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Róisín Lanigan’s new novel, ’I Want To Go Home, But I’m Already There’ tells the story of Áine, who has just moved in with her boyfriend Elliot in an affluent neighbourhood in London.
Áine should be happy with life, given her new home is in such a good area, surrounded by bakeries, yoga studios and organic vegetable shops. They even have a garden. And yet, from the moment they move in, Áine can’t shake the sense that there’s something not quite right about the place…
Here, the author shares her thoughts on rental buildings and all the experiences that come with those — good, bad and mildly terrifying — and includes a chapter from her new book…
THE MOST REPEATED writing advice is ‘write what you know’. I know landlords. Like most people my age, I can delineate the phases of my early to mid-adulthood as a series of landlords.
I left home a little over 10 years ago, and I can’t count on two hands the number of places I’ve lived since. I’ve rented single rooms from agencies, studio flats and bedsits, slept in bunk beds and on sofas. My buildings have been plagued by carbon monoxide leaks and stabbings, windows that don’t shut, and doors that don’t lock. I’ve finally started to believe in sage smudging when I move into somewhere new.
After a while, constant renting, moving all your earthly possessions from one address to the next at the whim of those landlords and with little to no information about the owners themselves or the safety of their properties, is something that becomes normalised.
In a sense the landlord himself becomes the only constant in your life, your life being a non-stop carousel of new addresses, unfulfilled deposits, dwindling hopes of security, homes that are only allowed to be a home for a little while, as long as you behave yourself for the owner and don’t make any changes you can’t undo when you leave. Once that’s normalised, it’s normalised too to begin demarcating your life based not in years, but in tenancy agreements. Where we live matters because it affects our day-to-day emotional state, our frame of mind, but also our relationships.
Just as I measure out my own life in tenancy agreements, I can chart the course of my ups and downs with boyfriends and friends, with flatmates who became enemies and then strangers, or strangers who became friends or lovers, in 12 or 18 or six-month periods, however long I was contractually allowed to stay. This — thinking of your life in the terms of capital given hand over fist to someone else that you might never even meet — is normalised, but it’s not normal.
Once I began to pick apart that expectation of normality, I realised that what was underneath it was rotten and grim. It seemed to me that the only way to properly describe renting — and the feeling of being wretchedly trapped in a situation you feel you can’t ever properly escape — was in the context of horror. After all, every haunted house story is essentially about the financial burden of owning property and being unable to escape it if you think something is not quite right.
Áine, the protagonist of I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There, is not a typical horror heroine. She’s neither a wife nor a mother (and of course, neither a homeowner nor homemaker), but then the book is not a typical horror. She only moves in with her boyfriend, Elliot, in the first place because her best friend and flatmate, Laura, decides that the time has come to move on and move in with her own boyfriend.
Áine is left adrift and uncertain about her own life and where she wants to live it – and more importantly, who she wants to live it with. She could flee her life if only she knew where the door was to let her out of it. The characters in this book could leave if they wanted to, if they really believed they were being haunted. But where would they go, and who would they live with? How can you really escape if all you’re running to is the next landlord?
***
EVER SINCE UNIVERSITY, Laura and Áine had a tradition called ‘Sad Wednesdays’, where they’d pause mid-week if they were stressed or miserable and bring all their bedding down in front of the sofa.
They’d watch the worst that their YouTube algorithms could offer – woman reviewing soap, eight hours of elderly Japanese craftsmen making shoes, smoking inside and drinking canned gin and tonics. Afterwards, the flat would reek of tobacco, but they would feel, despite the hangover, cleansed, light, free of misery.
Laura thought it was a good idea to compartmentalise sadness like that, so you could get on with the rest of your week without the heaviness leaking into all the other days. Now, Áine worried about the myriad of emotions bleeding out across her weeks and months without Laura to contain them. Previously, she’d always had Laura there to check whether she was overthinking something, whether she was correct or in the wrong. She could test out all her spirals on the person who knew her best and had seen them already.
Sometimes she didn’t even have to ask. She’d have a week where she didn’t shower for a few days, where she stayed up all night watching reruns of Family Guy on her laptop in the living room, surviving solely on pick ’n’ mix, and then sleeping 17 hours a day to make up for it, and Laura would notice and ask if everything was okay. Sometimes Áine didn’t even realise things weren’t okay until Laura asked. She missed her friend, but her friend was standing there. It was complicated and it wasn’t.
“And now you get to live with Elliott!” Laura was saying. “It’s going to be so exciting.”
“So exciting,” agreed Áine.
She finished the fizz and put the tinsel in their recycling bin, and thought about how long it would take before it disintegrated into the earth. A long time. Maybe never, actually.
It was exciting to move in together. Laura was always right about these kinds of things (things that implied happiness, positivity, personal growth). They constituted many of her specialist subjects, along with the best small plates restaurants in a five-mile radius and the exact length of time to leave between messages to lovers, colleagues, distant relatives and friends in order to appear the perfect amount of ‘breezy’.
Áine was not breezy. Elliott, however, had an air of genuine breeziness that she enjoyed. Together they achieved perfect temperance, she liked to think. And she liked the way he texted her good morning and how they felt the same way about several important things – the necessity of having creative outlets, the unfairness of the British class system, the fact that wrestling was a sport – and that they could argue about things they felt differently about – art-house movies being pretentious, rom-coms being art-house, ready salted being the best crisp flavour, whether it was okay to listen to earlier Smiths songs even though present-day Morrissey was a racist – without heat.
They were arguments where the stakes were so low, nothing was really at risk. They weren’t real. They were safe. And she didn’t like that he lived a 30-minute train ride away and sometimes more if there were leaves or a dead body on the line, and she didn’t like his two flatmates, anonymous-ish recruitment consultants he’d linked up with via a Facebook ad when he needed somewhere to live.
They’d had lots of experimental and kind of bad sex when they first met, with mixed results, and now they had sex less regularly but with more success because they both knew what the other person liked.
They were in love, she supposed. This was what love felt like. Maybe. And people in love were supposed to live together. People in love were meant to keep moving towards some sort of tangible end goal, or they’d fall apart. Sharks, Elliott once told her, had to keep swimming, or they would die. Cool, Áine had said, although it was a fact she’d already read on the internet.
I Want to Go Home But I am Already There, by Róisín Lanigan, is available now.
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