Life Class Read Online Free PDF

along here.’
    Twenty yards further on she stopped outside a tall, narrow house with cracked and blistered paint on the front door and skimpy, no-colour curtains drawn across the ground-floor windows.
    ‘I’m in the basement.’
    He unlatched the gate and looked down the steps. In the small yard at the bottom were five dustbins overflowing with rubbish. Behind them, a low door led into some kind of storage space, perhaps intended to hold the bins. As far as he could tell it was empty, but the light from the street lamp didn’t reach all the way to the back.
    He sensed Teresa was frightened. ‘Would you like me to open the door for you? Check everything’s all right?’
    ‘Please. If you wouldn’t mind.’
    She gave him her keys and he went down the steps ahead of her, his nostrils assailed by a smell of rotting cabbage. A few leaves, thick-veined and gross, their stalks yellow and flabby with decay, littered the ground. He turned the key in the lock, but the door, swollen with damp, resisted him. All the time he was aware of thedark cavity behind him. Anybody could hide in there after dark. No wonder she was frightened.
    The door gave before a more determined shove.
    ‘There we are.’
    She’d stopped halfway down the steps. Now only her head and shoulders were lit by the street lamp. Gradually, as she edged further down the steps, her face fell into shadow. Then she was standing beside him. He caught her scent, sweet and dark, above the stench of rotting vegetables.
    ‘He got inside once.’
    ‘I’ll have a look around.’
    He went first, walking ahead of her down a long passage, which bent sharply to the right in the middle. The lino was black with grey blotches, perhaps intended to suggest pebbles, but looking rather as if somebody had spattered paint across it. She had two main rooms – big, but dark. A tiny kitchen opened off the living room. The bathroom was squeezed in next door to the bedroom. He looked in the airing cupboard, inside the wardrobe, under the bed – feeling, as he pressed his cheek into the musty-smelling rug, like a ridiculous old maid – then returned to the hall. All clear.’
    ‘Good.’ She laughed on a sharply exhaled breath. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee? After all that.’
    ‘I’d love one.’
    He had no idea what the offer implied and daren’t think. He told himself there was no hurry. Most of his sexual experience so far had been kisses and cuddles and worming his way into the drawers of girls whose sights were firmly set on marriage, always feeling a bit of a bastard since he had no intention of marrying anybody. That, and a series of rather unsatisfactory commercial encounters. They should have been easier, since both sides knew where they stood, but they hadn’t been. In fact, the memory of the first time could still make him cringe. The woman, beside whom any one of his aunties would have looked like a mere slip of a girl, pointed him towards a bowl of water and a bar of carbolic soap and towel on the dresser by the bed. Obediently he started to get washed.Hands. Face. Neck. Ears. Even now he felt a hot blush of shame prickle his chest, as he remembered her laughter.
    ‘Are you all right in there?’
    He roused himself. ‘Yes.’
    ‘You’ve gone very quiet.’
    ‘Just thinking.’
    While she finished making the coffee he looked around the room. Her taste was good. She’d used deep shades of red and blue and positioned small lamps to cast golden arcs of light over the walls, so the effect was of being in a dark, rich cave. The dustbins and squalor outside were easily forgotten.
    She came back into the room carrying a tray.
    ‘The trouble with this place is everybody comes down here to empty the rubbish, so if I hear somebody moving about I don’t know if it’s him or just somebody from upstairs.’ She put the tray down on a table. ‘Or a peeping Tom. You get plenty of them.’
    ‘You shouldn’t really be living in a basement.’
    ‘I know, but it’s