As we swiftly approach a full week in this accommodation, I have noticed certain patterns forming. Little things you can't help but notice. Annoyances... Quirks... Worries...
Through the night, I wake up about once an hour at the moment; being 39 weeks pregnant, the cause of waking up is usually either heartburn, excessive drool on my pillow (ugh! seriously!), needing to pee or I have, yet again, rolled over onto my front. That shit hurts. Of course, I try and tell myself that my body is just practising for a newborn. At this rate, I'm going to find that I'm awake more than he is. I digress.
Each time I wake up in the night, the baby in the room next door to ours is crying. It sounds like the baby is a newborn. I haven't seen it, so it's hard to say. Currently residing in the other top floor room is a Nigerian looking woman, her baby and her daughter, who looks about four or five. The woman doesn't speak English, but she likes to grunt a lot. The little girl appears to go to school here, and has a pretty good grasp of the language. The top floor holds the only two "family rooms", which I can assume is the only reason that the two families who need to use prams have been placed up three flights of stairs. The family rooms have a double bed and a set of bunk beds, but not much room for anything else. I'm worried about where we're going to put the moses basket. We've been told that as soon as a smaller room is vacated, we'll be moved to it as we aren't eligible for this much space. I'm trying not to worry about what floor space is going to be like in an even smaller room, because at least it'll mean one less flight of stairs to climb.
Anyway, her baby cries. Which is fine. We can't hear it from our bedroom, and to be honest it reassures me that we won't be as annoying to other "residents" as we thought we would. However, at a certain point in the night she obviously gets tired of hearing her baby cry, and decides to put it outside our door. Which is nice. I look forward to it waking up my son in the coming weeks.
At about 7 or so, the little girl gets up for school. The toilet is right outside our door, and she tends to stand opening and closing the bathroom door repeatedly and shouting about how it's okay because there's nobody in there. This morning, it was being slammed particularly loudly. I hadn't long got back to sleep, so my partner got up to ask her to be quiet. It seems it wasn't the little girl after all. It was her mother. Because slamming doors repeatedly is a normal thing that grown women do.
It isn't always just the three of them, though. At the weekend we were graced with the presence of an incredibly loud man - I assume the father of one or both of her children. When he isn't there, the woman just calls him. All day and all night. On loud speaker, with the volume on full. And she isn't capable of talking into her phone. She feels the need to yell her conversation in whatever language she's speaking. She's probably only asking him to pick up some milk.
I don't like to stay in here all day. It smells awful, and it isn't healthy to stay cooped up and miserable. When I walk down the stairs, doors open a crack and eyes peer out at me. I'm the white girl, so I stand out and I'm weird. Kids run to their doors and whisper about me. If they pass me in the corridor they double take. There is one other white couple, I think, but they live lower down than me and have only ever been seen standing outside smoking together over the woman's bump. Nobody socialises, though, so none of us know anything about eachother.
I try not to go to the toilet in the daytime, because it causes me too much anxiety. The lock has been snapped at some point and management haven't repaired it (we're probably going to end up buying one and doing it ourselves) so people are constantly almost walking in on us. If either of us shower, we sit with the bedroom door propped open so we can tell people that there's somebody in there. To make matters even more stressful, as well as trying the door handle to double check that I'm not lying when I shout out that there's somebody in the bathroom, the young girl from next door has taken to standing and peering through the keyhole. There's nothing quite like taking a dump and meeting the eyes of a four year old stranger. Especially when you walk out of the bathroom and her mother pushes past you, grunting in your direction and listening to a particularly noisy phone call on loud speaker. Again.
My partner goes back to Milton Keynes to visit his daughter after school every afternoon, and drives back once she has gone to bed. Every evening I carry all of our dishes from the day before and our food down the three flights of stairs to the kitchen. We cook and do the dishes together if we have time; if not I do it myself. At 9.30 on the dot the kitchen and dining room is locked, whether you've finished or not - there is no wiggle room on this, and I have actually had to stop halfway through a meal before because it was time to lock up. We carry our meals, along with our utensils and uncooked food etc, up the stairs again. My personal favourite was trying to carry a plate flooded with gravy up the three flights because I ran out of time to eat downstairs, putting the plate on the bed and having to crouch on the floor because it was the only way not to spill anything. But hey, we're allowed to eat in our rooms in this place - we weren't allowed that luxury in the guest house in MK. And if nothing else, it has taught us the importance of buying one of those hospital bed table things. So there's that.
And so it's night time again. People opening their doors to see what we're doing every time we go out to the toilet. Kids running up and down stairs trying to get ready for the next day at school, their mothers screaming at them in an assortment of languages, each one louder than the last. We lay on our bed, watch DVDs and dunk choccy biccies in cups of tea and coffee until around midnight, when we finally accept defeat and hit the hay. An hour after we drift off, my hourly night time battle begins all over again. And that is my life right now. A bit of tweeting here, a blog post there and pretty much all evening whinging about my back/pelvis/hips hurting - and that's all there is. I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of Munchkin now (or Oswalt as we affectionately nickname him. I'm not sure why.) purely so that I've got something to do.
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