‘Yes, I suppose.’

  ‘So – do you think you can do it? Do you think you can get to know your tenants?’

  Toby nodded. ‘Yes. I really think I can.’

  11

  Joanne was in the kitchen. She was wearing a pair of jeans that were cut slightly too high up her waist, a red jersey polo neck, small gold earrings and very sensible flat leather shoes. Her hair was cut into a short layered bob and held back on one side by a glittery hair slide which looked incongruously girlie against her prematurely middle-aged outfit. Her lipstick was slightly off-centre and a not very pretty shade of coral. She looked shocked to see Toby in the kitchen and almost turned to leave, only stopping to acknowledge his presence when he said hello to her.

  ‘How are you?’ he ventured, cautiously.

  ‘Fine, thanks,’ she muttered, as she filled the kettle from the tap. He waited for her to ask him how he was, or at the very least to offer him a cup of tea, but she did neither. Instead she hummed gently under her breath and stared out of the window while the kettle boiled noisily. Toby glanced at her back. She was very small. Very narrow. Her waist looked like you could get your hands to meet around it and her shoulders were barely the width of a telephone directory.

  ‘So, Joanne.’ He paused, not quite sure how to continue, but knowing that he had to. ‘How long have you been living here now?’

  She spun round. ‘What –’ she said, pointing at the floor, ‘here?’

  ‘Er, yes,’ said Toby. ‘You know. In this house.’

  ‘Oh, right. God. I’m not sure.’ She pursed her lips and stared up at the ceiling.

  Toby waited, a bag of flour suspended in his left hand, wondering whether she was working out how long she’d lived here or if she was just staring at a damp patch.

  ‘Two years and eight months,’ she said finally.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And twenty days.’

  ‘Right,’ repeated Toby.

  ‘I moved in on the fourth of May 2002. It was sunny.’

  ‘Was it?’ he said, rubbing his chin, as if trying to remember the day itself.

  ‘Yes. I moved from south-east London. They had a march. It was for marijuana. There were people dressed up as cannabis leaves walking down my road. I was glad to be leaving.’

  Toby laughed, relieved that Joanne had injected some levity into the stilted conversation, but she just stared at him blankly. ‘Why d’you ask?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ he said, reaching for the sieve. ‘I was just wondering.’ The kitchen fell silent except for the sound of a teaspoon going round and round in Joanne’s mug.

  ‘And how are you finding it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The house. Living here. Are you happy?’

  ‘Well,’ she shrugged, stirring her teabag slowly now, ‘yes. It’s all fine. I have no complaints. Why?’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Is there a problem you wish to discuss?’

  ‘God, no, not at all. I was just thinking that I hadn’t really spoken to you for a few months and I just wanted to make sure that you were doing OK. That’s all.’

  ‘Right,’ she nodded tersely and squeezed her teabag against the side of her mug.

  ‘And how’s work?’

  ‘Fine.’ She dropped the teabag into the pedal bin.

  ‘Are you still, you know, still doing the old acting?’ Toby had broken into a light sweat.

  ‘No,’ she said, dropping the teaspoon into the dishwasher basket.

  ‘And the role? The one you were researching, did that, er…?’

  ‘No. It fell through.’

  ‘Oh, dear. That’s a bit of a shame. Anything else in the pipeline?’

  ‘There is no pipeline.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh. OK. So you’re just…?’

  ‘Just what?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re working, though, are you?’

  ‘Yes.’ She picked up her mug. ‘I’m working.’

  Toby nodded, slightly manically. ‘Good,’ he managed, as she wafted past him and into the hallway, leaving the flowery scent of Earl Grey tea in her wake. ‘Good.’

  12

  Toby was glad not to be a teenager in the twenty-first century – it all seemed so stifling, so conformist. Young girls all looked the same to Toby these days. They all had the same strip of stomach showing between the same jersey top and low-slung jeans, their belly buttons all studded with the same flashy gems. They all wore their long hair in the same side-parted style, their lips sticky with the same glossy gel, their complexions the same shade of Balearic brown all year round. And there was something about modern bras that rendered all young girls’ bosoms into the shape of pudding tins, attached, bam-bam, to their fronts, somehow unrelated to their bodies, like they could be unscrewed at the end of the day and put in a drawer.

