The Lubetkin Legacy (21 page)

Although there was no actual evidence of Mother's love affair with Lubetkin, there were tantalising clues hidden about the flat. For example, there was a book about modern architecture that Mother kept in the loo on the shelf above the loo roll, which featured the work of Berthold Lubetkin, with torn strips of newspaper between the Lubetkin pages for bookmarks. It had nice pictures, including one of Madeley Court, and small snatches of text, just long enough for an average bowel movement. As it happened, I had been reading it on the very morning I had arranged to meet Mrs Penny.

Her office was on the eighth floor of a grim concrete building around the back of the Town Hall. Lubetkin himself, according to this book, had worked with Ove Arup, the master of concrete; but his concrete swirled and flowed into playful patterns or uncluttered lines. ‘Nothing is too good for ordinary people,' he had said. The council offices, I surmised, were an example of the ‘new brutalist' school of architecture, a bracing offspring of Lubetkin's modernism that made no concessions to bourgeois notions like ‘beauty', which was strictly for wimps. This council building no longer housed the benign supportive state that Lubetkin and his post-war colleagues had tried to engineer, but a bossy, intrusive, policing ‘Them' whose role was to keep the undeserving poor in their place. In fact it was the perfect backdrop for nosy Mrs Penny and her flea-bitten ankles.

I took the lift (even in here, someone had pissed) up to floor eight and walked along a corridor lit with blinking neon and
floored with carpet tiles in a jarring mosaic of camouflage green and battleship grey. If, as Lubetkin proposed, the surroundings in which we live help to mould our souls, then this environment did not bode well for my meeting with Mrs Penny.

Her name, with four others, was on the door. They sounded more like a crew of international deadbeats than public servants. Mr Matt Longweil, Mr En Nuy Yeux, Mr Fred Treg, Miss Ignacia Noiosa, Mrs Eustachia Penny.

Eustachia! Blimey!

It was a large office with five desks, but none of the other officers was there; presumably they were all out terrorising innocent tenants in their homes. Mrs Penny's desk was neat and tidy, with orderly papers, a spotted mug full of sharpened pencils, and a fluffy teddy bear with a spotted ribbon. By contrast the desk next to hers, presumably Miss Ignacia Noiosa's, was strewn with papers, dead teacups, a sickly cactus and an ashtray overflowing with scarlet-lipstick-tipped cigarette butts. Which was odd, I thought, because smoking is usually prohibited in offices, especially in shared offices.

‘Come in! Good to see you. Please, take a seat, Mr Lukashenko.' Mrs Penny indicated a hard wooden chair with splintery edges.

‘Sidebottom,' I said.

‘Sidebottom?'

‘My mother remarried. Remember we talked about it? I've brought the marriage certificate and my birth certificate.'

‘Ah, yes, I remember now. Dear old lady. Three husbands. A little confused. No wonder.'

As I sat down, I felt a heavy clink in the pocket of my jacket. With my left hand I explored my jacket pocket: two coins – probably a 50p and a £1 – and something smooth and long. I peeped surreptitiously. Howard's Bic lighter.

Mrs Penny scrutinised my documents, nodded and reached for the clear plastic file she had brought to our flat. There, right at the top, was the green printed Tenancy Transfer form that Inna had signed with her own name. She opened it out and started to skim through it. Just at that moment, a telephone started to ring on one of the other desks. At first, she ignored it, and carried on scanning the form. The phone continued ringing: seven, eight … twelve, thirteen … nineteen, twenty …

‘Excuse me.' She stomped over to the desk in the far corner, and picked up the receiver. Her back was towards me.

‘Yes? … Sorry, Mr Treg's out of the office at the moment, can I help? … Urgent? … Emergency? … A fire? Oh dear …!'

I pricked up my ears. A fire? What a good idea! I clicked Howard's Bic and held it to the corner of a crumpled document in the waste-paper basket of the cigarette-butts desk. It smouldered for a moment, then a small flame took hold.

‘… Nobody hurt, I hope … Thank heavens …!'

I whisked the Tenancy Transfer and a few other papers towards the flame, taking care to safeguard my precious certificates.

