The Lubetkin Legacy (3 page)

Mother had lived in the flat since it was built in 1952, and she used to tell me with misty eyes that Berthold Lubetkin, the architect who designed it, had promised it would be a home for ever for her and her children. But since then the buggers hadn't built enough new homes to keep up with the demand, she fumed, and the ones instigated by the council leader, Alderman Harold Riley, and built by Lubetkin's firm Tecton had been flogged off to private landlords – like the flat next door, which had once belonged to a dustman called Eric Perkins and now belonged to a property company who filled it
with foreign students who played music all night and littered the lift with takeaway boxes.

‘Under-bed tax?' Could they make me move out because of that?

‘Is new tax for under-bed occupant.'

I kept mainly dog-eared scripts, odd socks and back copies of
The Stage
under my bed. Nothing you could call an occupant.

‘You mama very much worrying about break-up of post-war sensors. She say it make her sick in heart to think they take away her apartment and put you into street. This tax is work of Satan, she say. Mister Indunky Smeet. You know this devil-man?'

‘Not personally.'

I'd heard of course of something called a bedroom tax, which Mother described variously as an affront to human decency, the final death-blow to the post-war consensus, and a pretext for squeezing more money out of poor people who happened to have a spare bedroom. But it never occurred to me that it might apply to me, so I hadn't taken much notice. I did recall Mum and Flossie swearing at some minister on the television news recently; though, to be fair, this was not an uncommon occurrence. I sympathised with her righteous anger, of course, but I had my own problems to contend with, and you can't just live in a permanent stew of rage, can you?

‘But I tell her no worry, Lily, this under-bed tax for lazies scrounging in bed all day. You hard-working decent, Mister Bertie?' She eyed me sideways.

‘Oh yes. Absolutely.'

‘What work you working, Mister Bertie?'

‘Actually, I'm an actor.'

I always dread this question. It raises such expectations.

‘Aha! Like George Clooney!' Inna cooed. ‘You mekking film?'

‘I'm mainly a stage actor. Best known for my Shakespearean roles. And some television.' If you can count a stint as a proud football dad in a washing-powder advert back in 1999. ‘But I'm not working at present.'

The old woman was still impressed. ‘I never met actor before. I would like met wit George Clooney. He got nice eyes. Nice smile. Nice teeth. Everything nice.' She pursed her lips and discharged some more green phlegm. I looked away.

Bloody George Clooney. If he and I didn't happen to share a common birthday, I probably wouldn't care; in fact I probably wouldn't even notice him. As it was, I couldn't help comparing his success with mine (lack of). Of course someone who has dedicated his life to Art, as I have, cannot expect to wallow in the excesses of materialism. We have our spiritual consolations. But still, it would be nice to have more than an occasional latte at Luigi's to look forward to.

Take the case in point: it was George bloody Clooney with his affected smile and clean-cut chin that this old crone lusted after; yet it was I, Sidebottom, who sat here at her wretched bedside watching her phlegm-bowl fill to overflowing. How could that be fair?

The beautiful nurse was still making busy sounds behind Mum's curtain. It seemed to have been going on a very long time.

Inna's hands fiddled with the sheet. She gave me a sly look. ‘You got good apartment. Your mother tell me about her.'

‘Yes, it's a nice flat. Top floor.'

‘Aha! Top floor, good flat, bad lift. She say lift always broken, nobody repair her because she got hysterity.'

‘Hysterity?' It's true the lift was getting cranky but I personally would have described it as unreliable rather than hysterical.

‘She say banks made creases we give money. Now banks got all our money we get hysterity.'

‘Ah, you mean austerity! There's a lot of it around nowadays.'

‘Yes. Hysterity. You mama explain to me. Very clever lady. Almost like Soviet economist.'

‘Well, I wouldn't go so far –'

‘She love this flat, you mama. It is so beautiful, she say, she got it from arshitek boyfriend.'

