Unlike a Virgin (4 page)

‘No, Wend. He’s just proved that he thinks absolutely nothing of me.’

‘Grace, that’s not true.’

‘Wendy, if I was a posh bloke I’d have got the job, but because I’m a short blonde woman I didn’t, and I can’t tell you how angry that makes me. Do you know what, Wend? I’m going to fight. I’m going to make him sorry he walked into Make A Move. And so are you, Wendy. Help me make his life hell.’ I look in the mirror and make a roaring sound.

‘Oh, bleedin’ hell,’ mutters Wendy.

Wendy follows me out of the loo and into the office. The theme tune from
Rocky
is playing in my head. I’m going to sell so many houses this posh bloke will be terrified. I’m going to sell so many houses that Ken will come crying to me about the mistake he’s made. I am going to sell so many houses that there’ll be nothing left for anyone else to sell.

They’ve put Posh Boy at Smeg’s desk, which is opposite mine. I sit down.

‘What’s this?’ I say frostily. There’s a pile of printed forms in the middle of my desk.

‘Estate Agent of the Year forms,’ says Posh Boy. He’s ever so good looking. It’s ever so annoying.

‘What?’

‘You get your clients to fill one in when you complete a sale. There’s a prize for the best estate agent business, which I want Make A Move to get, and a prize for the best individual. I won it last year.’

I eyeball Posh Boy. He smiles; I don’t. I’m going to win this year, I decide. It’s Posh Boy or me. Let the games begin.

Next to the forms sits a lone business card. ‘John St John
Smythe – Head of London Sales’. I turn my nose up at it as though it’s a dead rodent. I want to toss it in the rubbish bin, but I don’t. I’m better than that. I drop it in my bag instead. I’ll use it as a toothpick.

The phone rings and he reaches for it, but I am John Wayne when it comes to answering the phone and I get there first.

‘Good morning, Make A Move.’

‘Am I speaking to the Lady Boss?’

‘No, I’m still plain old Gracie Flowers.’

‘You’ll never be plain, Gracie Flowers. Now then, do you fancy selling me some houses?’

‘I’m loving the plural, Bob, what are you wanting?’

Bob the Builder, as I call him, because he is a builder, is my magic client. He has a huge building company and he buys anything that needs renovation. He gets his boys in, makes the property look beautiful and then hands it back to us to sell.

‘Right, we’ve got this big beast on Shirland Road. No one’s seen it yet.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘A total shit hole,’ I tell him. I said I couldn’t lie. ‘And there’s another stinker that came on last week off the Harrow Road. That would suit you, too.’

I notice Posh Boy looking at me with his mouth open. I bet they don’t describe properties as shit holes where he comes from. They probably use terms like ‘well-appointed’ and ‘enviably located’. And don’t get me started on ‘architect designed’. Architect designed! Who else would design it? A dinner lady? I loathe estate agents like that.

‘Excellent, Gracie, that’s just how I like them.’

‘Right, Bob. I’ll come to you. I’m on my way.’

I hang up.

‘Wend, I’ve got an eleven and an eleven thirty coming in to exchange contracts. Can you make sure there’s champagne in the fridge and clean glasses? If I’m slightly late for the eleven o’clock, will you keep Mrs Walsh chatting. She’s got twin girls, so you can ask her about them. And the wife of the eleven thirty is a lady of restricted growth, so whatever you do, don’t use the word midget and try to make sure the boys don’t take photos of her on their mobiles like last time. Also, will you ring the Shirland Road man and find out what he’ll take. I’ll try and get an offer out of Bob this morning.’

Wendy is in her efficient office manager mode and nods curtly as I stand up from my desk.

‘Good work.’ It’s John Posh Boy Whatsit. Could he be any more patronising? ‘Grace? Is that your name?’

‘Yes.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’

I nod.

‘Although … have we met before?’

I shrug. I’m giving him nothing.

‘It’s a lovely name, Grace.’

