The Lubetkin Legacy

by Marina Lewycka

  The African contingent is led by the young man from Malawi in a too-tight coloured shirt, tapping out a beat on a hand-drum. Some of the Zambians are drumming and dancing too, and a troupe of young people in shorts or ra-ra skirts, wearing face paint, are whooping, blowing whistles and banging tambourines like a carnival. Three white-blonde Polish girls from the second floor are jigging in high heels – why don’t they wear trainers or pumps? A couple of shy Indians are carrying a placard that reads We ♥ Trees, and Berthold is carrying the parrot in its cage, God knows why, and trying to teach it to say, ‘Save our trees!’ though all it can manage is, ‘Save our dead!’

  Greg’s not there, he’s at work, to her relief. Having him there, staring at her in that way, would make her feel self-conscious. She’s wearing a black, green and red T-shirt in the colours of the Kenyan flag, with a Maasai warrior shield in the middle, and she’s in a combative mood.

  Greg’s son, Arthur, has bunked off from school and is walking beside her in his grey school shorts, skipping up and down in time to the tambourines.

  ‘What’s that on your T-shirt?’ he asks.

  ‘It’s a Maasai shield. They’re a warrior tribe in Kenya.’

  ‘No kidding! Warrior Queen! So why are you called Violet? Violets are supposed to be shy. Like that poem we did at school. Do they have violets in Kenya?’

  No one has asked her that before. ‘They have African violets, I guess. They’re bigger and tougher.’ She flexes her arms, showing two tight bulges of muscle.

  ‘Are you going to have sex with my dad?’ No one has asked her that before either.

  ‘I don’t think so. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I think he fancies you. He likes girls like you.’

  ‘What do you mean, like me?’

  ‘You know, sort of …’ he looks embarrassed, ‘… sort of … brown?’

  One of the pensioners turns and stares.

  ‘Oh.’ She feels a stab of annoyance, but there’s no point in taking it out on the kid, who probably doesn’t know what he’s talking about. She wants to ask him why they are living in this crummy flat in Madeley Court when Greg clearly has money.

  But while she tries to work out a polite way to phrase the question the kid blurts out, ‘We’re moving soon? As soon as their divorce goes through, and Dad gets his money back? We’re moving to a better place? This flat just happened to come empty when Mum chucked him out?’

  ‘Why did your mum chuck him out?’

  ‘She caught him sleeping with the maid?’ he mumbles, his hair flopping into his eyes. ‘Now she’s having sex with this creep called Julian, who wears cords? It’s gross? They do it in the living room or in the kitchen, and they make me go upstairs to my bedroom?’

  He talks in an awkward hesitant lilt, making every statement into a question.

  She feels sorry for him. ‘Was the maid … sort of brown?’

  ‘Mmm. I guess so.’

  Behind them, a girl with blonde plaits and green face paint is tooting a rhythm on her whistle. The parrot squawks, ‘Save our dead!’

  ‘What happened to his money?’

  ‘Mum’s got it? She says if he tries to get it back she’ll tell the police what he done?’

  She pricks her ears up. This is interesting. ‘Why, what did he do?’

  Arthur shrugs. ‘Dunno. They won’t tell me. Dad says nobody understands that rich people have problems too?’

  ‘I’m sure.’ She tries to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. It’s not the kid’s fault.

  He flicks his hair from his eyes. ‘When we move, you can come with us if you like. Dad says there’s gonna be a massive swimming pool? Underneath the house? In the basement?’

  ‘Thanks, I’ll consider it. But I might go to Nairobi.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My grandma’s there.’

  ‘Wow! Can I come?’ He does another little hop.

  ‘Wouldn’t you miss your parents?’

  ‘Not really. I don’t think they’re that bothered about me? Like they mostly ignore me? Except if I’m in the way?’ His eyes are pale grey, like his father’s, but with a watery glint. ‘Have you still got a mum and dad?’

  ‘Yes. They live in Derbyshire. I suppose if I went to Kenya, I’d miss them. Life’s complicated, isn’t it?’

  As they straggle across the main road at the traffic lights, cars honk and flash their lights; the boy steps off the kerb without looking – his road sense isn’t good – and she grabs his hand to pull him out of the path of a white van that whizzes up out of nowhere. Then they turn left past a parade of shops and head up towards the Town Hall.

