The Jar on the Fridge

We started the jar in the first flat, the one above the kebab shop in Leyton. Fifty quid a week, cash, into a Kilner jar on top of the fridge. Jamal's idea. He said if we could see it grow we'd keep doing it, and if it was just a number on a screen we'd forget. He was right about the first bit. It was lovely to watch. By Christmas it was properly heavy, a slab of notes you had to push down to fit the lid on, and I'd take it down sometimes and just hold it. He was wrong about the second bit though, or at least he hadn't thought it through. Because I did the sums one night in February. Fifty a week is two and a half grand a year. A deposit round here, even for a one-bed, even somewhere further out, was going to be thirty-odd. The jar was going to take twelve years. We'd be forty-four. I told him. He looked at the jar for a long time. "Okay," he said. "So the jar's a start, not a plan." That was the thing that changed. We sat at the kitchen table, which was also the only table, and we actually looked at it. Not the jar. Everything. His phone contract, which was a joke. My gym membership, which I used twice in January and then felt guilty about for eleven months. The takeaways from downstairs, which, when we added them up, made me feel a bit sick. We opened a proper savings account, the government one where they top you up. We set up a transfer for the day after payday so it went before we could see it. We kept the jar for the fifties but we stopped thinking of it as the thing. Then Jamal did something I still can't believe. He rang his mum and asked if we could move in with her for a year. I want to be clear, I love his mum. She is a wonderful woman with strong opinions on how a bathroom should be kept. But it was a year. In his childhood bedroom. With the posters still up.

We did it. September to September. We paid her a bit, less than a third of what the flat had cost. She fed us most nights. She commented on the bathroom most mornings. Some evenings I sat in the car outside for twenty minutes just to have a room that was mine. The savings account went up faster than I'd thought possible. It turns out rent is the whole problem. Take out the rent and everything else is just noise. We completed on the flat in May. Two-bed, ground floor, a bit of garden that's mostly slabs. Nowhere near Leyton. You can see fields from the bus. The jar came with us. It's on top of the new fridge. We put the last fifty in it the day we moved and then, that evening, sitting on boxes, we took it all down and counted it out on the floor, all of it, four years of notes, and it came to eleven thousand and forty pounds, and we ordered a takeaway with the forty and put the eleven thousand towards the kitchen. His mum's coming Sunday. I've cleaned the bathroom twice.