A Desirable Residence Read Online Free PDF Page A

go and sit down, and I’ll bring you a piece of toast.’
    ‘OK,’ said Liz grudgingly, taking another bite of her doughnut. ‘Where’s Alice?’ she added, in a muffled voice.
    ‘She went out earlier on,’ said Jonathan. He opened a drawer and took out the bread knife. ‘She didn’t say where she was going.’
     
    The house looked just as it always had done. Solid. Familiar. Home. Gazing at it from her strategic viewing position across the street, Alice thought that if she’d walked past it in a hurry and looked up, she might even have believed it was still home and that if she went inside she would find her mother in the kitchen or in the sitting-room watching Summer Street , her father playing classical music in the study, the smell of food in the air and Oscar asleep in front of the fire.
    Alice bit her lip and frowned and hunched her narrow shoulders in her old brown suede jacket. They’d had to give Oscar away. To Antonia Callender, of all awful, awful people. What a gorgeous cat! I bet you’ll miss him. You can come and see him any time, you know . Stupid bitch. There was no way Alice was going near Antonia’s house. She had hated her ever since they sat next to each other on the first day in the upper third, and Antonia asked Alice what her favourite drink was and laughed really loudly when she said Lilt. Of course, Antonia’s was gin and tonic. And then everyone else in the class had said theirs was gin and tonic, too, except the real squares. Now she kept asking people if they’d got stoned at the weekend, and last term she’d gone on about how she was going to stay with her cousins, who were really cool and smoked joints in front of their parents. Alice reckoned she made it all up. When they’d gone to her house to deliver Oscar, Antonia’s mother had offered Alice orange squash. But she hadn’t felt able to drink anything.
    They’d taken him there in the car, in his travelling basket, which he hated. Alice could still remember the precise feel of the wicker on her knees, weighted down unevenly by Oscar’s pacing paws. He’d scrabbled heavily against the sides most of the way there, as if he couldn’t wait to be let out. But when they’d opened the little gate, he’d looked around nervously, and then retreated back as far as he could go. They’d had to tip the basket up to get him out, and then he’d crouched down, looking panic-stricken, before streaking across the rug and under the sofa. Then he’d made a mess on the carpet. Hah. That served them right . . .
    An old lady with a shopping basket pushed past Alice, interrupting her thoughts.
    ‘Excuse me ,’ she said crossly, and gave Alice a suspicious look. Alice stared back rudely. This was still her street. She’d grown up here; she still belonged here. Not in Silchester shitty Tutorial College.
    She’d just had to get out of that place this afternoon. Her father was trying to sort things out downstairs, in the classroom bit, and kept shouting upstairs to the flat, asking her to come and help move desks around. Then he’d told her to turn down her music, then he’d told her she should really be a bit more helpful and lots of girls of fourteen had Saturday jobs, and all he wanted was half an hour of her time. The more he said things like that, the more she wanted to be as unhelpful as possible. So she’d shrugged on her suede jacket and made sure her cigarettes were in the pocket, and stomped noisily down the stairs. She couldn’t bring herself to say anything at all to her father—to have him smiling hopefully at her was even worse than hearing him shout—so she hadn’t told him she was going out. Anyway, it was pretty obvious.
    It was getting cold, and drops of rain were starting to fall on her head. She fingered her lighter, and wondered what to do. She hadn’t really intended to come back here. She’d just thought she would go somewhere for a cigarette, maybe sit on the grass in the Cathedral Close. That was one tiny