  Toby, like most men, loved nothing more than a little light porn, a few minutes of harmless thrusting and fellating shot at close range and poured down the virtual tubes and wires of the Internet into his bedroom. But he didn’t want real girls to look like that. He wanted real girls to have wobbly bits and breasts that were unexpected shapes. He liked variety in his women. He liked character. He liked PJ Harvey. He liked Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He liked that tall DJ girl with the DJ husband whose father was Johnny Ball. He actually thought that Cherie Blair was a very attractive woman, though he’d never yet found anyone to agree with him. And his all-time best-ever pin-up, since his teenage years, was Jamie Lee Curtis. He didn’t have a type. He knew what he liked when he saw it. But kids today – it was all so generic. It was all so boring.

  And that, when it was all boiled down to its essence, was the main problem with Con. He was boring. He added nothing to the mix in the house. His youth could have been a fizzing plop of seltzer into the still water of this thirty-something house; instead he lurked at the bottom like a dull penny.

  ‘Hello, Con,’ Toby opened, coming upon him eating a Big Mac in the front room.

  ‘Hiya.’ Con glanced up and looked at him in surprise.

  ‘Good day at work?’

  Con shrugged. ‘Nothing special.’

  ‘See anyone famous?’

  Con had once shared the lift with Cate Blanchett. Cate Blanchett was quite high up on Toby’s list of quirky, desirable women, so this fact had lodged itself firmly into his consciousness when he’d overheard Con sharing it with Ruby a few months back.

  Con smiled. ‘Nah. Not today. Saw that gay bloke coming in the other day, though, you know?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘That posh one. Can’t remember his name. He was in a film with Madonna.’

  The only film starring Madonna that Toby could bring to mind at that moment was Dick Tracy, but he was sure that Con couldn’t have been referring to Warren Beatty, who was, as far as he knew, neither posh nor gay.

  ‘So,’ he said after a moment, ‘do you think you’ll stay at Condé Nast for much longer? Is there any promise of a… of any career progression, at all?’

  Con laughed and wiped a fleck of ketchup off his chin. ‘Er… no. Definitely not. Unless I want to be post-room manager. Which I don’t.’

  ‘But what about the publications? The magazines. Surely there must be possibilities there?’

  He laughed again. ‘Not for the likes of me there aren’t. It’s like one of those fucked-up dreams, that place. On one side you’ve got reality – that’s us lot in the post room, the caterers, the cleaners – then on the other side you’ve got this whole other world, these posh people, my age, live in Chelsea, don’t know what day of the week it is, kind of floating round, like, you know… oblivious. They’re the ones that get the proper jobs there. The careers. We’re just there to make sure they get their letters and their lunch.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Toby, ‘I see. So, if you don’t want to be the post-room manager and you don’t think there are any other opportunities there, what’s your game plan? What’s next?’

  ‘My PPL.’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘My private pilot’s licence.’

  ‘You’re going to learn to fly?’

  ‘Yeah. Why not?’

  ‘God, well, isn’t that very expensive?’

  ‘Can be,’ he shrugged. ‘But I’ve been looking into it. If I go to South Africa it’s a third of what it would cost here. I’ve been saving since I started work, and I’ve worked out that I only need another eighteen months at Condé Nast to earn what I need. Then I’moff. Get my licence. Go to the Caribbean. Chartered flights. Island-hopping. The good life. Oh, man…’

  ‘Right, so, er…’

  ‘I tell you what, if it hadn’t been for Nigel writing to you and me getting this room, and the, you know, the great deal on the rent, there’s no way I’d have been able to think about learning to fly. I would never of been able to afford it. That was a good day that was, the day we met.’

