As I heard the body's impact against the wall and the raucous cry of "Fucker!" that accompanied it – both clear despite the intervening layers of brick, plaster, and faded paper – I knew the mistake I'd made. I'd got it all wrong, yet again.

Only, I didn't know quite how badly. Not then.

The signs had been there to see. Aren't they always? The glorious benefit of hindsight is a highway stretching into memory, and there on the roadside twenty meters high are the words of warning you could have heeded and didn't.

That you chose to ignore, because doing so was easier, and just maybe so that one day the cynical part of you, the part that doesn't like you all that much, could turn around and say I told you so.

I had. I'd told me so. I'd chosen not to listen.

The problem wasn't that the choices hadn't looked like mistakes while I was making them, either, because they certainly had. No, the problem was that they hadn't looked like choices. Case in point: fifty-five thousand pounds (or, let's get the specifics right, fifty-four thousand, three hundred pounds) coming unexpectedly into my possession. The death of a well-off relative I never knew I had, a cousin that when – still breathless, still wondering if this was all someone's weird idea of a joke – I asked my mother who she'd been, turned out to be so distant and unmemorable that she needed three minutes to place the name, another two to calculate the precise relationship.

At which juncture, we both realized, or at least began to suspect, that my mother should have been the beneficiary and not me. We're not a big family, but we're a profoundly disjointed one. I understood quickly that there had been some spite involved, and that the bad blood likely related to my dad, bless his heart, who gets more sympathy – from certain quarters, anyway – for being in prison than my mother ever did for dealing with his bullshit all those years.

Probably I should have offered to give her the money. I definitely should have volunteered to split it. I think I sort of tried to, though the recollection is fuzzy. I'd like to believe that I did and she said no; that she told me how much more I needed it than she did. I'd like to think that's how the conversation went, and if it did then she was right. Her: nice house in the countryside, happily remarried, close to retirement. Me: a shitty flat on the outskirts of Leeds, supply teaching work I'd taken as a stopgap until something permanent came along, the steadily growing comprehension that maybe it wasn't coming after all. Penny-pinching. Disillusionment. Mild depression.

Nearly fifty-five thousand pounds.

A wealth of possibilities. Pay off the student loan first, of course, and the credit card. Settle the car, actually own the damn thing before it once and for all gave up the ghost. Then – what, a holiday? I could take Yasmina away for a long weekend. We'd not even been dating a month, but the notion of spending a few days alone with her already seemed an attractive prospect. All of that together would still leave a sizeable chunk to bank for the inevitable rainy day.

Almost too many options. And by the time I was off the phone with my mother, I was starting to recognize the flaws in each of them. My student loan hardly needed repaying; it might be years before I was earning enough for the debt to become an issue. The car wasn't a necessity; I'd been thinking about scrapping it anyhow. If I asked Yasmina to go away with me, the result was less likely to be the weekend of passion I'd imagined, more me frightening her off. I could save the money, but how quickly would it devalue? With the economy in free fall, what was fifty-five grand really worth?

It was worth a house, that was what.

I knew it was possible. Real estate was dirt cheap around Leeds. A guy at work had bought a two-bedroom semi in the suburbs with his girlfriend only last month; that had cost them a little under eighty thousand. Obviously they'd paid most of that with a mortgage, something my unsteady work situation would doubtless rule me out of. But what did that matter? Even if the place was a slum, it would be home, and even if I was hanging off the bottom rung of the property ladder, I would still be on it. Compared with where I was at present, that prospect was a hell of an improvement.

I wasn't working that day, so I spent the rest of the afternoon on the internet, searching property sites. It didn't take long for my heart to begin to sink. My budget stretched to grotty repossessions and rundown terraced houses – and then barely. After an hour I had to stop because my hand was shaking, panic setting in at the prospect of actually living in one of these miserable hovels. I got up, made a cup of tea, and drank it leaning out the window of my third-floor flat, gulping the fume-soaked air.

I just had to lower my expectations. I was going to have to do some renovating; that was okay. So what if the money I was currently paying out as rent was going on paint and curtains instead? Perhaps I'd need to be flexible on location and hang onto the car. The compromises wouldn't be ideal, but what about my life was?

I made a shortlist of the least awful places. I made a few phone calls. A lot of them had already gone – and mostly I found myself feeling secretly grateful. My shortened shortlist comprised five properties, which I made appointments to view on Friday, the next day I had off. I spent the intervening days with a gnawing tension in my gut, and half a dozen times came close to phoning Yasmina to tell her what I was intending, before at the last minute thinking better of it.

The first place I looked at, a one-bedroom flat that had seemed pleasant enough in the photos, stank of mold. I could only assume a pipe had burst somewhere in the foundations, and I couldn't imagine that any amount of air freshener or incense would erase that biting odor. The estate agent pretended not to notice, and I pretended not to notice them pretending.

The second was opposite the crummiest cemetery I'd ever seen. Most of the gravestones had been kicked over or smashed, and the paths were liberally strewn with dogshit. As I was driving away, I realized that the large building behind high walls on the next street was in fact a prison.

The third, another flat, this time two-bedroom, was dark and dingy and made me feel uncomfortable the moment I entered. The door to the smaller bedroom was gouged deeply, and I spotted similar marks in the bare floorboards. When I asked the estate agent about it, she said absentmindedly, "Oh yes, I think this is the room they kept the python in." I almost laughed, until I grasped that she wasn't joking.

I can't remember what was so dreadful about the fourth place. I was starting to tune out by that point. Maybe it was nothing specific, merely a background sense of grime, inexplicable smells, frayed carpet, chipped work surfaces, and peeling wallpaper. At any rate, I had to interrupt the estate agent's dispirited efforts at a sales pitch when my mobile rang. The call turned out to be from the agent for my next appointment, ringing to tell me that the couple he'd just shown round had put in an offer, and the owner was taking the property off the market.

Good luck to them, I thought.

I went outside and assured the estate agent I'd think it over, both of us knowing I was lying. I hurried back to my car, grateful to discover that it...