A man told me last year that I was throwing money away, and he was right, and I went home and did it again.
We were on plastic stools outside a coffee place that does one thing well and nothing else. Late morning. The good hour, before the heat turns stupid. He put his laptop on the table and turned it round so I could see the screen. A spreadsheet. Countries down one side, days along the top, and a cell that went red when he got close to a limit.
He had tax numbers in 11 countries. He had beaten one of them in court, and he told me about that the way other men tell you about a fight.
Then he asked what my setup was. I told him. He put his cup down.
"You are paying for nothing."
He was right about the money. I still pay tax in a country I have not slept in for years. It is not a fortune. It is enough to notice, once a year, in the same month, and every year I look at the number for a second longer than I need to.
I did not have an answer for him that day. I said something about it being simpler, and then we talked about a motorbike he was thinking of buying.
I should have said this.
The setup is boring, which is the first honest thing about it.
I never came off the books at home. I told them I was leaving. I did not do the other thing, the full exit, where you sign yourself out properly and become a visitor in the place you are from. I kept a residency I do not use. I file. There is an accountant who emails me twice a year with a subject line that is just a year and a number.
Nobody has ever been impressed by this. Not once.
Everything out here asks you for proof.
A bank asked me, 3 years ago now, where I was tax resident. They did not ask it in a conversation. It was a box on a form, with a deadline, and a line underneath saying what happens to the account if the box stays empty. Banks have to ask now. They pass the answer on to somebody. There is no "nowhere" option on that form, and if you write something clever in it, a person in an office decides what to do with you, and that person has never met you and is not in a hurry.
Then there are the visas. Every long stay visa I have applied for out here wanted proof of money. Not a photograph of an app. Statements going back months, and standing behind those statements, quietly, a country that keeps records on me and will confirm I am who I say I am.
The system I supposedly walked away from is the reason I get to stay.
There is also a pension somewhere with my name on it, adding a year at a time. It is small. I expect to be disappointed by it. I would rather have the option of being disappointed by it.
None of that is the real reason, and I know it, because a woman who does this for a living has already shown me the cheaper way.
She went through it properly, on a call, with my actual numbers in front of her. I could keep the pension years by paying in from outside, voluntarily, for very little. I could do the clean exit and be resident somewhere sensible and dull with a low rate. The bank box would have an answer in it. I would be legal and lighter and a few thousand better off over 10 years.
She was right. I have had that form open twice. I have not sent it.
Being from nowhere is a good line at a bar. It is a bad line on a form.
I have met plenty of men who are from nowhere. It is a type. They are always the most relaxed person in the room and the story is always excellent. A company in one place, a phone number somewhere else, and nothing touching anything else.
And it works. That part is true and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because the version of this where the clever guy gets caught in the end is a story people tell to feel better about their own paperwork. Some of them are still going. Some of them are doing far better than I am.
But I watched what happens on the day something needs an answer fast.
A guy I knew slightly came off his bike on a road up north. He was not a friend. He was someone I had eaten near, a lot, for about a year.
The money was the easy part. The group had that sorted inside a day, which still gets me when I think about it. What took time was working out who to tell. Which country. Which family. He had been out here 6 years and had been careful, in his way, about not being on lists.
Somebody found a brother eventually. I heard he went home. I heard a couple of other things after that and I do not know which of them are true.
I am not going to turn him into a lesson. He was not a lesson. He was a man who ate a lot of chicken rice at the same place I did.
I just stopped enjoying the from-nowhere stories.
I got tired of being nobody's problem.
My post still arrives somewhere.
A man I shared a flat with, a long time ago, before any of this, keeps it for me. Nobody designed that. It started as a favour for 3 months and it has been going for years. He has a drawer in his kitchen. Every few months he takes a photograph of what is in it and sends it to me, badly, half of one envelope out of frame.
Most of it is nothing. A card from a bank. Something about the pension. A letter from the tax office with a reference number I recognise before I have read the words.
He has 2 kids now. I have never stood in that kitchen. I could not tell you what the drawer looks like on the outside.
It is the only address I have that a form will accept.
I saw the spreadsheet man again a few months ago. New country in the left column, no red cells, still winning. He asked if I had sorted myself out yet and I said not really, and he laughed and let it go.
Maybe he is right. Maybe I am paying a yearly subscription to a country that has forgotten my face, for a hospital I will never walk into and a pension that will not cover much.
I sent it again anyway. Same month, same reference number. It went out on a Tuesday and cleared on the Thursday.
Somewhere, in a kitchen I have never stood in, that drawer got one envelope heavier.
Andrew - No Refunds •••