  At the Town Hall steps they are greeted by an overweight, sweaty middle-aged man with his hair in a ponytail and a silver nose-stud.

  ‘Welcome, people of Madeley Court! My name is Councillor Desmond Dunster,’ he yells into a megaphone. ‘I’m the elected representative for your area, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you who voted for me at the last election. And even if you didn’t vote for me I hope you will vote for me next time. I want to assure each and every one of you that I am working hard on your behalf, and I totally support your petition about … about the important matter which you have brought to my attention. I am a firm believer in closing the loop between the people and their elected representatives and I promise each and every one of you that I will strive my utmost …’

  What a trog. He goes on like that for ten minutes in a voice like a dentist’s drill.

  ‘Gerr on with it!’ shouts Len.

  ‘Amen!’ shouts Mrs Cracey.

  Berthold rests the parrot cage on a low stone wall, and sits beside it staring at the sky with his usual glum expression. Arthur sneaks up and pokes a twig through the bars of the cage. ‘God is trees! Trees is dead! Ding dong!’ The parrot goes mad, flapping its wings against the cage.

  The tambourine girls, fed up with listening to the speech, start up again.

  Bored, she strolls away from the crowd, along the pavement and around the side of the Town Hall, attracted by a patch of green that looks like a small park. Beside an entrance to the grey building that houses the Planning Department, a couple of guys are hunched over cigarettes, puffing away furtively, trying to maximise their nicotine intake in the shortest possible time. One of them is Mr Rowland.

  ‘Hi!’ She approaches.

  They look up like guilty schoolboys; one of them stamps out the stub of his cigarette and vanishes through a door. Mr Rowland, who still has two inches of nicotine to inhale, smiles sheepishly and says, ‘He goes on a bit, Councillor Dunster, doesn’t he?’

  She laughs. ‘But will he do anything?’

  Mr Rowland shakes his head. ‘M-m. He’ll kick it into the long grass. Of which there’s no shortage around here.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because he’s just been on the MIPIM jolly at Cannes. That’s an international property conference where the big global property developers pour cheap champagne down the gullets of local authority worthies and persuade them to sell off old municipal housing estates for redevelopment into luxury housing. He’ll take the petitions and stick them in the bin, then come election time he’ll tell you how he did his best, but the other parties were all against him. And I’ll tell you something for nothing – it won’t stop at the cherry grove. They’re after the whole site.’

  She catches her breath. The brazenness of it.

  ‘And can’t you do anything, Mr Rowland?’

  ‘Me? I’m out of here next month. I’m sick of kowtowing to clowns like that. I’ve got another job lined up.’

  ‘With another Council?’

  ‘With Shire Land. One of the biggest developers in London. Qatari owned. As a matter of fact, they’re the ones that have got the application in on Madeley Court.’ He takes a long last draw on his cigarette.

  ‘You? You’ll be working for them?’ She stares, and his boyish looks seem to flicker and fade into something familiar and sleazy.
All the cheerful high spirits she set out with this morning evaporate in that final puff of cigarette smoke.

  ‘I’m getting married soon. I’ve put a deposit down on a flat. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’ He grinds out the end of his cigarette under his shoe, and disappears into the building.

  The meeting has already broken up and people are straggling home, so to cheer herself up she decides to run back along the canal.

  She gets home an hour later, quite out of breath, with a warm glow in her limbs and a film of sweat on her face, ready for a shower.

  Berthold: Birdcage

  Violet had disappeared. Though we’d barely exchanged a word, I’d walked behind her all the way to the Town Hall, carrying Flossie in her cage, which was bloody heavy I’ll have you know. I don’t really know why I brought her, but she’s good on slogans, and women I’ve noticed are often drawn to fluffy things. However, Violet was stuck in conversation with that weird kid, of whom more later. I planned to approach her when it was over and walk back together, stopping at Luigi’s for a coffee and neighbourly conversation. After our sweet, romantically chaste night of the rose-silk pyjamas, I knew I must take things slowly if I wasn’t to scare her off. A lovely girl like that is always surrounded by men wanting to get her into bed. Not me. I was different. I was caring, sensitive, a big soul, a good conversationalist, a good listener, a good neighbour and friend, a good … whatever it took.

