House of Bones (2 page)

He had dreamed that his demo would lead to a million-pound recording contract, but all that he had received in return were letters saying “interesting, but sorry”. John was mature enough to know why they were saying sorry. He was good, but he just wasn't good enough. And in the meantime, he had to make some money.

After a while, his friends grew bored of following him, and skated away. He turned around and watched them streak away through the crowds, whooping and punching the air. He felt a pang of jealousy.

He reached the offices of Blight, Simpson & Vane. They had an old-fashioned-looking frontage, right on Streatham High Road, with oak-framed pictures in the front window. The traffic roared past so that he could hardly hear himself think. Highly desirable five-bedroomed family residence overlooking the common. Compact two-bedroomed maisonette. Garden flat with use of garage. They were all so expensive that he could never imagine being able to buy one.

He could see his own reflection in the window and he hardly recognized himself. Last week his hair had been a wild tangle of curls. Now it was neatly cropped, right around his ears. Last week he
had been wearing hoops and daggers in his ears. Now all he had was holes. He was wearing a new Burton suit and a new Burton tie and he looked just like every other pale-faced office junior in the whole of Britain – just on the verge of handsomeness, just on the verge of maturity, with dark brown eyes and a strong, clearcut jawline, and one angry spot right next to his nose.

He held his air guitar in his hands and played
Susan's House
in front of the window, watching himself as his fingers ran up and down the invisible frets, pouting and moving his hips. Eat your heart out, Eels. Move over, Beck. This is John French, the greatest rock guitarist in the history of the universe.

He had almost reached the climax when he opened his eyes and saw a long, disapproving face staring at him from over the top of the oak-framed property pictures. Instantly he stopped playing air guitar and pretended that he had been stretching instead. But the front door of Blight, Simpson & Vane was instantly opened, and a thin, beaky-nosed man came out – the same thin, beaky-nosed man who had interviewed him when he first applied for the job.

“You're late,” he rapped. “I didn't think that you were going to turn up at all.”

“Yeah, I know. I'm sorry. It was the bus.”

“Well, you'll have to make better arrangements
in future. And in
this
practice, we say ‘yesss' with an ‘esss', not ‘yeah.'”

“Yeah, all right then. I mean, yesss, all right then, yesss.”

“You'd better come in and start work, don't you think?”

“Yesss, I think I'd better. Yesss.”

“You don't have to hiss at me, for goodness' sake.”

“Oh, sorry.”

The man led him into the main office. It was painted pea-green, with five desks arranged diagonally down either side. The lighting was flat and fluorescent and made everybody look as if they'd been up all night. At the back of the room were rows of grey steel filing cabinets and a large-scale map of south London.

“Right, then, you probably remember that my name's David Cleat but here in the office you'll call me Mr Cleat. I'm the deputy manager.”

Mr Cleat took him to the first desk, where a solidly-built, red-haired boy in a bright green shirt was eating an apple and reading
The Racing Post
. He had eyes as green as crushed bottle-glass and a splash of freckles over his nose. “This is Liam O'Bryan. Liam, I'd like you to meet John.”

“Well now, welcome to the wonderful world of estate agency,” said Liam, shaking his hand very hard. “You, too, can take one-and-a-half percent of
everybody's hard-earned money without lifting a finger.”

“Liam has a slightly irreverent attitude to what we do,” said Mr Cleat, pursing his lips. “Though he manages to sell rather a lot of houses. It's the blarney. The Irish gift of the gab.”

“Oh, come on now, Mr Cleat,” said Liam. “Isn't estate agency all blarney? Calling a house semi-detached when it's semi-stuck-together-to-another one.”

Mr Cleat ushered John to the next desk, where a young black boy was sitting, poring over a list of house prices. In front of him was a perspex name-block that announced him as Courtney Tulloch. He was so smart that he was almost unreal. He wore a navy-blue designer jacket and a red silk tie, and his hair was cropped so that the top of it was absolutely flat. He looked up and gave John a broad, unaffected smile.

