31 Dream Street (2 page)

I have had an interesting life. I have lived abroad and in various corners ofthis country, including Luton (!) and the Isle of Man. I have had many jobs, from the sublime to the ridiculous. I once spent a summer sticking eyes on balls offluffin a factory that produced promotional ‘bugs’. I also once spent a summer helping a famous actress rehearse for a role whilst she was suffering from a mild case of amnesia. I am not what I would call a particularly gregarious person, but I do like the company ofother people and that is why your home appeals to me so much. My flat is very well insulated and living alone I sometimes miss the noise ofexistence
.

I am currently researching a role for a film that is due to begin filming at the end ofthe year. It is a small role but pivotal and the director is very well known. Unfortunately the project is top secret so I can’t divulge any more information than that. It does mean that I will not be earning a regular salary until filming commences (although I will take on occasional temporary work) so the possibility

of being able to pay rent on an ad hoc, flexible basis could not have come at a more opportune moment
.

I am also clean, tidy, reliable, polite and non-smoking
.

I look forward to hearing from you
.

Yours, in good faith
,
Joanne Elizabeth Fish

February 2004

Dear Sir/Madam,

I have to admit I don’t usually read the Private Eye but someone left it in the toilets at work so I thought I’d have a flick through and your advert caught my eye. Not for myself, you see, I’m a married man with three kids and a house in Hainault, but for my friend, Con.

Con works with me at Condé Nast. He’s an assistant in the post room here, been working here for about a year now. He’s a nice lad, a bit of a loner, but reliable to a fault. He’s never had a day off. He’s young, eighteen I think, and what’s happened is that his mum’s done a runner, buggered off to Turkey and left him alone. His grandmother raised him and then after she died the mum came back and promised him the world, rented some luxury flat for the pair of them and then two months later she buggered off again. Poor kid couldn’t afford the rent on his own so he moved out, about a week ago. He was staying with a girlfriend for a while, I think, but then she kicked him out too. I don’t know where he’s living now but I can’t help noticing he’s not looking as sharp as he usually does. And he’s getting that smell, you know, that sort of grime smell. I reckon he’s sleeping rough. He gets the papers, looks at the ads for rooms but he can’t afford anything decent, not on what he earns here. I’ve tried to persuade him to come home with me but he’s too proud, and, if I’m honest, we haven’t really got the room for him anyway.

I know your advert says you want creative people and Con’s
not exactly that, but he is young and just starting out and this could be the moment in his life which makes or breaks him. When I was his age I got in with a bad crowd, lots of popping pills, taking speed, fighting, that kind of thing. Lucky for me I met Chrissie and fell in love. She showed me a better way to be, you know? She saved me.

Maybe you could save Con.

Hoping for your kindest and fullest consideration.

Yours faithfully,
Nigel Cadwallader

September 2004

Dear Toby,

It was lovely to meet you the other night. I just wanted to say thank you again, for what you’ve done for my Con. It fears me to think what might have happened to him if you hadn’t taken him in and given him a room. You are a very good man.

The reason why I’m writing is that I’m in a bit of a bind. I won’t go into too much detail, but suffice it to say that I’m going to be homeless too, not to mention unemployed, unless I find somewhere to live. Con said that he’s happy for me to share his room, but he said I should write to you, officially, as you like to do things properly, which I totally respect. So, would it be OK if I shared with Con for a while? I’ll pay you rent and it will only be for a few weeks, just until I get myself settled back in the country and get myself a job.

I really need to be near Con now, after what happened to him when I left the country. I feel so guilty and I’ve got so much to make up for. If you would allow me to spend some time with him in your beautiful house, I’d be forever in your debt.

Yours faithfully,
Melinda McNulty

1

Early mornings were the only time that Toby felt that his house belonged to him. Everyone was still sleeping. There was no imminent possibility of a key in the door, of footsteps down the stairs, of voices carrying through walls. It was just him, in his pyjamas, sieving flour into a bowl, tap, tap, tap, against the palm of his hand.

Toby made bread every morning. It was a ritual, something that Karen had done every day when they were together. The first morning after she left he’d come downstairs and immediately started pounding dough, desperate to re-create the scent of his failed marriage. He didn’t even eat it any more, just left it on a cooling tray every day for his tenants to enjoy.