  But then I had a crisis with Flossie. I was sitting on the wall waiting for that donkey, Councillor Desmond Dunster, to plod to a halt. The rank insincerity of his speech reeked of all that is wrong with politics today, all the scurvy self-flattering, gut-grinding, media-mouthed crap they peddle in the belief that we, the people, are too stupid or irresponsible to be trusted with the truth. I wished Mother was there and we could have lobbed a few heckles together. My injured eye was bothering me, and Flossie was stressed by all the whistling and banging of the tambourines. Suddenly the kid who’d been walking beside Violet came up and poked her with a stick and sent her flapping around, beating her poor wings against the bars of the cage. I could have strangled the little sod, but all I did was clip him around the ear. Like Sid used to clip me. Never did me any harm. But the kid made such an outcry – don’t they teach them self-control nowadays? – and said he was going to report me for child cruelty. Everyone joined in: Mrs Crazy said the parrot needed its neck wrung; Inna called the kid a hooligan element; Legless Len called me a child abuser. By the time the kid and Flossie had both calmed down – he apologised to Flossie, and I had to apologise to him – Violet had vanished. And so had Inna.

  I walked back to the flat alone lugging the cage, which seemed to have doubled in weight. It was almost supper time and I was getting hungry. Why did Inna choose the most inconvenient bloody time to disappear on one of her walkabouts? Where had she got to?

  Flossie had recovered from her earlier trauma and was snoozing on the perch in her cage. Rather than waiting for Inna to come back, I decided to take this opportunity to nip down to Luigi’s, have a decent cup of coffee, and meditate on the ghastliness of life. I’d just slipped my jacket on when the doorbell rang. Ding dong!

  My heart thumped. Violet? The postman? Inna who had forgotten her key? Mrs Penny?

  I steeled myself and opened the door.

  Berthold: Slapski

  ‘Bertie? Bertie! You haven’t changed a bit!’ A stench of alcohol and urine hit my nostrils. I couldn’t immediately identify the scrawny, raddled old geezer with a boozer’s nose, silver curls straggling on to his dandruffy collar, and a peaked cap pulled down over one eye who was standing on my doorstep with an empty bottle in his hand.

  ‘Howard! Your brother!’ He reached in, hooked an arm around my neck and pulled me towards him to smack a wet whisky-flavoured kiss on my lips.

  ‘Oh. Hi, Howard.’ I backed away from the blast-furnace of his breath. It was hard to recognise in this shrivelled sozzled figure the handsome, louche shoe salesman and air guitarist who had once been both my idol and my scourge. He must have been not much more than sixty, but time had not been good to him. ‘It’s great to see you. It’s been a while. What brings you back home?’

  ‘I tried to come to Lily’s funeral, honest I did, but I couldn’t find the damn place. Green something. Ended up at the burial of a lady called Mrs O’Reilly. Great wake. Beef sandwiches and whisky …’ He paused. ‘Was it a good send-off, Lily’s?’

  ‘Yes. Yes indeed,’ I lied. ‘Apart from the rain, of course. Someone turned up at the wrong funeral. And those twins were there – Ted Madeley’s daughters. I hadn’t seen them for some forty years. They seemed to think their dad had left the flat to them.’

  ‘Heh heh heh! What a pair of chancers! They were just trying their luck. Lily once told me that Ted Madeley and their mother were never officially married. Apparently, they were planning to marry when she got pregnant again, but she lost the baby.’

  ‘Oh, they told me …’ What had they told me? The story had become confused in a fog of morphine and double vision, but I seemed to remember that a dead baby had also been involved. Either they were lying, or Lily was. Probably I would never know.

  Howard cleared his throat. ‘We need to talk, Bertie. Did Lily leave me something in her will?’

  ‘She didn’t leave a will.’

  ‘She must have done. She promised.’ His grey-red eyes watered, and he brushed them with his sleeve, then he fumbled in his jacket pocket and produced a small orange cigarette lighter. More fumbling yielded a battered ten-pack of cigarettes, emblazoned with their deadly warning. ‘D’you mind if I smoke?’

