Nocturne (4 page)

Listening to him, it occurred
to me that we appeared to have
swopped roles.
He was pitching. I was playing hard to get.

‘
What about afterwards?
’
I said carefully.

‘
We do another series.
’

‘
I
meant me,
’
I nodded at the cassette.
‘
And all those ideas I sent
you.
’

Brendan looked at me for a long time. Then the smile was back.
‘
We
’
ll see,
’
he said softly.
‘
But first things first, eh?
’

Back
home
, in Petersfield, my mother was delighted. So delighted, she
offered to pay for the van I
’
d need to hire to ship my stuff up to
London. Thus far, I hadn
’
t given much thought to where I might live,
but once the Doubleact offer was in writing, I knew I had to get myself
organised. The series was already in
pre-production. Brendan Quayle
was i
nsisting I start no later than
1
st November. Time was short.

I spent the best part of the next week in London, camping out on
Nikki
’
s living-room floor. Nikki was my best girlfriend. We
’
d been
together down in Bournemouth and - lucky thing - she
’
d already got
herself a job on a new fashion magazine. Her flat was over in Chiswick
and I left every morning after breakfast, taking the tube to the Angel
and schlepping from estate agent to estate agent, looking for a place to
rent.

The first shock was financial. Down in Bournemouth, I
’
d been used
to paying
£150
a month for a room. Up here, that kind of money
wouldn
’
t buy me a bus shelter. By lunchtime on day one, my dreams of
a studio flat in Islington had withered on the vine. They were certainly
available, and some of them sounded really nice, but at
£650
a month
they were way past my limit. With my trusty
A-Z
,
I began to work
north, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, amazed at how slowly the
rents came down. Even one-bedroomed flats in Stoke Newington
would have stretched me to the limit. Finally, depressed by yet another
afternoon of trudging round damp, badly converted bedsits, I phoned
my mother. It might, I suggested, be cheaper to commute.

‘
Have you thought about buying?
’
she said at once.

‘
I
can
’
t.
’

‘
Why not?
’

‘
I
haven
’
t got the money. For the deposit.
’

‘
How much would you need?
’

I did the calculations. Up around Tottenham, only that day, I
’
d seen
places going for
£48,000.

‘
They normally ask for five per cent.
’
I said.
‘
That
’
s
£2,460.
’

‘
When would you want it?
’

‘
Now.
’

My mother gave the proposition a moment or two
’
s thought then
told me the money was mine. I could pay her back on a monthly basis.
We
’
d work the figures out later.

Next morning, newly bold, I was back in Tottenham Green. The
streets off the High Road were full of
‘
For Sale
’
signs but most of the
places looked grim. I was beginning to wonder whether I couldn
’
t
afford a bigger mortgag
e when - late in the afternoon - I
found exactly
what I
’
d been looking for.

The street was a cul-de-sac, a hundred metres or so from end to end.
At the top was a major road; at the bottom, sealing the street off from
the cemetery beyond, a pitted brick wall. Adjoining the brick wall, on
the north side of the street, was an end-of-terrace house, two stories,
with big square bays up and down. The foot or two of garden between
the house and the front wall had been covered with crudely poured
concrete, and the
‘
For Sale
’
board was sagging where someone had
nicked the loop of wire securing it to the gatepost, but I liked the warm
red colour of the bricks and the double bays were capped with a nice
piece of stonework in the shape of a Dutch gable.

I stepped back into the road, consulting the details I
’
d picked up at
the estate agents. The house had been subdivided into two flats and it
was the bottom half that was for sale. The window frames needed a
lick of paint, and the front door had seen better days but the road was
unquestionably quiet and I liked very much the idea of being in a cul-de-sac. Best of all was the price. For a living room, two bedrooms, a
kitchen and a bathroom, the agents were asking just
£43,000.

I returned an hour and a half later with the key. Inside, while the
woman from the estate agency did her best to secure a broken window
catch at the back of the house, I prowled from room to room, my
initial hunch confirmed. Like so many terrace houses, the property
was bigger than it seemed, stretching back along a dark, narrow hall
that smelled, very faintly, of disinfectant. The two bedrooms were a bit
of a cheat, a crude subdivision of a once-larger room, but the kitchen
was a good size and whoever had done the conversion had known a
thing or two about bathroom suites. This one was in egg-yolk yellow,
one of my all-time favourite colours, and it even boasted a bidet
between the pedestal washbasin and the big scalloped bath. By the
time the estate agent had finished wrestling with the window catch, I
’
d
made up my mind.