Toby had slept badly and his usual sense of melancholy was now overlaid by a thick blanket of tiredness. It was three days into the New Year and life had already fallen flaccidly back into place. He was still trapped in this mausoleum of a house, still surrounded by people he didn’t know and didn’t want to know. He was still married to a woman whom he hadn’t seen since he was twenty-five. He was still an unpublished poet and he was still penniless.

A pile of bills sat on his desk upstairs, unopened and unpaid. Next to the pile of bills was a pile of rejection
letters from publishers and literary agents. And next to that was a letter from a local estate agent informing him that there were people queuing down the street, apparently, to buy a house like his and enclosing examples of houses the agent had sold recently for unseemly amounts of money. While Toby was grateful to them for alerting him to this fact, it was really of no possible use to him. Toby’s house was full of people who had no intention of leaving and he had no intention of making them.

Toby finished making his dough and pressed it into a loaf tin, which he then slid into the Aga. He could hear the tinny drone of someone’s radio alarm switching itself on upstairs and he headed quickly back towards his room, before he inadvertently crossed paths with anyone. He glanced at things as he passed through the house. A pair of Con’s trainers sat under the coffee table in the TV room, with his socks curled up inside them like sleeping dogs. There was a copy of
Now
magazine on the arm of the sofa and a mug half full of blotchy tea on the floor. Ruby’s black lacy cardigan was hanging from the back of the armchair and Joanne’s Clarins face powder sat in a little plastic pot on the coffee table next to Ruby’s cereal bowl. A small plastic Christmas tree with multicoloured fibre-optic tips twinkled forlornly in the early morning gloom. A pair of Ruby’s pointy boots lay by the door, one upright, the other on its side, as if it had fallen over drunk. Toby picked up one of the boots and stared at it longingly.

This was his world, had been for years. A world of
other people’s possessions, rhythms, dramas, smells and habits. His presence left no imprint on the dynamics of his home. It was as if he didn’t exist. What would it be like to live alone, he wondered, to come home and find everything as he’d left it? To never have to take someone else’s unwashed saucepan out of the kitchen sink to pour himself a glass of water, never to be woken up by the sound of someone else’s snoring or someone else’s lovemaking? To know people only as they presented themselves to the world, not to see the ragged, domestic underbelly of strangers any more. Would he feel more substantial? Would he feel more alive?

He climbed the two flights of stairs to his room, three at a time, and closed the door silently behind him.

2

Ruby watched Con leaving for work from her bedroom window. He moved with the slightly lolloping gait of a teenage boy in trainers. His dark hair was slick with product and his jeans hung somewhere short of his waist but not quite below his buttocks. He was a lovely-looking boy, clear-skinned, well proportioned with startling indigo eyes. But Ruby didn’t find him attractive. She didn’t appreciate younger men. She liked older men. Not
old
men, just men who were slightly used, a little creased, like second-hand books. In the same way that you might look at a small child and try to envisage their adult face, she liked to look at a mature man and imagine the young man who’d once inhabited his features.

‘What are you staring at out there?’

Ruby turned and smiled at the man in her bed. Paul Fox. Her slightly creased forty-five-year-old lover.

‘Nothing,’ she teased.

She sat on the edge of her bed. One of Paul’s feet was poking from the bottom of the duvet. She picked up his big toe between her thumb and forefinger, put it between her front teeth and bit down on it, hard.

‘Ow.’ He pulled his leg back under the duvet. ‘What was that for?’

‘That,’ she said, ‘was for ignoring me last night.’

‘What?’ His brow furrowed.

‘You
know
what. Eliza walked in and suddenly it was as if you didn’t know me any more.’

‘Oh, Christ. Ruby – she’s my
girlfriend
.’