Why was she going on about the flat? What had Mother been saying? Suddenly she crossed herself and fell silent, listening. I listened too. Behind the curtains around Mother's bed a machine had been beeping constantly. Now in the silence I became aware that the sound was becoming intermittent. There was a flurry of scurrying and scuffling and low voices talking in urgent whispers.

Suddenly the nurse drew back the curtains, and murmured, ‘Mr Lukashenko, your mother has taken a turn for the worse.'

I leaned over her and peered into her dear old face, so familiar yet so mysterious, already sealed behind the glass wall of the departure lounge, checked in for the one-way journey to the undiscovered country.

‘Mum. Mum, it's me, Bertie. I'm with you.' I took her hand.

Mum let out a long rattling sigh. A single blue butterfly fluttered on the withered garden of her face. Pulling herself up in bed with immense effort, she gripped my arm and drew me down towards her, to whisper into my ear, ‘Don't let them get the flat, Berthold!' Then she fell back on the pillows with a groan.

Violet doesn't plan on staying in the flat for long. When she's saved up some money from her amazing salary, she'll find something better – not a council flat. This place is convenient for work, and she was lucky to get it at short notice, but she viewed it in a hurry and didn't notice how tatty the decor was and how rough the neighbourhood. On the day she arrived she watched someone being carried out on a stretcher. And there are those strange alarming shrieks from the flat next door, which sound like someone possessed by a shetani. Besides, it's too big for one person. The smooth-talking estate agent had persuaded her it would be easy to find some room-mates, but now she isn't sure she's ready for another flat share after her last disastrous experience.

When she first came to London, she'd done casual office work and waitressing to fund her internship with an NGO and shared a zero-housework flat in Hammersmith with a girl from Singapore and two boys from uni, one of whom was her boyfriend, Nick. The Singaporean girl, who used to borrow her clothes, eventually borrowed Nick too. She came home early one day to find them having a shower together.

Her friend Jessie, who had just moved into a flat in Croydon with her boyfriend, let her sleep on the sofa in the sitting room. But a month on a sofa is a long time.

The agency that found her this flat in Madeley Court specialises in student lettings, and it is furnished with seven narrow beds, seven desks, seven wooden chairs, seven small chests of drawers, and a small round table in the kitchen. How
did seven people squeeze into here? Maybe they were dwarves? She smiles, remembering the movie she saw with Jessie, when they were both at primary school in Bakewell.

When she got the flat, Jessie lent her a spare duvet, pillows, a set of yellow crockery and a frying pan. She texts Jessie a ‘Thank You', with a picture of yellow crockery on the kitchen shelf.

She opens another door off the sitting room/bedroom, and finds it leads out on to a balcony with a view – she hadn't expected that. Leaning on the parapet, looking down on the flowering tops of the cherry trees and the splashes of yellow from the daffodils in the verges, she breathes deeply and closes her eyes. The sunlight on her skin touches her memory with the view from her grandmother's veranda in Langata, Nairobi, the Nandi Flame trees and the dazzling blood lilies. It's been a long while since she remembered that time in her childhood. A man with a bald head is pushing his bicycle across the green. Looks like the same old guy she saw in Luigi's. Maybe he lives nearby.

She's only been in her new job for a month – thinking of it still makes her stomach flip with excitement. Tonight she's meeting up with her friends at the Lazy Lounge to celebrate her birthday. So now is her only chance to sort out her flat and explore her new neighbourhood. She puts on her trainers and decides to go out for a run while the weather holds.

It's a mixed sort of area, where old-fashioned terraces rub shoulders with scruffy council estates, little artsy shops, galleries and studios tucked up the side streets, and further away a lively street market. She passes several building sites bristling with cranes where modern offices and apartments are shooting up, and from time to time she catches the dark gleam of a river or canal threading its way between the streets.

In terms of clothes shops the area is disappointing, but there
are plenty of cafés and eateries with cheap and interesting menus, two supermarkets – Lidl close by and Waitrose a bit further away. She stocks up in both places, spending freely, especially on treats for herself. She buys a kettle in a quaint little hardware store halfway up a side street, where she also splurges on a cafetière. As an afterthought she buys a blue plastic bucket with a mop, a dustpan and brush, some rubber gloves and detergent, just in case the agency cleaner never shows up.