She smelled the smoke, turned around and screamed. I grabbed a half-f cup of tea off the desk and threw it at the bin. The fire fizzled, faltered, then picked up again. Mrs Penny tried to douse the flames with water from a kettle, but by now it was all burning briskly.

‘Oh, hell!' She hit a glass-fronted alarm on the wall.

Sirens sounded. Soon there was a drumming of running feet outside in the corridor.

‘You'd better get out!' I shouted, grabbing a fire extinguisher from the wall and directing it at the waste-paper basket, which immediately filled up with foam. ‘Don't wait for me!'

The green Tenancy Transfer floated up on the foam, mangled and scorched, but with the signature still visible.
Inna Alfandari
. I added it to the flames. Then I raced down eight flights of new-brutalist stairs to the exit.

There was a carnival atmosphere down in the courtyard below the stairwell. Like birds freed from a cage, the council staff fluttered around and around, flapping and chattering, but only a few picked up the courage to take flight. Two fire engines arrived. Yellow-helmeted hunks played hoses on the windows, while others ventured inside.

Mrs Penny spotted me through the crowd, rushed up and threw her arms around me. ‘Oh, Berthold! I hope you're okay! I kept telling Ignacia she shouldn't smoke in the office, but …'

She held me tight for just a moment longer than was strictly warranted by the occasion. I could smell her flowery perfume and feel her pneumatic breasts pressing on me through the fabric of my foam-spattered jacket. Down below the belt, the beast stirred. Which was strange, because he hadn't stirred like that when I had held lovely Violet in my arms.

‘Fine. All's well that ends well,' murmured the beast's cerebral master.

‘Thank you for trying to save my paperwork. Some of those old paper files go back years! The new ones are all on the computer, of course, but the old ones, like your mum's, are a piece of history.' She sighed. ‘You were so heroic!'

Heroic! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, George Clooney.

‘Don't mention it, Mrs Penny.' As I said her name, I wondered for the first time whether there was a Mr Penny.

‘Please, call me Eustachia. Stacey for short.'

‘Eustachia. What a pretty name. Isn't that something to do with tubes?'

‘Yes. In the ears. Actually, I was born with a hearing problem. My mum liked the name.'

‘It's quite unusual. But you're okay now?'

‘I've grown out of it now. But as a kid I really struggled to keep up at school. I went through a phase of feeling hopeless and depressed.'

Depressed. I'd been in that bear pit myself. ‘People don't realise –' I began.

‘They don't know what it's like.' She raced on in full confessional flow, her voice soft and confiding. ‘I felt so embarrassed about the way I talked, I hardly said a word all through my childhood. I just stayed in my room and talked to my teddies.'

This had suddenly become very personal. Her breasts, as if inflated by some intense private emotion, were still rising and falling directly below my nose.

‘Then my parents split up. But I got sent to this wonderful speech therapist. She taught me how to speak clearly. She told me to go out and do something useful instead of sitting around feeling sorry for myself. “Always keep on the sunny side, Stacey,” she used to say. After I took my A-levels, I went into local government. I reckoned there were a lot of people out there among our clients who were worse off than me.'

I glanced down at her ankles. They seemed shapelier, but the ugly scars were still there.

‘That sounds a bit like me.'

‘You, Berthold?' Her sweet face and direct manner, her own admission of vulnerability, invited confidence.

It was a long time since I had spoken to anyone about my breakdown. ‘I got depressed when my daughter died. Meredith, she was called. My wife blamed me. Our marriage broke
up. My stutter started up again because of the stress. Not the best thing for an actor.'

‘You're an actor?'

‘All the world's a stage.'

‘Isn't that a quote by Shakespeare?'

‘Absolutely. Shall we go and have a coffee? I know a nice p-place just up the road.'

Violet feels she deserves a treat. She's sat through an hour-long meeting with Marc this afternoon, avoiding his eyes and maintaining an air of utter cool throughout. Now she feels inexplicably sad, like she's mourning for something inside her that has died. Though she's still wearing the expensive uniform that goes with her job, her heart's no longer in it. It's not just Marc, it's the whole idea of wealth preservation that once seemed so glamorous, and now just seems sleazy. She takes her laptop into Luigi's to enjoy a real cappuccino while she checks her personal email and hunts for jobs online. There must be more worthwhile jobs out there.

