Elliot Burr was born and raised in Yorkshire and now lives in London, where he writes prose fiction of all lengths and tends bars. His stories tend to be about characters overwhelmed by massive social systems. He is currently working on a novella about a man’s erotic obsession with online stock trading.

He can be contacted at elliotburr98@gmail.com

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CRASHING: the door again, the bastard door of this bloody bastard house on Lewisham Way, one of the two nightmare A-roads making up New Cross’ eponymous cross – a Crossing not really that New, been here a good 400 years, first noted in the 1600s when this was still Hatcham hamlet, before it was ever New Cross in writing. A little later on people start New Crossing and for centuries both names persist, parallel paths which, like the roads themselves, eventually meld: New Cross taking over, becoming the main road, Hatcham melting out of speech and into history books. Anyway the CRASHING – sorry, I’m eminently distractible, distracted, distracting; always fidgeting, glancing around like a trainingstrained soldier checking exits. At school I was disruptive, always chatting or muttering or checking texts under the table, utterly away, ‘til the teacher clocked me and whether with a bark across the room or a sneakup scolding brought me CRASHING back. The CRASHING, yeah: this house on the Way, number 96, three storeys of just bedrooms and a basement split between kitchen and laundry room and living room – this towering house has high ceilings and brokenhinged windows that never quite close, i.e. the place is expensive to heat, breezes insinuating through gaps, stealing degrees, when windy bulging the heavy black curtains, buffeting them about as the gales do the CRASHING front door: the bulky red standingup slab that swings too lightly on its hinges and CRASHES too heavily against its frame, a low and angry slam accompanied by a light loose letterflap’s bouncing CLATTER, two distinct sounds melding into one apotheotic CRASHING… I moved into this house ‘cause I had no other: was evicted from my old flat in the middle of September, on a Thursday, while I was rushing down a dinner, had to rush up to work for 7pm. Scooping lentils into my mouth, balancing them on the spoon as they passed over my worktrousers, I got a phonecall from my landlady. The second time I’d ever heard her voice, following an inspection that morning which I’d hosted, flatmates having scrubbed the place pristine but not totally pristine: what they couldn’t clean were the warped doors of the cheap kitchen cupboards, the watermarks in the ceiling of the poorly-ventilated bathroom. Landlady frowned, ummed, ahhed about them; said little, left friendly. But now, as the lentil’d spoon traversed the cavern between table and mouth, the phone: vghhhhn. Hello? Hi Jude. Nice to meet you earlier. Oh hi again, what’s up? Well I just wanted to call you after the visit earlier. It was really nice to meet you by the way, really nice. But we’ve decided we’re not happy with the condition of the flat. We’re going to have to quite seriously refurbish it. We’re also thinking of selling. Right. So… I’m afraid we’ve decided we’re not going to be renewing your contract next week after all. Right. Sorry, I know it’s really short notice… We don’t want to just kick you out onto the street so we’ve been exploring options for signing a new short-term contract so you can stay for an extra month or so… Right? …But we’ve had a look and it seems like the shortest we could really do is three months… Which we don’t really want to do. So it is gonna have to be next Wednesday, I’m afraid. Right. And of course it says in the contract that the place has to be returned in an unfurnished state, so you’ll need to sort that as well, please… That conversation marked the point at which an already-mad week became the maddest of my life. Work was hell already: half the staff had COVID, so I’d spent the first four days of the week grinding myself to powder, the four of us available taking on all the work of the four who weren’t. We work in a pub, pretty famous as South London pubs go, pretty fucking busy one too: Thursday-Sat is 3am close, which in that week’s understaffed state meant a 5am finish, which meant a shift that started at 7pm would be ten hours: ten hours standing behind bars, speeding between them, shouting and being shouted at, the great mass of voices blending into a streaming drone ‘til one voice or face came CRASHING out of it; leaning in to hear them, feeling their spittle spray your face; memorising long orders, squatting for glasses, pulling three pints of an overactive IPA of which one would