My Legendary Girlfriend Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘proper food’ in the kitchen, but I lit up a cigarette from the emergency pack stashed in my suitcase to stave off immediate hunger pangs, and checked out the fridge for the sheer hell of it.
    The yellowing refrigerator in the corner of the kitchen gurgling vociferously, as if suffering from a heavy bout of indigestion was, at a guess, probably a decade older than myself, as was virtually everything in the flat. The cooker, wardrobes, sofa-bed, carpet – the rigours of age had consumed them all to such an extent that it had rendered them useless unless you had the know-how. For instance, to get a ring on the cooker to work, the control knob had to be turned on and off twice; to open the wardrobe door, pressure had to be applied to the top right-hand corner. Had I noticed all that was wrong when I first saw the flat, I wouldn’t have taken it, but at the time getting a roof over my head had seemed more important than checking wardrobe doors, and my landlord, Mr F. Jamal (at least that was the name I wrote on the rent cheques) had known this. His skills in interior design were so shoddy that he must have graduated with honours from the Rachman school of landlords. Every surface in the flat had been painted in cheap cheerless white emulsion some time in the last fifty years, which the passing of time and countless smokers had managed to downgrade to a pale orangey-brown. The only furniture in the room was a sofa-bed in fawn velvety material pitted haphazardly with cigarette burns; a tile-surfaced coffee table against the far wall which had the TV perched on it; and two small white Formica wardrobes along the wall opposite the window. To try and cheer the place up – an impossibly futile task – I had stuck my favourite photo of Aggi on the wall near the sofa-bed and an Audrey Hepburn poster on the wall in the bathroom.
    I’d spent two solid weeks searching for accommodation. They were the second most depressing weeks of my life, requiring me to get the 07.15 National Express coach from Nottingham to London four times, in order to traipse around the slum districts of the capital. In this time I learned the two laws of looking for accommodation in London:
Never trust a landlord while he’s still breathing.
The only good landlords are four dead landlords.
    The only place I saw, could afford and which didn’t have drug dealers in the vicinity was Flat 3, 64 Cumbria Avenue
    – aka – N6. A luxurious self-contained studio flat with own kitchenette, bathroom/shower
    – aka – a glorified studio flat, minus the glory, on the second floor of a decrepit Edwardian house in crappy Archway.
    To be truthful, Mr F. Jamal hadn’t advertised my abode in Loot or any other free ad newspaper. He hadn’t needed to. He had a kind of word of mouth thing going amongst people in the know in the lower end of the accommodation food chain, so much so that his many properties were consistently snapped up within seconds of becoming available. I, however, became aware of his legendary status not by being in the know – but through Tammy, my friend Simon’s girlfriend. She’d told him about Mr F. Jamal after I’d been moaning to Simon about the difficulty I was having. I’d looked at nine places, all complete and utter toilets ‘five minutes’ from the tube, the worst of which was a place in Kentish Town. The landlord arrived half an hour late for our appointment, by which time five other people had turned up to view the place he’d promised me first refusal on. It wasn’t anything to shout about, just a double room with a shared toilet and kitchen. He told the assembled crowd that the man living there had changed his mind and wanted to stay, but he was going to put an extra bed in the room and did anyone want it. At this point I’d walked off in disgust but three of my fellow house-hunters were desperate enough to stay behind. Tammy gave Simon Mr F. Jamal’s phone number. One call later and I was signing the lease. I had thought