding invitations, council bills for strangers, utility bills with five different names on, a poster of prawns from a glorious holiday in Lisbon, thank yous from photography clients including a triptych of a sausage dog on its first birthday. All the mementos of a life that’s over and a life that carries on.

I spend an evening peeling blue tack off the walls of my bedroom with the person I love, three years after putting it there with the person I loved then. We finally take down the Happy Birthday banner that has looked over the kitchen for three years with the logic that it had always been someone’s birthday, or was about to be somebody else’s birthday, until suddenly it was nobody’s birthday for months and months yet the Happy Birthday sign still loomed over us every evening.

Existing in the emptiness the night before is the strangest part. There’s no one to share in the space, the stories and the moths. I brim with a pre-emptive nostalgia that makes me ache and makes me smile. The rooms around me are gathering into the shape of memories before I’ve even left them behind.