  I shrugged and went to find an ashtray. Suddenly his legs buckled and he fell into an armchair, his eyes scanning the cabinet where Mum used to keep her booze. ‘Have you got any …?’

  I felt both pity and revulsion. ‘No. We drank it all at the wake,’ I lied. The only wake had been around my hospital bedside.

  ‘Be a good kid – nip round to Baz’s Bazaar for a bottle of Old Grouse. Here’s the money.’ He fumbled in his jacket pockets again and held out a tenner in a shaking hand.

  I laughed. ‘I’m not a kid, Howard. I’m fifty-three. And Baz’s Bazaar closed down twenty years ago.’

  ‘Heh heh. It was probably our fault, me and Nige, the amount of stuff we nicked from there. And you, Bertie. You were the villain of the piece. Remember how we lowered you into the coal hole on a rope? You were a skinny little kid. And you climbed up the inside stairs and opened the window for us?’

  A formless horror welled up out of my nightmares: I dangle like a newborn spider in a black void. The rope around my waist much too tight. Something massive and formless pressing on my chest. Eyes and nose covered with black-gloved hands. Mouth full of coal dust. Try to scream. No sound comes out – only a suffocating velvety cough, cough, cough. ‘Shut up! Keep quiet!’ Howard’s voice hissing through the grating.

  ‘I remember trying to explain to Dad how I got coal dust on my pyjamas. And the belt.’

  ‘The belt. Yeah. Dad and his belt. I got it too. But you know what, Bertie, I was always jealous of the way Mum used to stick up for you? Like you were her special little lamb. She used to rock you in her arms when you were crying. Meh-eh-eh! Hush, hush, my lamb. He doesn’t mean it.’ He squeaked in a mock-Lily voice.

  ‘But she loved you too, Howard. She talked about you for years after you’d gone.’

  ‘Nah. I was just this stray kid she’d took pity on. She lost interest in me after you came along. She didn’t even leave me anything in her will, though she must have got a fair bit from Dad. Did Mum ever tell you, after they split up, he made over a million on Buy to Let? He found the tax breaks were more reliable than crime.’ He chuckled glumly. ‘Heh heh heh. She never told you that, eh?’

  I felt exhausted and a bit sick. I wished he would go away, but at the same time I wanted him to keep on talking, throwing his bitter light into the secret places of the past.

  ‘Do you remember when we drove
up to Ossett to visit your real mother’s grave?’

  In the summer of 1983 Howard and I had travelled up to Ossett together, his hometown and the birthplace of my father, Sidney Sidebottom, aka Wicked Sid, swindler, child abuser, Buy to Let millionaire. Howard had inherited our dad’s good looks and his mother’s musical talent, and at that time he was having some local success with a band called the Blue Maggots, loosely modelled on UB40. I was a star-struck nineteen year old with time on my hands, and although I had no great fondness for my dad, I did have a certain familial curiosity.

  The Sidebottom clan, I discovered, despite the Cheshire origins of the name, had been living for generations in this dismal little industrial town halfway between Dewsbury and Wakefield. Ossett had once been a spa, but by the time we Sidebottoms came along it was known mainly for the big Ward’s ‘shoddy and mungo’ mill where both my grandparents worked recycling rags, like Gobby Gladys, who had once recycled rags in Whitechapel. So you could say rags were in my blood on both sides of the family, and in moments of introspection I have sometimes wondered whether that might account for my somewhat shredded outlook on life. But Sid felt he was destined for greater things. Charming and good-looking, with golden curls and a silver tongue, he found a day job in a newsagent’s shop and studied bookkeeping at night school.

  Once qualified, he started doing the books for the newsagent and other local businesses. His popularity grew as word got around that he was rather good at minimising payments to the Inland Revenue, all perfectly legally. No one, apart from Sid himself, could say exactly when some of the money that passed through the books started sticking to his fingers. By the time he was twenty-five he had stashed away enough money to put down a deposit on a terraced house in Ossett and to marry Howard’s mother, Yvonne Lupset, the beautiful and musically gifted (said Howard) only daughter of prosperous local farmers. She was six months pregnant when he took her to the altar.