The Seventh Housemate

The seventh housemate has gone and made me a violent person in my mind.

In a house of seven people, who knew that one, just one would manage to steal everyone else’s peace. Yet there is living, breathing proof in one of our housemates. I’m testing out that whole writing is cathartic theory.

I’ve written about my accommodation drama before. What I did not write about was the fact that I finally moved into the house I had booked earlier –it involved moving till 2am but I do not think I’m strong enough to talk about without my throat closing up. I’ll stick to the housemate for now. In the present house is one person who, having thought she was shy, we had all tried to draw out. The other housemates, including myself hit it off from the start –it helps that two of them are my sisters.

However the seventh housemate always locked herself away in her room. But we were all determined to get her out of her shell. See, her mother had come with her when she had first moved in, and asked us to make sure she does not keep to herself. We were determined to do what she had asked. But the seventh housemate only spoke in monologues. Hi. Yes. No. Okay. We even got her to go out with us once. Then it started to feel like we were “tying on her”. Then the tight school schedule made it difficult to make an effort.

I wish her being introverted made her the perfect housemate since you only get to meet her on the stairs and said the odd hi. But no, it was not like that with the seventh housemate. She made her presence known alright. And cemented my distrust for the overly silent types. I’m not talking about the silent types who carefully choose the people they talk to, and who have more to them than those not close to them would ever know. I’m talking about the silent type that never have an opinion about anything, whose answer to group discussions is “okay”, always, who never look you in the eye and smile with their mouths only. That’s our seventh housemate.

She made her presence known in the dirty dishes she left in the sink. In the sticky, oily, rotting mess she left on the countertops in the kitchen. A mess that told of peppers that went under the knife, oil that missed the pan, and sugar that escaped the teacup. And just so we really wouldn’t miss her presence, she left us souvenirs in our pots and pan –litres of oil, blacked from frying food. She really fried that food till its fat stuck to the walls of the house. We all knew when the seventh housemate was cooking. If we didn’t know our dirty pots and pans, laid out on the stove would let us know. The first few times it happened, we were not sure so the six of us would ask each other who had used the pans, and realise none of us uses that much oil. Good thing is that after a while the pots and pans would be clean again and so we would move on.

When it became very bad we had a house meeting –this is a civilised world after all. We agreed on a cleaning up after ourselves, a timetable for the garbage and a respect for each other’s property. The seventh housemate did not say a thing during the meeting. Any effort to have her involved only got a shrug from her, and that creepy smile that does not reach her eyes. I interpreted it as, “I don’t give a rat’s behind what y’all agree on, I’ll keep living my life the way I see fit”. But I told myself I was being paranoid.

Boy was I right on the money!

For the last three months, it has been like this. You can tell when she has been in the kitchen by the mess she lives. She manages to miss the garbage bag every time and so leaves egg shells, a variety of vegetable cuttings, leftovers of the cake mix she loves so much and more on the floor. I’ve even pointed this out to her once and asked her to mind how she disposes of her garbage. “Okay,” she said. Okay! I didn’t think that word could get more irksome than people typing it as ‘K’.

Flooded kitchen

Last month she poured rice in the sink. Thank God one of the housemates saw her in action because it was starting to feel like were imagining the poor state of the kitchen. See, among the six of us, at least two of us usually cook together and clean up the kitchen afterwards. Only to find it a mess in the morning. See, the seventh housemate must have been tired of all the “clean up after yourself” talks that she has resorted to cooking when the rest of us are not in the house or in the middle of the night –before you feel sorry for her, the latter has something to do with someone else out of our house, that’s a story for another day. Back to the rice in the sink. When the other housemate saw her pouring the rice, she assumed that the seventh housemate would take the rice out, and went on with her business.

A few hours later, our kitchen was flooded. The rice had blocked not just the sink but something connected to the washing machine in that water was flowing from the machine to the floor. How did we know this? Another housemate who is very good at finding solutions opened the pipe at the bottom of the sink and out poured rice, and more rice. When the seventh housemate was confronted she first denied it till the other housemate reminded her that she had caught her doing the deed.

I found them, flooded floor and all, looking tired and fed up. The seventh housemate was laughing. One housemate kept telling her to stop laughing and help her clean up the mess. The other was tightening the pipe under the mess. When I asked them what was up, they told me to ask the seventh housemate. That sent her into another fit of laughter. She was moving around the mop, without making any effort to do some actual cleaning. I’d had a long day at school and didn’t have the energy to get involved. The last I left the scene, the housemate who had been tightening the pipe had told the seventh housemate to leave the mopping alone if she was not going to do it properly. The seventh housemate had given her the mop and gone back to her room, without a care in the world. My blood boiled but I took deep breaths and let it go.