She notices her eccentric neighbour Berthold is there too, sitting at a corner table deep in conversation with a pretty middle-aged woman with auburn hair. They both look a bit flushed. M-mm, she thinks. Something's going on there.

‘Hi!' she greets him, but he just smiles mysteriously. He is strange, but not half as weird as the old lady he lives with – who, according to Len the wheelchair man, is not his mother at all, but just pretends to be. His new love-interest looks nice though, despite her funny hairstyle.

She logs on. There are emails from Jessie and Laura asking how she's getting on, and an invitation to a party at Billy's tonight. And – her pulse quickens – here's a response from a job she'd applied for, inviting her for an interview. It's a junior position with an investment company based at Canary Wharf, a household name, at least in some kinds of households. Good
pay; terrific prospects. It's exactly what she'd been hoping for. But now she hesitates.

There's also an email from an NGO promoting women's enterprise in sub-Saharan Africa, inviting her for an interview. The pay is pitiful compared with the other, but the job is interesting and carries a lot of responsibility, and its African base is in Nairobi, so she'd be able to stay with her grandma. She can apply for both and make up her mind later.

Both jobs are asking for references, which is kind of awkward at the moment, but instead of just naming her professors at uni she writes an email to Gillian Chalmers, asking her to be a referee. She gets an automated ‘Out of Office' response. Gillian Chalmers is in Bucharest but will attend to her message on her return; there is no indication when that will be. The closing date for both of the jobs is tomorrow. She takes her courage in both hands and fills in the forms online, naming Gillian Chalmers as her first referee.

Mrs Penny phoned me next morning at nine o'clock. She said she had gathered together the singed and sodden forms from her office floor and wanted to express her gratitude. She didn't refer to our moment of body contact, and I didn't bring it up, but she did mention the coffee (Luigi had done us proud, with a double latte for me, and an extra-frothy cappuccino for her topped with chocolate, cinnamon
and
ground nutmeg), suggesting we might repeat the experience another day.

‘Absolutely,' I said with faux enthusiasm, for I was beginning to regret my moment of weakness in the council courtyard. I'd detected a whiff of neediness in the way she had clung to me. There's no bigger turn-on for a man than sexual desire in a woman. But if you surrender to the beast and sleep with them, you're trapped. They suffocate you with their niceness, and next thing you know you're sitting in the back row of the multiplex every Saturday, eating popcorn and watching George Clooney. No thank you. Add to this that she was a hostile agent of ‘Them', on whose whim I could be ousted from my home if I put a foot wrong, and you can see why I was holding back.

Besides, I was now bracing myself for another bureaucratic hassle. In the words of the Immortal Bard, ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.' I had just received a letter from the Department of Work and Pensions, another outrider of ‘Them', which winked at me evilly from its brown-envelope window.

We are conducting a radical overhaul of the system, which will put the needs of you the jobseeker first
, it sneered, inviting me for a preliminary interview at Job Centre Plus to review my continuing entitlement to benefit.

I bumped into Legless Len in the ground-floor lobby, and learned that he had received one too. He was bristling with positivity.

‘I reckon they've found me a job, Bert. They reassessed my capabilities!'

‘That's brilliant, Len.'

‘Let's hope you're in luck too, Bert.'

‘As the Immortal Bard would say, the miserable have no other medicine but only hope.'

‘That's truly profound. I'll add it to my collection of positive sayings.' He wheeled away, humming cheerfully.

When I arrived at the Job Centre for my appointment, I found to my dismay that gorgeous Justin had gone, and the new representative of ‘Them' was George McReady, a lean foxy gingery man with a goatee beard and a Dundee accent.

‘What happened to Justin?' I asked.

‘He wasn't meeting his tarrgets, Mr Sideboatum,' he burred. ‘And you're one of them. I see you were last employed four months ago, and that was only for two weeks.'

‘Two weeks is bloody good, in my line of b-business.'

