House Rules

Opening scene

Okay so you need to understand the whiteboard situation before someone gets hurt, and by someone I mean probably Dermot. It used to just say BINS — TUES (JAKE'S TURN, YES JAKE, YOURS) and a drawing of a milk carton with a knife through it. Standard flatshare lore. Then last week it said RENT IS SPLIT EVENLY and now you're paying ninety quid less and Marchetti upstairs is paying more and none of them think that's weird, only you.

You're standing in the kitchen at half eight with your toast going cold, reading tonight's addition in handwriting you don't recognise: 'QUIET HOURS 9PM. HOST'S DECISION IS FINAL.' Host. There's a host now. There wasn't a host this morning. And underneath, freshly capped, the marker hangs on its little grey string, swinging slightly, like somebody's just this second put it down.

From the front room you can hear Dermot laughing at something, completely at ease, a man who does not know he agreed to anything. The marker is right there.

Do you write something before he does, or do you rub the whole board clean and find out what happens?

Turn 1 of 11

I take in the scene, and act on what matters most.

The kitchen smells like last night's stir-fry and the permanent ambient grease that wafts up through the floorboards from the chicken shop downstairs. Your toast is going cold on the counter — cheap supermarket bread, barely toasted, the kind of toast you make because you're technically an adult now and adults eat toast in the morning. You ignore it. The whiteboard is more important.

There it is, in blue marker that's starting to run thin, the handwriting neat and small and unfamiliar: QUIET HOURS 9PM. HOST'S DECISION IS FINAL. You read it twice, then a third time, because the thing about the board is that the first read is just words and the second read is when it settles into your brain like it's always been there. Host. The flat has a host. You didn't vote for a host. Nobody voted for a host. And yet the word sits on the board with the same quiet authority as RENT IS SPLIT EVENLY, which has saved you ninety-three pounds a month and which you have never once questioned, even though you remember — you're almost sure you remember — that Marchetti used to pay less.

The marker swings on its string, the cap still warm. Someone was just here. Someone wrote this and walked away, and in the front room Dermot is laughing at his phone, utterly relaxed, the laugh of a man whose reality has just been edited without his knowledge or consent. He doesn't know there's a host. He won't know. That's how the board works — it doesn't announce itself. It just makes things true.

You reach for the marker. Your hand stops about an inch away, fingers hovering, because here's the thing you've been trying not to think about: you're the only one who notices. You noticed the rent change. You noticed when the bin rota shifted to give Jake Wednesdays instead of Tuesdays and Jake just started doing Wednesdays like he'd always done Wednesdays. Everyone else's memory smooths over like water filling a footprint. Yours doesn't. Which means either you're immune, or you're going mad, or — and this is the thought that keeps you up — the board hasn't gotten around to you yet.

From the front room, Dermot's laugh breaks into a cough, and then footsteps. He's getting up. He's coming this way.