Bohemia Village Voice

One Hundred Garages

I bought my hundredth garage yesterday, on my sixtieth birthday.
I started collecting them – if that’s the right word – when I was fifty. I love the roundness, the wholeness of the numbers and the sense of completeness. I had wanted to buy ten a year for ten years, but of course it hadn’t worked out that way. A small inheritance and a pretty generous redundancy package meant that I got off to a flying start. I had just over fifty in four years but after that things slowed down a little. I’ve always specialised in buying up those little, concrete, up-and-over garages from the sixties and seventies. You won’t fit a Chelsea tractor in them or a big estate but they do quite nicely for most people. When I get a new tenant I usually tell them to tape some upholstery foam to the side of the garage where the driver’s door opens. It stops a lot of scrapes and chips.
I try to be a good landlord. A couple of years ago I had all the garage doors painted in racing green with a little triangular flash of yellow in the top right hand corner with my initials picked out in gold. ‘TBR’. Tom Barton Rentals. My wife, just before she left, said it was the final straw and just showed how those ‘bloody garages’ meant more to me than people. I don’t think that was fair because I’ve always taken an interest in my tenants. I don’t ask too many questions but I try and make sure that if there is a problem I respond quickly. I have a couple of guys who do most of the maintenance work for me and between the three of us we make sure that the outside looks neat and smart.
I think I know all my tenants by name. I give each garage a number and everything is recorded in a big leather ledger with marbled page edges. My wife used to say it would be easier to use a computer but I love opening that book and running my fingers down the smooth, cream-coloured pages. One page for each garage. One hundred pages and one hundred names.
If you asked me who rents garage seventy-five I could tell you straightaway: Mrs Jennifer Sanderson. I remember when she came round to sign the contract. I liked her. I reckon she was in her late forties and she looked like she was living a tough life. She seemed sad but so grateful to be getting the garage. Seventy-five was not my best garage. It was a little bit out on a limb on the edge of town and too far away from the station to be any good to commuters.
Still, I kept the rent down on that one and I knew we would look after it for her. We had to help her a couple of months after she started the let when she lost her keys. I left a message on her mobile and said I’d go and open it for her. I’d meet her there and give her a couple of spare keys. I got there first and checked the key worked. As I turned the key and pulled the door open it wasn’t a car I saw. Filling the whole of the garage was a four poster bed with delicate hand carvings and flutings and a canopy decorated with feathers and clover leaves. I closed the door just as she arrived.
Like I say, there’s no need to ask too many questions.