One of her famous messes is the blackened oil in the pans, usually three. I’ve always wondered what needs so much oil to cook but don’t have to energy to find out. Because we have asked her to keep the oil and thus the puns away so that the rest of us can use the stove, she got into the habit of putting them in one of the ovens.

While warming something in the oven one day, three of the housemates noticed smoke coming out of the second oven. They opened it to discover a pan with the blackened oil. The oil had been burning. They took it out, waited till the seventh housemate came to the kitchen and told her what had happened. “Okay,” she said. Again, my blood boiled but I had essays to deal with so I let it go.

No smoke without fire

Yesterday, however, did it. One of my sisters and I had left church, blissful, a little unwell with colds, and very hungry. We had dreamed of the meal we were going to cook up, our mouths were watering. As the taxi approached our house, we noticed two fire trucks parked near our house.

“Are those fire trucks?” I said.

“They must be ambulances,” sister said.

“They look like fire trucks,” I said.

“Our door looks open!” sister said with alarm.

“Don’t tell me our house is on fire!” I said, my heart going to my throat.

“My heart is beating so fast. Oh God!” Sister said.

“But I don’t see smoke. Do you see smoke,” I said, trying to reassure her.

I remember the taxi driver making a comment, cannot remember what, then we paid him in a daze. Just checked, and he gave us the right balance, bless his heart. Our attention was fixed on the firemen at our doorstep and inside the trucks. Our neighbours were also out and some were taking photos. Cannot blame them, I might have done the same thing in their position.

“Oh my God I smell smoke! Don’t tell me the seventh housemate’s pans finally caught fire,” I said, trying to crack a joke as we hurried into the house.

Turns out my joke was not a joke. The seventh neighbour had left one of her pans in the oven we rarely use. The other oven had been turned on to make some delicious chicken. Unfortunately, that also meant that the blacked oil was also cooking. It cooked so well that it fried the oven and caused a fire. The fire alarm had gone off but the smoke was so much that it went right back on every time it was switched off. One of the neighbours must have become alarmed and called the fire brigade. These guys don’t joke! They were there in a few minutes, with two trucks.

We arrived when they had just put out the fire. The house reeked of burnt oil, rubber, plastic and whatever other elements make up the oven. But that’s not what put violent thoughts in my head.

The seventh housemate denied her pan! The nerve! She said it was not hers, which would have been fine since we told her we were not going to make a big deal out of it. Now that we were all in the kitchen, we brought up the dirty pots she had left at the sink –pots that did not belong to her. And she denied using them too. Her denial would have held water if the dirty pans had not shown up on the day she and the rest of us returned from the Chrsitmas break. Five of us had cooked dinner together, and cleaned up after ourselves, leaving the dirty pans as we had found them. The owner of the pans was still away on Christmas break so unless she had supernatural powers, she had not used the pans.

When she denied using them, it’s as if something snapped in every housemate. Turns out everyone has been keeping quiet about several things besides the kitchen and they all came to heed yesterday. To being some semblance of order to what was going to become an attack, I asked everyone to first hold on. Then I asked seventh housemate if she was sure she had not used the pots. You’ll never guess what she did next.

I. Cannot. Deal

She placed her fingers in her ears and said she was not listening to anything. Fingers in her ears! Can’t remember when I was last saw someone doing this! I asked her to stop behaving childishly and she said she was a child, not a grown up. I saw red. Red! Then she walked out of the house and we had to deal with the messy kitchen.

Seeing as beating her up was being thrown around as a good solution, the landlord was called in. He calmed us down by telling us to understand her. Something about personal problems, and how she has always had a hard time with all past housemates. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the word of God from Church was still ringing in our respective ears, but that clamed us down quickly. We admonished him for not giving us a heads-up and he apologised. Too hungry and tired to do anything else we cleaned up the mess. She returned to the house and still refused to help us clean up. I was still seeing red.

The landlord may blame her behaviour on personal issues but it does not do anything for my anger, especially since we went to bed with the kitchen spotlessly clean, only to find sugar on the countertop below her cupboard. If this is a test about loving thy neighbour, Lord I need more grace.