  He smiled at Toby, a lovely warm smile full of gratitude and Toby felt his ribs crunching together as his chest slowly deflated. He sighed quietly. This was exactly what he’d always wanted. This is what this house was for. It was for allowing people to follow their dreams. His main criterion for choosing house mates was that they should benefit in some positive, constructive way from having tiny outgoings. The only exception to this rule had been Ruby, whom he’ doffered a room to on the grounds that he wanted to have sex with her. He’ doffered Con a room because he felt sorry for him, because his mum had abandoned him, because he had no fixed abode and was about to lose his job and end up on the streets. And now, a year later, Con had a dream, too. He wanted to fly planes. And Toby should have been delighted. Instead he felt trapped.

  Toby thought sadly about the wedge of magic money that had appeared from thin air to make real the dreams he’d had in the wake of Gus’s death. And then he looked at Con, a boy who’d arrived here with nothing, no ambition beyond a bed to sleep in, no dreams other than to keep his job, who’d suddenly and magically found a path he wanted to follow. Toby had had his whole life to make a success of himself. He had no one to blame but himself for finding himself washed up in Nowheresville in his late thirties. Con had no ready-made safety net – he’d had to knit his own. What was more important, wondered Toby, his own silly middle-aged need to prove himself to his father or a young man’s future?

  He sat for a moment, staring blankly at the television, listening to Con slurping his cola, letting his dreams slink away like naughty children. Then he slapped his hands against his thighs and got to his feet.

  ‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘that I might invest in a pair of new sofas. What do you think?’

  Con looked at him in surprise, then at the aged blue sofas dressed with tatty ethnic cushions. ‘Yeah. Why not? Go for it.’

  ‘Cool.’ Toby put his hands in his pockets. ‘I’ll go shopping tomorrow. Sales on now. Good time to go.’

  And for now, he mused, new sofas might just have to do.

  13

  Melinda McNulty was forty-five. She maintained her toned size-ten figure by going to the gym three times a week, attending two power-boxing classes a week, and doing Pilates on her bedroom floor in front of the TV. She ate Special K breakfast bars in the morning, then went off to Stansted airport where she worked as a check-in girl for Monarch. Her cupboard in the kitchen was full of things such as Snack-a-Jacks and instant noodle soups. She drank Cava (‘It’s better than champagne.’) pretty much every day of the week, and went clubbing on Saturday nights with her friend Zoë, who was twenty-eight. She wore too much make-up, too much perfume and very tight velour tracksuits in bright colours that showed her muscled tummy.

  Toby wasn’t sure how he felt about muscled tummies on forty-five-year-old women. It was impressive, but a bit unsettling.

  When Toby saw her get back from work that night, smart and trim in her airline uniform, he deliberately sought her out. He found her ironing in the front room. The room was humid with the aroma of damp cotton and rhythmic with a tinny beat emanating from her headphones. She smiled when she saw him and popped the earphones out.

  ‘Hello m’Lord!’ She had the penetrating, unripened voice of a fifteen-year-old girl. It was very disconcerting. Her face disappeared briefly into a cloud of steam. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Excellent. How are you?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m good, too. Just getting some ironing out of the way.’

  Toby glanced down at the pile of clothes growing on the arm of the sofa. They appeared to be mainly Con’s clothes. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ he offered.

  ‘Ooh, yes.’ She pursed her strawberry pink lips into a crinkled ring. ‘White, one sugar. Can I have the mug with the cats on it? You know, the big one?’

  He didn’t know, but searched the kitchen cupboards until he found it. When he came back, Melinda was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, examining a glossy, blood-coloured toenail. ‘Ooh, thanks, Toby,’ she said, stretching her heavily ringed hands towards the mug, ‘just what the doctor ordered.’

  Toby sat next to her and rested his tea on the coffee table.

  ‘I hear you’re getting rid of these,’ said Melinda, stroking the fabric of the sofa.

  ‘What…?’

  ‘The sofas. Con said you’re thinking of buying new ones.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that is the plan. They’ve done their service, these ones.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘they are a bit minging.’

  Toby winced at the coarse lingua franca.

  ‘How’s that weird cat?’ she continued.

  ‘Boris?’

  ‘Is that what you’re calling him?’ she laughed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, I like that. He looks like a Boris. How’she getting on?’

  ‘He’s fine, as far as I can tell. Very low-maintenance. I’m not that keen on the whole litter tray thing, though. It’s not very pleasant.’

