Terry and the Foreign Object
One street, two flags, and the death of difference…
There was a house in Hampton Wick which stood like a rotten tooth between two smug semis, each one glistening with the polyester dignity of men who waxed their family estates like they were aircraft carriers, air fresheners swinging in the windscreens, fences measured to the inch, CCTV in case the bins blinked out of turn.
The house in the middle, though, had other ideas. Its front path crazed in three directions, like it couldn’t decide whether to escape, surrender, or strike back. The letterbox dangled open, a bristly yawn, as if exhausted by decades of supermarket leaflets and final warnings. Paint slid down its window frames in slow, vertical strips - the tears of something once promised a future, now just flaking its way into silence.
Then there was the flag.
From the upstairs mansard jutted a flagpole - if you could call it that - constructed with the sort of resourcefulness you usually find in prison yards and post-revolutionary war zones. Broom handles, mop shafts, bits of stolen conduit - all lashed together in the desperate, creative panic of the unwelcome. And at the end of it - snapping with impertinent cheer - the Romanian flag. Blue. Yellow. Red. Three wide, infuriating stripes of refusal. It flapped not like a banner, but a dare. A middle finger in fabric form.
The garden below was a shrine to inertia. A smashed cot. A shopping trolley with no wheels. A mattress folded in half and rotting. Bags of concrete, sealed by rain. An oil drum, once used to grill meat, now blackened to history. Nature had returned in patches, but without affection. Grass rose in tufts, like bad hair. Shrubs had turned feral.
Across the street was Terry. 68. Twice divorced. Once laid off. Still proud of a past no one wanted to hear about. His front garden was shaped by spite. Gnomes stood to attention. The paving was scrubbed so hard it had no texture left. Inside, he had a Union Jack cushion on a cane chair which he refused to sit on. He watched the flag like it owed him money. His face wore the haunted cheer of a man who had not felt useful in years, but would never admit it.
Terry believed in order. In fences. In the bins being brought in on time. He had once been in the Navy, or the Post Office, or some other institution which gave him a badge and took away his wonder. His days were measured in clickbait headlines and ritual fury. He could not explain what he wanted from the street. He could only tell you when it went wrong.
And to him, the flag was wrong.
The building of it. The gall of it. The homemade defiance of it. The broom-handle monstrosity with its taped joints and Balkan confidence. It was a flag which said, ‘We’re here, and you’ll live with it.’ Terry had no answer to that. So he raised one of his own.
Soon there were others. Flags stuck on bins. Flags rising from bushes. Flags above porches and tied to aerials. Union Jacks waved with increasing desperation from houses with nothing to celebrate. The whole street performed its indignation in primary colours. Nobody spoke. The decorations just kept coming, as if nationalism could be installed like double glazing.
Then, without a sound, the Romanian flag disappeared.
No one saw it go, nor claimed the credit.
In its place appeared a Union Jack, new and smug, screwed into the window frame with absolute certainty. It hung still, even in wind. It belonged to no one, but everyone took comfort in it.
The men inside adjusted. They stopped speaking on the front step. They took the bins out earlier. One of them shaved. Another started wearing a windbreaker with an England football crest. Someone cleaned the bay windows and left it ajar, as if waiting for inspection.
And then came the beer.
The cans of Ciucaș and Timișoreana vanished from the windowsill. Instead, London Pride appeared in fours, in sixes, in stacked twelves from the Co-op. Room temperature. Acceptable. A beer with nothing left to prove. The sort of drink people like Terry recognised; the sort of drink you could forget.
They drank it without comment. They set the empties in the green recycling bin like proof.
Terry saw the change. And for a few days, he looked satisfied. Then uncertain. Then bored.
Because nothing else changed.
The garden remained an archive of indecision. The light in the hall still flickered. The front door always stuck. The shape of the house remained stubborn and untransformed, even when wrapped in the right flag and drinking the right beer.
Terry began watching something else. The traffic warden. The weather. The kids on scooters who never waved.
He could not say what had happened, only that something had been removed. Some tension. But also a shape which had made him feel necessary. It had been there, then gone. And he begun to miss it.
This was the true triumph of the new flag. It gave everyone a way to stop thinking. And it turned presence into background. It quietened the wrong kind of story.
When we demand sameness, we may win silence, but we lose the story which makes us human. The flag did not bring peace; it only hid the questions which made us real...