The Lubetkin Legacy (20 page)

When I had finished reading, I took the change from Howard's tenner and strolled up the road to Lidl to get the whisky.

Twenty minutes later I opened the door to the flat to be greeted by the pleasant steamy smell of kobaski in yushka, beneath which a faint whiff of whisky was still noticeable, and a slight taint of burning in the air. Inna was bustling about in her pinny, laying the table with a clatter. Howard was slumped in the same armchair holding a bloodstained handkerchief to his nose. There were some small spots of blood on the carpet.

‘Hi, Inna,' I greeted her with a peck on the cheek. ‘Everything okay?'

She pushed me away. ‘Oy! You tell me he homosexy!'

Howard moaned, dabbing his nose, ‘I like a bit of slapski, but I didn't think she'd get quite so rough.' I noticed some pieces of broken china on the floor. ‘Did you get the whisky? Blimey, you don't get much for a tenner these days.'

Just then, the doorbell rang.
Ding dong!
Inna scuttled over to open it, still holding a fistful of cutlery in her hand.

A woman's voice, as sweet as a harp. ‘I'm sorry to trouble you. I've run out of coffee …'

Violet! I jumped up. My heart was beating madly.

‘Sorry. We got no coffee.' Inna slammed the door.

When his nose had stopped bleeding and he had finished most of the whisky, Howard wandered out into the night with an air of disappointment. I accompanied him to the lift.

‘Come back and see me again, won't you?'

‘I don't think so, Bertie, not while
she's
here. Don't know what you see in her.'

‘It's not what you think.'

‘It never is.'

With a sigh, the pissy lift carried him away.

Inna was equally adamant. ‘I telled him go boil his kobaska. He nearly set fire on flat. Look!'

There was indeed an ugly burn-mark on the upholstery. I
extracted the orange Bic lighter from down the back of the armchair, where it had lodged itself, and put it in my pocket. It was still half full. We'd had a lucky escape.

‘Calm down, Inna.' I put my hand on her arm, and then I realised what had changed about her appearance.

Instead of a neat silver coil at the back of her head, there was a coil of glossy black. She had dyed her hair. But why?

Violet washes and oils her hair in the shower and wraps it in a warm towel. While it's drying, she picks up the phone and dials her parents' number in Bakewell.

Handling your parents can be tricky, steering that fine course between their protectiveness and her need to live her own life. She'd intended to wait until she had a new job lined up or some good news to share before phoning her mum – easier to keep up a cheerful tone with texts and emails than to hide the unhappiness in your voice – but after her run-in with Marc and her conversation with Mr Rowland, something has snapped inside her. She's lost the confidence, drummed into her for twenty-three years by her parents and her schools, that here in Britain it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from, that hard work pays off, the good guy always triumphs, and integrity wins through in the end.

‘Violet, that big city is depressing you, why don't you come back home for a while?' Her mother, as always, can tell when she's upset. ‘It's so nice up here in summer.'

It's a tempting thought, to pack in her job and have her mother look after her while she chills in her bedroom, listens to music, and applies for new jobs. But she knows she would be fed up in less than a week – especially as all the kids she was at school with have moved away, apart from the drop-outs who hang around the square with spliffs and hard-luck stories. After London, the smallness of Bakewell depresses her.

‘Thanks, Mum. I'll think about it. But it's cool here,
honestly. I've met loads of interesting people, and I'm campaigning to save a grove of cherry trees. Don't worry about me.'

Saying the words out loud makes her feel more positive.

‘So you have become a tree-hugger,
mpenzi
?'

‘Sort of. I guess.'

Her mother laughs. ‘Like Wangari Maathai. She was a great Kenyan fighter for trees and for human rights. Whenever Wangari had something to celebrate, she planted a Nandi Flame tree.'

She has heard this story about Wangari Maathai several times, but never taken much notice before.

‘Yeah, I remember those trees. Beautiful. Like cherry blossom.'

‘Wangari said trees and people both have rights, and they need each other.'

‘It's true. I wish she was here in London! The trees have brought the people together.'

She's noticed that in the face of their common enemy, the community spirit at Madeley Court has come alive. Neighbours now greet each other and stop to talk, and all the bitching is about the Council, not about each other. There are always little knots of people down in the grove, and the tambourine girls, who apparently are mostly sixth-formers at the local school, have started putting on regular noisy shows, which, if she's to be perfectly truthful, can get a bit annoying. It's like Langata, both the friendliness and the racket.

‘Wangari linked the deforestation of Kenya to the despoilment of the country's wealth. But even she couldn't stop it. There is a new corruption scandal every day,' her mother says.

‘Talking of corruption, Mum, when you were in Kenya, did you ever hear of someone called Horace Nzangu? A businessman?'

‘Nzangu. It's quite a common name …' Her mother pauses. ‘I think there was someone called Nzangu in our hospital many years ago, who was involved in a scandal about reusing syringes.'

‘Hm. Grandma once mentioned that while Babu Josaphat was working in the hospital administration he discovered some wrongdoing relating to supplies and went to the police. Then she clammed up. She wouldn't say any more.' She still remembers Njoki's tight angry mouth and frightened eyes. ‘Could that be the same man?'

