3.8

 

"Our landlord, or the one at the pub?"

Paul cocked his head to one side, as if he was considering the two. "Both, actually, but I meant the one at the Kentish. He'll bar you for no reason whatsoever and forget--" he performed finger quotation marks -- "to pay you until you check your bank account and ask for it." He shrugged. "He's okay most of the time, just props up one end of the bar talking to his mates, but he's a real tightwad with money. He once sacked me in the middle of a shift because I served someone who was clearly drunk, then phoned me up the next day to ask why I hadn't come in to work."

"He does sound a bit of a Kentishman." Roisin dropped the sheets on the bed and sorted them out, grateful to be covering the slightly stained mattress although she knew it would nag at her from the depths of her mind every time she lay on it. She imagined germs creeping from the stains like ticks and bed bugs coming to feast on her while she slept, and shuddered.

"I don't have a spare quilt, I'm afraid." Top nodded toward the quilt cover as she spread it across the sheet. "Or a pillow, come to that, although there are cushions in the living room."

"Living room?" She remembered the website. "Is that the 'comfortable recreation area for socialising?'"

"Yeah. I suppose." There a sofa and a TV stand. No telly, though I do have a pack of cards somewhere."

"I'm not very good at cards," she admitted. "I can never remember which ones have already been played."

"You don't have to remember them, unless you're betting."

Roisin opened the ancient wardrobe, half-expecting a faun to trot out, and emptied her rucksack into it, followed by the rucksack itself. "Is there a kitchen?"

"Yeah. At the back. I'll show you."

She followed him back into the hall and past the top of the stairs. Paul pointed at a door to the right of the stairs, if you were looking down them. It was a sturdier door than the others, solid wood with cross braces and a hasp and staple with a motorbike padlock through it. "That's Steves. There's another set of stair that leads up to the attic. He doesn't really like people going inside."

"So I see." It didn't stop her giving the padlock a light pull as she went past. "What does he keep up there, that he keeps so well guarded?"

"Boxes," said Paul. "Cardboard boxes full of whatever they're full of. I don't ask and he doesn't offer. All I know is he turns up with one and leaves with another. What I do know is that he has a separate electricity supply that goes directly into the attic and nowhere else, that only he pays for. Or his dad. Either way, it's not us." He stopped, turned, and gave a slow and quite deliberate wink. "And if he ever asks, we don't have an extension cord that runs directly off his mains input."

"But presumably we do?"

"Let's just say there's a decent electric heater in the kitchen, but you can't move it anywhere else." He continued down a corridor three or four meters long and opened a door into what must have been an extension on the original floorplan. It was three meters across but another four long, and when she looked out of the window over the sink to their right, she could see a wall perpendicular to this one with another sash window. "That's the living room. I'll show you that next."

At the far end of the kitchen was a heavy-duty door with a single pane of frosted glass running from top to bottom, along with a heavy mortice lock and a bolt top and bottom. If anything, it was more secure than the front door. Paul went up to it and turned the key in the lock, then pulled back the two bolts and flung it open. On the other side was a steel fire escape from this floor to a small, well-kept garden below, in which was scattered several balls and a child-sized football net that had seen not only better days, but better lives than this one. Around the edges, in a half-meter wide strip, was planted a row of marigolds, geraniums and fuchsias. "The garden is only for the downstairs people," he said, as if there were a particular breed of earthbound dwellers, "But we have the use of the fire escape if you want to. It gets a bit of sun in the evenings. I quite often bring out a chair and a cup of tea and watch it go down."

"The sun?" She looked out across the rooftops of several streets of terrace houses, all huddled together like refugees under Reform UK.

"Yeah." He sniffed. "Until the Cannock Towers block it out, anyway."