By the time she's unpacked her shopping there's still no sign of the cleaner, and she is resigned to doing it herself. But first she plugs in the kettle to try it out, and spoons coffee – Kenya AA of course – into the cafetière.

Just as she pours on the water and breathes in the dark aroma, the doorbell rings. A young black girl is standing there, so young and skinny she looks like only a kid, wearing a blue overall and carrying a mop and bucket, a brush and some rubber gloves. Violet peers at her name badge: Homeshine Sanitary Contractors. Mary Atiemo. That's a Kenyan name.

‘Cleaning contractor,' says the girl with a broad smile. Her front tooth is chipped. Violet's grandmother Njoki used to say that dental deficiency is a sign of untrustworthiness. She was full of funny ideas like that.

‘You're late,' says Violet. ‘I was just going to do it myself.'

‘Sorry, please,' says the girl. ‘No bus. Please, let me clean it for you. No clean, no pay today.'

Tears well into her eyes. Violet hesitates. She looks a bit useless, lost in her too-big uniform, twig thin, smaller than the mop she's carrying, this scrap of a girl standing on the grey concrete walkway, with a grey thundery sky looming behind her.

‘Where are you from?'

‘Kenya. Nairobi,' Mary Atiemo says. ‘Kibera. You know Kenya?'

‘I was born in Nairobi,' she replies. She remembers Kibera; it's a slum not far from her grandmother's house. Once or twice she glimpsed its dirty twisted alleys from the back seat of the car and shuddered. How has this slum girl from that wretched insanitary place got to be a ‘sanitary contractor' in London, standing here on her doorstep just as she's standing on the doorstep of her exciting new life? It seems a bad omen, as if the past won't let her go.

‘My mother is Kenyan,' she adds, to put the girl at ease.

The girl's smile widens till it takes up half her face. ‘
Shikamoo
.'

‘
Marahaba
,' Violet replies, cringing at the deference in the girl's voice.

Suddenly a clap of thunder rattles the rooftops, and rain sheets down like a monsoon.

‘You'd better come in. I've just made some coffee. Would you like some? It's from Kenya.'

Mary Atiemo nods. ‘That would be fine. In my home we only used to drink tea.'

Despite her small size, Mary Atiemo is a wizard of a cleaner. She sweeps the floors, bags the garbage, then fills up the bucket at the sink, squirts in some detergent, sloshes it around the floor, and chases it furiously with the mop. Scraps of food, shreds of grime, cigarette butts, every type of filth, all float up on the frothy water to be captured in the strands of the mop, swirled into the bucket and flushed down the loo. She cleans the grey fingerprints off the woodwork, the grime off the cooker, the yellow stains off the toilet, and the black ring around the bath. Just watching makes Violet feel exhausted and she thinks, with her new salary, it would be nice to have a cleaner to come in once in a while.

‘Do you have a phone number?' she asks the girl. ‘Maybe you can come and clean another time.'

The girl looks embarrassed. ‘We're not allowed to have a phone. Mr Nzangu doesn't let us work for somebody else. But give me your number, please, and I'll get in touch when I can.'

She writes down her name and number on a bit of paper. The girl slips it into the pocket of her overall, gathers up her cleaning things and disappears out into the rain.

Mrs Penny, the Council's housing officer, was twenty minutes late. I'd tried to telephone to cancel her visit of course, feeling too devastated to do battle with the tentacles of bureaucracy so soon after Mother's sudden death, but the Town Hall phone was constantly engaged and I gave up in the end. Well, it was probably best to get the tenancy business out of the way sooner rather than later. At last the doorbell rang.
Ding dong!

‘Ding dong! First of March, 1932! Ding dong!' Flossie chimed, to make absolutely bloody sure I'd heard.

Mrs Penny stood on the doorstep, reaching out her hand.

‘Mr Madeley?'