  ‘Ooh, yes. My mum had one of those housebound cats. Bloody nuisance. But at least you know you’re not going to get the dead rats on your pillow and the dismembered birds on the carpet.’

  Melinda turned to face him, one knee tucked up under her. Her hair was the wrong shade of blonde for her colouring, slightly yellow, as if it had been left out in the sun for too long. Her nose was small and hooked, and her lips were a strange shape, too thick in places and too thin in others. She didn’t have any wrinkles at all until she smiled, and then she got a set of very dramatic crow’s feet which exploded from the corners of her eyes like fireworks. But she had beautiful eyes, a clear Caribbean turquoise, fringed with heavy black lashes. ‘I know this sounds dreadful,’ she leaned towards him, conspiratorially, ‘and don’t take this the wrong way, but I much prefer it here now that Gus’s gone.’

  Toby glanced at her in horror.

  ‘Not that I didn’t like him. Don’t get me wrong. But it was just a bit weird, wasn’t it, having him around? Didn’t quite fit the image of the house. But now he’s gone it just feels perfect here. You know something, Toby, I love this house, I really do. Can’t imagine living anywhere else now.’ She glanced up towards the towering ceilings. ‘I couldn’t move back into some pokey little purpose-built with paper walls now. I’m ruined.’ She laughed.

  Toby gulped. ‘So you’re happy, are you, sharing a room with Con?’

  ‘Oh, it’s lovely. You know, I was thinking I might ask you about Gus’s room, now that he’s gone. Thinking I might ask if I could move in there. But then I thought, do I really want to share a room with that horrible cat? And then I thought, do I really want to move out of Con’s room? And I don’t. Really don’t. I love sharing with him. He’s such a great boy. And after being apart from him for so many years. I missed out on a lot. But now… we’re so close,’ she gushed. ‘It’s like we’re best mates, you know, we’re equals. It’s lovely now. Everything’s lovely.’ She smiled and caressed her mug. ‘What about you, Toby? You’ve been single for a while. Anyone special in your life?’

  ‘Er, no,’ he began, subconsciously filing away Melinda’s suspect conversational leap from her relationship with her son to Toby’s love life. ‘Not at the moment.’

  ‘Ah,’ she cooed sympathetically, squeezing his leg gently, ‘that’s a shame. How old are you now?’

  ‘Thirty-nine,’ he said, ‘next week.’

  ‘Yes. It’s a funny age that. I remember my late thirties. You start panicking, thinking you’re running out of time. Irony of it is that it takes you bloody ages to get old after that. I thought I’d be an old relic by the time I hit forty-five, but I didn’t get a wrinkle until I was forty-one. And my boobs are still pretty OK.’ She put down her mug and gazed thoughtfully into the distance. ‘You know, every birthday I look in the mirror and think, not yet, Mel, you’re still there, still looking good. Have to work at it mind, but it’s so worth it. Especially in my line of work, looking good is so important.’

  ‘You mean, being an air hostess?’

  ‘Well, no, not an air hostess exactly. Ground staff now. Keeps me closer to home, closer to Con. But image is still mega-important. You’re the first contact the customer has with the airline. And if you look crap, well, that’s not going to make the customer feel very confident about their flight, is it?’

  Toby nodded sagely, thinking that he would be more likely to base his confidence in an upcoming flight on the condition of the aircraft than on the eyeshadow on the check-in girls.

  ‘Well,’ she got to her feet, ‘you’re a lovely fella. I’m sure someone’ll come along when you’re least expecting it. And you’ve got tons going for you.’

  ‘I have?’

  ‘Yes, you’re lovely and tall. Girls like tall men. You’ve got this amazing house. And you’re generous and caring. I mean, look at us all, all us waifs and strays. Where would we all be without you, Toby, eh? You took my Con off the streets. You’ve given me a chance to be with my boy. You’ve looked after poor Ruby since she was a kid. And what would have become of Gus if he hadn’t had you to take care of him? You’re a hero, Toby, a true hero. And what woman doesn’t want a hero?’