A Perfectly Good Family Read Online Free PDF Page A

place I have to go.’
My brother’s jaw jutted forward, like my father’s. ‘Don’t you think you might have asked?’
‘Asked? Unless Hugh appoints us otherwise tomorrow, I just inherited a third of this place. Why would I need your permission to live in my own house?’
Averil had started clearing the table, pitching silverware on to stacked plates from inches above, crash-crash; then she made quite a project out of bunching all the napkins into a single, furiously tight wad.
‘Because other people live in it,’ said Truman.
‘If this place is so massive,’ I reminded him, ‘that Father wanted to donate half of it to the homeless, it’s obviously big enough for you and me.’
‘But I thought you had this great career going. That you had a gallery and you were going to be famous and you’d made your real life in Britain. All that about applying to British immigration for “settlement”…How you liked your new flatmates …And a sidewalk seems like a pavement now.’
‘You mean you thought you’d got rid of me.’
‘I didn’t—’
It happened again, up-side of the head: I was starting to cry. Averil shot me a quick dirty look, as if tears were cheating. As punishment, she cleared my wine glass.
‘What did you mean,’ Truman prodded, ‘you’ve been “evicted”?’
    When I found the spacious flat in South Ealing I was patching together a living from bootlegging films off the BBC for third-world black-market videos, and part-time messengering in town on a gasping secondhand scooter. At thirty-four, I was wearying of odd jobs and empty pockets for the sake of ‘my work’, and my attitude towards my higher calling had grown sardonic. However, I’d had just enough encouragement from selling the odd piece privately that I hadn’t, incredibly, given up. The pretension of being an Artist may have made me cringe, and at low-rent parties I never introduced myself as anything but a bohemian ex-pat scavenger. Still, alone with mud, refining a plane or tapering those delicate fingers, I did not want a drink, a fag, a nap, or a chat; sculpting was the single thing I did that was all I wanted to be doing while I was doing it.
    What’s more, I savoured that my income was illegal. From girlhood I had been a sneak. For four years I’d limped by on tourist or student visas and wasn’t officially allowed to work; I was in my element under the table.
    So after I’d made a hash of one more live-in relationship, I may have wished myself beyond the stage of communitarian arrangements with names on milk cartons, but I could not afford a flat on my own, full stop. I posted for flatmates at universities. I knew it was safer—and wouldn’t it have been—to advertise for females, but girls bored me and I grew up flanked by boys.
    I had several takers, so I must have selected the winning couple with some care. I don’t know what system I applied—the two men were not in the least alike.
    Andrew Finlay was a grad student in political science at the London School of Economics, a scrawny bookish-looking boy with sharp shoulders and tapered wrists. His body was knobby and perverse, with a prominent Adam’s apple and double joints—his elbows bent backwards. Though twenty-four, he looked twelve, an effect he encouraged by wearing outsized overalls bibbing harlequin jumpers, trouser cuffs rolled high to expose rumpled socks and chunky shoes. His facial features were narrow and weaselly, dwarfed by wide National Health horn-rims. Though his grin was sly and he laughed knowingly from the side of his mouth, it didn’t take long to ferret out that Andrew had had meagre experience with women.
    Peter Larson was a broader man, still well my junior but older than Andrew by six years. He was a Glaswegian, and it took me weeks of deciphering his accent to understand that his ostensible ambitions were in journalism. Such a future was hard to picture, save the bit about boozing up sources at late-licence pubs. Peter was on the