Inspection

21 September 2025

I’m looking for somewhere to live. An apartment. I like the city, and I want to live right in it. I am energised by the density of people. I feel for its canyon-like streets and its towering towers much as I do the valleys and mountains of a childhood now far away in both place and time. Judging by the poverty of quality and quantity of options available, many others want to live here too. The places I’ve looked at have views onto air-conditioning units, hospital-beige floors, windowless bedrooms, and arthritic bathrooms. Their entry lobbies smell of restaurant grease and lost hope.

Even without that hope, the need for a home persists, and I fill in an application for an apartment in an Art Deco building in a block that is loved and groomed yet still busy and complex enough to feel alive. And I like the building. Calling it Art Deco goes some way to describe it, but the façade also has Tim Burton and Magritte ‘vache’ period elements to it. The online listing promises a view over plane trees to a handsome sandstone Victorian-era building over the street. The lobby has been recently renovated and sports a sparkling mosaic-tiled curved entry wall demarcated from the laneway outside by a full-height frameless glazed façade and door. Hope returns.

Tenancy law dictates an in-person visit before applying. I tidy up my hairs and shoes, press a navy suit, and strangle on a tie. And even a tie clip. The clip is extra to my usual attire, but first impressions matter more than they should in this apartment leasing market. Looking good feels good. I take myself and this feeling off to the city to meet the real estate agent and my hopefully new apartment.

I arrive at the door to the lobby at the agreed time. Someone else is waiting as well – which is not surprising given the apartment for lease. I notice he’s made no apparent effort to polish his appearance and looks to be carrying a plastic shopping bag containing two cans of Coke. On impressions alone, he doesn’t stand a chance. The intercom appears not to be working. My competitor and I shuffle awkwardly while denying each other’s existence as I send a text message to the agent about my struggles with the doorbell. She tells me what we already know about the intercom not working and says she’ll be right down.

Through the glazed door rendered inoperable by the faulty intercom, I see all the way to the lift door, which opens and spits out a real estate agent so well put together that for a moment I’m a film noir detective meeting the proverbial. She strides on elegance towards the door-release button. The magnets holding the door shut obey her command and we find ourselves facing each other – two people equally overdressed in the service of the best possible impression. She puts her hand purposefully out to greet mine and I accept. She really is very handsome. Which distracts me from noticing at first that she does not greet my competitor, nor even acknowledge his existence. I start to think this one is going to go my way. She turns and walks into the lobby and towards the lift door, and I follow. My competitor follows too, yet somewhat sheepishly – perhaps shaken by her failure to spare him any attention.

She calls the lift and, like the door, it obeys. With more grace and elegance than her job requires, she flicks her hair and moves her hips a little suggestively as she steps into the lift and turns around to beckon me to join. Which I do. But I refuse to be seduced by the film noir fantasy that is trying to seduce me from within my own mind’s eye, as I am here to look at, and secure, this apartment as a place for me to live.

As they are programmed to do, the lift doors wait patiently for anyone else in the lobby to pass through their gate, but my competitor hesitates awkwardly, as if in a purgatory – unsure about whether to enter the lift or not. He looks at us both as he tries to decide, and we both look back through veils of professional indifference. He decides against it and the doors close. Both his decision, and that I seem somehow part of it, puzzle me. Why did he enter the building with us if not to see the apartment? And if not to see the apartment, why not enter the lift with us? There was ample room alongside my bulk and the agent’s petite physique.

But this puzzlement evaporates. His loss, and I have work to do maintaining a good impression.

“What do you do for a living?”

Asks the agent as we ascend. I tell her I am a professor of architecture at a university – a small over-polishing of the truth for her benefit. A lie she seems very happy to accept. Perhaps she is even genuinely impressed.

“I’m very attracted to the architecture of this building,”

I tell her, and she agrees. The awkward dance in the lobby is now many floors below us and long gone from my mind. And I have the impression that the agent didn’t notice it at all. The ascending of the elevator comes to an end. Somehow much has been exchanged on this lift journey and we are soon about to enter what I am feeling increasingly hopeful will be my new home.

