Entity story · 4 min read · Set in Tenth Street ·
Rent Is Always Due
A housing caseworker visits a harbour-city tenement whose courteous landlord corrects arrears by finding each missing tenant an earlier life in the flat.
Number 18, Tenth Street, is a five-storey tenement with a lobby the colour of bottled moss, and the corridor walls further up are painted the same green, and the landlord's ledger is bound in the same green, and June Okafor wrote all three facts into her file before she wrote anything else, because pattern is where a caseworker starts.
She had been sent by the housing advice centre on a Tuesday, carrying a tenant's file. The tenant was Walter Petrie, seventy-one, four months of arrears accrued while he was in hospital, and a letter from the building — polite, unthreatening — reminding him of a visit. The letter had used the phrase *at your convenience*. Petrie's solicitor said, on the phone, that she had dealt with this block before, and that Okafor should look at the mailboxes first.
The mailboxes are brass, floor to ceiling in the lobby, a wall of them, and every door has a typed label. Okafor's brief was Petrie's flat: ground floor rear. The label read ARTHUR COYLE, typed in fresh letters, the black still glossy, and when she put a knuckle to it, faintly warm, like a page coming off a copier.
Beside it a door swung open and the landlord came through, heavy and well-kept in a camel coat, his shoes dry. It had been raining since the morning; Okafor's shoes were not dry. His keys hung at his belt, a ring of them as long as a churchwarden's, and he carried the green ledger open against his forearm as though he had been reading it while walking. Tenants, Okafor later learned, called him Mr. Alder. The name is on no lease.
He was courteous. He offered her the conversation chair by the frosted pane, and took her questions in order, and answered none of them, and wrote answers that were not answers into the ledger in pencil, because the pencil was what he used for arrears. Yes, the flat had been let. No, he could not discuss a tenant's account with a third party. He asked the year of the arrears, and said that that account was in good order, and turned the ledger so she could see the line, and the line was in a different ink and a different hand, settled monthly, a tenant's signature at the foot of it. It was not Petrie's signature. The hand was eighty, if a hand could be an age.
Inside the ground-floor rear flat she was shown the chrome kettle, the photographs, the hospital letters. The man who answered was Arthur Coyle, of eighty, and he could not have been kinder. He described his late wife's nephew with a nephew's accuracy — the name, the year the nephew had come to lodge, the job at the tram depot, the two fingers he was short of on the right hand, which was two fingers that, on Okafor's file, Petrie was short of on the right hand. He described Easter in the yard in 1963 and the plum tree that had come with the house and the ladder he had lent up the road. She asked the neighbours afterward, four of them, off the record, on the pavement. All four remembered Coyle. Two had decent years of him: the ladder, the plum, the queue at the fishmonger's on a Friday, the wife's name. The electoral roll was Coyle's. The mailbox was Coyle's. The lease was Coyle's, and the lease was eleven years old.
Walter Petrie, when she drove out to the sheltered housing across the city where the referral said he now lived, did remember Easter in the yard in 1963. He did not remember the street. He could not have told her the number of the door if she had doubled his pension for it. He remembered the weight of the key, he said — big old pattern, warm from a pocket — and the plum, which he called *his* plum, and nothing that attached the plum to an address. The referral's paperwork was complete and kind and did not once mention arrears.
Petrie pays in advance now. Okafor noticed, going down the lobby ledger months later, how many of the building's accounts do — early, in person, receipts taken — and how the ones that don't are the ones that, across eleven years and twenty-six evictions no paper trail addresses, are recorded as *vacancy arrangements, no action required.* Nobody who has a label on the brass can remember an eviction. She has asked. The question is always received warmly, answered fully, and about someone else.
Mr. Alder offered her a receipt when she left, the first time. She had made no complaint, paid nothing, filed nothing. He says the offer stands.
The ledger lists one flat in the building as unlet. It is the top floor front, and the door is painted the corridor green, and no tenant in twenty-six years of eviction has ever seen inside it, though it is referred to, in the building, as *upstairs.* Okafor has the key question written on the back of her hand, where notes live until they get typed: what does a landlord whose building is over-full keep one room empty for — and whose name is waiting on the brass?