inexorably fountain, leaving you a glass halffilled with foam; while that dissolves rushing off to make the spirit-and-mixers: wrenching open the fridge, not finding the cranberry juice, dashing back to ask if customer’s okay with anything else, dashing back to the fridge to grab the huffilychosen orange juice, finding the crumpled cranberry carton behind it; finally presenting the finished drinks, defoamed and cranberried; turning away for the card machine, turning back to find the customer vanished, with their drinks; setting out to hunt them down, card machine hanging from your belt like a pistol; pushing through the bodies packing the room; finding the runner, accosting them, brandishing the machine, extracting pay; between these episodes dropping basementway to lug heavy boxes, shift heavy barrels, scoop icecubes into the bucket, retrieve bottles, all while dodging pipeleaks, pretending not to notice mice, reshutting the door of the fireaxe case whose latch is long rusted loose; then after close, closing: sweeping the floors, mopping the floors, wiping the bars, collecting empty filthy glasses stuffed with halfsmoked beersoaked cigs from the freezing outdoors, pushing tray after tray loaded with glasses, barmats, plastic cups into the droning industrial dishwasher… Borne along by laughter: jokes muttered and shouted, incredulous what the fuck are we doing heres groaned while kneeling to peel with fingernails ticketstubs off the stillsticky dancefloor, delirious 5am chatter, banter, flirting…  Thurs-Sun of that week I did all that work but more, with fewer breaks and half the people and no chat at all, just hollow hellos and grunted goodbyes; then I’d totter home, sleep poorly, wake to a list of urgent tasks: pack up everything you own, empty all fridges and wizened cupboards, disassemble the flatpack furniture you’d like to keep, have people come to speed away the stuff you wouldn’t, the living room furniture bought not by you, not by the people you moved in with, but by the people they moved in with, some musty downstuffed sofa now lifted by two Eastern-European guys who with your blessing just tip it over the walkway rail to smash on the grass two storeys below, rattling the neighbours’ windows with its CRASHING – the door just keeps going! I’m in the ground floor front bedroom you see, bed pushed up to a hollow wall on the other side of which is the hallway, so the door slams just feet from the head of my bed, where I’m writing this: lying on my side, my laptop unhinging its jaw, swallowing this streaming drone. Inches from my head is a frosted window that blurs the A-road I sleep beside, basically on: bunkmates with every congesting commuter and screeching ambulancedriver in Lewisham. But absent the standouts – the keening sirens, growling bikers, impotent revvers, yapping pedestrians, yelling dogs, hissing buses, bumping basses, blaring horns – absent these it’s surprisingly fine: the massed-together traffic noise melds, the combustion engines’ millions of tiny explosions falling into one undifferentiated flow of low-level sound, like a punk band going ambient. A streaming drone. Grey noise. You can get used to it, learn to ignore it. Not so much the CRASHING: it leaps out at you from the general muted din like an alligator out of a river, all snapping jaws and flailing limbs and glistening waterflecks, jolting you from your riverside nap and sending you sprinting. My first proper encounter with the door was on move-in day. By sheer coincidence, this new house was a three-minute walk (across the street and up the road) from the storage place where I’d stashed my stuff as I couchsurfed: my boxedup library, cardboardcased computer, bedframe and desk broken into bones. Across four hours, two coworkers – Ethan and Ania – helped me hump everything I own from locker to livingspace. First thing was my mattress, a decent double I’d thought an investment, hadn’t anticipated how fucking inconvenient it might become: imagine three twentysomethings – a guy in sweats, a girl in jeans, a guy (me) in a massive secondhand overcoat that flapped in the autumn breeze – all hoofing it downstreet, shouldering a great white cuboid like Steve Jobs’ pallbearers, then dropping it and letting it hang between us at hip-level as if overwhelmed by the weight of the screwed-over souls that would surely have beset him. It struck me how unstruck the people we passed seemed, none of them even glancing our way: we didn’t stand out in the city’s busy blur. Finally reaching the house we found the door waiting, red and monolithic atop high steps. It unlocked fine, but, open, clung to my key, clenched its alligator jaws around it, so I had to stand there and