Houses have been by no means left empty on this metropolis,” observes Áine, the protagonist of Róisín Lanigan’s debut novel I Need To Go Dwelling However I’m Already There. Each potential London rental property, nevertheless dispiriting, appears to be snatched up in a panic moments after it is advertised. Often, there’s barely a day or so of grace interval between the outdated tenants setting off of their rented vans, and the brand new ones arriving in theirs.
So why, then, is the flat that Áine is viewing along with her boyfriend Elliot eerily free from any signal of life? Why is it nonetheless available on the market a fortnight after the itemizing appeared on-line? Why is the lease nearly inexpensive, on this “boujee” enclave of the capital, the place trendy mother and father gown their equally trendy infants up like “tiny Copenhagen-based style influencers”? There’s something concerning the area that unnerves Áine; a way of “wrongness continued regardless of the ticked packing containers and the attractive bay home windows”, Lanigan writes.
Inevitably, although, the couple hand over the deposit and e-sign the contract. Sure, these bay home windows are solely single glazed however, as Elliot places it, “we’re used to damp at this level, certainly”. His phrases appear to sum up the awful pragmatism of the serial renter, whose grim logic tends to go one thing alongside the strains of: we may do higher, however we may definitely do worse.
So many people have lived out our own renting horror stories, experiences which might be usually deeply painful on the time, however ultimately turn out to be part of our private mythologies, tales that we are able to later recount, usually with a darkly humorous spin, from a secure distance. The owner with a behavior of “simply popping in” unannounced, then continuing to itemise each attainable approach you’re ruining their superb residence. The upstairs neighbours who appear to rearrange their furnishings each weeknight at roughly midnight, in bursts of insomniac feng shui. The rats that re-emerge from the pipes on a quarterly foundation. The withheld deposits and the Kafka-esque e mail threads arguing with letting brokers.
As homeownership turns into an more and more tough, even fanciful prospect for youthful millennials and Era Z, the period of time – and cash – that we are going to spend renting appears to stretch out exponentially in entrance of us. Final yr, the quantity of lease paid yearly by below 45s elevated by £3.5bn, reaching a report complete of £56.2bn.
Towards this backdrop, the assorted indignities and injustices that make up life as a tenant have supplied wealthy materials for among the most memorable debut novels of the previous few years. Oisín McKenna’s Evenings and Weekends, launched in 2024, follows a cluster of buddies of their early thirties. A few of them are on the verge of being lastly priced out of London after years of renting, whereas others see these would-be abandoners as someway giving up – on their youth, on their friendships, on a hard-to-define sense of risk that life within the capital has at all times promised.
Jo Hamya’s 2021 guide Three Rooms was a superb evocation of what it’s wish to have your psychological well being slowly ground down by a house share situation, whereas one other 2024 launch, The Lodgers by Holly Pester, unpicks the disorientating expertise of subletting, carving out your individual life whereas surrounded by different folks’s issues.
Precarity is the prevailing temper in all of those tales. “We’re influenced by what we expertise, and even when it comes to the place we sit down to write down, housing and renting have inevitably turn out to be a significant concern,” Lanigan just lately advised The i. “Fiction being written in s***, damp flats that suck up all of your cash isn’t going to be bucolic.” What feels notably hanging about her debut, although, is the way in which that she leans into, nicely, the outright horror of all of it.
In I Need To Go Dwelling However I’m Already There, Áine begins to expertise her personal nightmare rental as a Gothic novel, albeit one affected by the trimmings of millennial life. At residence, she begins to really feel as if she’s being watched, noticed by an viewers that’s “threatening. Virtually malevolent.” Black mould begins to seep out from behind the basement door and splatter the partitions of their residing area. Wails emerge from the upstairs flat. Submit doesn’t arrive for weeks, then turns up all of sudden, on a Sunday. Fruit turns rotten and mushy inside hours of being unpacked from the grocery store. Áine’s recurrent cough comes again with a vengeance.
In isolation, any considered one of these happenings may really feel like a banal annoyance. However as they slowly accumulate, they begin to go away Áine oppressed, disorientated and more and more at odds with Elliot. Like so many younger {couples}, they’ve leapt into cohabitation just a little sooner than they could’ve appreciated with a purpose to get monetary savings and keep away from re-entering the fray of Spare Room; it’s a call catalysed by flatmates shifting on and leases coming to an finish.
Transferring in collectively solely appears to have thrown the cracks and uncertainties of their relationship into stark aid. It doesn’t assist that Elliot is resolutely rational, whereas Áine has extra of an affinity with supernatural tales, having grown up listening to household tales about banshees and the like. Even Laura, her finest pal and former flatmate, takes Elliot’s aspect with regards to the potential haunting. “I don’t suppose you will get a Foxton’s low cost for demonic possession,” she says, dripping in snark. Lanigan has a knack for punctuating the lurking sense of dread with bursts of darkish humour, which forestall Áine’s Gothic nightmare from straying over into melodrama. The narration, too, is usually enjoyably deadpan, which chimes completely with the futility of the renting cycle, resembling when Áine ponders how she had “by no means moved into a spot that was clear, by no means left a spot with out cleansing it, and by no means obtained a deposit again with out an extortionate cleansing price deduction”.
Each new residence that we transfer into, as soon as the final one has turn out to be unaffordable, is occupied by the spectres of tenants previous, every with their very own hidden historical past
What Lanigan has lighted upon is that there’s something inherently ghostly about the entire rental course of. Each new residence that we transfer into, as soon as the final one has turn out to be unaffordable, is occupied by the spectres of tenants previous, every with their very own hidden historical past. Their outdated mail clutters up the letterbox, their outdated cutlery nonetheless knocking round within the drawers. They’re even, in a approach, lurking round within the air or the carpet: Áine turns into preoccupied with “how mud was made from different folks’s pores and skin, and it felt bizarre not figuring out whose pores and skin she was coughing up now”.
Mannequin tenants, these excellent renters you fake to be when assembly with an agent for the primary time, those who’re clear and social however don’t wish to celebration, are anticipated to exist like ghosts, too – or a minimum of to be someway incorporeal, leaving a property unmarked, as if it has by no means been lived in by precise people finishing up precise lives. So your bed room is splattered with summary thrives of black mould? You’re in all probability simply respiratory an excessive amount of, in the home you pay to stay in. Lanigan’s characters obtain a barrage of emails reminding them of all the things they’re doing flawed of their cursed property, as if cooking with a pan lid on can cease the supernatural unfold of the damp.
Which brings us to “regular put on and tear” – a notoriously subjective time period for many landlords. No surprise Áine cringes each time that Elliot bashes his work rucksack into the very same spot on the wall, leaving a mark that, she fears, will ultimately be factored right into a hefty deduction from their deposit. She surreptitiously searches on-line for tips about how finest to take away stains from magnolia paint. After all their partitions are magnolia – it’s the common shade of the soulless, liminal rental residence. The very blankness and beigeness is a reminder of your lack of stake on this place, of your impermanence.
That sense of impermanence, of by no means feeling comfortable within the place that’s ostensibly your secure haven, slowly causes Áine to collapse. Her disintegration is likely to be heightened, nevertheless it’s horribly recognisable all the identical. I Need To Go Dwelling… is likely to be a ghost story, but it is usually a visceral, typically unbearably practical exploration of how renting can take a very scary psychological toll – scarier even than wanting up property costs on Rightmove.
I Need To Go Dwelling However I am Already There by Róisín Lanigan is revealed by Fig Tree, £16.99
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