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| (Original unedited image via www.wvpublic.org) |
Something funny happened to me the other day. Granted, it was not the kind of funny that had me bent over double in laughter, but it was funny all the same. Funny in a kind of WTF-holy-crabcakes kind of way.
We have a guest cottage. We built it after TFTF was born and the idea was to rent it out to holiday makers and make a bit of income after I quit full-time work. The cottage has been good to us and we’ve been lucky to have some pretty awesome guests. The holiday-maker market however, is very seasonal, and so we decided to rent out the cottage during the Winter months to get a regular income when bookings slowed down.
We’ve had some really awesome tenants and we’ve had some total oddballs. One thing I know for sure is that a) even if people look clean, they don’t necessarily live clean and b) no-one, not ever, cleans an oven. Sies!*
Our very first tenants were very religious. Super Christians, if you like. We know this because 24 hours after moving into the cottage, they arrived at our front door with a box of “evil” things they didn’t want in the house during their rental period. These included: the spiral finials from the curtain rods (apparently they were “serpents”), a candle holder (that I thought looked like the kind of statues you see of Mary in a Catholic church - I think the tenants found it blasphemous - though they never really said), and, most of the book collection we leave there for guests to read (who knew Philippa Gregory and John Grisham were so evil? Not me, apparently.) When these tenants finally left, we deduced by the damp streaks left on the wall that they hadn’t opened the windows oncethroughout their lease period (Would it let the evil in? I had to wonder.) There were also remnants of notes that had been fastened to the wall with Prestik. Hundreds of handwritten notes that very much reminded me of the journals that the serial killer wrote in the movieSeven.It was creepy AF.
Then there was the skittish single woman who was convinced she was a target for crime. She would hint – sometimes discreetly, sometimes directly – that we needed to install a state-of-the-art security system in the cottage because burglar bars, locks and keys just wouldn’t be sufficient.
There was the seemingly nice young couple who broke the shower and then split up. The dodgy girl disappeared in the dead of night, never to be seen again. She left her boyfriend to cover the rent. Which he couldn’t, so he also left. Sayofuckenara.
There was the other single lady who made films and seemingly, did little else. For one thing, she never vacuumed the carpet. Like seriously, not even once. When we had the carpet cleaned after she left, it was like those advertisements you see on TV for Verimark where they show a filthy, stained carpet and then contrast it with a now-sparkling clean section of carpet. She was also very religious and once asked me darkly - after spotting me with my yoga mat - whether I did yoga for the exercise or the philosophy. Before I could answer, she suggested, in a rather cryptic voice, “You might not want to do yoga.”
Last year’s tenants were a lovely missionary couple from the USA. Oven cleaning is either not big in the USA, or it isn’t a big thing with missionaries. I used an entire can of oven cleaner and 16 million rolls of kitchen towel to clean the oven after they left. Heaven only knows what they cooked in there but it sure as hell spit a lot of grease. I didn’t hesitate to pay them their deposit before they left as I automatically assumed (them being missionaries and all) that they would have declared any major breakages and filthages. Won’t make that mistake again. They totally trashed the shower and we had to replace the whole thing. (WT living F do people do in the shower?!?!? I should add that they took up the tenancy unpregnant and left pregnant. Maybe that’s down to our awesome shower?)
But other than that, all our tenants have been rather nice. And so is our current one. Well, for the most part.
When Jason* (not his real name) came to view the cottage he was clean shaven, dressed in a smart-casual shirt and chinos, smelled of soap and aftershave and was chatty and personable. He explained that he was self-employed and had his own security company. Private body-guard stuff is how I understood it. After chatting a while and doing what I thought was some super-sleuth work, I decided he was the right candidate for our Winter rental.
We see Jason from time to time. Mostly we chat in the driveway about random this-and-that. Our dogs love popping in to see him and he loves petting them. There are, however, a few curious things about Jason. Things that, in retrospect, were signs.
For one, he has two phone numbers. One number, he explained, is only for work. Fair enough, I guess, if you’re in the security/body guard/spy industry.
Secondly, one of the first questions he asked, is whether the cottage has a safe. While this is a common question for holiday makers who wish to stash their visas and forex safely, I can honestly say that no tenant has EVER asked this before. Jason said it was for safe-keeping of his firearm. OK, so ja, fair enough, security and guns go hand in hand.
