Lucky Break Read Online Free PDF Page B

effect in yet another square-cut bodice trimmed with white. Among the many beauties in their year Nell felt small and plump as a pony, and so far, six months into the course, she’d been given nothing but wenches, children and servants to play, although once when she’d complained, she’d been cast as someone’s aged mother.
    â€˜Nell?’ Charlie had hold of her arm. ‘Listen, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you move in?’
    â€˜Me?’
    â€˜Please! It will be fun. You can move in on Sunday, right after Rob takes his things. Or before. Or anytime. You can have the spare room.’
    Nell bit her lip. She’d have to give notice where she was. Although not much, and at Charlie’s she wouldn’t have to endure those late-night talks outside the bathroom with her landlord, always inexplicably wandering round the house in his open dressing gown whatever time she came home.
    â€˜OK,’ she said. ‘I will. I’ll do it. The week after next.’
    â€˜Thank you.’ Charlie wiped the tears from her face and Nell watched as with one small smile her beauty was restored.
    Â 
    Charlie lived on the top floor of a house in Willesden. From the outside the house looked unexceptional, the window frames peeling a little more than most, the glass in one panel of the front door boarded up, but once you were inside, the full scale of the dereliction hit you. Damp, decay, and a deep heady stench of rotting wood. Charlie ignored it. She kicked shut the front door, swept up the two flights, past the abandoned flats on each landing and on to her own floor, where the radio was playing low, the battered sofa was draped in creamy shrouds of cotton, and bunches of dried flowers stood on low tables among scattered photographs and abandoned mugs and the occasional beautiful object – a blue glass bottle or a carving of a Nigerian god.
    Nell had visited several times. Had gone back with Charlie after college to go over lines, had sat on the foam comfort of the armchair, encased in its white throw, with the gas fire blasting and Charlie, even in midwinter, slouching in a pair of combat trousers, her bare feet tucked under her, her smooth brown arms and prominent shoulder bones shown off to their best advantage in a boy’s school vest. Until now she’d never really noticed the spare room – had only seen the room Charlie shared with Rob – its low white bed, always unmade, the layers of antique lace at the windows, the clothes – flea-market dresses and a dun-coloured trench coat, hanging from pegs on the wall. But today Charlie continued up the stairs to a small room in the attic. It had a window that looked out to one side with a view over the garden, and a gas fire built into the chimney breast, cracked across the middle. There was a bed and a cupboard and the raised pattern of the wallpaper just visible through a coat of magnolia paint.
    Nell dropped her bag and sat down on the edge of the bed. Charlie crouched on the floor and lit a match and the fire fluttered and flickered and attempted to catch. ‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ Nell asked, remembering vaguely some warning of her mother’s about the dangers of gas, but Charlie blew on it a little to spread the flame and said she’d slept in here often after rows with Rob and she always left the fire on all night.
    â€˜Bastard. Bastard.’ She crawled across the bed and lay stretched out. ‘Thank God he’s gone. You wouldn’t believe what a wanker he was. You know, he was so vain? He was obsessed with his ears. Said they stuck out too much. He was always holding them back and asking what I thought.’
    Nell pictured Rob and laughed. She’d met him three or four times but he never remembered her. He was one of those men who only noticed women who were beautiful. ‘Fuckable’ is what he’d probably have said. ‘Now you mention it I did notice his ears,’