Fury

(I have a big post to write about the Night of the Senses ball on Friday night. It was a very different atmosphere to that of the Rubber Ball last week, but still brilliant. At one point I was standing on a stool in a room full of people in various states of undress and debauchery, singing Life Is A Cabaret from Cabaret in impassioned tones through my microphone as a semi-naked man accompanied me on the bongos. There is something I need to say first, though.)

Back in 2005 I had a nasty experience involving an unwelcome visitor in the flat in which I was living at the time. I wrote all about it here.

Fast-forward three years and that experience is a fading memory. I do, however, feel I have a heightened sense of security and privacy as a result. When alone in a house, even in my parents’ house, I still do find myself sitting still and rigid, listening for evidence of some malevolent intruder.

After the ball on Friday my friend Lily stayed over at my house. By about midday on Saturday we were still under the covers, discussing the night before amid glorious girly giggles. Each of us in one of my night dresses and sipping cups of tea.

The door bell rang. I looked up from tea and chats, confused. In central London people don’t just ring doorbells. They call first to announce themselves. Perhaps, I thought, one of my housemates had left their key and their phone somewhere, and needed to be let in. I got out of bed and started looking for my dressing gown to put on. Taking my time, still chattering with Lily, I left the room.

I started making my way down the stairs, then stopped, frozen, halfway down. A startled-looking teenage boy stood in the hall, facing me. The front door was swinging open, wide onto the busy Brixton street.

My brain leapt to a reasonable explanation. The door had been left open and he had been ringing the bell to alert us to the fact. Something reasonable. Laughable.

Then I saw the key in his hand, and walked down the rest of the stairs.

“What are you doing?” I asked, simply.

“Um, yeah. I rang the bell.” He gestured towards the door as if to illustrate this point.

“Right.” I pulled my thin dressing gown around me as realisation dawned. “Wait, you have a key? Why the hell do you have a key?”

It transpired that he was from an estate agent down the road. Not, I hasten to add, the estate agents that we are with. Different ones.

“The landlord said we could come in and do an evaluation.”

“Oh” I said. “Did you have an appointment?”

“Nah, but the landlord, said, like, if nobody answered, just come in.”

I rarely lose my temper. I am rather good at sulking, at brooding and thinking dark thoughts, but I cannot remember the last time I truly lost it. Those times are indeed rare, but this was definitely one of them.

I went, for want of a more sophisticated phrase, completely mental. This moronic teenager stood there, backing out of the door whilst I told him exactly what I thought of his estate agency, of the landlord, and of him. I raved at him, a wild woman with insane hair and not very many clothes, feeling righteous anger bubble and pour tumultuously from my mouth.

Eventually I let him go, acknowledging that if he had been told to let himself in then he wasn’t solely to blame, but also in complete disbelief that anybody could be so stupid as to let themselves into someone else’s house without permission.

Then I called my estate agent. They weren’t there (it was a Saturday) so I told the answer phone what I thought. I was so, so angry and I told them as much. I wanted, I said, to know exactly what had happened, and for them to call me first thing on Monday morning. First thing.

They, of course, did not call.

At ten thirty this morning I called them. I was put through to a dismally stupid-sounding woman called Kelly, who informed me in bored tones that they had called my housemate, Ed, to apologise to him. Had I not spoken to him? “Yeah, he’s our point of contact, Lee-oh-neee. So we called him.”

I explained that I had specifically told them to call me. That they had my number, and that I had left it in the answer phone message just in case.

Then Kelly, having clearly run out of brain cells for the week, saw fit to tell me off for my tone of voice in the answer phone message. Instead of apologising profusely for a massive error on the part of her company, she decided to chastise me for reacting to it the way I did.

“I can understand it wasn’t a nice thing to happen, Lee-oh-nee, but we are looking into it and your message really upset the girl who checks the answering machines. There was really no need.”

For someone who doesn’t often lose my temper, it was an odd sensation to have twice in the space of three days.

“How dare you tell me off for my tone of voice when thanks to you I came downstairs to find a strange man in my house. I refuse to be spoken to like that.”

Kelly, in her infinite wisdom, thought best to tell me off a bit more.

The rest of the conversation was the most aggravating one I have had in a long time. Being reprimanded by someone with the intellectual capacity of half a slice of ham, and having her whining, patronising tones slithering down the telephone at me was too much to bear. I hung up.

So, what to do? We have two months left on our contract in the house (a contract that clearly states that they must give us twenty-four hours notice before a visit, and that we have a right to veto that visit). My housemates were not there and have not had the same previous experiences as I have. They are, needless to say, not at all as upset about the whole thing as I am. However, entering a house without permission is breaking and entering, whether it is by means of a key or by means of smashing the front door in. I know from painful first hand experience the possible consequences of having a stranger in the house.

I want an apology for that, as well as compensation. I know it shrieks of this hysterically litigious society we’re in, but I am deeply upset by it. I also want an apology from the estate agent Kelly for treating me like an errant five year old and not calling me immediately to discuss what had happened.

Please let me know what you think. My past experience has made me more sensitive to this, but no matter which way I turn it I cannot see that I am being over-sensitive.