‘Thank you,’ I say.

‘It’s my mother’s name.’

I don’t respond and start to walk towards the door, but I bump into my desk on the way.

‘Ow, tits!’ I exclaim. Posh Boy laughs. The name Grace has mocked me since childhood.

I manage to sashay out of the door all the same. Estate Agent of the Year, I think, rubbing my newly bruised thigh, I like the sound of that. He’s not taking that from me as well.

When I embarked on my career as an estate agent I was handed a tatty box of index cards and told by Lube to get my ‘chops round them’. On each card was scribbled a name and telephone number. Occasionally, there was a note, too, offering a valuable piece of information such as ‘500,000 max’ or ‘bloke’s a tosser’. On my first day I called every number in the box to find out if that person was still looking for a property. Most had moved four years previously or didn’t answer. Out of the whole box of two hundred only two needed my help. However, there was one card that fascinated me. The name ‘Robin Duster’ was printed clearly in capitals spanning two lines, and below it was a mobile number and a street address. What intrigued me was that the entire card had been circled in biro-drawn stars. Now, the doodles could have been because Robin Duster bored the cheaply tailored suit trousers off my predecessor on the phone, but really, if telephone tedium drove estate agents to doodling, everything in the office would
be covered in graffiti. The Miss Marple in me decided that Robin Duster had
earned his
stars, so I set about stalking him.

For three weeks I called him three times a day, but there was never an answer or even a voicemail. So on the Monday of the fourth week I left work and drove to the address on the card. I pulled up on Scrubs Lane outside a single-storey industrial-looking building with no door. I started to suspect the stars denoted my predecessor’s suspicion that Robin Duster was a serial killer, so I texted Danny:

Hey, hot stuff, checking out a client. If you never hear from me again, here’s the address.

He texted me straight back:

Wish you wouldn’t keep doing this, babe. Why don’t you get some work singing?

I got out of the car and walked slowly round the building, where I saw a gate propped open by a bag of cement, and a young lad with his top off loading a van.

‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’ he asked.

‘Are you Robin Duster?’

‘Nah, I wish,’ he answered and pointed through the open gate. ‘He’s in there.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You can thank me any time.’ He winked. I left that job to Wendy, who performed it with aplomb in the bathroom of one of Bob’s showroom apartments three years later.

I walked through the gate into a yard stacked with bricks, planks and bloke debris – unwashed mugs, empty Coke cans and old copies of newspapers showing nipples – and at the far end was a partially pulled down grille leading to a brick building. I could hear sounds coming from inside, so I crouched down and entered, imagining my severed limbs being pulled out of the canal by a dog walker in the morning. The building was full of sheets of wood, plastic and metal. A man stood in front of me wearing a visor over his face, combat trousers and a T-shirt, he was holding a whirring, sparking machine that looked a bit like a chain saw and he was cutting a thick piece of kitchen surface material. I spotted a yellow hard hat on the floor and put it on just in case. Whoever it belonged to had a very large head, so it sat quite low on my face, making me feel like a Lego figure. Robin Duster was deep in concentration, so I walked over to a shelf where a radio was playing and turned it off. I don’t like the radio.

‘Who the hell are you?’ the man shouted.

‘I’m Gracie Flowers,’ I told him.

He turned the machine off.

‘Who?’

‘Gracie Flowers.’

He pulled the visor off and I tilted my hard hat so he could see my eyes.

‘You from the Inland Revenue?’

‘Yes. You owe me loads of money,’ I said with relish.

His face fell.

‘I’m joking.’

‘How do I know?’

‘I’m an estate agent.’

‘Oh, you’re not from Smiths?’

‘No,’ I said affronted. How dare he? ‘I’m from Make A Move.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Are you Robin Duster?’

‘Yes.’

‘I wanted to see if I could find you some properties.’

He laughed loudly.

‘I like properties that need work done to them. The more the better.’

‘Excellent. Consider it done,’ and I shook his hand and left. I still have the hard hat. It sits on top of my filing cabinet at work.