Thirdly, Jason has no car. Well, he sort of has one now (it’s borrowed) but it seems to mostly stand in the driveway and he tends to get lifts. This is odd. Especially for someone who might need to, you know, secure something or someone.
Jason is either at home a lot. But like, for days at a time. Or, he is away a lot. Like, for days at a time. He likes to make fires in the braai area at mid-day during the week. Sometimes he actually cooks on the fire, sometimes he just sits next to it. And while this is kind of nice, it’s also kind of odd.
Jason has visitors who pop by for very short visits. True, his parents did come for a braai in his first week, but since then it’s mostly been young men who pop in for anything from half an hour to several hours.
But here’s the thing. Jason always pays his rent on time. And while he occasionally has a boisterous braai and a spot of trance music playing, he generally keeps to himself. He’s friendly and chatty and though he was sporting a rugged stubble for a while, he recently shaved it off and went off to work in a suit, looking smart and smelling good.
Fast forward to an enquiry I got for a holiday rental in December. The prospective guest had had some bad experiences with AirBnB and asked whether I would mind if his daughter popped in to vet the cottage.
Of course, I emailed back to him. No trouble at all.
I firmed up a time with Tara* (not her real name) and let Jason know that we’d be accessing the cottage.
Shortly after Tara arrived, I received a phone call from Jason.
“I’m so sorry”, he said “I’m running late but I’ll be there in 5 minutes.”
“Oh, don’t stress”, I replied, “I have my own set of keys and I’m just about to open up.”
Tara and I enter the cottage and although I’ve already explained that we have a tenant and that the cottage isn’t arranged to Five-Star standards, I’m eager to demonstrate to her how lovely the cottage is. Or at least, normally is.
At first glance it looks fine. Sure, Jason has moved the furniture around in a boxy kind of way – chairs up against the wall, the TV cabinet squished into a corner – but it looks fairly neat and clean. At the very least it looks like a doctor's waiting room.
We walk through the lounge into the open plan kitchen. I glance down the passage that leads to the bathroom and bedroom and then notice that the bedroom looks all closed up and dark. Dark that is, except for a purple light that is coming from quite near the doorway. My first thought is “LAVA LAMP” – standard bachelor decor. But, on closer inspection, I see that the purple light is coming from inside a tent that has been erected in the bedroom.
My second thought is “ALTITUDE TENT”. Aaah, I think to myself, all this time dear Jason has been hypoxic training for a hike in the Andes. Impressed by his commitment and drive, his staying-at-homeness and car-lessness (Duh, he’s a hiker!) now makes total sense to me.
I had literally JUST been telling Tara how lovely our tenant is, when I noticed that the Jason’s altitude tent wasn’t an altitude tent at all. Tara and I notice - at the same time - big, FAT shrubs growing in the tent. The light, we now realised, was actually a grow light.
I was speechless. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Jason had pushed the beds right up against the opposite wall and the bedroom looked nothing like the light, airy bedroom it was born to be.
It was at this moment that Jason made his entrance.
“Jason!” I say, a little took loudly. “Welcome to the set of Weeds!” I add a little awkwardly, eager to make light of the slightly horrifying situation I now found myself in.
Jason is sweating profusely and blurts out in a loud, sheepish kind of voice “Hehe. Erm. It’s legal.”
And though I want to add “Sure it is! Like my plantation of poppies is for flower arranging,” I don’t say anything at all. And though I’m dying to ask him just what the living fuck he things he’s doing, I am also super conscious of keeping cool for the sake of Tara.
Jason stammers from sentence to sentence, blurting out in discordant order how he’s “getting into cannabis oil” and that it’s “medicinal”. But his overall demeanour belies the truth.
Suddenly everything makes sense. The safe. The being at home. The timeous payment of rent. The no-more visits from his mum and dad.
I had to think long and hard about what to do about Jason and his sweet Mary Jane. You see, it’s not really something about Mary Jane, it’s more about trust. But it’s also a little about bedrooms in general and about how, whether you’re growing tomatoes, basil or Kush, bedrooms aren’t the right place to do it.
*Names have been changed to protect the innocent as well as the guilty.
