‘So what’s it about, this Waiting for Godot? I’ve heard the name.’
‘It’s about two guys under a tree waiting for someone who doesn’t turn up.’
‘Really? That’s it?’
‘Well, it’s philosophical. About the meaninglessness of life.’
‘In my opinion you’re best off out of it, Mr Sidebottom.’
Meaninglessness notwithstanding, my situation was now so desperate I told Justin I would be glad of anything. He was sad to see my status slip from art to survival, but he informed me there were currently openings for actors dressed as Mickey Mouse to hand out leaflets at the Brent Cross shopping centre.
‘Or there’s one here that might suit you,’ he said, scrolling down his screen. ‘A funeral parlour in North London is looking for an actor with a good voice for burials and cremation ceremonies. Zero-hours contract but possibility of overtime.’
‘Zero hours? What’s that mean?’
‘It’s like that play you said, Waiting for Whatsit. Like you’re permanently on call, but they only pay you if they call you up?’
It reminded me of Mother’s story of Grandad Bob and the dockers waiting for the brass tallies to be handed out. A strong reluctance tugged at my soul. ‘I’ll look into it,’ I said.
Maybe Inna could contribute to the rent, but when I suggested this, she looked aghast, crossed herself, and told me to apply for Housing Benefit. I was reluctant to go down this road because of what Mrs Penny had said. It would open me up to a whole new level of official nose-pokery. But it did add to the urgency of transferring the tenancy agreement to me. Which brought us back to the question of her signature.
Inna tossed her glossy, newly black plaits and flatly denied my accusation. ‘Oy! You think I got crazy, Mister Bertie? Why you think I sign Inna Alfandari?’
The question of the wrong signature preyed on my mind. Was Inna really as stupid as she pretended, or did she have a different agenda? Was there a malign plan at the back of her gobabki-addled mind to register the tenancy of the flat in her own name?
I recalled that when she had signed that Tenancy Transfer form Inna Alfandari instead of Lily Lukashenko, Mrs Penny had folded it without a glance and slipped it back into the file. Where I hoped it would stay un-looked-at for another fifty years. But what if Mrs Penny noticed the wrong name when she opened the file?
I could invent another marriage/death/divorce which Inna, aka Lily, had forgotten about in her confusion. Maybe Jimmy the Dog would help with a forged death certificate – he owed me one. I could say that my mother had forgotten who she was and had inadvertently written down a friend’s name. Surely demented old people do that sort of thing all the time? Or I could simply steal the mis-signed document and destroy it. With all these possibilities roiling in my mind, I put on a clean shirt, attended to a call of nature, gathered together my birth certificate and Mother’s marriage certificate to Wicked Sid, and prepared to brazen it out with Mrs Penny.
Berthold: Eustachia
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-full 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 A
lfandari. 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: Luigi’s
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.
Berthold: The Scottish Play
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 medi
cine 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?’
The Lubetkin Legacy Page 18