‘Well, in my line of business it's pathetic. How many jobs have you actually applied forr?'

‘Since then?' I racked my brain. It all seemed to blur into one long haze of failure. ‘About ten. And f-four auditions.' Possibly I was exaggerating a bit.

He perused a dog-eared document covered in Justin's scribbles and ticks, and tutted.

‘According to your agreement, your tarrget is six applications per week. Of which two in six should lead to an interview.'

‘Six per week? That's absurd. Six p-p-per month would be p-pushing it.'

‘Is this, or is it not, your signature, Mr Sideboatum?' He pushed the paper towards me.

My chest tightened. My head started to spin. His name and the vague hint of menace in his Dundee accent brought up a strange bubble in my memory of a long-ago performance of the Scottish play at Newcastle in which I'd played the porter. To great critical acclaim, I might add.

‘Faith, sirr, it is.' I could hear the tense hush in the theatre, the audience breathless in their seats.

‘When you signed, you committed yourself to six applications perr week. You're bound by the agrreement, and you've not perrforrmed.' He leaned across the desk with a leer, and I could feel the bones of my resolution snapping between his foxy jaws. ‘Do you have any excuse to offer?'

‘Faith sir, I was carousing till the second cock: and drink, sir, is a great p-provoker of nose-painting, sleep and urine.' There was a murmur of laughter in the audience.

McReady looked at me coldly. His eyes were very light grey, with hard points of black at the centre. ‘Are you takin' the piss, Mr Sideboatum? If so, I dinna advise it.'

‘Lechery, sirr, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but takes away the p-perrforrmance.' More laughter.

‘I've no idea what you're on about. But here's a couple of jobs to get you started. Come back same time next week. Let's see how you've got on. If not, it will give me great perrsonal pleasure to sanction your JSA, and send you for retraining.'

He clicked the print button, and handed me two sheets containing details of the Mickey Mouse job and the funeral parlour job.

‘Sanction?' This wasn't in the script.

‘In your case it means cut it off.' He flicked his fingers across his throat. ‘Next!'

An aged hunched man, unshaved, uncombed, and reeking of alcohol, shuffled over and slumped in the chair I had vacated, while I shuffled over to the side-room where the computers and printers were chained to desks under the steely eye of a chignoned matron with a cruel mouth and ultra-clean hands who could have been a central-casting Scottish Lady.

I started to draft an application for the funeral parlour – it was indeed Wrest 'n' Piece – but an image floated into my mind of Jimmy the Dog at my mother's funeral, floundering in the mud with an unknown corpse, declaring, ‘We're helping to prepare the unemployed for useful jobs.' Not me, Jimmy, not me. I put the sheet aside and reached for the Mickey Mouse application. ‘Drama students or similar sought for retail promotion opportunity.'

The aged alcoholic who had followed me into the interview was now slumped in front of the computer next to mine, stinking heavily and snoring lightly. His screen read:
Retraining opportunities in retail
.

The Scottish Lady approached, rubbing her hands and muttering, ‘Who'd have thought an old man to have so much booze in him.'

She kicked the back of his chair. He jumped up with a start and stared around him with bloodshot eyes, his glance falling on the paper I had just discarded.

‘Aaargh! The graveyard ghouls!' He leaned towards me and laid a hand on my arm. ‘Don't touch it without a bunch of garlic, mate!'

‘You know the firm?'

‘Wrest 'n' Piece. Worked for them for forty years. Know
everything there is to know about laying out a corpse. It was a good firm while old Mr Wrest was in charge.' He tossed his grizzled locks. ‘Then he died and his daughter took over – with her big-nose boyfriend, James. Decided to expand the business. Privately managed cems and crems, bidding for local authority contracts. Tried to cut their costs. Laid off anybody that knew anything about bodies. Brought in a bunch of young uns off the dole to do it for free.'

‘For free?'

‘Unpaid work experience. Thirty hours a week.' He gripped my arm. ‘They wanted me to train them up before I left. Sod that, I said. You've got to show a bit of respect for the dead. Mind you, I never got as much lip from a corpse as I did from them young uns.'

