The meter is labelled Room 4. There are three rooms in my flat, and I have measured them.
The engineer came out on a Tuesday to fit a smart meter and left after forty minutes without fitting one.
I remember it was a Tuesday because I had swapped a shift to be in, and swapping that shift cost me the whole of the following weekend, so it stuck. He was about fifty, name of Gerry, and he was perfectly nice about it. He went down to the meter cupboard under the communal stairs, and he was down there a long time. When he came back up he had that face people get when they have decided not to say the first thing they thought of.
He said there was a discrepancy on the account and it was above his pay grade, and somebody would be in touch.
Nobody was in touch.
I should explain the flat, because the flat is the whole of it.
It is the ground floor of a converted terrace, one of four in the building. When they carved these places up in the seventies they did it cheaply and they did it badly, and you can tell, because the skirting board in my hall runs into a wall it clearly used to run past. Three rooms and a bathroom. A front room with the bay, a bedroom behind it, a kitchen at the back, and the bathroom off the kitchen where the scullery would have been.
Three rooms. I have measured them. I measured them the week I moved in because I was buying a sofa and I did not want to be the person who buys a sofa that will not go through a door.
The meter cupboard is in the communal hall, under the stairs, and it has four meters in it because there are four flats. They are labelled with those brown Bakelite tags on wire, and somebody has written on each tag in pencil, in the same hand, a long time ago.
Room 1. Room 2. Room 3. Room 4.
Mine is Room 4.
I want to say I noticed straight away and I did not. I lived there fourteen months before I looked properly at that tag, and when I did it was only because Gerry had put the cupboard door back on the wrong way round and it would not shut, and I was crouched down there at eleven at night with a screwdriver, annoyed, and the tags were at eye level.
Four meters. Four flats. Ground, first, second, and the loft conversion at the top.
Except mine is the ground floor. If you number four flats in a converted terrace you number them from the bottom. Mine should be Room 1.
I stood there for a while with the screwdriver in my hand. Then I checked the other three, because obviously I did, and the tags run the way you would expect. Room 1 is the meter for the first floor. Room 2 is the second. Room 3 is the loft.
And Room 4 is mine, at the bottom, and there is no Room 1 in the sequence at all if you start from where I live.
The pipe from my meter goes up. Not along the hall wall into my flat. Up, through the ceiling of the cupboard, into the underside of the stairs.
I rang the supplier in the morning. Everybody expects a story like this to have a villain in a call centre. Mine did not. The woman I spoke to was patient and she was thorough and she was on the phone to me for fifty-one minutes.
She could see the account. She could see the address. She could see the meter serial number, which I read to her twice off the front of the unit.
She could not see when the account had been opened.
That was the thing that started it properly, for me. Not the tag. The tag is a bit of pencil on Bakelite and pencil can say anything. But she went quiet and she said, in the voice of somebody reading something they have not seen before, that the account had a start date field and the field was populated, and the date in it was before the building had a postcode.
I asked what that meant in practice. She said in practice it meant she was going to escalate it.
The escalation took eleven weeks and produced a letter.
The letter said that following a review of my account, no further action was required at this time, and that my tariff was unaffected. It did not mention the start date. It did not mention Gerry. It was signed by a department rather than a person.
I have that letter. It is the only piece of paper in the whole of this that I have, and I keep it in the drawer in the kitchen with the takeaway menus, which is where you put things you do not want to look at but cannot throw away.
Here is the part I have thought about most.
My gas bill is not high. It is not low either. It is the bill of a person who lives in a ground-floor flat in a badly converted terrace and is careful about the heating, which is what I am.
But I turned everything off. In February, which was stupid, I turned the boiler off at the wall and the hob off at the valve and I went to my mum's for nine days.
The meter moved.
Not much. Nine days and it moved the way a fortnight of hot water would move it, and I know that because I photographed the dials before I left, which is not the behaviour of a normal person, and I am aware of that.
Something in that building burns gas that does not come through anything I own.
I went up into the loft.
Not my loft, because I do not have one. The communal loft hatch is on the top landing outside flat four, and flat four at the time was a young couple who were never in, and the hatch has one of those poles with a hook that lives in a bracket on the wall.
There is no room up there. I know what a story like this is supposed to build to, and it does not build to that. There is no room. There are joists and there is insulation, and there is the underside of a roof that needs work, and there is the top of the stair void.
But the pipe is up there.
It comes up from the cupboard, through the stair void, past three floors, and it ends in the loft in a capped stub about a foot long, and the cap is new. Not new like this year. New like it has been replaced at least once, because it is a different metal from the pipe and there is fresh compound on the thread, and the pipe itself is old enough to be the original.
Somebody, at some point, went up there and capped it, and then somebody else went up and capped it again.