wrestle it out while my two already-regretting-their-charity friends stood struggling behind me, Steve keen to descend. I should have known then this door would be trouble, should have read into its roughness, but I was just glad to be housed, and preoccupied with the task at hand: the running there, struggling back, desperate to be out before business closed and I’d have to pay for another week’s use of an empty unit. That was what I was thinking about, not the door. I barely thought about the door ‘til that night, when I was lying in bed, exhausted, but kept out of unconsciousness by the CRASHING that punctuated the regular ins and outs of my new housemates, by the way the letterflap clattered with every swing, every slam, every gentle breeze. Did you know the letterflap was invented in 1843, in Liverpool, by cutthroat industrialist and eccentric inventor Theophilus Rudd? Before then every door-set letterbox was flapless, an open gap, which let in draughts, which is why most people had those oldfashioned fence-mounted boxes instead. But the new living conditions in cities like Liverpool, major benches in the Workshop of the World, made this impossible: urban labourers like those at Rudd’s factories lived in packed-out flats, didn’t have fences to mount boxes on. So the door-set letterhole was the only option, and it became necessary to invent the covering flap. Rudd’s memoir recounts the difficulties he had with the weight and acoustics of the design: it had to be light enough to lift easily when post came through, but heavy enough that its clattering fall let residents know the post was here; it had to be loud enough that you’d hear it in the day, sharpsounding enough to cut through the general industrial heaving, but quiet enough not to disturb the workers sleeping ten-a-room if it went off at night. Imagine: a blearyeyed 12 y/o boy standing at an 1860 production line, shirt sweatsoaked, fingers singed, fringe plastered to his streaming forehead, hammering steel into shape – but fucking it up, getting the shapes wrong, getting fired, having been exhausted off his young game by an overloud letterflap CRASHING away all night, ruining his allotted six hours of sleep. What’s he supposed to have been making? Letterflaps. Sorry to digress, I’m a bit of a history buff, sort of: not  a dates-and-battles guy, it’s social history I’m interested in, ambient history. What I take from history isn’t the naildownable anecdotes, details of when and where, but the texture of a time, the streetsmells and airtastes, the oddness of other lives, other worlds, their uncountable daily shocks. Dates distract from the real movements of history, that streaming droning river, events the alligators that come CRASHING – this fucking door! I just can’t get used to it – after that last predash clause I shut my laptop and traipsed to work, pretty easy Tuesday shift, sweeping crannies while coworker Ethan whinged. His girlfriend’s house was mousemobbed; she’d caught five in those dinky nokill traps and wanted him to come take them somewhere grassy and far away, release them there – but she didn’t know he was terrified of mice. This was, I’m serious, all he talked about; I tuned out, let the details recede into a streaming drone. Got home at 1AM, found the door waiting for me, practically throbbing red – but, look: by the lock a chunk had been torn loose, leaving a splintered gash the colour of milky coffee. Last night someone tried to break in: rip the door open and get at the treasure-trove (laptops, phones, 5 y/o PlayStation) it guards. Gotta hand it to the door: it kept them out. This morning I rang the landlord to let them know what’d happened and they sent a contractor round that afternoon, a gruff grey Polish geezer trailed by teenage son: I stood there dumbly while dad swung the door about, squatted by the gash, squinted at it as he turned the handle. Watching him, I started to fabulate: what if the door was fucked? what if they had to totally replace it? install a new door, slower on its hinges and softer on its frame, with a normal letterflap? The bungling burglar might’ve done me a favour: given me silence, given me peace… Then dad heaved himself erect and said: It’s fine. Mechanism isn’t damaged. We’ll come fill the hole in the New Year but you’re not in trouble. Then son stepped forward to squirt the lock mechanism with a complimentary dose of WD40, and they left. CRASHED the door shut on their way out. Great. Can’t even rely on burglars these days. Turning from the smug solid door I found housemate Sarah tottering down the stairs, bleary-eyed at 3PM. I explained to her once what’d happened, three times that everything was fine. I don’t think my