33 East

by Susannah Rickards

  She had it all worked out. Her mum had a Freedom Pass thing so Eva had planned to get the bus to show her Clissold Park and Sutton House, to feed the ducks and have picnics and look at the rose gardens and sit by Regent’s Canal, but it looked like it wasn’t going to come off.

  The problem was two-fold. First, her mum found the idea that she was entitled to free travel in the nation’s capital simply too incredulous for words. In fact it took a whole day’s persistent cajoling and convincing on Eva’s part to get her to give it a go. (‘Don’t worry Mum I will have two pounds in my hand if the driver says it isn’t valid’ Eva explained, at which her mum nearly fainted at the idea that a bus journey anywhere could cost two whole pounds.)

  And second, it nearly didn’t matter anyway as her mum’s refusal to admit that her hip was giving her gip, which would be an acceptance that she is getting old, meant that she claimed that she couldn’t walk as far as the bus stop anyway.

  ‘I don’t want to walk anywhere where I can’t see my destination when I start,’ Eva’s mum said as she opened the window and started smoking a Silk Cut, half-heartedly puffing the smoke out the window. At this Eva saw red and asked her, perhaps a little too curtly, to smoke outside as they had agreed.

  ‘But it’s raining,’ her mum had said.

  ‘Then don’t smoke’ snapped Eva.

  Ironically enough that seemed to clear the air for some reason. And the next day, when the rain had stopped, Eva took her mum and Milly down to the stop, which wasn’t that far away after all, and they set off to enjoy the Geffrye Museum. At the bus stop a small Turkish-looking man helped lift Milly’s buggy on to the bus and then offered his arm to Eva’s mum, who took it graciously as he doffed his pork pie hat and helped her on board as well. He then turned and offered Milly a strange Turkish sweet. Milly got all shy and refused it, so Eva stuffed it in the changing bag and apologised. The man simply doffed his hat again and got off the bus and smiled some more.

  Mum went home four days later, a day later than she planned, which cost Eva 40 quid, but Eva didn’t mind. The Hackney Factor had worked its magic and a trip that could have left a bad smell in the air merely left the faintest whiff of cigarette smoke in her flat.

  The 48 arrived and they boarded. Half way towards Hackney Central, Milly fell asleep and Eva sat down. And she smiled to herself a little smile.

  ***

  The Royal Inn on the Park was pretty empty today. Weekday lunchtimes the vibe was chilled and pleasantly not busy. A young couple with a wad of estate agents’ details of flats for sale in the area drank Polish beer and chatted on their mobiles. A forty-something creative-looking bloke typed on his Apple Mac and drank Pernod and water with ice. He was eating sausage and mash, which Susan thought must be a drink/food combination too far, but he looked happy. Someone in a waxed jacket read a trashy book with two muddy dogs asleep at his feet. The two people behind the bar were doing the Guardian quick crossword at the end of the bar. It felt like a comfy place. A place in which she belonged. She was 33 and a woman and alone in a bar and it felt good. It felt right.

  Susan lived just down Victoria Park Road in one of those 70s flats. Flats she had recently discovered were designed by the great Basil Spence, or at least his practice. She’d lived there for ten years and couldn’t see her self ever moving anywhere else. ‘The Village’ – what up-their-own-arse residents of Victoria Park called the collection of shops that huddled around the roundabout at the crossroads of Viccy Park Road and Lauriston Road – had become a little poncey and, well, up-its-own-arse, but it still felt vital and she had made some good friends there. And if The Village itself ever got too much, there was always Broadway Market, an old drovers’ track that shepherds used to use to drive sheep to Smithfields back in the day. True, that when Susan had first moved to E9, Broadway Market consisted of one stall selling carrots and cabbage and a dodgy-looking bloke trying to sell crack, but now it had grown into a bustling Saturday market with street food and stalls selling guitars and bikes and olives and hot-smoked stuff and Isle of Wight tomatoes. And, as a consequence, the whole area had perked up and was felt like somewhere that had a soul. Somewhere with an edge still, but somewhere that wasn’t a shit-hole. But, on a Thursday lunchtime, the Royal was a lovely place to go and sit in the sun and have lunch and a drink or two.