I asked the neighbours. That is a short section, because there is not much to it. The couple in four had been there five months and did not know the loft opened. The woman on the second floor had been there six years and told me the building had "always had a problem with the gas", in the tone you would use about damp, and did not want to talk about it further. The man on the first floor is in his eighties and has been there since 1979.
He was the one I actually wanted, and he was lovely, and he made me a cup of tea, and he answered everything I asked.
He said there used to be five.
I said five what, and he said flats, and I said there are four, and he said yes, now.
I got the deeds. It costs three pounds and it takes about ten minutes online, and I do not know why more people do not do it, because it is the most interesting three pounds I have ever spent.
The conversion is registered in 1974. Five units. The plan is a scan of a hand-drawn plan and the resolution is poor, but you can read it. Four of the five are laid out roughly the way the building is now.
The fifth is on the ground floor, at the back, and it is drawn as a single room with its own door onto the hall, and it is small. Smaller than my kitchen.
There is no door onto the hall at the back of the ground floor. There is a wall, and in front of the wall there is the boiler cupboard, and inside the boiler cupboard there is my boiler on a bracket, and behind my boiler there is more wall.
I know the depth of that wall now. I know it because I measured the flat from the inside, and then I went out into the communal hall and measured from the front door to the back, and the two numbers do not agree.
They are out by about two and a half metres.
I have not knocked through. People expect that this is the part where somebody gets a bolster and a lump hammer. It is not.
I have not knocked through because I rent.
That is it. That is the honest answer. I am not brave and I am not a coward, I am a tenant, and my deposit is eleven hundred pounds, and there is a clause in my agreement about structural alterations that I have read four times.
I rang the letting agent. They said they would raise it with the landlord. The landlord is a company, and the company is registered to an accountant's office in Wolverhampton, and it owns two hundred and six properties, and my flat is one line on a spreadsheet somebody looks at once a quarter.
In April I put a stethoscope against the wall.
It is a cheap one from the internet, seven pounds, sold for people who want to listen to their own heart, which I suppose is what I was doing.
I listened for a long time, at different heights, at different times of day, and mostly I heard what you hear when you put a stethoscope on a wall, which is your own hand and the road.
At twenty past two in the morning on the nineteenth of April I heard the boiler fire.
That should not be alarming. Boilers fire. Mine is on a timer and the timer does not come on at twenty past two, but timers fail and I would have accepted that.
What I could not accept, and still cannot, is that I was standing next to my boiler with my hand on it, and my boiler was cold, and the sound was on the other side of the wall.
I moved the drawer.
Not that night. I am not somebody who acts at night. In the morning I took everything out of the kitchen drawer, the menus and the letter and the batteries and the fuse wire nobody has needed since 1990, and I pulled the whole drawer out of the runners and put my arm into the carcass.
At the back of the drawer space, the carcass is open. Whoever fitted the kitchen fitted it against the wall and did not bother to back the units, which is normal, and cheap, and how you would do it.
The wall behind the drawer is not plaster. It is board, and there is a gap at the bottom of the board where it does not meet the floor, about the width of a finger.
Air comes out of it. Warm air, and it smells of nothing at all, which is worse than if it smelled of something, because a room that has been shut for fifty years smells, and this does not.
I put a camera in.
One of those endoscope things, the kind that plugs into a phone, nineteen pounds, the sort of thing a plumber has. I fed it through the gap under the board and I ran it as far as the lead would go, which is a metre and a half.
I have the footage. I have watched it more times than is good for me.
It is a room. It is a small room and it is empty and the floor is bare boards, and there is a light fitting on the ceiling with no bulb in it, and there is a door on the far side that must open onto the communal hall behind where the boiler cupboard is now.
The walls are papered. The paper is a pattern of small brown flowers and it is intact, all of it, no damp and no lifting, which for a room that has been sealed since before I was born is the detail that I cannot make sit still in my head.
And in the middle of the floor there is a gas fire.
Not a modern one. One of those old radiant ones with the clay elements, standing free, not plumbed into a fireplace, with a flexible hose running off it to a bayonet point in the skirting.
It is lit.
I have not been back into the drawer since May.
I still live there. My rent went up forty pounds in July and I paid it, because the alternative is moving, and moving costs more than forty pounds a month, and this is the actual arithmetic that the actual decision was made on.
The bill comes every quarter and I pay it and it is not high.
Once, in August, I stood in the communal hall with a tape measure and worked out exactly where the door in that footage would come out, and it is the bit of wall where the meter cupboard is. The cupboard was built over it. You can see the join if you know to look, and now I know to look, and I look at it every single time I come through that hall with my shopping.
The tag on my meter says Room 4.
I have stopped thinking that the pencil is wrong. I think the pencil is the only thing in the whole building that is telling the truth, and I think whoever wrote it numbered the rooms in the order they were closed.