I wouldn't sail this ship if I were you
1. There was an apartment building, I think it was in London somewhere. In the penthouse lived an entirely unremarkable couple, who had passed through thirty years in the world without leaving any mark on it. They did not quite realise this, living as they were on a day-to-day basis busy with small actions. But everything they did seemed to be erased shortly after they did it. People forgot them; their spilled coffee melted away; the people at the local shop greeted them every day as if they were new to the area. Certainly they seemed to have no family. In the end I am not sure if this was bad luck, or the action of some vengeful and powerful enemy.
2. On the floor below the penthouse lived some robots. Before their retirement, they had been involved in a top-secret surveillance project and hence they were conditioned to enjoy the view. Needless to say, their existence was also top-secret and, since they had been largely abandoned by the government, they had had to devise complex strategies for continuing to operate in peace. One of these, they thought, was to seek out forgettable and reclusive people and live near them. They were able to recharge from the electricity supply. For spare parts and oil they had taken to making orders from Amazon, then answering the door in a full-size Peppa Pig costume which a disgruntled London Marathon participant had discarded next to the building. Due to their compact, modular nature they were able to fit in spaces inaccessible to humans with no outward sign other than the occasional scritching noise. This was fortunate as they were often raided by the police (who had noted the apartment’s electricity use as highly suspicious) and had to all hide under the floorboards. Otherwise they spent their time making an enormous quilt, which one of their former operators had told them was a good way to pass the time.
3. There was a man who was writing a book, and he lived two floors below the penthouse. He survived on a small pension from the Department of Springs, which he had been awarded after a tragic pogo accident had led to him losing one and a half legs. He had been writing this book for fifty years. It was a beautiful thing and very long, with all manner of gilded maps and illustrations and equations and fold-out origami clocks and collages and flipbook animations. One volume was nothing but a series of holes in coloured pages which combined to spell out ever-changing poems; another contained only one enormous folded map of a city almost exactly the same as his own, combined ingeniously with a diagram of the nervous system of a rat. There was a book set in barely-discernable dark greys which was full of maps of caves. The fiftieth volume contained a hollow chamber which was always stocked with a tiny bottle of sherry and told of the coronation of a king in the book’s world. In the seventieth volume, the characters mounted an escape through a hole in the back cover, leaving behind themselves only a small trail of lost full stops. After this, the pages of subsequent volumes were largely blank or abstract, or dealt only in matters of space, time and geometry. The current volume, however, told of the author’s struggle to lure his characters back (he assumed they were living, like mice, in the walls of the house, and that this was what had been causing the scratching noises) via the medium of smells, and as a consequence his southward windows were stocked full of herb pots; thyme and rosemary and fennel and bay.
4. Three floors below the penthouse was an apartment that was entirely full of insects, from floor to ceiling. Because the insects entered the apartment via a private drainpipe on one side of the building, and exited it via the sewers, the other occupants were not aware that they were there. Indeed, they were generally held to be good neighbours, because they were mostly quiet and did not leave rubbish in the hallway. I am not sure why this apartment was such an important staging post on their journey, or where they came from, or where they were going. On summer nights, when the scent of thyme rose in the air, those insects who were currently in a winged phase would dash in joyous zigzags around the apartment’s congested spaces before falling to the floor to mate.
5. Six old women lived in the apartment on the ground floor. These women had once been in a ladies’ cricket team together, but had fallen on difficult times after an unsuccessful attempt to use occult powers to improve their fortunes. Since that day, they had been haunted by the hairy ghost of W. G. Grace. The ghost was most put out at finding itself haunting a London flat and would frequently invite other ghosts of his era around to complain at them. The old women thus usually found their sleep interrupted by querulous Victorians. They welcomed the quiet buzzing and pattering of summer nights, which they assumed was some kind of air conditioning system above, as it partially drowned out the constant spectral grumblings they were subject to. On these nights they all sat up and drank saffron gin in their huge bed.
6. Below the old women there was no flat, only a basement. Although it had been intended for the storage of cleaning equipment, it was currently officially marked as unused, and its plywood door was closed with an enormous padlock. However, it proved easy to remove the door from its hinges. The basement had therefore been inhabited by a succession of squatters, and was currently the home of a young man and his labrador. In the daytime, they pretended to be statues on the riverbank for the amusement and edification of tourists. The basement was rather damp, and so they did not care to spend longer there than could be helped. However, they happened to be in on the night that the ghosts of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, who had been getting drunk on saffron gin fumes, stumbled through the ceiling. Gilbert and Sullivan, who were pretty shitfaced, spent the rest of the night singing a new operetta about the many humorous problems faced by a ghost in the modern world (by which they meant the Edwardian era). Unfortunately, only the dog was awake.
7. Some days later, the dog (who was plagued with earworms which it was entirely incapable of expressing) took a wrong turning and ended up in the building’s malfunctioning lift. It was rare to find the lift venturing down as far as the ground floor, because one or other of the inhabitants of the building had levered open its workings and poured irn bru into them. The dog travelled to the top floor, where it howled and howled under the impression that it might have been singing until its owner came to find it. And that night, everyone who was heading home headed into the wrong apartment. Perhaps the dog had been singing after all, who knows?