“Don't take any notice of Liam,” he said, shaking John's hand. “If you play your cards right, you can make a fortune in estate agency. You want a BMW? With alloy wheels? And a Kenwood sound system? You're in the right job.”

“Let's think about service and integrity, as well as profit,” said Mr Cleat, sniffily.

“But don't let's forget about getting ourselves a great set of wheels,” Courtney grinned at him.

Mr Cleat took him along to the last occupied
desk, where a brunette girl in a yellow linen jacket was sitting in front of a word-processor, typing out the details of a desirable two-bedroomed maisonette within easy reach of shops.

“Lucy Mears,” said Mr Cleat. “Lucy, I'd like you to welcome our newest recruit.”

“Hi,” said Lucy, giving John nothing more than a quick sideways glance. “Hope you're good at making coffee. Mine's black, one Hermesetas.”

“Right then,” said Mr Cleat. “I'll leave you in Courtney's capable hands. That door to the left leads to the kitchen, where you can make tea and coffee, and also to the smallest room. The staff make weekly contributions towards refreshments, and also towards, well,
tissue
.”

John stared at him, uncomprehending. Mr Cleat flushed, and contorted his face into an extraordinary expression of embarrassment, pushing his upper teeth out like Bugs Bunny. “He means bog paper,” said Liam, without looking up from
The Racing Post
.

Mr Cleat said, “Thank you, Liam,” in a voice like concentrated nitric acid. Then he said, “That door, to the right, leads to Mr Vane's office. Mr Vane is semi-retired now, but occasionally he comes in to deal with certain favoured clients. I must advise you that Mr Vane expects a high standard of decorum.”

Again, John blinked. Liam said, “He doesn't want you eating fish and chips in the office or mooning at clients who annoy you.”

Mr Cleat said nothing to that, but he gave Liam a stare that would have killed a tortoise. Then he looked at his watch and said, “Anyway, I have to go. I'm meeting some prospective buyers for the Wavertree Estate, and I'm running late. I have to tell you, John, that punctuality is absolutely
essential
in this business. You must never leave people hanging about. You understand that?”

“Yeah. I mean, yesss.”

As soon as Mr Cleat had left, everybody relaxed, except for Courtney, who picked up the phone and started talking to a prospective buyer about a house overlooking Tooting Bee Common. “I know you think it's too expensive, but think of the view. Grass, trees, tennis courts. If you look out of your kitchen window, you could be living on your own private estate.”

“I don't know where he gets the nerve,” smiled Liam. “Have you seen Tooting Bee Common on a weekend? Crowded? It looks like a tinful of maggots.”

When he had finished on the phone, Courtney came over and said, “Right, John. You won't have too much to do today except make the tea and answer the phone and take the post to the post office. But I'll take you out with me when I visit some houses that people want to sell.

“There may be a couple of times when you're alone in the office, all right? If people come in and ask about any of our houses or flats, all you have to
do is go to these filing cabinets, find the right particulars, and give them a copy.”

He opened up one of the filing cabinets and took out a glossy folder with a colour photograph of a large six-bedroomed house on the front. “If they say they want to see it, take their name and their phone number and say that we'll arrange a visit to suit them. That's all you have to do.”

“Do you always have to go with people when they look at houses?” asked John.

“Well, mostly we do, except if we're really busy, or the owners prefer to show people around themselves. Or sometimes, if a house is empty, we lend people the key so that they can go and look on their own.” He opened a drawer in one of the filing cabinets. “All the keys are in here. And the alarm codes, too.”

“All right,” John nodded.

“There's one more thing you need to know about—” Courtney began, but at that moment his phone rang and he went to answer it. John hung around his desk, not knowing what to do, but in the end Courtney put his hand over the receiver and said, “This is going to take a bit of time. Why don't you take that desk and go through the property lists – get to know what we've got on our books.”

John sat down and tried to smile at Lucy, but Lucy looked through him as if he were the invisible office junior.

