The Lubetkin Legacy (25 page)

‘Well, I've put myself down for a nice little one-bed flat, the sooner the better. I can't afford the rent in here no more because of the spare-room subsidence.'

‘What are you talking about, Len? You do talk some crap.' I struck out pre-emptively, to deflect attention from my own irregular situation regarding the spare bedroom.

‘It's costing me twenty quid a week off of my benefit because I've got two bedrooms from when our Joey was at home.'

‘Isn't that where you breed your budgies now?'

‘I know, but like the man from the Council said, budgies are a luxury if you're on benefit. I agree with the policy, like, but I just can't afford the money, and there's nowhere cheaper I can go because of the wheelchair.'

I quipped, ‘You could always eat the budgies.' I realise it was an ill-judged remark, but Len's dogged defence of the indefensible can be irritating.

‘Bert, why are you always so down on everything? Some good may come out of it,' he said.

He was right. I, who had grown up untainted by worldliness and cynicism, had become both worldly and cynical.

‘Grow up, Len,' I said.

At that moment a small red car drew up in the parking area at the side of the grove, the door opened and a dainty high-heeled shoe reached for the ground. A flea-bitten ankle followed. My heart thudded a warning. Inna, Mrs Crazy and Mrs Penny all in one place could be a deadly combination.

‘Aha, is fatty Madame Penny!' Inna waved her arms.

Mrs Penny approached. She was wearing an interesting above-the-knee Campbell tartan outfit with a matching tam-o'-shanter-style pompom hat. It's amazing what people give to Oxfam these days.

‘Mrs Lukashenko! How lovely to see you!' She shook Inna's hand, then she turned to me. ‘Do you know what's going on here, Berthold? I was called out for an emergency accommodation crisis following eviction.'

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Mrs Crazy watching us with a curious frown. She began to edge towards us. We were saved by the councillor who, spotting Mrs Penny's council ID tag, came bustling up, his face gleaming with official sweat.

‘Mrs … er … Penny,' he bent and peered at the name. ‘I'm trying to get these … er … people moved. The bailiffs have been called but there's been some delay. Have we got somewhere to put them? Do any of the hostels have vacancies?'

A bead of moisture trickled down his nose, and disappeared
into the hole made by his nose-stud. Several more of the tent-dwellers had crawled out and stood muttering among themselves. The woman with the baby sat on the bench to feed it again.

‘I've just run a check, Councillor Dunster. There's nothing closer than Cleethorpes.'

‘Cleethorpes is a very nice place. Get them booked in before some other bloody borough nicks it.'

‘But it's all single homeless up there. Nothing for families.'

He turned towards them and spoke loudly and slowly. ‘Do you understand? We're going to put you in a very nice B&B in Cleethorpes.'

‘
Ce se fucking intampla
?' said Mr Y-fronts.

Inna hurried over to translate, her hands and eyes animated. I have no idea what she said, but as she spoke I observed expressions of dismay cover their faces. The man with a dog on a string let out a torrent of expletives and spat on the ground. The old lady uttered a low moan. The woman with the baby shrieked and clutched her child closer to her bosom. The big Y-fronts man staggered and keeled over in a dead faint.

Mrs Penny, clearly shaken by this display of emotion, cautioned, ‘We could be penalised for not providing suitable –'

The councillor threw up his hands. ‘So what can we do?' He had turned a deep, dangerous red.

‘We might be safer leaving them where they are for the time being.'

Inna translated and the tent-dwellers cheered. Violet clapped.

The councillor raised his palms in surrender. Mrs Crazy hit him with her umbrella. His knees crumpled and he banged his head against a tree trunk on his way down.

Mrs Penny whipped out her mobile phone and called for an ambulance.

A while after the ambulance had woo-wooed away, and the bailiffs had arrived and been sent packing, Mrs Penny kicked off her shoes, threw off her pompom hat, and reclined like an exhausted flea-bitten, tartan-clad odalisque on the sofa in our sitting room, wiggling her mauve-tipped toes while Inna brought us cups of mint tea.

‘You're a lucky man, Berthold, having a mother who looks after you so well.'

‘Yes. We look after each other.'

Although she did indeed look after me well, Inna would often disappear to her old haunts in Hampstead for the whole afternoon. But today, for some annoying reason, she chose to hang around the flat, leaving the kitchen door open as if to keep an eye on our visitor. Maybe she'd cottoned on that I wasn't gay, after all, and thought if she weren't there I might be tempted to inflict my lust on her. As if.

‘It's funny, a woman I spoke to down there just now was saying Mrs Lukashenko isn't really your mother.'

My heart thumped in my chest. Despite her odalisque pose, she was still a representative of ‘Them', trying to catch us off guard.

