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About the Author

Phoebe Luckhurst was born in London and brought up in Glasgow. She is the Features Editor of the Evening Standard and appears regularly on their podcast, The Leader. She has written for the Guardian, Sunday Times Style, ELLE, ES Magazine, Grazia, The Telegraph and Vogue. She has had the theme tune to The OC stuck in her head since 2003 and once almost spent her student loan on a micro-pig. She no longer shops online when drunk.

Dedication

To Samuel

Our story will always be my favourite house-sharing anecdote

1. Ellen

Ellen was a bit rusty on what their tenancy agreement said about flooding the entire ground floor of their house. But she suspected that Elias, the balding, barrel-chested sociopath who owned their property in Lewisham, would have prepared for the eventuality. This would most likely involve damages being pillaged from their security deposit. The prospect of explaining the flooding to him was about as appealing as walking into moving traffic.

There was never any arguing with Elias. True, Ellen had never known a sympathetic London landlord, but Elias was a tyrant. He lacked any empathy or humanity, and overreacted at the slightest provocation. His emails were always abrasive and usually written predominantly in caps lock. Last month, when Ellen’s housemate Alexa emailed to ask whether there was a mop in the house, he responded by calling her a ‘FREELOADING C**T’. Then there was the Friday evening before a bank holiday weekend, when the dodgy flush had broken on their only loo. When they asked for Elias’s help with a handyman he baulked at paying the higher call-out fee and suggested they ‘flush it with a bucket until Tuesday’.

He also had a habit of letting himself in without warning, which was, Ellen was fairly sure, a violation of the terms of their lease. They’d hear the grind of his keys in the door and, quick as a flash, assemble in her room (which was technically the living room) for a crisis meeting to determine the party line on when they’d last hoovered the stairs. Elias always found something to complain about, be it the state of the lawn or a lingering smell in the kitchen. (He didn’t ‘like’ Chinese food. On his last visit his eyes were narrowed and searching, as if expecting to find a chow mein sequestered away in a cupboard.) He once called – called! – to warn them that if they didn’t polish the kitchen surfaces once a month he’d have ‘their bollocks in a vice’. In person, he often eyeballed the docile Jack when he made threats (especially ones about bollocks), fingering his keys. There were two key rings on the chain – a blue bottle opener bearing the name of a casino, and a small plastic busty pin-up girl in a Baywatch-red swimsuit.