On the morning of the 11th of January I drove over to the house to let Gary, the plumber, in to fix the boiler; typically, predictably and infuriatingly, the hall lights were on and the electric storage heaters were on full blast, with no-one at home. Three of them worked, with only one on benefits at this point, but it was not necessarily the unemployed one who’d left it all on; it’s what people generally do when someone else is paying the bills. Anyway, I found a tiny, rickety trestle table to stand on and, risking life and limb, got up to the height of the electric meter by the front door, planning to read the meter and then check and see what they used in the next three months (of course, I later forgot to follow this up), as we could charge them for anything over £100 a month, according to our tenancy agreements (although we never once did this).
Later in January, Gerald rang in answer to a text from Adrian. He was in a rotten mood:
‘Hey, what do you think you’re doing, texting me, accusing me of not paying the £70? I paid it at the end of last week. So why are you asking for £140 this week?’
Adrian said, ‘Okay, I’ll check the bank account and get back to you.’ It turned out he had paid £70 on the Friday, but we’d received several payments that day and he hadn’t put his name as a reference, so it came up as an anonymous payment. We then didn’t get around to texting him back. The following morning he sent a message saying, 'I didn't sleep all night with the worry.'
He hadn’t cared one iota when he’d ignored the electricity bills for a year, and the debt went up to £1,400, but now he was worried about whether we’d received £70.
One night I even dreamt about him. In the dream I went to his market stall to ask him for the rent, as by then he'd completely stopped paying. In the dream he offered me £80 and I said that wasn’t good enough as he owed us over £500. He then stormed off, leaving me behind on the stall. When I’d arrived, there’d been quite a queue of shoppers waiting to buy things; he was doing very well! As I was now left to run the stall, one customer came and was interested in a blouse. I asked what she was willing to pay for it. ‘Half a dozen’, she said, bizarrely.
‘I thought maybe 12’, I replied, ‘so let’s meet half-way at 9.’
‘I couldn’t go above 8’, she said, ‘and I need to pay by cheque.’
‘Make it out to ‘R Lynch’’ I said, thinking it was better than nothing. My early Sunday morning dreams now included that beer-bellied, toothless wonder. We were trying not to get too angry, as he would be out soon and in a year’s time he would be a distant memory… That is one of the techniques one is supposed to use in order to stay calm.
Adrian tried a different tack another day, texting Gerald, to say he'd be in the area and would call in and pick up the rent as Gerald always professed he hadn’t paid the rent into the bank because he couldn’t leave his market stall unattended. He texted back to say that Adrian could, by all means, come to see him but that he was ‘not in a position to pay anything.’