‘Lily's got a sister, and she gets them confused. They do look a bit alike. That woman's quite crazy. Early-onset dementia. A sad case.' I tried to cast Inna a warning look, but she had disappeared into the kitchen again, and soon I could smell the heavenly aroma of roasting almonds and honey wafting in above Mrs Penny's flowery perfume.

‘Mm. I thought so. She had a sort of fanatic gleam in her eyes. And the way she clobbered that councillor. Nobody deserves that, even someone as morally compromised as Desmond Dunster. A dangerously deluded psychopath, I would say. I come across a lot of them, in my line of work.'

‘Where they put dangerous cycle path?' Inna called from the kitchen.

‘And why morally compromised?' I added.

She sighed. ‘You know, trips abroad, no expenses spared. Hand in glove with the developers. But don't tell anyone I said that. While us lot, the staff, we have to implement the policies.'

She scratched her ankles, and I was wondering how to ask her whether she had pets with fleas, when she added, ‘The things you have to do in this job. Like making people homeless, or cutting their benefit off. Or forcing them to have their pets put down. It's not a lot of fun.'

‘Indeed not.'

‘I went into housing because I wanted to help people, and all I do is bring them misery.'

A look of sorrow clouded her odalisque features and I wondered whether I had misjudged her motives. Ought I to put a comforting arm around her?

While I hesitated, Inna bustled in with a plate of warm slatki. ‘It, it!'

‘Please,' I handed the plate to Eustachia. She looked solid enough to withstand a small dose of poison, and I succumbed too, having survived thus far.

‘I don't mind if I do.' With an anguished look, she wolfed down two, while Inna watched smiling.

‘Mmm. These are yummy. Did you make them yourself, Mrs Lukashenko?'

Inna nodded.

‘Oh dear, I'm not supposed to eat pastries. I'm trying to lose weight. But sometimes I just need something sweet to take the bitter taste away. I'm curious, Mrs Lukashenko,' she added. ‘What did you say to those Romanians, to make them react like that?'

‘I remind them October 1941 in Odessa. Romanian soldiers take Jews away. Romanians tell them they go for rehousing, but they take all to central square and shoot them. Then they throw on gasoline and make it fire. Everybody burned dead.'

‘My God!' Mrs Penny dabbed her forehead with a tissue. ‘It makes our Government's policies seem relatively humane.'

Next day I was still feeling a bit queasy, maybe from the slitki, and I decided to treat myself to breakfast in bed, which I hoped Inna would make. But despite repeated hints, at eleven o'clock she suddenly expressed a need to go out. She applied a dab of lipstick and rouge, tied a headscarf over her newly black hair, rammed a bulging brown A4-sized envelope into her bag and headed out mysteriously into the late morning.

‘Where are you going, Inna?'

‘Hempstead. I got business. Back soon, Mister Bertie.'

Maybe she was going to stock up on prussic acid, though Eustachia, I noted, seemed unaffected by the slatki, even though she had eaten six of them. But now I grew curious about the contents of the brown envelope.

‘What sort of business?'

‘Mind it own business,' she snapped.

I got up and made my own breakfast, wondering what she was up to. Business. I wished I too had some business, somewhere I needed to go to, or a script to be working on. It was at least four months since I had trod the boards. I had had no response to the Brent Cross Mickey Mouse application. The need to be usefully employed itched like a skin disease of the soul. For all his nastiness, Nazi George had stirred a hunger in me for meaningful activity, a role in the great drama of our national life. Maybe I should write my own part in my own play; but what would I write about? I stared out of the window at the cherry grove with its winding path between the trees, now gloriously heavy-leaved, pregnant with summer, timeless
yet vulnerable. The hero would be a middle-aged man seeking a renewed meaning in life who chains himself to a tree in defiance of the cataclysm of post-modernity. It was a great subject; but hadn't it been done already? As I was sketching out a dramatic structure in my mind, the doorbell rang:
Ding dong! Ding dong! Ding dong!

It was Legless Len, in his wheelchair, his thumb still jabbing aggressively at the bell.

‘Whoa, Len. One ring is enough. You'll waken the dead!'

An unfortunate slip of the tongue for one recently bereaved, but Len didn't notice.

‘Listen, pal, I'm having a bit of trouble. Can you lend me a tenner?' Before I could answer, he grasped the wheels of his chair and rolled himself into the flat.

‘I'm a bit strapped for cash myself, Len.' This was embarrassing. ‘I thought you were working in tele-sales.'

‘Nah! Got sanctioned off, didn't I? Benefit stopped. Just like that.'

‘What happened?'

