Portobello Read Online Free PDF Page A

sixty and what
was the point of putting the two amounts? It took Lance a few
moments to understand and when he did it made him angry. Trying
to catch people out, that's what it was. The person who stuck that
up there wanted to have a good laugh when the caller said a
hundred pounds and it was really a hundred and twenty or ninety
or whatever. Lance felt like tearing it down and stamping on it.
He didn't. It would have been a woman who had written that, he
was sure of it. He'd remember that number all right, it was the
same code as his ex-girlfriend's and the four digits were those of
his birthday 2787. Phoning would do no harm. But think about it
first. Think carefully.
    He might even ask Uncle Gib. He hated Uncle Gib and his
religion and his horrible house but still he had to admit that the
old man was clever. Not cleverer than him, of course, but clever
in a different way.
    Gilbert Gibson had put down a deposit on the house in the
days when he was a burglar. Prison was an occupational hazard
in his job and, all in all, he must have spent about twenty years
inside. While he was away, his wife Ivy went to work in the
Chevelure hair products factory to pay the mortgage and had just
handed over the final instalment when she dropped dead of a brain
haemorrhage. Her death coincided with Gilbert's exit from his
fourth term of imprisonment. It would be his last. While inside
this time his cellmate had been the Assistant Shepherd at the
Church of the Children of Zebulun and the result of their frequent
talks and Reuben Perkins's proselytising was that Gilbert got religion.
This meant no more breaking of the eighth commandment.
It also meant clothing the naked and giving shelter to those without
a roof over their heads.
    Uncle Gib, as he was known to everyone in the family, knew
no one who was naked. However, his own nephew – in fact, his
late wife's great-nephew – was without a home. When Lance Platts's
parents threw him out and the girlfriend he moved in with got her
brother to deal with him after he blacked her eye and knocked out
one of her teeth, Uncle Gib took him in. Lance didn't want to live
with Uncle Gib. It wasn't that he was fastidious or ambitious – he
was in no position to be either – but even his parents' flat was
moderately clean, had central heating and quite a nice bathroom.
The girlfriend's place had been newly decorated by the council
before she moved in with her baby. She had a microwave and an
espresso coffee maker, and a huge flat-screen TV on which you
could get about five hundred channels. Her flat in Talbot Road
was always clean and gleaming, and had a balcony that caught the
afternoon sun. Uncle Gib's house, on the other hand, standing in
Blagrove Road right up against the Westway and the train line, was
in much the same state of decoration now as it was when he put
down that deposit on it in 1965. What had changed was the immediate
neighbourhood, now packed with social housing, blocks and
blocks of flats, rows and rows of little houses. Lance knew this
because Uncle Gib often boasted about the unchanged condition
of his home and the virtues of his wife.
    'My poor dear wife, your Auntie Ivy, she couldn't afford the paint,
let alone what you might call structural alterations. Everything she
earned went into paying off the mortgage. A saint she was. They
don't make them like that no more.'
    The saint had nailed up the bathroom door when only a rusty
trickle was coming out of the cold tap and the old geyser broke.
The prevailing view held by Uncle Gib and Auntie Ivy was that
when you had a kitchen sink and an outside toilet you didn't
need a bathroom. One icy morning in early spring when Lance
opened the toilet door he saw a rat scuttle away behind a ragwrapped
pipe. He reported this to Uncle Gib who merely looked
up from his scrambled egg and slice of black pudding and said,
'Don't let the folks next door hear you or they'll all want one.'
When he had got over laughing at his own joke, he added,