  Susan ordered paté and toast and a large glass of white wine and sat down with her notebook writing a list of things she needed from Tesco’s. Normally she’d shop locally or get a delivery, Ocado probably, but she’d taken a few days off work that she was owed in lieu and was going a bit stir crazy in her flat. Her husband tried to take some holiday as well, but he was working on a massive project and he just couldn’t get the time off, so she was on her own for a few days, something that she wasn’t used to. In fact yesterday the barman in the Pub on the Park, not to be confused with the Royal Inn on the Park, the former being in London Fields the latter by Viccy Park, apologised for not recognising her without her husband in tow: ‘You two are a bit of a double act,’ he explained, which she thought was lovely and repulsive at the same time.

  She thought she’d cook something this afternoon and although her kitchen cupboards and fridge seemed to be full she just couldn’t muster up the energy to assemble any of it into anything that might resemble a dish. Instead she thought she’d bake, something she used to do with her mum, and sometimes her nan, on Saturday mornings. Flour, sugar, desiccated coconut and jam were calling and perhaps a few other bits too, and a trip on the 277 seemed a good way to get out for a bit.

  She finished her meal and drank the last of her wine and looked out of the great windows down Lauriston Road into Bethnal Green for a bus. The long, straight road dissected the park and at the roundabout by the Crown Gate and The Crown pub a bus was heading her way. Susan grabbed her book and her pen and her bag and left the Royal as quickly as she could without actually running full pelt. The bus stop is about 200 metres from the pub, on the other side of the road and the bus sped past her and screeched to halt leaving her about half way left to go. In her heart Susan knew there would be another bus along in a few minutes and it was a lovely day so she wasn’t sure why she was running. Is it something we are taught or is it innate? Nurture or nature? Perhaps there is a bit inside us that harkens back to when we were hunters chasing our prey; can’t let this one get away, don’t know when the next one might turn up? Kind of the predatory equivalent of the fight or flight thing. Anyway, for whatever reason, Susan darted across the road, which is strangely very wide at that part, and towards the bus. Beep beep beep, she could hear the doors closing and the see nearside indicator cancelling. Arse, she was too late and only just too late too, which is the worst sort of late. Being late by ages is okay, but just missing something is somehow much worse. Just for the hell of it, to finish what she started she supposed, she continued to run up to the bus expecting to see the driver looking over his shoulder for a space to get out and on his way. But instead he was looking at her coming up alongside the bus and pressing the button to open the doors again. A little out of breath, she climbed on, thanked him and pressed her Oyster card against the yellow reader. A satisfying electronic chirrup answered her and she considered herself the luckiest person in Christendom. Not only for the fact that the bus driver waited for her, but because it was sunny and she was off work and she lived in such a great place.

  ***

  In the little wine shop on Old Street, just south of Hoxton Square, Keith was buying a half bottle of Black Muscat. For some reason they only sold the half bottles in the UK and they went down too well. Not that Keith drank particularly a lot, or that he had particularly expensive tastes, he just liked the Black Muscat and had decided a long time ago that money is too vulgar to be only spent on necessities. He’d been in the shop a few times before and liked it a lot. It was well stocked and run by knowledgeable people who enjoyed what they did. There weren’t many shops like that about any more: The Algerian Coffee Shop on Old Compton Street; the
pipe and cigar shop on Threadneedle Street, Smoker’s Paradise or something, not that he smoked any more; and the umbrella shop on New Oxford Street (he couldn’t remember the name of that one at all); not many. But this one was his favourite. He eyed the bottles of Cristal Champagne and the cases of Gavi di Gavi and Hennessey XO Cognac and promised himself that he’d drink more – something his doctor wouldn’t be pleased about, but an admirable hobby he thought for a fifty-seven-year-old man to take up. He handed the small bottle over the counter to be swaddled in tissue and then gave over his card. The bottle was popped into a bag and the terminal thing handed across for him to pin his chip. ‘Pin Accepted’ pinged up on the screen and he handed the terminal back. The shop assistant, the man who owned the place thought Keith, had a pained look on his face.

