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Real men (and landlords) measure short stories in feet
In my early twenties, I moved into a large flat-share in a tenement in the Marchmont area of Edinburgh. Although the other tenants had voted me in, the landlord wanted to meet me, too. He was called Flaherty and lived down towards Leith. We knew little about him, except that he owned a lot of tenement flats and that he collected the rent in cash each month. On rent day, he would arrive with a briefcase handcuffed — seriously — to his wrist. He wouldn’t leave until the rent was paid in full. He exuded a menace that guaranteed the rent was paid in full each time he visited.
My audition took place in the shared kitchen. We sat at the table and he asked me some cursory questions. I was nervous, partly because I needed and wanted to move into this flat and partly because of the aforementioned menace. He never once looked me straight in the face but I sensed that he was fully aware of my every twitch and expression.
Of course, he asked me what I did. At the time, I was unemployed, so I told him I was a writer. He asked me what I wrote. I told him I wrote short stories. This was an exaggeration: at the time it would have been more accurate to say I had written a short story. He surprised me, then. He said he loved short stories. A literary landlord, I thought. Then he ruined it all by telling me had forty-eight feet of short…
