This Saturday, me and my flatmates stumbled out of bed and went along to show our sallow, bag-eyed faces at our bimonthly residents’ meeting. After enduring the usual heckles from our fellow block-dwellers about our reluctance to pay the rent on time, the woman with a noisy TV who lives on the ground floor piped up. The basement, she said, needed cleaning.
No one ever goes into our basement. There’s no exciting reason for that – no tower block folklore about it being haunted by dead kids, or whatever – it’s just a filthy, dark, stinking hole, and, in my experience, people generally tend to avoid holes of that nature.
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But then the old, bearded guy who’d come down to help me flicked the light on…
…and what’s this? It looks like someone hasn’t been avoiding my basement. In fact, the evidence seems to suggest they’ve actually decided to make a home of the festering shit-pit.
At this point, the woman with the TV shouted down to us that she’d seen some “dark characters” loitering around the entrance recently. Whoever you are, dark characters, I don’t think you’re going to win any prizes for home-making any time soon. Didn’t your mothers ever tell you to put your torn apart plug sockets and array of useless electrical fittings away once you’d finished playing with them? It looks like a bunch of militant luddites gate-crashed C3PO’s house in here.
When we saw all the medicine and paraphernalia, my wise old sage of a companion pointed out that whoever bust-up all the electrical stuff had done so in order to get at the copper inside. “What sort of drugged-up bums would do a thing like this?” he wondered aloud. For all his years on this earth, he’d clearly not met too many drugged-up bums.
We followed the room through to another, and found a bunch of toppled shelves and collapsed benches, and in the corner was a pair of torn-up pants and a kid’s Sesame Street vest. I didn’t want to imagine what had happened here.
Arguably, what awaited us in the next room was even stranger. Turns out my basement wasn’t just a filthy, dark, stinking hole – it was a filthy, dark, stinking hole that people used to hide from nuclear bombs in!
The posters showing the stages of explosion, the potential extent of the blast area and a guide on how to fit your own gas mask were pretty charming given they were meant to aid people caught in the wrath of the most evil weapon humanity’s ever devised. I quickly got to thinking – does whoever’s been sleeping down here know something I don’t? Because if I’m gonna get blown up by a nuclear bomb any time soon, I’m definitely not paying next month’s rent.
I think this was a layout of my block of flats. It was hard to tell, given that decades of rain and pollution have stripped whatever colour there might have been from the exterior walls and no one’s cut the grass in about 20 years.
Then I saw these post-atomic etiquette reminders still pinned to the walls. They read:
Demonstrate proper behaviour, self-control and manhood at all times.
Prepare your own personal means of protection.
Take with you only your passport, ration book, personal valuables, medicines, individual means of protection, covers and enough food and water to last you three days.
Remember you may have a long way to go on foot.
Look after each other.
Inspired by these messages of human compassion and unity, we decided we didn’t need to tidy the basement, just buy a door with a big fucking lock on it. Until then, we tried to secure it with this flimsy-looking clasp type thing. It might not have been our nuclear bunker, but the least we could do was make sure it couldn’t be anyone else’s. Is that heartless? Until karma pushes the big red button, I’ll sleep easy at night safe in the knowledge no one’s sleeping in my basement.
TEXT AND PICTURES: БЛАГОВЕСТ БЛАГОЕВ