  ‘It’s jammed again,’ he grimaced and, placing the glasses that dangled around his neck on to his face he picked up a ‘waiter’s friend’ and prised the top off the machine with the little knife. From inside the terminal he slowly pulled a very screwed-up piece of paper and ripped it off with the gusto of a well-trained sommelier refilling an empty glass.

  ‘I’m sorry sir, but I can’t see if it’s gone through or not. I think it has, but I can’t see what it says.’ he said offering the pleated piece of paper to Keith which, Keith had to agree, was illegible.

  ‘Do you want me to pay again?’ Keith asked.

  ‘I think it’s gone through,’ the shop owner mused. ‘No, sir, perhaps you can have a look at a statement in the next few days and see if it shows up. If not would you mind popping back to pay, if it does then it’s all okay.’

  Keith thanked the man and left the shop. A 55 bus was coming up the road and Keith boarded it en route to the Hackney Empire.

  It wasn’t until the bus had turned the corner and was half way up Hackney Road, one of the most desolate roads in London thought Keith, that he realised what had just happened. Nowhere else in London but Hackney would a shopkeeper trust him to go back and pay if he hadn’t have been charged. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to pay again sir and if it shows up twice, please come back for a refund,’ is what he would have expected. But Hackney was different. Hackney people were good people: artisans; thinkers; lovers; musicians; writers; artists; and loose cannons. The sort of people who’d trust you to go back and pay if they happened not to have the first time.

  His dreamy thoughts were soon put to the back of his mind as the bus driver seemed to be trying to break some world land speed record as he raced past Cambridge Heath Station and up Mare Street. The whole fleet of London buses had been fitted with information displays in the last year or so, with details of what the next stop is going to be. A great invention thought Keith, now no one has any excuse not to get a bus. To make the system even better, a soothing woman’s voice accompanies the changing signs announcing the number of the bus, its destination and the name of the next stop. Sometimes, on busy routes, she orders people ‘not to stand on the upper deck or stairs’ or to ‘please move down inside the bus’. Every now and again the bus will be held at a stop and the soothing voice will explain that ‘this bus is being held here briefly to help regulate the service’. Perhaps they needed to record a new message thought Keith: ‘this bus is being driven at 70 miles an hour to help regulate the service’. Perhaps he’d go online and suggest it.

  As the person sitting next to Keith left, Keith shuffled over to allow people to sit down. It really pissed him off when people sat in the aisle seat. Especially when they placed their bag next to them and pretended not to notice anyone wanting to sit down. It was like when you worked in an office – okay, Keith hadn’t worked in an office for ages, but he remembered – when you filled your instant coffee cup with water from the crappy electric kettle in the cheaply-furnished ‘kitchen area’ and then didn’t refill it. Have some consideration for other people, was his point. As he slid over he picked up a copy of some free newspaper that had been left behind. What a shit waste of time he thought as he folded it up and moved it on to the seat he’d just vacated. He really couldn’t stand the vacuous pseudo-journalism all those free papers were now spouting across London. Okay, their passively right-wing editorial leanings were abhorrent, but what was really wrong with them was their lack of depth. Cute pictures of squirrels that had fallen from trees sat cheek-by-jowl with paedophilia cases and sensationalist Daily-Mailia.

  And, in this copy, the front page didn’t let him down. ‘Negative equity a reality for London’s home-owners’ was the empty headline. He was sure that house prices were not growing as fast as people wanted, but that was surely a function of the fact that people, and especially London people, looked on their house as an investment and not just a place to live.

  Keith lived on Cassland Road. Actually he lived in one of the large houses on the semicircular bit of Cassland road just north of Well Street Common. He’d lived there since the early seventies with his partner. (He didn’t like the word ‘partner’, it didn’t feel important enough, more suited to how one might refer to an old dog. And as for ‘girlfriend’; well that simply too weird for words.) And he considered himself lucky. Not just in the I-live-where-I-want-to-live way, or in the my-house-is-ace-and-still-increasing-in-value way. Keith was lucky because his house had paid for itself – literally.

