Alcoholic Landlady

Behind those glasses, thick as the bottom of a milk-bottle, her eyes were fucking massive, glaring out at me rather devilishly and seeming oddly out of shape; they seemed to protrude out further than where the side of her face line ended. The result was that it lent her a sort of comical edge. I could take nothing she said seriously, because she looked so strongly like a cartoon character; her enormous caricatured eyes, orange shock of hair, and short stumpy build, like something out of Rugrats. What was that characters name; the ginger kid with the glasses? Well, that one anyway, that’s what she was like, and she made me snigger inwardly whenever I spoke to her. It was as much as I could do to control my derision at the interview, and I am thinly veiling it now, perfectly aware that I am staring at her glasses and not her eyes, and not bothering too much that the sides of my mouth are visibly flickering every time I look at her for too long. Chucky, that was his name! Yes, she looks just like Chucky. My name is Lissa. It is my first day at my new job, and Chucky is my new boss, but right now I’m going to rewind back, so that I can explain a little about myself.

When I first used my phone as an alarm, I trailed through all the irritating ring tones it hosted in order to discover the most grating one on it (it only has annoying tunes such as the can-can, and I find it incredulous that it does not have a single, simple ring-ring tone. It’s a goddamn phone for fucks sake!). This, I had decided, would be my alarm clock. I am not, admittedly, the best morning person, and since I graduated from University and have had to wrench myself out of bed in the mornings, I have consequently discovered that ‘getting-up’ is not one of my abilities. In fact, to illustrate this aspect of my life more clearly, it may be helpful, perhaps, to narrate to you that in the last five or six weeks of my life, I have been sacked from no less than three jobs. Pathetic, I know. At least in part, although definitely not wholly (as the reasons for my dismissals are complex and numerous), this can be attributed to my apparent inability to simply get out of bed in the mornings. This is, if we zoom in on the bedroom scene, exactly what I am struggling to do now (“now”, by the way, is four and a half weeks ago). Picture the scene:

This room, my bedroom, is contained within a small and cold tenement building. The floor is laminate, which although has been done very recently, is already starting to crack and break. This is because the floor is extremely uneven, and also because my landlady is stingy and got her toy-boy boyfriend, “Jimmy”, to re-floor it. “Jimmy”, as you might gather, is pretty incompetent at laying laminate flooring, and will eventually make my landlady regret her lustful ways. This feeling of regret will strengthen in time as she realises that not only has he stolen three grand from her, but has also posted naked pictures of her grotesque, sagging flesh on the internet. In an out-of-character wicked act, he prints off hundreds of sheets of paper; sample pictures with the web address highlighted below, and he pays his kid brother, who complies gleefully, to laminate them and post them around Glasgow. My landlady, as you might deduce, is not going to be very pleased when she staggers onto this piece of information. That’s right, staggers, not stumbles, because stagger is what she does, all the time. Of course, raging alcoholics (like herself), you might suppose would also be ‘stumblers’, but I am fairly confident that ‘stumble’ is not the right word to describe Martha. She staggers, sways, sometimes she swoons and reels, retches, let’s not forget retches, lurches, and crashes, but she never really stumbles. Stumble, I feel, suggests something accidental. You know, a soft little tumble, a slight trip, a tad embarrassing but, you know, nothing to worry about. There is nothing accidental about Martha; unless, of course, you can somehow tag ‘accidental’ to the devouring of a bottle of vodka and a bag of speed, every fucking day. It wouldn’t be so bad if she would just leave us alone, but she doesn’t. She is in the flat every day, manically cleaning, or trying to make us clean. It’s a terrible situation for both of us, because she is determined to keep the flat tidy, and we are just as determined to leave it as a pigsty. I can’t report her crazy invasion of civil rights and she can’t evict her disgusting, destructive tenants (us!) because we are renting the flat illegally off of her. This means we do not have to pay council tax; she does, because if we register they will know she is sub-letting. Since the flat consists of three ex-student wasters, two of which (including myself) seem to be permanently unemployed, this means it is unlikely that we will ever leave the flat. I am two months late with my rent, but this is ok because the beauty of it is that she cannot evict us. Much of the last three months the four of us have been locked in fierce power struggles whereby the two sides both try to gain authority. Previously Martha had tried her best to force us to leave by being as annoying and intrusive as possible. Not that she wasn’t, of course, like this before, but recently this has been consciously exemplified, as she grasped, vaguely, through her foggy alcoholic blur, that her frenzied cleaning exploits was perceived by us as just ever so slightly wacky and irritating.