This piece of new writing by Hannah Silva, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness, captures conversations with her child after their landlord sells up.

‍

But Mummy what do you mean?

We don’t own it.

But it’s our house.

No it’s not our house, a landlord owns it.

What’s a landlord?

A lord of the land.

I’m outside a twenty storey, 55-metre high tower block in Hackney. It was built by Hackney council in 1972 and named Sudbury Court, part of the Clapton Park estate. The other blocks were infested with cockroaches and demolished. A private developer bought Sudbury Court in the 90s, gave it a cheap makeover and a new name: Landmark Heights.

Now the block has a gated entrance and a concierge. I’m viewing a two bed, £2200 a month, which is at least £610 above the Universal Credit Local Housing Allowance, possibly more – it’s on the boundary between outer and inner East London and the Government website doesn’t say which, and gives incorrect figures anyway – it wasn’t updated when the rates were raised and frozen in 2020, but even people working for Universal Credit still refer to it. I’m not looking at anything further out because less rent corresponds with less Local Housing Allowance. It works out worse or the same.

But it’s not their house it’s our house.

I wish it were our house.

When is it going to be our house?

They want to sell it. It could only be our house if I had enough money to buy it.

I greet Rachelle, a letting agent, who has a limp hand, a woollen coat with no cat hair on it, heels and Gen Z authority. We walk past the cockroach, I mean concierge, and take the lift. It’s on the ninth floor, which I’m happy about because I feel safe high up, like a cat. No pets, to tell you the truth, says Rachelle. Then she tells me that I’m not a cat and anyway, cats prefer to live in ground floor flats with gardens.

Good points, I say, plus it doesn’t make sense to feel safe high up because of what happened at Grenfell, and Lakanal house and Markland House and Ronan Point. We step out of the lift and into the wind. The walls up here aren’t complete walls – sections are sliced out of them and the wind howls through.

‍Did a dragon bite it, or, no, was it a pterodactyl Mummy?

I think it was yeah – swooped past and chewed up the brick.

Did it get a tummy ache?

It did.

In the old days when there were dinosaurs and dragons and ghosts and monsters?

Erm, early seventies.

Rachelle thinks I am a good prospective tenant even though I’m a single parent and most agents look through me then wipe their shiny shoes. I don’t tell Rachelle that my university job is temporary and part-time and that I am on Universal Credit.

Mummy why is it only their house?

Because they own it, they bought it with their money over twenty years ago, and we don’t have money.

But I want money.

So do I.

If I lived here, I tell Rachelle, I would slice open the walls of my torso so gusts of dragon’s breath could billow through my core. You haven’t got a core, Rachelle says, that’s a lie Pilates instructors pedal as you pedal your feet in the air and your back has an identity crisis against the floor, bent or straight, no one is neutral, our losses are imprinted on our spines, come in, it’s better inside.

There’s a plant called dragon’s breath.

How do plants move house?

They don’t, they don’t have houses, they stay where they’re planted.

No they don’t.

Yeah, that’s true actually.

You have to tell the truth Mummy.

Rachelle inserts a key into a lock with the confidence of a dyke threading a cock into a harness ring but it gets stuck and she has to give the door a little kick. Inside is freshly painted. Covering the mould?

Well, Rachelle replies, I don’t know about that to tell you the truth, but look at all the light. Yes, I say, my three-year-old and I would like to step into the light. Outside, the sky, a school and the Hackney Marshes are caught in a net. To stop birds suiciding against the glass, Rachelle says.

Or pterodactyls, I reply. Rachelle doesn’t answer. Or to catch our thoughts, I continue, no big sky thinking here. Blue sky thinking, says Rachelle. Leash the power of creativity, I say, as the floor creaks beneath the weight of my heavy breasts. Heavy heart, corrects Rachelle.

My breasts are heavier than my heart, I tell her, they weigh approximately 680 grams each. Whereas the average weight of a heart in a female, which is a question ‘people also ask’ on Google, is between 230-280 grams.

‍I want to paint it. I want to put lots of colours on the wiper.

We can’t paint it because we won’t own the new house either, but we can put your name on the door.

But I want to live in our house forever.

Me too.

Mummy I feel sad in my tummy.

Me too.

What do you think? Rachelle asks, from the middle of the brown peeling kitchen. I can’t afford it, I reply, it’s half the size of where I currently live, £520 more a month, and less well connected. We go back down in the tiny lift that my furniture won’t fit into and out to the gym – a cold concrete room with some weights in it. It’s been listed for a while, to tell you the truth, Rachelle says, as a man drinks blue liquid like it’s going to turn him into a superhero, the price is unrealistic, make an offer.

I want, I want my own money, I need money.

You do sweetheart, yeah.

You have to make some money.

I know and I’m going to try.

Mummy but I don’t know how to make some.

You know what I don’t really know either but I’m a lot older than you – nearly forty, can you believe.

Yes.

Oh okay, so I’m going to try really hard.

I make an offer and after a few days of trying to get me to raise it, I am turned down.

I need a unic- a comp- I don’t know what it is, what you work on?

I write books.

No but I don’t know what you work on, I don’t know.

Computer? I write books on it.

Mummy, why?

Well, because I really love doing that but it doesn’t make me money – to steal Robert Tressell’s idea, who wrote The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in 1914, writers (like the working classes) are philanthropists, generously providing low paid labour to make money for publishers.

‍

* This is the first of seven stories from Hannah Silva’s unpublished short story A single parent flat-hunting on Universal Credit - London, 2023.