‘Are you …?' Through a horror of mud and pain a memory crawled into my mind, ‘… Philip?'

‘Phil Gatsnug. That's me. Master mortician. Artist of the dead.'

‘My mother –'

‘Yeah, the old lady. Your mum, was it? Awful shame. I did my best, but the young uns messed her up. We had to send her straight to cremation. But you should ask for her ashes. They always give you the ashes.'

‘Thanks, Phil. I got the ashes. But how can I be sure they're the right ones? Given the cock-ups we've had so far.'

‘Sometimes they do mix 'em up.' He fixed me with a bloodshot gaze. ‘Whoever they belong to, my friend, treat 'em with respect. It's somebody's mum or dad. Say a prayer and sprinkle them in a nice place. Not on your porridge, ha ha!'

His words struck a chord in me. I resolved forthwith to honour the ashes of the unknown crematee in the hope that someone would do the same for Mother; I would sprinkle them at the heart of the cherry grove that she had loved. Of
course, if anyone asked I would have to pretend it was a dead parrot.

‘So you resigned from your job?' I asked.

‘Yes, and according to this austerity Nazi,' he waved his arms in the direction of foxy McReady, ‘it makes me voluntarily unemployed, so I'm not entitled to any money for three months. I've been living off tinned beans from the charity food bank for the past fortnight, but it runs out tomorrow. I'll have to go and scrounge some bread off the pigeons in the park.'

‘But with your skills, surely you'd find another job easily? People are dying all the time. Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die.'

‘Not enough, mate. Besides, all the big money is in weddings: funerals they want to do on the cheap. I won't compromise, see? I like to do a good job.'

I felt a sudden bond of kinship with this wounded man, this fellow soldier injured in life's battle against the mean, the slick, the self-serving, the ‘it'll have to do' mentality. Despite the odds stacked against him, he had tried to do the right thing by my mother. I was glad that he'd been the last person to handle her mortal remains.

‘Mmm. Thanks for trying, pal. Maybe you should set up on your own.'

‘Good idea, mate.'

With a heavy heart I completed the application form for the Mickey Mouse job, signed it, and gave it to ‘Them' to process.

When I tiptoed out of the Job Centre, Phil Gatsnug was asleep again, his head resting on the keyboard.

I got back to Madeley Court around five o'clock of a sultry afternoon; I had wasted most of the sweet day in the airless Job
Centre. Legless Len was hanging around in the grove enjoying the last of the sunshine that dappled through the cherry leaves.

‘How did it go, pal?' I asked him.

‘Great.' He tipped up his Arsenal cap so I could see his shining face. ‘Telephone sales. Well-known legal firm. My job will be informing the public of their right to redress for wrongful mis-selling of financial services. Not bad, eh? I'll be glad to be off benefit and earning again. Like the man at the Job Centre said, it'll build my self-esteem and boost my aspirations.' His face glowed. ‘He said he's incredibly passionate about aspiration.'

Had I been wrong to sneer at Len's dreams? There were jobs out there, even for the legless. If double amputation was no impediment to employment, why should a slight stress-stutter hold me back? Maybe Nazi George truly had my best interests at heart and all I really needed was a kick up the backside. My eyes watered with gratitude and resolve. Mickey Mouse, here I come!

‘Well done, Len! Great! When d'you start?'

‘Straight away. Self-employed. Flexible working. Zero-hours contract. How about yourself, Bert?'

‘Yeah, I sent off an application too.'

Inna was in the kitchen, slapping minced pork for kobabski about on a chopping board, mixing in crushed garlic and finely chopped herbs, ready to force through a wide funnel into a skin made from the gut of some unknown animal. Her neat, newly black plait was coiled at the back of her head, and a frown of concentration sat between her stern black brows. In the weeks that she had lived with me, her cuisine had become more sophisticated, though using the same basic ingredients.

I told her the good news concerning the flat, and she laughed and wiped her hands on her apron before giving me a hug. Then we tipped back a glass of vodka to celebrate.

I didn't have the heart to tell her that the tenancy transfer was all but complete and I soon wouldn't be needing her services any more.