‘Zero-hours contract. Got to be on call twenty-four-seven. Didn't go out for four days. Waited by the phone, but the call never came. Then yesterday, when it all kicked off down in the grove, I went to see what was going on, and, would you believe it, that's when the buggers phoned from the Job Centre. To make sure I was still available for work.' He took off his Arsenal cap and combed his fingers through his hair, which seemed thinner and greyer since I had last seen it. ‘Do you reckon one of them Romanians grassed me up?'

‘I think that's unlikely, Len. You'd need to speak a bit of English for that.'

‘Well, someone must've done. Why d'they pick just that moment to phone?'

‘It's a mystery. Sorry I can't help, pal. I haven't got any work myself.'

‘I've heard it's the immigrants that's undercutting us.' He lowered his voice as though he was imparting confidential information, though I had read the same sentiment recently in the newspaper at Luigi's. ‘If you don't give a foreigner a job, next thing you know the PC brigade's got you up against the Court of European Rights.'

‘Yes, Len. The country's going to the dogs. I blame the foreigners and the budgies.'

He rubbed his forehead. ‘Why the budgies, Bert?'

‘Why the foreigners, Len?' I smirked. ‘They can't be benefit scroungers one minute and undercutting our wages the next.'

As I unleashed this devastating repartee, an unpleasant thought popped into my head. I was due for another visit to the Job Centre soon. Would I now be dragooned into the Wrest 'n' Piece back-to-work Training Programme? I wondered how Phil Gatsnug had got on since my last visit.

‘But can't you bank on the food bank at times like this, Len? Apparently there's plenty of baked beans out there for the taking. I've got a spare tin of tuna, if that's any help.'

‘Thanks for the thought. It's not food I need, Bert, it's electricity. My bill's overdue. They've cut me off. I need to keep my insulin chilled. I had a funny turn yesterday.'

‘I'll ask Inna when she comes back.'

‘Thanks. I'd appreciate it.'

Len wheeled himself back over the threshold and down the walkway towards the lift. Thank God he had not accepted the tin of tuna. Far from being ‘spare' it was, in fact, all that stood between me and starvation, at least until Inna got back.

I closed the door behind him, and that's when I noticed a slim purple envelope lurking on the doormat. How long had it been there? The postman used to come first thing in the
morning, but now, thanks to the collapse of civilisation as we know it, he can come at any time during the day. Soon, no doubt, it will all be delivered by drones and even postmen will be a thing of the past.

I bent to retrieve it. It was a letter from Smøk & Miras Promotions informing me that all the promotional vacancies at the Brent Cross Shopping Centre had been filled, but inviting me to an interview at 12.30 p.m. today for a similar opportunity to promote a new brand of coffee at major railway stations. Coffee – that was my thing! It could be my first step to Clooneydom! I glanced at my watch. It was 12.30. The address was near King's Cross. Normally, I would have hopped on my bike, but as fate had cruelly unwheeled me, I grabbed my jacket and raced down the stairs to the bus stop.

It was 1.15 when I arrived at the fourth-floor (no lift – puff puff) office of Smøk & Miras Promotions in a slim Georgian house on a cobbled side street overlooking a building site behind King's Cross. A lean young man in his mid-twenties with a shaved head and a strangely tattooed scalp was sitting on a high swivelling chair behind an enormous computer screen in a box-sized office with bare walls, a skylight and a black canvas folding chair. There was a not-unpleasant smell of coffee and musky aftershave.

‘Hi! Come in, Berthold! Cool name! I'm Darius. Have a seat.' He shook my hand and indicated the black chair, which was low like a deck chair, so my face came up to his knees.

‘Sorry I'm late. I only just got your letter.'

‘No problem. The other guys didn't show either. What it is – right – we've got totally a new concept in coffee, which is that it comes from beans!' He swivelled to face me with a radiant expression.

‘Cool!' I feigned surprised enthusiasm.

‘What you have to do – right – is hang out in the station forecourt at the rush hour between seven and ten a.m. and four and seven p.m., wearing a Bertie Bean outfit, and handing out free samples. Like these …' He passed me a small cotton bag, which looked as though it contained six coffee beans.

‘Cool!' My heart froze. Bertie Bean. Oh, horror, horror, horror!

‘We pay twenty quid for the day, cash in hand. No deductions.'

‘Isn't the minimum wage – ?'

‘That's the apprentice rate, man.' His voice was slightly high-pitched, as though the stress of lying had contracted his vocal chords.

‘But I'm –'

‘You may as well start at King's Cross. Come here just before seven on Monday and pick up your costume. How tall are you?'

‘Er, six foot, actually.' (For your information, that's an inch taller than George Clooney.)

‘Cool.'

He jotted it down on a Post-it note.

‘See you on Monday, right. Seven o'clock.'

‘Cool.'

As I descended the stairs after my cursory interview, I heard him locking the door of the office.

Seven o'clock. That meant getting up at six. It was several years since I had been out of bed so early. It would be a challenge.