‘Could be. Your Babu's body was found by the roadside soon after he went to the police. No one was sure whether it was an accident or a deliberate killing. In those days there was much talk of witchcraft, and everyone was afraid. People who spoke out died mysteriously, so Njoki never talked about it.' Her mother lowers her voice. ‘Be careful, Violet. These people are more powerful and ruthless than you can imagine.'

The sad resignation in her mum's tone makes her feel irritated. Why do people just accept all that crap without doing anything about it?

‘But that's all old history and folk tales. If we know there's a crime, we should speak up, right?'

‘Of course we must speak the truth, even if it means taking a risk. But who will listen to us if we don't have any evidence?'

‘I think I may have the evidence.'

My dismal existence, already thrown into crisis by the death of my mother, imminent homelessness, unrequited love and the revelations about my criminal past, was now under attack on a new front. I had long been in avoidance about my financial situation, but the irrefutable evidence came out one day when my debit card was declined in Lidl. To my utter humiliation, in front of a whole queue of lunchtime shoppers, I was outed as a pauper.

‘Look, there must have been a mistake. I'm a regular customer in here. Don't you recognise me? I spend hundreds of pounds … well,
lots
of pounds, on your crap products. I could switch my loyalty to Waitrose, you know. You're not the only supermarket around here,' I blustered.

‘Cash or card?' the pretty check-out girl repeated. Her name-tag was full of
z
s and
ch
s. Polish, perhaps.

I knew in my heart that I was doomed and the pound of flesh would eventually be carved from me, but you have to protest, don't you, at the sheer pettifogging meanness of life? I took a breath, stabbed the air and bellowed, ‘Therefore, Jew, though justice be thy plea, consider this! That, in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation! WE DO PRAY FOR MERCY AND THAT SAME PRAYER DOTH TEACH US ALL TO RENDER THE DEEDS OF MERCY!!!'

Why was I shouting? Surely Portia hadn't shouted at Shylock? The girl pressed the buzzer for the manager who arrived, harassed and sweaty, in a polyester shirt with a pile of nappy boxes under his arm.

‘This gentleman is refuse to pay,' said the girl. ‘He make anti-Semitic speech.'

The people in the lengthening queue behind were stabbing me with their eyes.

In the end, I returned the bottle of sherry and a jar of coffee to the shelves. Fortunately, I had enough cash in my pockets for a tin of tuna, a loaf of sliced bread and an iceberg lettuce. Still, it was a wake-up call. There would be no more lattes at Luigi's for the foreseeable future.

I stumbled back to the flat with my pitiful bag of retail therapy, where another outrage awaited me, in the form of a small blue letter that had been slipped under the door while I was out.

Dear Berthold,

We've been watching you and we think there is something fishy going on, you are trying to rob us of our birthright. We need to resolve the flat, and we would like to come to an arrangement with you without having to involve solicitors. We are getting desparate with waiting.

Your loving sister,

Jenny

PS: Our pet bunny is buried under a cherry tree in the garden so you can see why we are despirate to come home to be near his grave. Margaret

I crumpled the letter and threw it into the recycling bin, annoyed but not alarmed. Howard had alerted me to their wiles. No wonder they wanted to avoid the law. Ha! Their bloody pet bunny of fifty years ago! And they call that despirate (sic). I could bloody show them what desperation is.

While Mother was alive, she had enjoyed three pensions – her DSS ‘old age' pension, her NHS pension from her speech therapist years, and a widow's pension from Ted Madeley. In other words, she was comfortably provided for, if not quite in the oligarch league, and we'd lived sheltered from the cold winds of austerity. Her pensions, plus whatever money she had received from my dad, had been enough for us both to manage on comfortably, covering the rent, living expenses, evenings out at the Curzon, and even the occasional little holiday. I felt tempted to leave the pensions in place just for a while, until my finances were on a more secure footing, but Jimmy had warned me against it.

‘You'll get done. Besides, your finances are never going to be secure, are they?'

He was probably right. My own income was the pittance I got from Jobseeker's Allowance augmented occasionally by short-run, ill-paid roles in small grant-funded theatres where the stage set was inevitably a table and a wooden chair and the actors could sometimes outnumber the audience – a commitment to Art which I doubt George Clooney has ever experienced.

Like many actors, I was no stranger to the dole office, but I always regarded the dole as a stopgap, not a solution. I mean, no one can really live on £72.40 a week, can they? My case worker was a handsome young black guy called Justin, with a gold front tooth and a degree in media studies. He took my case seriously, as though my appearance in a series of deadbeat fringe shows was his personal contribution to the arts. He persuaded the local Job Centre to subscribe to
The Stage
, and for his sake I read it regularly, and attended auditions whenever something promising came up.

My last such foray had been to audition for the part of Lucky in
Waiting for Godot
at The Bridge, a fortnight before Mother
died. Fortunately, I didn't get it. Who wants to spend their evenings dragged around by a rope on a draughty stage under a railway bridge in Poplar? Justin had been curious when I gave him my edited feedback.

‘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.