Simon also had the habit of ‘phoning the Housing Office and asking to be paid the rent directly. After he had previously spent a Housing Benefit payment, we had had the payments switched so that we would receive the money. One Friday evening I arrived home to find a letter from the Housing Office saying that as Simon had asked for the money they would be acquiescing in his request as he was no longer in arrears.
So I rang Simon.
‘Why have you done this? The only reason I can see is that you want to get hold of the money so you can spend it. This is the last straw. You’ll be getting your notice now. I’m sick of your games.’ The call ended with us both raising our voices. A great start to the weekend.
We often received these troublesome letters on a Friday and if we got home late, it was impossible to ring the relevant offices and sort it out. Or the letters would come on a Saturday morning and we’d have to wait until Monday to deal with the issues. I was so mad this time though that I decided to act immediately, rather than think all weekend: 'I'll say this and I'll say that, in the letter.' So I spent half an hour of my Friday evening writing to the Housing Office:
‘It’s only because we have received the money directly that Simon has got out of arrears. As soon as the payments go back to him, he’ll withhold the rent like he did before.’ I asked them to reconsider as they were only going to cause problems for all of us.
After getting all aerated on the Friday evening, I also decided never to open post on Friday evenings or Saturday mornings in the future.
A week later I received a brief letter stating they would pay him directly.
'That's it!' Adrian said, 'he's going.' And we issued his notice. Some new law had apparently come in, however, whereby we could now be accused of ‘retaliatory eviction.’ According to this brainwave from Government, if a person winds you up, defrauds the system by claiming a benefit for rent which they have no intention of passing on; all of which affects your state of mind and you then evict them, you've broken the law.
The day he received his notice, he was straight on the ‘phone.
‘How can you do this to me? What have I done? I don’t understand it. I thought we always got on well.’
It turned out he was oblivious to how difficult we’d found him over the years and didn’t comprehend that we'd run out of patience.
A few weeks later Adrian was at the house with the gas engineer, when Simon came downstairs and started moaning about something. Adrian cut him off:
‘Simon, don’t speak to me because it ends in a row,’ to which Simon said:
‘Have you reconsidered my notice? Do you still want me to go?’
Adrian replied, ‘No, we haven’t reconsidered. We definitely want you to move out.’
The day he left, Adrian was his usual soft self, even giving him a lift to his new house with the last of his belongings. This was out of Adrian’s way and made him late for an appointment, but Simon expressed his appreciation and promised to pay the several hundred pounds he owed us. We never saw the money nor did we hear from him again.