  It was the early seventies and that part of Hackney wasn’t particularly upmarket (in fact, no part of Hackney is particularly upmarket even now, not even with the Olympic village spreading its light across east London like a benign dictator of municipal spending) when Keith and Sharon bought their place. In fact, it was a right tip. Previously owned by a Jewish couple who had fled the Holocaust in the years running up to WWII, it seemed like a crazy museum when they had moved in. Dark rooms, old wiring, antimacassars, stale smells and cold comfort. The old couple, after fleeing Herr Hitler’s worst and settling in E9 had bought up two sons and a daughter there. The man had died a year before the house went on the market and, as is the case in so many of these close relationships, his wife nine months later. The eldest son sold it to Keith and Sharon for six thousand pounds. The son couldn’t bring himself to clear the house, either through laziness or repulsion to the idea of breaking up his family home and Keith and Sharon moved in to a spookily fully furnished house, albeit one furnished in or around 1955.

  Keith had never been super house-proud, but the place was like a morgue with the dead couple’s stuff everywhere. So, even though they didn’t have any furniture of their own Keith and Sharon started to clear the place and make it theirs. Sharon was, after all, pregnant and the cigarette-tainted settee was not what she wanted her son or daughter to play on. First, the drawers and tallboys and cabinets went. They were well made, but not what people wanted in these modern times. Keith got a few quid for them, but that was all. Then the soft furnishings and the curtains and all that stuff. It was hard work actually. The old couple were by no means slovenly, but perhaps their eyesight had deteriorated along with their propensity to clean over the past few years. Dust seemed to pervade and weigh down every atom of every item they moved or threw away or sold or burned. But the armchairs and the sideboards were nothing compared with the rugs. None of the rooms had wall-to-wall, as was the mode those days. Instead threadbare woollen rugs lay heavy in the centre of every space. Rugs that belched clouds of dust if you lifted a corner and dropped them. Keith hated the idea of lifting them, but the idea of his child crawling on them was an even bigger turn off, so he put on a pair of overalls and wrapped a handkerchief over his face and, along with Sharon, began the task of rolling up the rugs.

  They started in the front room, on their hands and knees, making a kind of grime-encrusted swiss-roll, all ready to lift up and out, into the back of a Bedford van Keith had borrowed the day before.

  ‘Look, The Beatles take America!’ Sharon exclaimed.

  In her hand was a browned and crispy copy of the Daily Mirror from 1960-something that had been lying under the rug.

  In front of them, where the rug
had lain was a week’s worth of tabloid, carefully spread out like a paper underlay. Keith picked up another page and a large white oblong of paper fell from the sheets. Then another. Sharon lifted the sports page and there were some more.

  ‘These are fivers’ Keith acknowledged, incredulously.

  ‘There must be 40 or 50 here’ Sharon replied.

  She was wrong. There were 328 under that rug and 138 under the equally grimy rug in the back parlour. Then 312 in the hall, 626 stuffed in the unused chimney flue in the bedroom, 52 in a little cubbyhole in the toilet and 234 in an old leather football they found in the attic.

  Eight thousand, four hundred and fifty pounds. Okay it was in old money that, since decimalisation, no one could spend, but the banks were still accepting it and exchanging it for bright shiny New Pence.

  The house that had cost them £6,000 had made them £2,450. Real money.

  Keith felt genuinely bad for anyone stuck in the negative equity trap, especially first time buyers, and he felt a pang of guilt that it wasn’t an issue for him.

  ***

  At 1.20 the 48 approached the Hackney Town hall stop from the north and Eva reached down to give Milly a carton of juice and strap her in, ready to get off the bus. At the same time, across the road, directly outside the Town Hall below the one-tonne-a-letter typography that the Hackney Empire wears like a concrete and steel toupee, the 277 and the 55 pull up and Susan and Keith both wait to get off their respective buses. One is blocked by a really much too fat woman with a hundred Argos bags, the other by a frail old man, shaking as he tries to lift himself down the step. As they both manage to get off Eva and Milly have crossed the road and Milly is struggling to get out of her buggy so she can run about in the little square that sits corned by the library, the town hall and the theatre, so her mum reaches down and lets her out. Susan looks at the town hall and remembers her wedding day there. Keith helps the much too fat woman with her bags and sets off towards the Empire.