Trevor Pascoe became a landlord the way most people in Carlton North become landlords, by inheriting a house and deciding, after several conversations with friends who owned investment properties, that he was prepared for "the worst." He had pictured unpaid rent, a damaged wall, maybe a dispute over a bond. He was not prepared for what has actually happened on Fenwick Street, which is that his tenant has spent fourteen months slowly alphabetising the nature strip.
It began, as far as Pascoe can reconstruct it, with the letterbox, where his tenant, a quiet man named Dmitri who works in logistics and has never once been late with rent, rearranged the junk mail into alphabetical order by sender before putting it out for recycling. From there it progressed to the recycling bin itself, which Dmitri now sorts not just by material but by brand name, and then to the nature strip's volunteer street library, where the paperbacks have been reordered from Austen to Zusak with a consistency the local council's own libraries do not always achieve.
"He's not technically breaking anything," Pascoe said, standing at the fence and looking at a row of recycling bins that now read, left to right, like a very small and very boring dictionary. "There's no clause in the lease about book order. I checked. I have read the lease four times looking for a clause about book order."
Pascoe's inherited anxieties about bad tenants, he has come to realise, did not account for a tenant who is, by every measurable standard, excellent. Rent arrives on the first of the month. Nothing is broken. The smoke alarms have been tested more recently than Pascoe's own, in the house he does not live in but technically owns. The problem, insofar as there is one, is that Pascoe now finds himself unable to leave for work without first checking whether the bins have moved, and increasingly unable to explain to his girlfriend why this bothers him.
"I wanted a boring tenant," he said. "I got a tenant who has made boring into a hobby, and now I think about him every day." Dmitri, contacted via a handwritten note left in alphabetical order with the mail, declined to comment, citing a preference for letting his systems speak for themselves.