John's first day at work was a mixture of boredom and confusion, seasoned with occasional moments of embarrassment. He spent over an hour photocopying the particulars of a block of new flats in Gipsy Hill. Then he made tea and coffee for everybody: tea with three sugars for Courtney; white coffee for Liam; black coffee for Lucy. All Lucy said was, “Where's the biscuits?” and sent him down the road to Sainsbury's for a packet of chocolate digestives. He saw two boys he knew outside Our Price records, laughing and smoking and chatting up girls. He felt trapped and frustrated, and he walked back to the office by the longest route possible: all the way along Pendennis Road and then left down Gracefield Gardens. It was
hot and he loosened his tie, and by the time he opened the biscuits they had all melted. Lucy said, “Where did you go to get those? Zimbabwe?”

Just before lunch, Courtney took him out in his metallic blue BMW to meet a couple who wanted to view a small two-bedroomed house in Streatham Park. John enjoyed the drive and the car had a fantastic sound-system. Courtney turned the volume up to “deafening” and John was sure the outside of the car must be bulging out with every beat.

The house in Streatham Park was cramped and chilly and had obviously been unoccupied for a long time. There was a large brown stain on the shagpile carpet in the living-room. Somebody had stuck a poster of Barry Manilow on the back of the larder door and circled his eyes with felt-tip spectacles. The couple who came to view it were fiftyish and vague. He wore a brown nylon short-sleeved shirt and she wore a dress like a chintz chair-cover. They peered morosely into every room and made no comment whatsoever, except at the end, when the husband said, “What's the soil like round here? Acid or alkaline?”

“Clay,” said Courtney.

“Well, that's no good, then. I want to grow azaleas.”

On the way back to the office, Courtney said, “You want to do them an injury sometimes. I mean, you physically want to beat them up.”

He laughed, and John laughed, too. He was beginning to think that he might grow to like this job, after all.

At lunchtime, Courtney invited him to come along to McDonald's for a cheeseburger and fries, but he said no.

“Listen, man, I'll pay for you. I know what it's like when you first start work.”

“No, no. I've got enough money. I'm just not hungry, that's all.”

“All right, then. Please yourself.”

Lucy said, “Well, if you're going to stay here, I'm going to go and do some shopping.”

They closed the door behind them and left him alone. The truth was that he was starving, but he only had enough money for his bus fare home, and he was too embarrassed to admit it. His dad had offered him lunch money but he hadn't wanted to take it.

Mr Cleat had given him a desk right at the front of the office, so that he would have to get up and greet anybody who wandered in. He had a PC terminal which he didn't know how to use, a blotter, and a pencil holder with Blight, Simpson & Vane printed on it.

He opened all the drawers but they were empty except for a few stray paperclips and a scenic postcard from Rhyl:
Dear All, it hasn't stopped raining since I got here. Love, Bill
.

Time seemed to crawl. John leafed through the local
Property Gazette
. Then he went to the window and stared out over the oak-framed display board, in the same way that Mr Cleat had stared at him. Streatham High Road was dusty and bright, and he saw lots of girls in very short skirts. His stomach made a noise like a cistern emptying.

He made himself a cup of coffee and ate three chocolate digestives all stuck together like a sandwich. He was wondering if he ought to risk eating another chocolate digestive when the front doorbell jangled, and a tall man in a cream-coloured blazer walked in. He had a big, suntanned face, immense eyebrows and thick horn-rimmed glasses. He banged down a brown leather briefcase on to John's desk and said, “66 Mountjoy Avenue!” His voice was so booming that John could have heard him three miles away.

“Oh,” said John.

The man stared at him for a very long time without saying anything. Then, enunciating his words as if he were speaking to a complete idiot, he said, “I want to look at it.”

“Oh,” said John.

“I called last week. I spoke to David about it.”

“Oh, I see, Mr Cleat. He's not here at the moment. Nobody's here at the moment.”

“
You're
here at the moment.”

“Yes, but this is my first day.”

“What difference does that make? All I want is to look at it. I've been trying to find a house in the Mountjoy Avenue area for God knows how long. They only seem to come on the market when somebody dies.”

“Well, I'm sorry. There's nobody here at the moment.”

“I can borrow the key, can't I? I can have it back to you in three-quarters of an hour.”