reassurances got through, I think they were just white noise; I do tend to overexplain, to overtell stories, part of that whole needless digression thing. Unconsoled by my explanation she blinked, turned around, and, muttering about how scary it was, went back upstairs. Back to bed. I thought that was a good idea. Went and lay on my bed for the couple of hours I had before I had to get ready for work, ostensibly reading (Bernhard, Correction) but actually listening to the door, which only CRASHED once, though the letterflap – rattled by gusts of wind or by the minor shudders sent through the house whenever another door closed or a drawer was opened upstairs – clattered constantly. The noise is moving from annoying to unbearable now; before I moved here I was worried about the noise from the roads, despite reassurances that you get used to it, that it blends and recedes – but it does, it really does, sirens aside at this point I barely notice – but the CRASHING from the door is just so loud, so heavy, so sharp, so irregular, that it’s impossible to get used to! I emerged from my room more resentful than ever, stinkeyed the door as I passed it to get downstairs to the basement kitchen and grab my tupperwared dinner – leftovers probably left a little too over – then in my egress tried silence: was careful to close the door as slowly and gently as possible, degree by degree, second by second. My heartrate spiked, blinkfrequency dipped, blood retreated from extremities to core, so firm was my focus: I was gonna do it, was gonna close it without cacophony, and then I’d know the door was defeatable: I could teach my housemates how to close it with the same precision, the same technical care, and never again would it disrupt my sleep. It was happening: under my steady guidance the door was inching toward a soft, silent landing: bit by bit the hallway beyond was obscured by its red mass: the door got closer, closer, closer… and CRASHED!, its unwieldy bulbous handle slipping from my grip at the final moment, the whole thing slamming home as loudly as it ever did. I dropped my hand to my side and for a minute just looked at the thing. Heard a lorry blare its horn behind me. Turned around and set off on the hyperconvenient fivemin trek to work. Whatever. Fuck the door. People have suffered through worse. People used to live in one-room huts with all their families, kids struggling to sleep as parents rutted and moaned on a straw mat, parents struggling to enjoy themselves as the kids interrupted. Think I read that once. Personally I would just not have kids, if that was the only living arrangement available. That’s just me though. Ania gets free board in a room above the pub, her one window looking onto the rooftop seats where people drink and smoke and shout past midnight, if the window’s open sometimes reaching to steal the little plants off her windowsill. I wouldn’t go for that either, though maybe it’s worth it to not have to pay rent. She was behind the bar when I got into work, polishing glasses. When she saw me she smiled as usual then frowned, asked why my face looked like that. I adjusted my features and said Like what?, which put her off; she went on to tell me how the pub’s general chaos had manifested today: Ethan had been sent downstairs to stack empty barrels and found mice hiding among them, had sped upstairs to find the hook hitching basement door to backroom wall had at the worst time malfunctioned, i.e. its fixture had popped entirely off the wall, so the door swung shut, locked automatically upon closure, trapping Ethan down there: Ethan the suriphobe, who quickly reached peak panic, smash-and-grabbed the fireaxe whose case couldn’t lock, so as the boss was standing on the right side of the door trying every key on the heavy ring a blade burst through it, steel edge hairs from his ear. Ania showed me the gash in the door, the axe propped back up in its case. That set a plan going in my head, a let’s-be-honest-pretty-obvious one: it was all I could think about all shift, all 7-til-5, occupied my mind as I was supposed to be listening to the orders of customers and commands of bosses; as I poured drinks, tidied fridges, swept and mopped floors. All I could think about. The only moment I didn’t think of it was when I was sweeping the dancefloor, coloured lights blazing silently overhead, and the boss came up to me out of a shadowy corner: Alright Jude? Yeah, just finishing up sweeping. Well that’s great mate. I need to let you know though that since Christmas has been and gone now we’re in for a slow couple of months. Right? Yeah mate. So we won’t need as many staff. After New Years’, like. …Right. D’ya get what I’m