Should I correct her? I let it pass, and took her pale manicured hand. It was like shaking a lettuce leaf out of the fridge – cold and limp, not what you'd expect from such a warm solid-looking woman.

‘Come in. Come in. I appreciate your …' What exactly did I appreciate? ‘Your hair.'

Her hair was shiny and a slightly unnatural copper colour, swept up in a curled ponytail with a deep fringe and long curled sideburns, sort of country-and-western singer meets rabbi. She ignored my comment and advanced into the entrance hall, releasing a powerful floral perfume in her wake. Was she my type? She was in her fifties, I guessed, not unattractive for her age, but way too old for me. She was a bit plump, too, though her high-heeled shoes made her legs look
shapely. A saucy pink silk scarf was tucked into the lapels of her municipal-colour raincoat.

‘It's ages since I've been in one of these big old family flats.' Her voice was pleasant and low, with a slight hesitation, not quite a stutter, that at once disarmed me. ‘There's not many left with the Council now. They've mostly been bought up and sold on under Right to Buy. I'm surprised this one wasn't. It would have been quite an –' she stopped, aware she was committing a faux pas.

‘Investment. Mum didn't agree with it.'

Mother could have bought the flat for £8,000 back in 1981, after the Right to Buy came in, but she had refused. ‘I told them to stick their offer where the sun don't shine,' she'd told me. ‘I said it belongs to the people of this borough and it ain't yours to sell.'

I'd already left home by then, and it never occurred to me that I would return one day, let alone seek to inherit the tenancy, so I was mildly amused at Mum's fury. Needless to say, when Eric Perkins next door – now resident in the South of France – resold his for £38,000 a few years later, she was regretful and envious. But by then she had divorced Lev Lukashenko, and he'd disappeared with all her cash.

Mrs Penny peered in through the open door to my mother's bedroom, where the assortment of crumpled lingerie was still strewn on the floor.

‘You do sometimes wonder,' she said cryptically, making a note.

She also noted down that my mother had lived in the flat since it was built, and that I had lived there from birth until I went to university, and then again for the last eight years. She didn't ask why I had come back eight years ago, and I wondered whether, if she had, I would have told her the truth. She asked about siblings, and I explained that my half-brother
from my father's previous marriage had moved out many years ago.

‘Mmm. I always longed to live in one of these big modern flats. I grew up in a poky terrace in Hackney. It's nice that you can support Mum, and help her keep her independence in today's challenging environment.'

There was something so sympathetic in her manner that I was on the point of pouring my heart out, telling her about my daughter Meredith's death and the bear pit of depression, the split-up with Stephanie, the stutter, the dead end of my career, the eviction from my bedsit, the hospitalisation, the valiant way I had fought back with Mother's help against the bloody injustice of life.

A sudden squawk from Flossie interrupted my train of thought. ‘Shut up, Flossie!'

Yes, Flossie was right – I must shut up. Despite her niceness, she was the local agent of ‘Them' – the shadowy bureaucracy that Mother had warned me about – probably on a reconnaissance mission.

‘She sup-ports me too,' I replied. ‘We look after each other.'

‘I've got this tenancy registered to a Mr and Mrs Madeley,' she said. ‘Is that right?'

‘She remarried. She's now Mrs Lukashenko.'

‘Luckychinko? That's a pretty name. Chinese, is it?'

‘Ukrainian, actually. Her last husband was Ukrainian.'

‘Mm.' She scribbled something in her file.

Mrs Penny was impressed, as most people are, by the sitting room with its rooftop view over London towards the City. My father, Wicked Sid Sidebottom, Mum's second husband, who'd been a bit of a handyman when he wasn't being wicked, had put up the bookshelves in the living room, giving the flat a genteelly bohemian air, though the books were mostly his thrillers and Mum's romances, interspersed with a few
leather-bound classics for gravitas. The floor was carpeted with Persian rugs, rescued by Lev ‘Lucky' Lukashenko, her last husband, from a fire-damaged warehouse – they still retained a faint whiff of their smoky odour. The walls were cluttered with pictures and photographs which had fascinated me as a child, though now I barely noticed them. Without wanting to appear snobbish, I would guess it was a notch above your average council flat.