The lift doors release us and the agent leads the way into and along a corridor – again with a walk clearly designed to seduce – but a walk that has no power over me, for I am here to be seduced by a building and an apartment, and I can now feel that I am very, very close.

She produces a key previously concealed on her person and opens one of the doors leading off the corridor and invites me in with an almost implied gesture. I follow her over the threshold and look around the first room, taking it in. And instantly my heart sinks.

The apartment is furnished. A detail that I must have somehow missed when reading the listing. The furnishings are perfectly fine, if not a little lacking in the flair and lustre promised by the building. But I do not want or need a furnished apartment. I have my own cherished accoutrements that I want to bring with me to my new home – not to mention that a furnished apartment comes at a price that I would not be willing to pay in exchange for living amongst someone else’s belongings. The hope I had nurtured all the way from the listing to the lovely lobby, past the awkward dance, through the ascension by lift, now mocks me. Levity has turned to lead.

Out of what might seem a sense of politeness, but in truth is more a desire to squeeze every last drop of enjoyment from the persona I had created for myself for this occasion, I instinctively decide to conceal my disappointment. So I politely step through the balance of the tour and interview. And as the agent points out to me where the toilet and shower are, she asks:

“How long would you like to stay?”

I’m on autopilot now, and 12 months is the standard lease length, and so ‘12 months’ is what I say. But she is so deeply perplexed at my response that the air in the apartment has time to thicken, and the clock on the kitchen wall stops and waits while she processes my words. A silence opens between us. And she fills it with this:

“…but your appointment is for two hours…”

I’m spinning inside as I try to process her words. I can imagine a world where property preview requires a two-hour booking, but that is a world where the preview is of a mansion – and this apartment has but a few rooms. Why would I have made a booking for two hours? And why would she have accepted it? And why……… oh shit. Oh fuck. The awkward dance in the lobby. The unnecessarily seductive walk.

“I’m here to inspect an apartment for rent.”

The air thins, the room stops spinning, the clock resumes its ticking – with a vengeance.

“Out, out, out, out, OUT!”

Like the front door and lift of earlier – I obey. Enthusiastically. I’m out! I march down the corridor – with some new kind of a walk. By button I put in my request for the lift to collect me and wait. But now I have no patience for its clunking whose direction I cannot ascertain, and I take the stairs. These taken stairs wind me down and around and down around the lift and deposit me back into the mosaic-besparkled lobby where I find my competitor and someone who is, and this time also looks like, a real estate agent, both awkwardly looking for someone that neither of them is to the other.

The moment my poorly attired competitor sees me, he strides towards me with aggression, shoulders pushed back, and chest puffed forward. A rooster defending his honour.

“What just happened, mate?”

“Look… I think you should just go up. She’s waiting for you.”

Like me, he assumes he has power over the lift, but it refuses to comply. So he takes the same route to ascend that I had just taken to descend. And I am left in the lobby to begin my second attempt at introducing myself to the agent representing the listing of the apartment – whose pull on me persists.

I do my best to dust myself off without being seen to do so and introduce myself – round two. She accepts my introduction. But I can feel that my attempts to re-frame my own outlook have not worked. I feel the need to confide in another. And as she exercises her own power over the lift, which complies, I let out a sentence:

“I just had a rather peculiar experience…”

As I say this, the lift doors open and the first agent steps out looking for her actual customer. Her outfit is the same, but the walk and velvet tones are gone. Before the doors can decide to exclude her, she scans the lobby and, finding it empty of her prey, she steps back into the lift. My agent follows her in. I have no choice but to follow.

On this second ascension, the car’s air is a new awkward. Someone must break the silence. I feel very certain that it won’t be me. Judging by tight lips, neither does the first agent. And as I see in the changing of the second agent’s facial expression that she is about to utter what she thinks will be a perfect morsel of harmless small talk to ease the horrible social stiffness taking place between the three people in this confined space, I brace myself:

“So, tell me about this peculiar experience you just had…”