‘
Yes,
’
I told her.
‘
Very definitely yes.
’

We stepped out into the street and she locked the door behind us. It
was nearly dark by now but I could see a blur of little black faces
behind the curtains in the house next door. One of them offered a shy
wave. I waved back.

‘
Know anything about the neighbours?
’
I inquired.

The woman from the estate agency looked blank. She couldn
’
t find
her car keys.

‘
Nothing,
’
she said.
‘
Apparently there
’
s some bloke up top but that
’
s
about the size of it.
’

I nodded, another little query answered. Nice to have company, I
thought, waving at the kids again and wondering vaguely about the
man upstairs.

It took longer than I
’
d thought to move in. The mortgage people
demanded a survey and the
surveyor
’
s
insistence on various
‘
structural
adjustments
’
took my mother
’
s loan to
£4,850
before
31
Napier Road
was legally mine.

By now it was early December and I
’
d se
en enough of the realities of
mainstream television to make the prospect of my little hideaway all
the more enticing. Doubleact had become a nightmare, a never-ending
series of deadlines that seemed to stretch onwards and onwards into
some infinite future. Not once at university had it occurred to me that
broadcast television might be nothing more than an assembly line, a
machine for turning bad ideas into fat profits, but the more people I
talked to, the more I realised that this was exactly the way it was. I was
working in a factory - exhaustion salted with moments of blind panic
- and what made it worse was the fact that I
’
d finally recognised the
logic behind Brendan Quayle
’
s offer of a job. He
’
d always made it
pretty plain that he badly wanted to shag me. That I could cope with,
but what came as a surprise was the realisation that he was offering the
same challenge to more or less anyone else who
’
d demean themselves
by appearing on his wretched show. In part, poor sad man, he was
using me as a kind of company come-on, a role for which three years at
Bournemouth most definitely hadn
’
t prepared me. Not that I had any
intention of playing along.

I moved into Napier Road on a S
aturday, the week before Christ
mas. We
’
d partied late on the Friday after a particularly boisterous
recording and I
’
d spent the small hours fighting off a predatory staffer
from Conservative Central Office. Because he was so much younger
than the rest of them, he seemed to think that conferred special
privileges and he
’
d raised the stakes to a weekend in New York
and
a
chance to meet Michael Portillo before it dawned on him that my
knickers were staying on. When I finally got out of his flat he was very
drunk and very angry.

‘
Why the fuck not?
’
he shouted down the stairs.
‘
Why make it all so
bloody
personal
?
’

Next morning, I left for Petersfield at dawn, badly hungover. I was
driving a hire van and had Nikki for company. My brother met us at
the other end to help load the one or two bits of heavier stuff and by
late morning we were bowling back up the
A3,
feeling a good deal
better. The previous weekend I
’
d scrubbed the flat out, every single
room, and one of the reasons for bringing so little furniture was my
determination to strip the doors and sand the floorboards. In my
mind
’
s eye, by early spring, I
’
d be living in a little minimalist bubble,
all varnished pine and fresh flowers, plotting anew my assault on the
world of documentary film-making.

We got to Napier Road in the early afternoon. The heavens had
opened and we sat in the van until the shower passed. I remember
looking up at the house, wondering why the curtains were never pulled
back in the bay window on the top floor. I
’
d heard someone moving in
the top flat the previous weekend, and I
’
d toyed with going up there
and introducing myself, but by the time I got round to it my new
neighbour had evidently gone out because there was no answer at his
door. Odd, I
’
d thought at the time, because we had a shared hallway
and front door, and I
’
d heard nothing.

When the rain stopped, we began to unload the van, carting the
cardboard boxes into the house and stacking them in the smaller of the
two bedrooms. The house faced south-west. After midday, the front
room was flooded with sunshine and this particular afternoon, the
clouds gone and the van emptied, we sat on the floor demolishing
cheese rolls and toasting the move with a bottle of Cote du Rhone I
’
d
lifted from what my dad used to call his
‘
cellar
’
. Nikki and I were still
arguing about my plans for rearranging the kitchen when, for the first
time, I became aware of music overhead. It was exquisite, a piece of
something classical, light, melodic, almost jaunty.