‘My, it's spacious! May I?'

Without waiting for a reply, she opened the door to my bedroom and stepped inside. There was something so presumptuous, so rudely intrusive, in this action it was as if she had yanked down my underpants to examine my private parts. Worse, in fact, because at least I can confirm that my privates are clean. My room was as untidy as Mum's but in a different way. Dead coffee cups, stacks of newspapers and theatre magazines, sports shoes, T-shirts and cycling gear instead of soiled silk.

‘I'm afraid it's a bit of a mess.' Why the hell was I apologising to her?

‘Don't worry. You should see some of the places I visit, Mr Luckyshtonko. Is that another bedroom you've got through there?'

Alarm bells started ringing in my head and Mother's last words rang in my ears. I remembered the beep … beep … beep and the terrible groan when it stopped.

‘It's just a small study.'

What I didn't say was that when Howard lived with us – he was my father's son by a previous marriage – that little study had been my bedroom. What was it Inna had said about the under-bed tax? My heart thumped. While Mrs Penny was taking notes, I decided to make a pre-emptive move.

‘I would like to register the tenancy in my name. Would
there be any p-problem with me taking it over from my mother?'

‘Hm.' Mrs Penny sucked the end of her biro nervously. ‘No, not normally a problem, Mr Lucky-s-stinker. You need to satisfy certain conditions. For example, you would need to demonstrate your relationship with the tenant, and you would need to provide evidence that you have actually lived here as your main abode for the last two years.'

‘Fine. No problem.'

‘But in the challenging currently prevailing climate of acute multi-causal public sector housing defectiveness, I mean deficiency, and a major increase in the number of deserving qualified decent hard-working local families on local authority waiting lists, the Council is spearheading a multi-fanged, I mean -pranged. No, sorry, I mean a multi-pronged initiative. To counteract incidence of under-occupancy in the borough.' She spoke too fast, mangling the words between her teeth. ‘It means that a tenant in receipt of housing benefit might incur an under-occupancy charge. According to the Council's newly formulated criteria, this flat could be classed as having too many rooms.'

‘Too many rooms?' She should see where George bloody Clooney lives.

‘I'm just doing my job,' she murmured, blushing rather sweetly and lowering her head to flick through her file. ‘But don't worry, the rule doesn't apply to pensioners. Your mother is still living here, isn't she?'

‘Yes.' As I said it, a spasm tightened my jaw. But it was too late. The word had bolted. ‘She's just popped out to the shops,' I added, for realism.

Mrs Penny smiled. Her face was pretty, her features delicate and doll-like, despite her age. ‘Oh, where does she go for her shopping?'

‘Er … just around the corner.'

‘I live locally myself. The area has improved so much, hasn't it? There's even a Waitrose not far away.'

‘Mm.' I made a mental note to avoid Waitrose from now on. ‘She goes out quite a lot.'

‘Important to keep active at her age. How old is she, by the way?'

‘Eighty-two.'

Mrs Penny made another note.

‘Well, the easiest thing would be for her just to sign a little form to put the tenancy jointly in your names, in the event of her death or mental disability. But no rush. Just keep us informed of any change of circumstances, won't you, Mr Looka-skansko?'

‘Of course.'

She stowed her notebook in her handbag.

I watched through the window as she crossed the grove and squeezed herself into a small red car parked on the far side. Then I flopped down on the sofa. The whole encounter had been far more stressful than I had imagined. Fortunately the sherry bottle was not quite empty.

‘God is dead!' Flossie called.

‘Shut up, Flossie.'

‘Shut up, Flossie,' Flossie retorted. The Dom‒sub relationship only applied with Mum. She and I would have to fight it out now.

‘Shut up, Flossie. I need to think!'

What I was thinking, as with a trembling hand I poured the last drops of sweet sherry into a chipped crystal glass, is that frankly, when you think about it, one dotty old lady is pretty much like another, isn't she? If a substitute were to appear in Mum's place, who would know the difference?