‘Yeah, I know. But it’s still not very nice, is it?’ Ruby and Paul’s relationship had always been an informal mix of occasional business and no-strings pleasure. He got her the odd support slot for one of his acts, they got together once or twice a week for sex or drinking or both, and he paid her what he jokingly referred to as a ‘salary’, a small monthly cheque, just to keep her ticking over, just to keep her in tampons and vodka, because he could afford to and because he wanted to. It was easy-come, easy-go, a bit of reciprocal fun that had worked for both of them for the past five years. Ruby didn’t expect anything more from Paul. But at the same time she couldn’t help feeling a bit gutted that Paul had failed to fall in love with her throughout their five-year relationship. And she couldn’t help feeling a bit cheated that six months ago Paul had fallen in love with a forty-two-year-old earth mother from Ladbroke Grove with two kids, her own business and a vineyard in Tuscany.

‘Look,’ sighed Paul, sitting up in bed, ‘I had no idea she was going to show up last night. She said she couldn’t get a babysitter –’

‘Sorry?’

‘She’d originally said she was coming to see the band and then her babysitter let her down and –’

‘And you invited me instead.’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Fucking charming.’

‘Jesus, Ruby –’

‘Jesus-Ruby-what? I’m sick of this. This whole thing is fucked.’

‘Ruby. Come on.’

‘No. I will not come on. You and I. We used to be equals. We used to be the same. But ever since you met Eliza it’s like I’m just some bit of crap who follows you around plugging the gaps in your life.’

‘That is
so
not true.’

‘And don’t talk like that. Like some American teenager. You’re forty-five years old. You sound
ridiculous
.’ Ruby winced inwardly as the words left her mouth. She was being a bitch, but she couldn’t help it.

She glanced at herself in the mirror. Ruby had an image of herself that she carried around in her head. It was an image of a smoky brunette with black eyes and creamy skin and a look about her as if she’d just had sex or was thinking about having sex. Generally speaking the mirror reflected back exactly what she expected to see. Every now and then it didn’t. This was one of those moments. Her make-up was smudged under her eyes. Sometimes when her make-up was smudged under her eyes it made her look sexy and dangerous. Right now it made her look tired and vaguely deranged. Her hair was dull and dirty – she should have washed it yesterday, but just couldn’t be bothered – and she had a big spot on her chin. She wondered what Eliza looked
like first thing in the morning and then realized that it didn’t matter what Eliza looked like first thing in the morning because Paul was in love with her and to him she would look beautiful no matter what.

There was a knock at the door. Ruby breathed a sigh of relief and pulled her dressing gown together.

‘
Ruby. It’s me, Toby
.’

She sighed and opened the door.

‘Hi. Sorry, I was just, er – oh, hi, Paul.’ He peered over her shoulder and threw Paul a stiff smile.

Paul put up a hand and cracked an equally stiff smile. He looked silly, arranged between Ruby’s marabou-trimmed cushions and fake leopard-skin throws with his big hairy chest and his mop of greying hair. Silly and like he didn’t belong here. He looked, Ruby suddenly and overwhelmingly realized, like a silly handsome man having a silly adulterous affair. She gulped silently.

‘Yes, I was just wondering about the rent. Just wondering if maybe you could give me a cheque today. It’s just, there are some bills, and if I don’t send a cheque by the end of the week, then, er, well, there’ll be no hot water. Or heating. That’s all.’

‘Fine,’ sighed Ruby, ‘fine. I’ll give you a cheque tonight.’

‘Yes, well, you did say that last week, and you didn’t. I haven’t had any rent off you since the end of November, and even then it wasn’t the full amount and –’

‘Toby. I’ll give you a cheque. Tonight. OK?’

‘Right. OK. Do you promise?’

‘I promise.’

‘Good. Right, then. See you.
See you, Paul
.’

‘See you, Toby.’

Ruby closed the door, and turned and smiled at Paul. He peeled back the cover and smiled at her invitingly.

‘Sorry, mate.’ She flipped the duvet back over his naked body and picked up an elastic band from her dressing table. She pulled her hair back into a topknot with it. ‘I’m not in the mood.’

Paul threw her an injured look. ‘Not even a quickie?’ he said.

‘No. Not even a quickie.’ She winked at him, softening the bluntness of her rejection. She wasn’t in the mood for another scene. She knew there was a Big Conversation waiting to happen, but she didn’t want to have it now. Right now she just wanted to have a shower. Right now she just wanted to feel clean.