Over the next few weeks, whenever we got something suitable I would print out the particulars, put them in a plastic sandwich bag, take them to his depot on Scrubs Lane and slide them under the gate. I used to add a little note on a Post-it, too. For a long time I used to write, ‘Hello, Robin, hope you’re well. Thought you might like this.’ But by the time I put the eleventh envelope through his door I’d deteriorated to, ‘Robin, this property needs so much work it will make you poo your pants and cry for Mummy.’ It was the eleventh property and the poo reference that got him interested. Ten minutes later I saw something I never thought I’d see: Bob’s number flash up on my mobile.

‘Robin,’ I sighed as I answered it. ‘I do wish you’d stop pestering me.’

‘Gracie Flowers. Gracie Flowers.’

‘Robin Duster. Robin Duster.’

‘Call me Bob.’

‘Bob the Builder.’

‘Don’t you dare.’

‘Promise.’

Oops.

‘Listen, I’m outside the property you sent me. Good work. Can you get the keys?’

‘Give me four minutes. I’m on my way.’

Fifteen minutes later he’d put in an offer, bought me a pasty and told me I was ‘OK, for an estate agent’.

So Bob the Builder was a tough nut to crack, rather like trying to crack a Brazil nut by banging it repeatedly against my head for months, in fact, but once cracked Bob turned out to have the softest, gooiest, truffliest centre.

He’s a legend and a man of few words, which I admire greatly. When faced with a topic of conversation he won’t hurl himself at it and rub himself all over it, like an overexcited dog – or me – he’ll simply think, then speak. Genius. His main passions are QPR, fishing and making millions and millions of pounds. Oh, and his hideous girlfriend, Stella. She’s not actually hideous, she’s stunning, but stunning in the style of a WAG pictured at a funeral in
Hello!

Stella’s with him today because they’re going to do some shopping after the viewings. Not that Stella looks like the sort of girl who would want much, maybe just a helicopter and a tropical island.

‘Yep, I’ll take this one, too,’ Bob says. ‘Put in at fifty under asking and we’ll go from there.’

He’s standing in the centre of the run-down room, darting his eyes quickly about him, as he always does when he’s thinking. Bob looks like Bruce Willis, according to Wendy. In fact, years ago Wendy forced me to develop a crush on Bob by repeatedly saying things like, ‘Imagine those calloused hands
travelling up your thigh,’ and, ‘Think of that strong builders’ back as it pumps up and down on top of you,’ when no one else was in the office. It wasn’t a full-blown crush, and meeting Stella for the first time soon doused it. She’s the least warm person I’ve ever met.

Still, I’d best make an effort. She’s currently looking bored and staring out of the window.

‘I love your shoes,’ I tell her. They’re four-inch patent heels in an appropriate blood-red colour. Normally, when girls meet other girls we find a whole shared language revolving around handbags and shoes, over which we can bond, but even that doesn’t work with Stella. Rather than do the obligatory, ‘Oh, thanks, only twenty-five quid in Dorothy Perkins’ retort, she just gives me a look. And what a look it is. She manages to say so much simply by raising her top lip, and the gist of it is, ‘Don’t speak to me. I will never speak to you. You will never be able to afford these shoes and you would look like a backward child trying on shoes in a tranny shop if you did. The mere fact that I’m sharing air with you offends me.’

I stare back at her. It’s such a feat of coldness I wonder whether I should applaud.

‘All right, sis, we’d best get on,’ Bob says, walking towards me. I think that’s why Stella hates me, because I get on so well with Bob and he calls me sis.

‘Cool.’

‘What do you think got into Lube?’

I shake my head.

‘Dunno. He obviously thinks that John St John Smythe is better than me.’

‘That name rings a bell. Wasn’t he at Smiths?’

‘Probably. He’s twat enough.’

‘I’ve always got a job for you, finder of shit holes. I’d do you some business cards.’