Rental Opportunity of the Week: This Place Screams ‘Bad Vibes’
Credit to Author: Joel Golby| Date: Wed, 02 Oct 2019 12:51:13 +0000
What is it? The vibe here is very much "hidden cell within an otherwise normal family home, which was used to house a hostage for years, more news at 9PM", but it is in fact just a two-tier one-bed with an overwhelmingly sinister energy.
Where is it? In Greenwich, home to the very concept of time.
What is there to do locally? Greenwich is the closest thing London has to a 70s-era picturesque seaside town – Big Promenade Energy – in that it has a few pubs with deliberately quaint hand-painted signs, an old tea-boat with ancient grey-haired tourists crawling around it in bumbags, "quite a big hill" and a naval college. It feels like a Midsomer murder is about to break out there at any time. You are constantly under threat of being stabbed to death with a cake slice by a second-place baking fête non-champion, fuming that her pineapple upside-down was beaten by a lowly Victoria sponge.
Alright, how much are they asking? £1,100 pcm.
When researching this column – beloved as it is by millions – I have a mental grain-sifter that I drop every potential housing advert through, and it sorts those listings into one of two types: the Wheat, which are technically nice houses with glaring flaws or notable errors of space, and the Chaff, which are the little black-damp shit-holes that have a washing machine built somehow into the front door. It is rare that anywhere qualifies along a third axis, but it's possible, and we have one this week: a private listing that is, very simply, "Bad Vibes".
This is what a Bad Vibe looks like:
This is a Bad Vibe. This is an overwhelmingly Bad Vibe. I love Bad Vibes, personally, because they scream to the humanity in me: a dog cannot identify a Bad Vibe, for instance, and neither can your supposedly intelligent dolphins. Bad Vibes can barely even be converted into words – that rough tool of the tongue we invented to bluntly express our thoughts and actions, a hammer we use when we truly need a laser – because Bad Vibes can only be sensed. They tap into something primal within us, they make the hairs on the back of our necks stand up and our pulses run, and they make our knees tense with latent fight-or-flight energy.
You have been at a party and sensed an electrical Bad Vibe tingle on the air. You have been trapped on a bus and sensed, metallic, the Bad Vibe all around you. I once walked through central London during an eerie Bad Vibe blackout – nobody was on the streets, for some reason, and even the sounds of the roads around me seemed muffled, as if I'd walked into a dream or a vision – and then, as I got to Tottenham Court Road, the gears started to revolve again and life returned towards me, but then in a 300-yard stretch I saw the results of not one, not two, but three accidents, humans stranded on the ground in neck braces or dappled with black dark blood, all of them occurring recently, mid-blackout, and I thought: this is a Bad Vibe. We know Bad Vibes because we have all survived them. We know Bad Vibes because there is always more to come.
Anyway: this flat is a Bad Vibe. Is there something fundamentally wrong with the flat that contributes to the vibe of it? Well, yes: the top floor is something between a mezzanine and a half-floor, a floor wedged in near a ceiling in the hope that humanity – against the regularly accepted laws of evolution and nutrition over the past 200 years – will actually start to shrink and grow smaller rather than stretch and grow large; every room is equipped with, instead of a radiator, an oil heater, and for some reason each of them has been placed in the corner, like that lad at the end of Blair Witch Project.
The oven is directly located next to the incredibly steep stairs and forms a narrow corridor into your small "leisure room", which just reeks of accident, of falling clonk–clonk–clonk down every one with a boiling pan of pasta, not being found for two-to-six months. The only thing on the window is a classic landlord-issue "blind that I can see from here doesn't elegantly work".
The bathroom is made up of a sink wedged into a bath, wedged right round a toilet, three bathroom items in the space of one. The kitchen is apparently illuminated with a fluorescent strip bulb, like a hospital ward. There is no furniture in there at all, to the extent that it suggests the police cleaned all the previous furnishings out as evidence. The floor is stained a deep, rich mahogany colour, an overwhelming brown, as if to hide the blood stains from the people who were cut into pieces there.
But also, fundamentally, the place has a menacing energy: as if the walls might twist and crack and, within the plaster wrinkles, form a face, and that face will fix you with dark empty eyes and simply whisper: GO. Or: you come home and open the door, and behind that is another door, and behind that is another door ('This is too many doors,' you are thinking, 'surely.'). Or: the lights flicker on and the corpse of that girl who stared through your window last night lays there, still, just for one second, and as the lights flicker out again you're sure you hear a short strangled scream.
Or: everything is glowing, all the electrical items are on, and gosh, what is this, that old radio you found wrapped in newspaper in the back of a cupboard is plugged in and tuning itself, way–yow–wah–yow–wah, and the words from the olde time songs it plays – Nothing before 1974, you note, hmm: the exact year that boy died – the words it plays in brief snippets from all the songs seem to spell out: leave. now. and I. won't. have to. KILL. you.
Or: you wake up to 20 missed calls from your mum and your boss and your friends, a pile of post behind the door, and they are all frantically asking Where Are You? Where Are You? Are You Alright? Where Are You?, and you check the calendar and realise you’ve been asleep for eight days, and you call your mum back – "Mum, I'm so sorry, the weirdest thing—" – and she cuts you off and says: "You just phoned me." Or: open a cupboard and find a severed hand. Or: when you emerge from the shower, your name is written on the mirror, daubed out with a single finger and etched in blood. Or: the floorboards creak and shimmer and you realise with a clunk of dread that you died, two months ago, the first day you moved in, when you plugged that cord in and it flashed large and exploded: that killed you, and everything since has been the feverish imaginings of a dying mind.
The most feverish being: £1,100, a fucking month. For two staircases in Greenwich.
This article originally appeared on VICE UK.