Cold comfort

The landlord and his wife arrived on Saturday morning to inspect the fridge I'd had delivered a few days previously. From his eagerness to unlock my door and barge past me, I concluded that the landlord had yet to witness the miracle of refrigeration at first hand.

To me it looked like something that had been salvaged from a rubbish tip, but to him it seemed a wonder to behold. He even went so far as to examine items of food, as if to verify for himself the popular belief that fridges kept things cool.

His wife appeared suspicious about the appliance, associating it with some sort of moral failing.

"The other man who was in this room, he was a nice man. He did not want a fridge. He did not need one."

As welcome as the fridge was, it hardly transformed my bedsit into a palace and certainly didn't appear to warrant an increase in rent, which is what happened.

The bed had long since seen better days; there was enough give in the mattress to suggest that it had once been used as a trampoline by a pair of hippos. I soon learned to lower my weight on to it gradually instead of merely jumping in, so as to avoid collapsing the whole structure.

As there wasn't any heating, I had to wear several sets of clothes at night to ward off the usual grantstudent pitfalls of hypothermia and pneumonia. For entertainment, I listened to (the late) Father Michael Cleary's radio programme behind threadbare curtains, sellotaped together for privacy.

As poor as the facilities were, to begin with, they were the least of my worries. I was far more concerned about the behaviour and movements of my fellow residents.

The caretaker came across a little bit over-friendly and anxious to help, knocking on my door every five minutes to relate some trivia. He had a tendency to drone on, his talk going around in circles, leading me to suspect that he might be trying to lull me into a trance.

He lived upstairs, beside a room that was rented by a man who was "never there" and across the landing from an old fellow he insisted on introducing to me on the day I arrived. It hardly seemed worth the caretaker's while doing that, as the old fellow seemed reluctant to come out on to the landing, and quickly retreated into the shadows of his room, with what looked like a pained expression on his face. It was almost as though he were recoiling from the sunlight.

One night I heard someone come in and proceed up the stairs with a heavy and irregular tread. Before he reached the top, he unleashed a volley of oaths and execrations on some unknown target. It wasn't the voice of the caretaker and by definition, it couldn't be the man who was never there so that left only the old fellow from the top of the stairs.

Only one pair of feet had climbed the stairs, something that set my mind racing. Had he carried a disabled companion home and was he now upbraiding him for his lack of mobility, or was it something more sinister? Had he stunned someone with his dark powers and needed to invoke the forces of Hell to finish them off?

I reported my concerns to the caretaker who returned to me with the implausible story that the old fellow had gone "one over the eight", gotten annoyed with himself and proceeded to give himself a piece of his mind when he got in. As if anyone ever heard the like of that. . .

The caretaker appeared highly amused by the episode, which made me think that the pair of them might be in it together. Could it be that the man who was never there was merely a cover for ritual sacrifice and God knows what other sort of skulduggery? I determined to stay out of their way.

My father had been against the bedsit idea from the start and had advocated "digs", the preferred option of the social inadequates who wanted a surrogate mammy in Dublin, someone to send them out with a packed lunch and ironed underpants.

The poor man couldn't grasp the idea that the move to Rathmines was as much an experiment in living as it was a way of staying in Dublin.

When the landlord and his lovely wife left me to play with my fridge that Saturday in January 1990, I washed some laundry in the sink and listened to the football on the radio.

In the failing light of the winter evening, I saw in the mirror a man surrounded by a haze of steam and cigarette smoke, out there on the edge of the known universe, somewhere between Rathmines and Harold's Cross. I knew I'd done the right thing.