Portobello Read Online Free PDF

'Beggars
can't be choosers.'
    Lance was a beggar and he couldn't be a chooser. He lived on
the benefit and Westminster City Council paid his rent to Uncle
Gib. The council had been told he had the whole first floor but
this was a joke, considering Uncle Gib had the main bedroom, the
box room was unusable on account of a leak in the roof over the
window where water came in every time it rained, and the bathroom
was boarded up. There was a second floor but this was never
used or even visited. A rope had been tied across the bottom stair
with a card hanging on it which said No Entry like on a one-way
street. Lance and Uncle Gib lived in the quite large kitchen and a
kind of cavern with a stone floor and a sink the old man called the
'scullery'. The front room and 'dining' room were never used, though
they were furnished with hand-downs inherited by Auntie Ivy when
her own parents died in the seventies. These rooms, according to
Uncle Gib, were to be kept 'looking nice' for when he put the house
on the market and prospective vendors came to view it.
    When he wasn't writing tracts for the Church of the Children
of Zebulun or being an Agony Uncle, answering The Zebulun magazine's readers' queries, Uncle Gib spent his time leafing
through the glossy brochures estate agents put through his letter
box almost every day. The neighbourhood was 'coming up' and
houses soaring in price into the four and five hundred thousand
bracket and beyond. Only after considerable refurbishment, of
course, a requirement that Uncle Gib ignored while reiterating
the enormous advantage of the house being made detached by the
construction of the flyover. His laptop in front of him, he sat at
the kitchen table drinking cup after cup of dark-brown tea and
chain-smoking. Another thing Lance hated about the house was
the all-pervading stink of cigarettes.
    'There's a poky little place here,' said Uncle Gib, 'only two
bedrooms, no garden, what they call a patio, which means a backyard,
no scullery, couple of streets away in Elkstone Road, what
d'you think they're asking?'
    'I don't know,' said Lance. 'Might be five fucking million for all
I know.'
    'Don't you use that language here. This is a godly house. Of
course it's not five million. Have a bit of sense. Be your age. Four
hundred and fifty thousand, that's what.'
    Lance tried to get his own back by making a fan out of one of
the brochures and waving it briskly to clear the air.
    'You don't like my fags the remedy's in your own hands. You don't
have to stay here. I don't want you. You'll have to go when I sell
the house.' Uncle Gib pointed a nicotine-stained finger at him. 'I'll
tell you something. Our Lord would have smoked if there'd been
any tobacco about in the land of Galilee. He drank, didn't he? It
wouldn't just have been water into wine at the marriage at Cana,
it'd have been Marlboro Lites for all the guests.'
    But in need of fresh air, Lance had gone out into the garden, a
very small trapezium-shaped plot where nature prevailed untouched
and where grass, nettles and thistles, dock and the occasional large
speckled fungus grew unchecked. A shed in the far corner, its roof
long caved in, served as a winter store place for Uncle Gib's garden
furniture, an iron table he had stolen from a pub and two kitchen
chairs, one of them with a leg missing. Lance sat down on the
intact chair – the other one had to be propped up with bricks –
and began thinking carefully. She'd want to see him, whoever she
was, she wouldn't just be content with him talking on the phone.
Maybe she wouldn't even ask him for the right number between
eighty and a hundred and sixty. He'd have to go to her place and
have her question him. He went back into the house to consult
Uncle Gib.
    The old man had opened his laptop and was answering his
letters. Immensely proud of his role as amateur psychologist and
adviser, Uncle Gib never minded other people reading what he
had written, though criticism wasn't allowed. Over his