saying? Uh. Yeah. Alright mate, thanks for understanding. Get on with that sweeping then. I did. After we’d all finished closing, after we’d downed the drinks customers had bought us – my two beers, a rum and a shot of jager, a second unbought one ‘cause fuck ‘em – while Ania waited to lock us all out and go upstairs to bed, I dashed drunk down to the basement to grab my prodigious overcoat, which I wore over my shoulders like a don, arms underneath; coming back up I stopped by the axecase, paused: then snagged the fireaxe, tucked it under my coat’s length, emerged and said goodnight with what must have looked like the longest and hardest erection ever recorded, slipped out the door near-giggling to myself, practically skipped home. At the usual crossing I didn’t arse checking the traffic, feeling I’d settled on such a sensible course of action nothing could stop it: obviously I nearly died, twirled around the bonnet of a Honda that screeched into slow-motion in front of me, its driver looking ready to come out for a confrontation. What saved me was that the mad twirl that took me out of the car’s path blew up my coat, revealed the axeblade, which glinted in its headlights; the driver’s frowning brow popped up to shock, his engine revved, and he sped off, not wanting it. Again I felt like a genius, skipped onto the opposite pavement, danced down to 96, using the axe like Fred Astair’s cane. I unlocked the door, glancing at the gash the failed robber’d left, then entered the house: swung into my room and dropped onto the bed, held the axe aloft, saw it properly lit for the first time: its flaked red handle, its not-unblunted blade. I lifted it like a dumbbell, pulled it to me like a lover. Sang a little song. Drank a little rum. As I was sitting there sipping, 5AM on a winter night, amidst the silence of the huge house, it came: a housemate returned, heralded by a great CRASHING. I slupped another rum as the housemate clomped upstairs, then got up off the bed, grabbed the axe, and let it hang floorward as I went to stand in front of the door. The bloody bastard door. I stood there eyeing it, all Clint Eastwood; wanted to quip or give some Gladiator speech but talking to inanimate objects would’ve felt too mad even for my current state. Instead I just swung the axe about, not at anything, just enjoying its weight, its balance, the way it actually swished. In italics! I danced a little bit too, just a little, jumping from foot to foot, getting my blood coursing, my breathing heavy. Almost surprised myself when I whirled out of the buildup and just fucking swung at the door, CRASH, cracked it open with the first hit, they don’t make ‘em like they used to; I let go of the handle and just looked at what I’d done for a sec, no going back now. A thought flashed across my mind of the possible repercussions for this but I let it slide out the other side and grabbed the axehandle, wrenched it out the door, smacked it back in again. Then that was me: I stood there hacking away at it, at the bloody bastard door of this bloody bastard house on Lewisham Way, under every heavy smack feeling it weaken, buckle, promise collapse; delighting in the cacophony, in the CRASHING CRASHING CRASHING CRASHING CRASHING CRASHING   CRASHING CRASHING CRASHING CRASHING CRASHING CRASHING CRASHING CRASHING CRASHING CRASHING!!!

Finally I stopped swinging. I planted the axe in the door and just left it there for a second, hands on my knees, huffing. The door was completely savaged, riven with pale brown gashes, the floor before it littered with chips, a playground. In particular the letterbox was destroyed; on the other side I heard the letterflap fall: clatter on the top step.

Behind me I heard downrushing footsteps. I straightened, rolled my neck, and reached forward to yank the axe out of the door. Somehow that was what did it: the door came off its splintered hinges, tipped forward, and surfed clunkily down the too-many steps. A gaggle of housemates with Sarah at their head appeared at the bottom of the stairs, yelling; the sight of me looking back at them, with an axe in my hand and a mad look in my eye, shut them up. I looked away from them, looked down the steps at the mangled tinderpile lying in the front courtyard. Silent at last. I smiled.

And then I heard it. All of it. The keening sirens, growling bikers, impotent revvers, yapping pedestrians, yelling dogs, hissing buses, bumping basses, blaring horns. Most of all I heard the general growling, the combustion engines’ millions of tiny explosions, no longer melding, no longer limited: flooding in, drowning every corner of the house, of my head. I stood there and was swallowed by the city’s unmuffled cacophony.